A film is making its way through Europe right now, and many people are unnerved by it. It’s called “Citizen Vigilante,” and it follows an American who moves through a lawless European city executing migrant criminals the courts let walk, and becomes a folk hero for it.
The writer who put it in front of me, Rod Dreher, was careful to say he doesn’t endorse it. Neither do I, but I have not actually seen it… But that isn’t the point. I have read a lot about it and at this point don’t really want to see it although maybe I need to force myself to speak direct from the source…
The bigger point is that the film exists, and that it speaks to a rage an uncomfortable amount of ordinary people feel and aren’t allowed to name.
Years ago, Ross Douthat warned that if you don’t like the religious right, wait until you meet the post-religious right. That’s what this is. A right with the Christianity scooped out and only the “strength” left standing.
The film is just an effect. It’s the latest round of what people are already marching toward, and Dreher put his finger on the root of it: a generation raised on thin religion, reaching for strength wherever it can find it, even in the neopagan worship of raw power.
He’s right that if the church keeps only scolding strength and never honoring it, the neopagans win.
He’s right that our current sentimental, therapeutic faith is about to get crushed.
And it isn’t only the political right. Recently, a democratic socialist headed to Congress said plainly that the prisons should be torn down, because the system failed the people inside them. Different flag, same desire.
One young man on the right was asked what his crowd actually wants, he answered: they don’t want anything, they want to tear it all down.
Because of this dynamic, people keep bringing up Weimar. They keep pointing at Germany, at the 1930s, at the street fights between the reds and the browns.
But I don’t hear anybody mentioning Bonhoeffer. So, let’s mention Bonhoeffer.
But first, let’s look at the two mobs, because they seem like enemies but they act like twins. The post-religious right and the eat-the-rich left are both religions for the dispossessed. One worships strength, the raw capacity to impose. The other worships purity, the spotless moral standing that comes from being the wronged and never the wrongdoer. Two different idols. And underneath their political costumes, they’re selling the exact same sacrament: tear it down, and the tearing will make you clean.
That’s the whole appeal of raging against the machine. Not the difficult process of productive policy. Just a baptism of burning the thing you hate down to the ground and come out the other side purified. No confession, no cross, no cost. Just the clean feeling on the far side of the fire.
And everyone is responsible for this! We dug the hole they’re falling into.
We took the living God and shrank him into a life coach. A supportive presence who mostly wanted these boys to feel good about themselves and manage their anxiety. We preached a Jesus who would never raise his voice, never ask for blood, never march a man toward anything that could cost him his life. We sanded every dangerous edge off the faith until there was nothing left a man could cut himself on.
And these were boys built for danger. They wanted weight. They wanted a fight worth losing teeth over. They wanted something so real they’d bleed for it. We handed them a fog machine, a coffee bar, and a sermon about their best life. We gave them comfort when they were begging for a cross.
So they left. Of course they left. They went looking for a god who would actually demand something of them, and the church had nothing on the shelf. So they found other gods who did. We are losing them to a counterfeit strength, because we were too afraid to show them the real one.
We starved them. Then we clutched our pearls when they went hunting for meat.
So Dreher’s right. The church has to relate to strength, or we lose them. But here’s the problem: If we just say “relate to strength” and stop there, the loudest men in the room will hear it as permission. And they will hand these young guys a cross-shaped idol.
There are 2 ways to faceplant here, and both are already happening.
The first is the muscular-Christianity crowd that takes the Nietzschean strongman and nails a cross to him. Same worship of power with an out of context Bible verse taped to it.
The second is the crowd that calls every use of force a sin, which responds to the hunger for strength with a lecture about being gentle. Doesn’t really account for the braided a whip, walking into the temple, turning the tables over, and making a public spectacle of the powers. You cannot scold strength away.
So young men are being lied to from both sides. One side worships the idol. The other pretends the strength isn’t there. Neither can provide the real thing.
And the real thing is harder than either. Because the honest answer is yes, sometimes you do tear it down.
The question was never whether to use strength.
The question is what using it does to your soul.
Which is finally why Bonhoeffer matters.
