Andrew Klavan has been warning Americans that our cultural rot isn’t accidental, it’s prophetic — and he lays that argument out in his recent work and on his show, arguing that a poem and a tradition of literature anticipated the spiritual collapse we now live through. Klavan traces a thread from Cain and classic dark literature to modern horrors, insisting these works are less entertainment than cautionary prophecy about what happens when a people forget God.
The thrust of his message is simple and terrifying: art that stares unflinchingly at murder and nihilism doesn’t create the vacuum, it reveals it — the vacuum created by secular elites who have spent decades hollowing out faith and meaning. Klavan connects three notorious murders and the gruesome cultural artifacts they spawned to a larger story about what happens when the image of God is banished from public life and men are taught to make themselves gods.
The facts on the ground demand we pay attention. Our homicide numbers spiked sharply during the pandemic years and reached a 21st-century peak in 2021 before falling somewhat by 2023, but even the partial decline leaves the nation with far more murder than the low years of the 2010s. That rise and partial retrenchment are not merely statistics; they are red lights flashing over neighborhoods where the moral scaffolding that once restrained violence has been removed.
At the same time, decades of survey data show Americans moving away from the churches and creeds that once taught the very habits of self-restraint and neighbor-love a free society needs. Pew Research finds the Christian share of adults has fallen over the long term and religiously unaffiliated Americans have grown dramatically, especially among the young — a demographic reality the elites refuse to reckon with. This is not just sociology; it is a civic emergency.
Call it what you will — secularism, progressive faithlessness, the triumph of therapeutic individualism — the consequence is the same: a weakened moral culture that tolerates excuse-making for criminals and excuses religion out of the public square. The Left insists that institutions and traditions are oppressive when in fact those institutions have been the brakes on barbarism. When you remove moral deterrents and lionize grievance, you shouldn’t be surprised when violence grows.
If Klavan is right — and the evidence tells us he is at least worth listening to — then the remedy is not more government lectures or more woke re-education, it is the slow and stubborn work of rebuilding faith, family, and civic responsibility. He argues that true art can show us both the depths of our sin and the path out of it; that same principle applies to communities and churches that model repentance, charity, and moral clarity.
So what can patriotic Americans do? Go to your church, teach your children virtue, support leaders who defend law and order and who refuse to kneel before fashionable ideologies. Stop funding companies and institutions that mock your values and start investing time and treasure in the institutions that actually hold society together: local congregations, neighborhood schools that teach responsibility, and public leaders who speak plainly about right and wrong.
We can lament the cultural collapse, or we can rebuild. The poem Klavan reads as prophecy did not predetermine our fate; it merely described the road taken when belief dies. If we want safety, prosperity, and a future worth handing our children, we must turn back toward the One who made us and the moral habits He taught. America was built on those habits — it is time to practice them again.
