More than twenty people were killed in a Russian attack on a village in eastern Ukraine this morning. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky posted on X: “A brutally savage Russian airstrike with an aerial bomb on the rural settlement of Yarova in the Donetsk region. Directly on people. Ordinary civilians. At the very moment when pensions were being disbursed.” His post showed horrific footage of bodies strewn across the ground.
When I saw the news, I admit that it felt like “more of the same.” This terrible war has been going on for more than three years. I have never been to Ukraine and don’t know that I know anyone directly affected by this tragic news.
And yet, far more people died in this morning’s airstrike than were killed in an attack on a bus depot in Jerusalem yesterday, a tragedy that I used to lead the Daily Article and have continued to grieve. My response comes from the fact that I have many friends in Israel, having led dozens of study tours there, and love the land and its people deeply.
Here’s my guess: many in our culture likely viewed the latter as I viewed the former, seeing another attack on Jews in Israel as irrelevant to their lives. Or even worse, they saw the victims of the Palestinian attackers as the villains and the attackers as the victims.
“One of the fruits of the Oct. 7 attack”
One-sided media narratives against the Jewish state have been regularly debunked, but they persist, drowning out reporting that disagrees. As a result, 60 percent of young adults told a recent survey that they favor Hamas (which has been designated a terrorist organization by at least eight nations and the European Union) over Israel.
In addition, recent moves by various governments to recognize a Palestinian state have strengthened Hamas, whose leaders are calling them “one of the fruits of the Oct. 7 attack.”
The rise of antisemitism is tragically on display in America as well. According to the American Jewish Committee, attacks on Jews in our country “have reached shocking levels, affecting American Jewish behavior and sense of security like we haven’t witnessed before.” As just one example, a man speaking Hebrew was assaulted recently at the Santa Monica Pier, part of what officials are calling a “deplorable escalation of antisemitism across southern California.”
What explains this escalation?
The “Marvelization of reality”
Paul Miller is professor of the practice of international affairs at Georgetown University. A veteran of the war in Afghanistan, he served as a member of the National Security Council under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In a recent article for The Dispatch, he explains “the problem with framing the Israel-Hamas conflict as one between the powerful and the powerless.”
Dr. Miller perceptively describes the process through which the left came to view Israel as:
- A powerful overlord, with the Palestinians as the heroic resistance.
- A “settler-colonial” state, with the Palestinians as indigenous rebels.
- And “white,” with the Palestinians as their “nonwhite” victims.
As he shows, all three claims are spurious.
- Israel became powerful by defending itself from nations seeking its annihilation. This does not make it an “overlord” or evil by definition.
- It is not a settler-colonial state: it began resettling the land under the Ottoman and British empires and did not erase or replace the people already living in Palestine. In fact, the Arab population of historic Palestine grew from 1.4 million in 1948 to 7.4 million today.
- Israel isn’t white or European; an equal number of Israeli citizens are descendants of immigrants from Asia and Africa as from Europe; 20 percent of its population is Arab.
However, as Dr. Miller explains, none of this matters to Israel’s critics. In what he calls the “Marvelization of reality” whereby “we expect reality to conform to the story arcs of fiction,” there’s the protagonist (the Palestinians), the goal (statehood and liberation), and the villain (Israel).
In a complex world, we crave simplicity, with white hats for the good guys and black hats for the bad guys. And to much of America these days, Israel wears the black hat.
From active participants to passive consumers
This “Marvelization of reality” is relevant beyond Israel in ways that speak to our national future.
As author and educator Neil Postman warned in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, the television age turned us from active participants in society into passive consumers of entertaining sound bites. Digital technology exacerbates this trajectory, since we can now watch whatever we want for as long as it entertains us.
Since there is far too much content available for us to consume, we filter it by preconceived biases. And since we don’t produce the content we consume, we are at the mercy of those who do.
This is massively significant for our post-Christian society, which has no objective filter by which to discern truth from falsehood and, in fact, rejects the existence of objective truth itself. But it is just as significant for Christians in such a society.
We can be as secular as our secular friends. According to research by George Barna, about half of those who attend evangelical churches say there is no absolute moral truth and believe people can earn salvation through good works. Only four in ten believe humans are born into sin and need salvation in Christ. We can be swayed by entertainment that normalizes extramarital and same-sex sexual relations. We can evaluate political news through our partisan biases. We can measure success by cultural popularity rather than biblical obedience.
“He will guide you into all the truth”
I can claim that the answer is to view secular culture through the prism of the Bible, but skeptics will assert that this is just as biased as viewing the Bible through the prism of secular culture. After all, the Bible is a book like any other book, subjectively written by flawed people using words that must be subjectively interpreted by flawed people, or so they will say.
Here’s the difference: The Spirit who inspired these words can give us the discernment we need to understand and obey them.
Jesus promised that, in ways no secular person can understand, the Holy Spirit “will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you” (John 14:26). Accordingly, “his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true, and is no lie” (1 John 2:27).
Because he literally lives in you (1 Corinthians 3:16), the Spirit can speak to your mind and influence your spirit in ways no one else can. If you “keep in step with the Spirit” (Galatians 5:25), “he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). As the book of Acts and a plethora of spiritual awakenings across history show, he can empower and direct God’s people to impact their broken culture in transformative ways.
But he can guide only those who will follow. Would the Spirit say you are “in step” with him right now?
If not, why not?
Quote for the day:
“When we have the Holy Spirit, we have all that is needed to be all that God desires us to be.” —A. W. Tozer
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