He was a pacifist. He wrote the book on costly grace, on the Sermon on the Mount, on following Jesus down into weakness. And then he joined a plot to murder Hitler. When people pressed him on the contradiction, he put it like this:
If a madman is driving a car into a crowd, a Christian can’t just wait and bury the dead afterward. You have to try to wrench the wheel out of his hands.
That’s a just case for tearing it down. But listen to what he said next, because this is the whole thing.
He wrenched the wheel and refused to idolize it and make it clean. Asked flat out whether a Christian could kill, he said murder is still murder. He wouldn’t rename it something holy to get himself off the hook. His conviction was that the act might be a grim necessity, and that the man who does it has to take the guilt onto himself and throw himself on grace.
I think it’s a helpful barometer. Testing the aftermath. Does what you did leave you feeling clean, or leave you needing mercy? The vitalist tears down and feels baptized. Bonhoeffer tore down and felt the weight, named it as weight, and reached for a cross.
The act is similar but with completely different hearts.
And as most of you know, he got killed for it. At dawn on an April morning in 1945, in the last weeks of a Nazi regime that was already collapsing, they stood him in a prison yard, stripped him naked, and hanged him. Three weeks later his executioners’ whole world was ash, and he never lived to see it.
To eyes trained on strength as domination, Bonhoeffer at the gallows is a loser.
Naked, erased, powerless, killed by the winners. This is exactly what the vitalist believes, whether he would put it that way or not. By the thing he worships, he is committed to calling that dead man a failure. The strongman religion has no category for a naked corpse.
But everyone with working eyes has known for 80 years that Bonhoeffer was the freest, strongest man in Germany that morning. The vitalist literally cannot see the strongest man in the room. His eyes are wrong. That isn’t an insult, mostly, but it is a diagnosis. Something happened to how modern people see, and it left them unable to recognize the one kind of strength that ever actually saves anybody.
From time to time, I feel the same pull. I can find something infuriating, and there’s a part of me that wants to pick up and fight back and and feel righteous doing it. However, over time, I’ve come to believe that part of me can’t be fully trusted. Tearing down isn’t always wrong. But the moment a cause makes me feel righteous, I’ve already become the thing I hate.
No one is as righteous as they seem, and never from the inside. From the outside, the man with the cause looks luminous, purified, holy in his anger. Get inside the inner circle, or read the diaries 50 years later, and the halo typically is paint over something small and cruel. And the tell, every single time, is that the cause never makes them feel guilty — it makes them feel clean. Real righteousness does the opposite. It acts when it must, and then refuses to let itself off the hook.
That’s why I’d prefer a cross to a cause. A cause certifies me while a cross indicts me, and then carries me anyway. Most of the time I cannot tell, in the heat of it, from the inside, whether I’m Bonhoeffer wrenching the wheel or just a man in love with how holy his rage feels. It is almost impossible to tell from the inside. That not-knowing is the fear of God, and it’s the only thing standing between me and every righteous man who ever felt righteous while he was drawing blood.
So what do we do now? Because Dreher is probably right that some kind of clash is coming, and I don’t think we stop it by being clever.
We start by telling the young the truth, and the truth begins with an apology. We’re sorry. We handed you gruel and called it a feast. You were right to be hungry.
Then we give them the real thing, which is neither the idol nor the lecture. We tell them strength is real and the scriptures are full of it, and then we show them where the true strength lives. It lives on a cross.
Christ didn’t beat the powers by tearing them apart. He beat them by letting them tear him apart, and walking out of the grave on the other side. That’s the strength the mob can’t see and the machine can’t sell. And it’s the only one that has ever changed a single human heart from the inside out.
We teach them the test, so they can feel the difference between descent and demolition in their own chest. If it feels righteous, stop. Guilty and needing grace? Then maybe.
We teach them that the wheel sometimes has to be grabbed, and that the man who grabs it and feels holy about it is the man who should never have been near it.
We raise sons who can act, and refuse to feel purified, and choose to go down before they choose to tear down.
That’s the resolution, if there is one. Not a truce between the two mobs. They are both wrong about the same thing in opposite directions. The way through isn’t left, and it isn’t right. The way through is down.
The kids keep asking who’s strong enough to tear it all down. It’s the wrong question, and it is going to get people killed.
The real question is who’s strong enough to be torn down, and not call it defeat.
