On July 3rd, 2022 my family was returning from church, and we passed our local mall as we always do on our commute home. By the grace of God, we did not go in. Had we done so, my wife and I would have found ourselves fleeing with our two children in tow as a gunman fired into crowded corridors. A few days after this tragedy, Denmark gathered to mourn and weep for the dead and injured, and the Prime Minister denounced the violence as ‘cruel, unjust, and senseless.’ On behalf of a country shocked by the uncharacteristic violence, PM Frederiksen spoke to those most affected saying, ‘You must know that the whole of Denmark is with you. We mourn with you, we share your pain.’
Inconsistent thought and moral impulse
I am thankful for the Prime Minister’s words, but they underscore an inconsistency that dominates much of western thought. The prevailing secular and social dogma of the West is materialism, a philosophy that holds matter to be the sole explanatory cause of all things, thus relegating divine things to the archaic past and deeming the notion of transcendence an intolerable supposition. But if Danes desire to be good, consistent materialists, why mourn with those who are suffering? What is cruel and unjust about violence if all things are merely matter and devoid of transcendently infused meaning?
What is cruel and unjust about violence if all things are merely matter and devoid of transcendently infused meaning?
Underlying convictions
With respect to PM Frederiksen, this violence was not senseless; on the contrary, it was perfectly sensible within the applied materialist framework that tends to dominate Danish society. Why then did the Danes react with so much sorrow and shock? Because we are not materialists, even though many of our underlying convictions tend towards materialism. The Danish response to this tragedy has shown that when confronted with evil and suffering there remains a deep moral, and consequently metaphysical, impulse within the collective Danish conscience.
Assumption of value
In Danish culture there has been a near total rejection of divine and biblical belief. What has replaced it is a strict naturalistic paradigm, the disavowal of the metaphysical for a love of the material. But this revolution of thought allows no room for the mourning of this shooting or declaring it ‘unjust’ because these are moral moves that conflict with the foundational principles of materialistic philosophy. There is nothing to mourn in a violent death if man is only meat. In fact, there may be something to celebrate, since every act that ‘proceeds from power is good’ in the materialist schema.
Transcendent truh
But what was Denmark doing when it gathered in solidarity? Was it celebrating the exercise of an individual’s autonomy and power in a world sterilized of all transcendent meaning? No. It was a ceremony that recognized transcendent truth: evil exists, and lives of value were harmed and lost. We even understand that the killer, as cruel and despicable as his act was, is due dignity. When apprehended, he was taken before a judge, not slaughtered like a rabid dog. He was reprimanded to psychiatric care and treated humanely. Why is his fate different than those he killed? Because there is an assumption in the broader culture that life has value, even if it is a life deeply disordered. But for the materialist, sorrow over the dead and wounded and our mercy towards the merciless is incoherent, because life and death mean nothing, mercy and suffering mean nothing, justice and bloodlust mean nothing; the indifferent universe does not care, and neither should the materialist if humanity is merely its accidental and inconsequential offspring.
Entrenched irrationality
However, Danish society did not respond with the indifference demanded by materialism. Collectively, the Danes mourned as though there is metaphysical meaning, as though acts have a moral quality, and the death of the innocent should cause us pain. Shall we then in our daily lives neglect the metaphysical and moral realities that have so powerfully made themselves known through our shared suffering? To do so would be irrational, but sadly this entrenched irrationality has become a standard feature of the West. We ignore Jesus the God-Man who, like us, wept over darkness and suffering and by his divine death singularly proved that human life is of unutterable value. In place of this most noble doctrine, humanity has dehumanized itself by arguing for a mere material existence; we are animals of a fortuitous origin. Are we then surprised when we are slaughtered like animals? We shouldn’t be. Our confessions will dictate our actions. Our beliefs will determine how we engage our fellow man.
If the West wants to hold life as meaningful, it must again look to Jesus as the sole fountain from which human life is to be understood and judged.
Jesus as sole foundation
If the West wants to hold life as meaningful, it must again look to Jesus as the sole fountain from which human life is to be understood and judged. The incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Son of God rebukes our materialistic leanings by the declaration that human life is so meaningful that God would even die to save it. Elements of this meaning are recognized as true on occasion, the faint flickers of the image of God within, but the allure of materialism is strong. Western culture wants to structure life by a materialistic framework because of the freedom it allegedly provides, but it clings to fragments of the Christian faith in order to maintain the meaning humans desperately need in life. Because of this, there remains a collective belief that some things are sacred and transcend individual valuation, like the worth of human life, the evil of violence, the equality of persons, or the inherent goodness in seeking the welfare of others. By mangling and mashing elements of Christian convictions with naturalistic commitments, Denmark, its Nordic neighbours, and other western cultures have become mired in a fatal doublemindedness: not fully Christian nor absolutely materialistic.
Compartmentalized and flawed
This mass shooting in the typically peaceful land of Denmark exposed the compartmentalized and flawed thought that is currently popular in the West. Many Danes believe God is dead but respond to evil like he is very much alive. If we take seriously what was said and felt in the wake of this tragedy, the Church must help those around her to renounce the half-hearted embrace of materialistic philosophy and its underlying principles, since it is incompatible with the charity we feel for those who are suffering and the evil we want to condemn. We are not materialists, at least not in the full sense of what the dogma demands. The Nordic moral imagination is still very much reliant on its Christian past, but the current Nordic preference for materialism inevitability collides with this, with materialism’s unavoidable end being the erasure of much that makes the Nordics distinct in a world where inequality, oppression, poverty, and violence are the norm.
Love compels our witness
There remain vital Christian impulses within the Nordics, but why continue to hamper these by clinging to a false and harmful belief system like materialism? There is something far greater than the soul-crushing naturalistic philosophy that, for the moment, is firmly rooted in the cultural mind. In a world plagued by suffering, we can mourn with meaning, love in truth, think with clarity, and live in hope.
In a world plagued by suffering, we can mourn with meaning, love in truth, think with clarity, and live in hope.
Materialism makes these impossible, but in the Lord Jesus they are offered in unending abundance. The role of the Christian then is to speak into our cultures with bold wisdom, outlining the contradiction between the many Nordic values inherited from the Christian faith and the materialistic inclination that presently holds cultural dominance. Love for our neighbor demands we seek the good of our neighbor, and in the Nordics one way we must seek the good of our neighbor is by exposing the myth of materialism and its evil ends.
Let us speak boldly
Let us, therefore, speak boldly into this bankrupt philosophy that has blinded many to the wonderous light of the gospel. Silence and indifference are not an option when confronted with a darkness like materialistic philosophy. Love compels our witness, to speak the truth and condemn what is evil. This may seem daunting as we assess the present state of the Church in the Nordics but this hope we have: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).
