I’m still haunted by the videos of people celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death. Their faces, are contorted by a kind of gleeful hatred.

To give him credit, the far-left politician Bernie Sanders left a very moving tribute. It was not exactly a ‘Je suis Charlie’ moment, but he said he was at one with him over the need to make society a place where arguments could be articulated and tested in debate and discussion.

I think the first time I came across the gleeful celebration of a public death was when Mrs Thatcher died. I had friends who began to put up messages that read “Ding dong the witch is dead.” She was a controversial figure. Some who admired what she did economically in the first five years disliked what she did in the second five years. Of course, the mining communities that were destroyed by changes of economic policy had their own intense views. But for a non-miner to celebrate with “ding dong the witch dead?”

Brought up on John Donne’s “no man is an island” I thought this was a surprising of dreadful lapse of manners.

“No man is an island,

Entire of itself;

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less,

As well as if a promontory were:

As well as if a manor of thy friend’s

Or of thine own were.

Any man’s death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.”

No one’s death is a cause for celebration. It should first act as a reminder ‘I’m next.’ I may be next. I will die soon. ‘Soon’ is relative.

What I didn’t know was that I was seeing the first sign of Orwell’s two-minute hate.

And hate is what has been planted, inculcated, nurtured, and fed as a staple as a central feature of the new culture wars.

There are many aspects of the Christianity that have forged our culture that we took for granted, and we only miss, with shock, when they are gone. Who knew that ‘Love your neighbour as yourself would be replaced within a very few years by “Hate your neighbour as yourself.”

Many of us have been warning that the changes in our culture were part of a sustained secular utopian assault based on a redirected and rejuvenated form of Marxism. Only of course to be laughed at and denigrated as far right conspiracy theorists. But let’s a take a look at Orwell. He wrote the playbook in “Nineteen Eighty-Four’”

In case you deed a quick memory refresh, in, George Orwell describes the “Two Minutes Hate. In every workplace and collective setting a film is shown. It flashes up images of the enemy (Goldstein’s face, foreign armies, or Eurasian soldiers) and the audience is whipped into a frenzy of hatred, fear, and loathing. People are encouraged to shout and scream at the screen. Suddenly at its peak, Big Brother appears and restores calm, love and loyalty to the party and everything it stands for.

In the novel, there is perpetual fear and a never-ending global conflict. Rational critique is not allowed. The culture is held in place by emotional conditions. The glue is hate.

Orwell was describing the characteristics of the onset of progressive totalitarianism.

Watching Charlie’s public dialogue, it becomes clear very quickly that many of his ideological sparring partners are consumed by a high level of emotional antagonism towards not only his ideas, but also against him.

This is the moralistic demonising that the Left have inculcated in a generation. One of Charlie’s gifts was to confront the fear with warmth and compassion, and invite the emotionally conditioned partner (who chose to participate) to establish the case for their views by proving him wrong. ‘Proof’, or in this case, ‘what is your better argument?’ was a powerful way to expose the dynamic which was really driving their world-view, which was educationally and culturally conditioned moral opprobrium based on a mis-presentation of fact.

It was always the airing and recourse to the facts that Charlie was so good it.

But beyond the ignorance, what he and we are facing is the replacement of the Christian ethic with an ethic of hate; but one that starts with the self and then spills over into the neighbour. Especially if the neighbour holds views that have been demonised as different, and usually reprehensibly as far-right, or fascist.

We find the hatred permeating so much of the new progressive culture. Masculinity, and especially white masculinity is hated, as part of the programme of so-called reversal of the power dynamics of the old order.

Even the outbreak of gender dysphoria appears to be related to a degree of self-hatred and mistrust. 70% of dysphoric youth are diagnosed as being afflicted by anxiety, depression and the experience of self-conflict which lies on a scale of self-doubt at one end to self-loathing at the other.

The accomplishments of Western culture are pejoratively rejected as irredeemably polluted by an abuse of power. What was assessed and appreciated by earlier generations as competence, inventiveness and skilled imagination, becomes filtered through a lens of power relations and interpreted as an abuse of the less competent, less skilled and less imaginative.

Hatred of self, hatred of whiteness, masculinity, and even hatred of competence since it undermined the project of equality of outcome has seeded and corrupted a whole generation of the West.

The tragedy is that a culture reared on hyper-emotional sensitivity where words (or the wrong words) or criticism, constituted violence, and became immune to critique, or the quiet assessment of self-reflection.

The hatred of the neighbour which lay behind not only Charlie Kirks’ assassination, but equally behind the toxic, mean and nasty celebrations of his death, are rooted in the loss of the gift of the Christian Gospel, founded on the revolutionary and healing teaching of Jesus, that love flows from God the creator, through the incarnation, towards each of us if we are willing to accept it and flows out to the neighbour.

What we are encountering of course at the level of spiritual conflict is a demonic reversal of that though in the form of progressive culture and politics.

And if you want a glimpse of the demonic character that lies behind it all, you can glimpse it in a communality of expression that the haters display as they jeer and celebrate the death of a profoundly good, kind, intelligent and gentle man.

Take a look. What we face is certainly ideological and political. But it is also theological and metaphysical. And so we need to confront it in both dimensions.