I have written for the Spectator for years. I value it. I read it. I defend it. It remains one of the few places where serious argument is still possible. Which is why Luke Lyman’s recent essay on “Christian nihilism” is so frustrating. It mistakes metaphor for diagnosis — and confusion for insight.

Lyman opens with a disturbing scene: a protester in Minneapolis screaming at armed officers to shoot him. From this single episode, he extrapolates a sweeping claim — that America is drifting into a kind of “Christian nihilism,” a pseudo-religion that mimics Christianity’s language of sacrifice while stripping it of meaning.

What we are witnessing is not Christianity curdled into violence, but the consequences of a culture in which Christian moral limits have collapsed.

As Lyman writes:

Violence serves a central role in Christianity: the hinge of history, the Crucifixion, is bloody. Christ endures the Cross to purify mankind, because he knows we crave purity. Revolutionary leaders have stolen this idea, given it a godless twist, and sold it to their followers to encourage them to sacrifice themselves for whatever cause demands it.

That conclusion does not follow.

A cultural template

This is because Lyman treats Christianity as a cultural template — a set of symbols and emotional cues — rather than as a moral and metaphysical system with hard limits. Once you do that, anything that resembles sacrifice or martyrdom can be described as “Christian-adjacent.” But resemblance is not inheritance. Borrowed language does not imply borrowed belief.

What Lyman is describing is not Christianity emptied of content. It is secular despair borrowing familiar moral imagery. There is nothing Christian about begging for death on camera. Christianity teaches endurance, restraint, and perseverance — not theatrical self-annihilation. It demands self-control and humility. The gospel was not written for livestreams.

Lyman gestures toward Christian theology but never quite engages it. He suggests that Christianity centers on violence because the Crucifixion was bloody. That is like saying surgery centers on knives. The cross is not an endorsement of violence; it is a confrontation with it. Rome used crucifixion to terrorize and dominate. Christ faced that machinery of force and answered it with mercy. When Peter reached for the sword, Christ stopped him.

RELATED: Why Christians should care about politics

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Interrupting the cycle

Christianity does not command others to die in God’s name. Christ gives Himself. He absorbs hatred rather than unleashing it. He prays for those driving the nails. That distinction matters. It reverses the logic of every revolutionary movement ever devised. One path runs on rage and always demands another victim. The other interrupts the cycle, insisting that no human life is expendable.

Lyman claims that revolutionary violence is Christianity drained of belief — that figures like Mao or Frantz Fanon merely stole the cross and removed God. This misstates the relationship entirely. Revolutionary ideology does not distort Christianity; it rejects it outright. Christianity insists that every person bears the image of God. Revolutionary politics insists that some lives are disposable. These views do not occupy the same moral universe.

Calling this phenomenon “Christian nihilism” only deepens the confusion. Nihilism denies meaning. Christianity proclaims it. What we are witnessing is not Christianity curdled into violence, but the consequences of a culture in which Christian moral limits have collapsed.

Spiritual starvation

Lyman suggests that Americans secretly want Christianity but refuse the church. There is a grain of truth here. Human beings crave meaning, ritual, belonging, and redemption. But that longing does not turn protests into pseudo-liturgy. It indicates spiritual starvation. What Lyman treats as evidence of Christianity’s corruption is better understood as evidence of its absence.

Minneapolis is not a city of warped martyrs. It is a city where public order has broken down and civic leadership has failed. Dressing that disorder in theological language may sound evocative, but it explains very little.

When Lyman points to murals of George Floyd or grotesque memes about a murdered CEO and sees religious iconography, what he is really observing is a loss of proportion. To blame Christianity for that is to confuse the absence of moral limits with their cause.

American Christianity is not driving mobs into the streets begging for bullets. Churches across the country are feeding families, running recovery programs, rebuilding marriages, and teaching repentance, forgiveness, discipline, and duty. Those are not the ingredients of nihilism. They are the antidote to it.

​Christian nihilism, Minneapolis, Minneapolis protests, Ice, Anti-ice, The spectator, The media, Lifestyle, Leftists, Faith 

When Allie Beth Stuckey took on 20 liberal Christians for a recent Jubilee debate, one question stuck with the BlazeTV host of “Relatable.”

