A Death Made Useful

In September 2025, Paula White declared Charlie Kirk's murder was "God's sovereign plan" to bring "the greatest awakening." A young man dies, and within hours, his death becomes a divine strategy for political power. These actions aren't faith; they're the performance of faith by those who've killed what they claim to worship.

When tragedy becomes opportunity, when death becomes useful, when God becomes a political tool, we're witnessing something unprecedented in American history: the murder of the divine itself, performed by those who claim to be its defenders.

From Playground Bully to Empire

Watch children on any playground. A bully emerges, demanding submission. However, what's crucial here is that the bully requires more than fear. He needs legitimacy. So he creates a narrative; he's protecting everyone from chaos, maintaining order, and defending the weak. The other children, desperate for meaning and a sense of belonging, begin to believe it. Soon they're not just obeying; they're enforcing. They've internalized the bully's shadow projection as reality.

This analogy is America now, but with nuclear weapons and a surveillance state the world has never before witnessed. The playground bully has become the empire, and the narrative has become a divine mandate. Trump isn't just the president; he's God's chosen one. The surveillance state isn't oppression; it's holy protection. The violence isn't violence; it's righteous judgment.

The children who once enforced the bully's will have become evangelical leaders, providing sacred justification for profane power. But something unprecedented has occurred: in their desperation to matter, to avoid cultural irrelevance, they've traded away not just principles but the sacred itself.

Nietzsche and the American Exception

When Nietzsche declared "God is dead," he wasn't celebrating. He was warning. Kill the transcendent anchor of meaning, and humans will create new gods from power, race, nation, ideology: each more violent than the last. Europe learned this through two world wars and the Holocaust. Millions died in the vacuum left by departed divinity.

God Is Dead, but America Reanimated the Corpse

America took a different path. Instead of acknowledging God's death, we propped up the corpse and made it speak. We've achieved something even Nietzsche couldn't foresee: we've weaponized dead divinity. God isn't absent; God is present but hollowed out, animated by political necessity, speaking through televangelists and politicians who operate its mouth like a ventriloquist's dummy.

Weaponized Dead Divinity

This charade is infinitely more dangerous than honest atheism. An absent God creates a search for meaning. A murdered God whose corpse still speaks prevents that search, offering false meaning that serves only power. It becomes the ultimate in false idolatry; the irony is as timeless as it is tragic.

The Justification Machine

How much consent must we manufacture to sustain this pattern?

Every empire needs divine justification:

• Rome had its deified caesars
• Medieval kings claimed divine right
• The British Empire carried out "God's civilizing mission"
• American democracy exports "freedom" with religious fervor
• Israel claims a biblical mandate while operating modern apartheid

The pattern never changes: power clothes itself in sacred garments. But we've reached peak efficiency. Previous empires took centuries to deify their violence fully. We've compressed the timeline to days. Kirk dies on Wednesday; by Friday, he's a martyr justifying surveillance expansion "in his name."

From Tragedy to Strategy

Watch the mechanism accelerate. The calls for violence against "ANTIFA"—a phantom enemy that can mean anyone who dissents. The designation of opposition as "terrorist." The transformation of political enemies into demonic forces necessitates divine violence to defeat them. We're speedrunning the collapse that took Rome centuries to achieve.

Here's what makes our moment unique: we all participate. We're not innocent victims of corrupt leadership. We're co-creators of the shadow play. The right projects all chaos onto the left; the left projects all fascism onto the right. Both sides need their enemy to exist. Without the Other to carry our shadow, we'd have to face what we are.

The Industrialization of Meaning

This maintenance of enemies is the Cancer of Integration metastasized: the inability to hold paradox has become civilizational architecture. We're simultaneously:

• Damned and saved
• Victim and victimizer
• Freedom fighter and terrorist
• Defender of democracy and its destroyer

But instead of holding these paradoxes internally, we split them and project them onto Others. The evangelicals project their doubt onto atheists. The atheist projects their hunger for meaning onto believers. The patriot projects their shame onto critics. The critic projects their need for belonging onto patriots.

Everyone performs their assigned role in the shadow play, never realizing they're reading from the same script with different parts.

From Mystery to Meat

When you dissect the sacred for political utility, you're like a child taking apart a beloved pet to understand it—muscle, bone, organs, cells—until you've explained everything except what made it capable of love. You've mapped every component, catalogued every part, but the life is gone. What remains isn't a pet; it's meat arranged in familiar form.

This analogy is precisely what the evangelical-political alliance has done to God. They've reduced infinite mystery to talking points, divine paradox to party platform, transcendent love to tribal loyalty. Every time they invoke God for political gain, they perform another cut in the dissection.

"God wants this tax cut"—slice. "God demands this war"—slice.

"God sovereignly planned this murder"—slice.