“This might seem a little silly, but a lot of people actually have this question: Is our spirit gendered?” Stuckey says.

“No. Nothing in Scripture points to this idea of our soul and spirit possibly having a separate gender from our biological sex,” she explains, recalling her response in the debate.

“I said, ‘Oh I don’t think that we see that in Scripture at all. That’s not a Christian belief.’ And she said, ‘Well, I’m a part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.’ And so, I don’t know if this is a tenet of Mormonism,” she says.

“There is definitely a different belief about the spirit and what it is. Different belief about eternity, different belief about Jesus, different belief about time past, different belief about heaven, all different kinds of things that are so far out of the orthodoxy of any denomination of Christianity,” she continues.

“I thought that that was an interesting assertion that I have not heard other Mormons, by the way, believe,” she adds, noting that those who have New Age beliefs or secular people often make points like this to justify transgenderism.

“We see in Genesis 1 that God made us male and female. Sex is a biological reality,” Stuckey responds.

Stuckey explains that in a book titled “Love Thy Body,” author Nancy Pearcey homes in on the philosophy of dualism and how it’s led many people astray in order to separate the spirit from the body and to say the spirit has authority over the body.

“That’s not true. God cares about the body. It’s a temple of the Holy Spirit,” Stuckey adds.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Free, Video phone, Upload, Sharing, Video, Camera phone, Youtube.com, Relatable, Relatable with allie beth stuckey, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Stuckey, Transgenderism, Jubilee debate, Gendered souls, Christianity, Debate, Christianity debate 

In the days following a brutal street beating by Antifa members outside a left-wing event, the incident has taken a tragic turn.

On February 12, a 23-year-old man, identified as Quentin, was involved in a violent clash outside an event connected to the French left-wing party La France Insoumise’s MEP Rima Hassan at Sciences Po Lyon, the European Conservative reported.

‘To the unfathomable pain of losing a child must not follow the unbearable impunity of the barbarians responsible for this lynching.’

The incident occurred between anti-fascist groups and the right-wing feminist group Némésis, according to the collective’s director, Alice Cordier.

RELATED: Antifa, women’s clothing, and Church of Satan: Thug who allegedly threatened ICE agents is a proud degenerate

Photo by Henrique Campos / Hans Lucas / AFP via Getty Images

The clash began when members of the Némésis group unfurled a banner criticizing “Islamo-fascists,” after which they were physically confronted by antifascist members.

One 19-year-old woman was reportedly strangled and dragged prior to Quentin’s serious beating.

Quentin, who was serving as an informal security detail for Némésis, attempted to protect the female members of the group during the incident. However, he was subsequently ambushed and beaten unconscious as he and a friend were leaving the scene of the incident.

He was later taken to the local hospital in Lyons.

Quentin remained in a coma with a critical brain hemorrhage until Saturday in a condition his family described as “between life and death.”

The European Conservative reported on Saturday that Quentin succumbed to his injuries.

French president Emmanuel Macron declared Quentin “the victim of an unprecedented outburst of violence,” adding that he was sending his “thoughts,” to his family and loved ones.

“In the Republic, no cause, no ideology will ever justify killing. On the contrary, the very purpose of our institutions is to civilize debates and protect the free expression of arguments. Pursuing, bringing to justice and convicting the perpetrators of this infamy is essential. The hatred that kills has no place among us. I call for calm, restraint and respect,” Macron added.

French conservative leader Marine Le Pen also issued a statement upon news of Quentin’s death: “After clinging to life, Quentin breathed his last. To his family and loved ones shattered by this terrible ordeal, I send my heartfelt thoughts and my deepest compassion. To the unfathomable pain of losing a child must not follow the unbearable impunity of the barbarians responsible for this lynching. It will be for justice to judge and condemn with the utmost severity this criminal act of unprecedented violence.”

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Politics, Quentin, Lyons, Sciences po lyons, Emmanuel macron, Marine le pen, European conservative, Antifa, Nemesis, France, French, Rima hassan