The fundamentalist moral justification machine makes this dissection frictionless. When you can sanctify any action through selective scripture or claims of divine revelation, you've created a system where you render the sacred infinitely malleable, which is another way of saying you've murdered it. Watch the speed: a young man dies on Wednesday, and by Thursday evening, pastors across America explain how his death serves God's greater plan. They offer no pause for mystery, no wrestling with divine silence, no acknowledgment that some tragedies resist easy meaning-making.

Instead, the justification machine whirs to life, processing raw tragedy into practical theology within hours. This processing isn't faith; it's the industrial production of meaning from meaninglessness. When you can morally justify anything instantly–war becomes divine judgment, poverty becomes spiritual discipline, death becomes strategic blessing—you've proven that nothing is actually sacred to you. The ease itself is the confession: genuine transcendence creates resistance, demands wrestling, refuses to be deployed on command. Dead divinity, by contrast, speaks whatever words you put in its mouth.

Eventually, we're all left with God-shaped meat that appears divine but contains no life; cubed, packaged, and put on ice for anyone to consume. Churches often become political rallies, complete with worship bands and other entertainment. Sermons become stump speeches with Bible verses. Prayer becomes strategizing with "Amen" attached.

American political authority has become hollow: power without substance, legitimacy without merit. Like an empty vessel that only makes noise when struck, it cannot generate meaning from within. Meanwhile, American evangelicalism has become equally hollow, religion without transcendence, faith without mystery, Christianity without Christ.

Weekend at Bernie's" Theology

These two hollow structures prop each other up with a murdered God between them, Weekend at Bernie's-style, insisting the divine still speaks while they operate its mouth. The empire needs divine justification; evangelicals need political power. Neither has substance, so they create a feedback loop of mutual validation.

But here's the terrible secret: both know God is dead. The politicians know their appeals to divine authority are a performance. The evangelical leaders know their prophecies are propaganda. The desperate intensity of their insistence betrays their knowledge. The louder they proclaim God's presence, the more they reveal God's absence.

The Return of the Shadow

When God dies, something else takes its place. Not absence, but presence; the presence of our own shadow projections wearing divine masks. The violence we won't acknowledge becomes God's judgment. The greed we won't admit becomes God's blessing. The hatred we won't face becomes God's righteous anger.

Violence as Divine Mandate

We're witnessing a multifold increase in calls for violence, each justified by divine mandate. "Ruthlessly dismantle the left," says the influencer with millions of followers. "Destroy terrorist infrastructure," says the politician. "God's sovereign plan," says the spiritual advisor. The shadow we've projected onto dead divinity returns as divine command to destroy our projections.

This pattern is what Europe experienced after God's death: the return of the repressed as political religion, racial mythology, and national destiny. Millions died as humans tried to fill the God-shaped hole with human-shaped gods. We're speedrunning the same collapse, but with nuclear weapons and global surveillance.

The Sin Against the Spirit

In biblical terms, this is the sin against the Holy Spirit: the only unforgivable sin. Not because God refuses forgiveness, but because when you've murdered transcendence itself, there's nothing left to forgive you. You've destroyed the very channel through which forgiveness flows.

The evangelical-empire alliance commits this sin daily. Every invocation of God for political power, every claim of divine mandate for human agenda, every transformation of mystery into strategy, all of it is the ongoing murder of the divine, performed by those who claim to be its greatest defenders.

They stand at podiums weeping for God while displaying God's corpse. They quote scripture while practicing its opposite. They perform resurrection while preventing it.

Collapse and What Follows

The empire will collapse, as all hollow structures must. The evangelical movement will face its reckoning when the youth who've fled their churches become the majority. The shadow projections will intensify until they consume their projectors.

And then? Perhaps from the ruins, something authentic might emerge. Not the old God reanimated, not new idols to replace the old, but the return of genuine mystery. The divine, which cannot be contained or manipulated. The sacred that offers no political utility because it transcends all human categories.

But first, we must witness the complete collapse of the current performance. Many on both sides will intensify their calls for violence. They will multiply their phantom enemies. They will make their divine justifications more absurd. They will force the murdered God to speak increasingly incoherent commands until even the faithful can no longer pretend to believe.

The Age of Deicide

We're living through the age of deicide, where those who claim God's name most loudly are those who've driven the nails most deeply, where every appeal to divine authority reveals divine absence, where the performance of faith masks the murder of the sacred.

The question isn't whether God survives; the divine always does, in forms we haven't imagined. The question is whether we'll survive what we've created in God's absence: a hollow empire animated by hollow religion, each feeding the other's emptiness while the shadow they won't acknowledge prepares to devour them both.

Waiting for the Authentic Sacred

Until then, we document the deicide. We name the murder being committed by those who claim to be God's greatest defenders. We refuse to participate in the shadow play. Instead, we wait for the return of what cannot be killed, only temporarily buried: the authentic sacred that needs no empire because it serves no power but truth itself. We'll know it by its resistance to utility, its refusal to serve power, its capacity to be mystery again.