Opinion: Reflections on a week when madness overwhelmed public discourse

These past few days have given us a series of civic episodes in which the public square seems to lose its mind all at once. Let’s consider just a few of them.

Joy Behar said on ABC’s “The View” that Jesus never went around declaring Himself the Messiah and then got corrected in real time by her own co-host. Tucker Carlson amplified the line that “Muslims love Jesus” in the middle of a broader anti-Israel turn. President Trump publicly attacked Pope Leo XIV on Truth Social, and Vice President Vance publicly joined the criticism. And Trump also circulated imagery on Truth Social that drew outrage for casting him in overtly messianic terms during his feud with the Pope.

I’ll begin with the obvious point: Jesus did, in fact, identify Himself in both messianic and divine terms. In John 4:25–26 He tells the Samaritan woman, “I who speak to you am he.” In Mark 14:61–62 He answers the high priest’s question about whether He is the Christ with an answer so direct that the court erupts. In Luke 4:18–21 He reads Isaiah in the synagogue and then declares that the Scripture has been fulfilled in their hearing. Catechesis and theological musings rarely succeed on daytime television talk shows. But Scripture does state that Christ is “the same yesterday and today and for ever” (Heb. 13:8), which means our era gains zero authority to reinvent Him according to comedians such as Behar.

Meanwhile, the Tucker Carlson line must, I think, be judged more strongly, because the claim that Muslims and Christians “love Jesus” in any shared theological sense is false and absurd. The Quran says of Christ, “they neither killed nor crucified him” in Surah 4:157, says “Allah is only One God” and “far above having a son” in Surah 4:171, and says “The Messiah, son of Mary, was no more than a messenger” in Surah 5:75. That figure is radically different from the Jesus of the Gospels and of history, who said “I who speak to you am he” in John 4:26 and answered the high priest, “I am” when asked whether He was the Messiah in Mark 14:62.

Christians worship the crucified and risen Son. Muslims reject His Sonship, His Cross, and therefore His saving identity. As the late New Testament scholar Larry Hurtado once wrote, “to speak about God without reference to Jesus is inadequate discourse about God.” Tucker would do well to learn that point. The Islamic Isa is a revised religious character stripped of Calvary and emptied of divinity. Therefore, Tucker’s remark was asinine, as Muslims and Christians do not revere the same Jesus at all.

Then there is the Trump versus Pope Leo clash, which has now moved far beyond a passing irritation and into the realm of real public disorder. Trump publicly called Leo “WEAK on Crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy,” refused to apologize, and kept escalating after the Pope’s peace appeals regarding Iran. Reuters also reports that Trump reposted an image of himself with Jesus embracing him amid the widening backlash from Catholics and other Christians. Vance then sharpened his own criticism of the pope’s rhetoric, even as the political and religious fallout in the U.S. grew more visible. None of this, of course, proves that every papal prudential judgment is beyond disagreement. It does, however, prove that American political culture has become intoxicated with treating even the sacred authority of the papacy as just another target in the mud-slinging grinder of political ugliness.

Yet, amid such insanity, Christians ought to resist the temptation to talk as if history began less than a week ago. Western history has seen weeks far more mad and troubling than this one.

During the Reign of Terror in revolutionary France, the state quite literally put terror “on the order of the day,” arrested hundreds of thousands, and executed thousands as revolutionary virtue became an excuse for bloodlust. In 1914, Europe moved from diplomatic tension to world war in roughly five weeks after the assassination at Sarajevo triggered alliance systems and mass mobilization. In Salem, Massachusetts, during 1692 and 1693, an entire colony descended into accusation and judicial delirium until nineteen people had been hanged and many others imprisoned.

Human societies can lose proportion very quickly when fear, tribalism, and ideology take hold. Our age did not invent this frenzy; it just digitized it and gave it social media traction.

Even so, history also gives us reason for hope, because each of those episodes eventually broke under the pressure of truth or institutional recovery. The Terror ended with Robespierre’s fall. The fever in Salem ended when authorities finally rejected spectral nonsense and started acting like adults again, letting reason reign. Europe eventually rebuilt after wars that had shredded its own soul. Human beings are capable of great madness. Human beings also are capable of returning to reason, rebuilding institutions, and rediscovering our moral limits. Grace can do even more than that.

The Christian assessment of history never cycles in despair, because the Resurrection introduced an irreversible fact into time: Christ rose from the grave. Therefore, history has a Lord, chaos has an expiration date, and, most of all, the insanity of evil has a stopping point.

That is why Christians must guard their minds. “God did not give us a spirit of timidity but a spirit of power and love and self-control” (2 Tim. 1:7). “Do not be anxious about anything,” and “the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 4:6–7). “You keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on you” (Isa. 26:3). “Be still, and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10).

Our Lord Himself says, “Let not your hearts be troubled” (John 14:1) and “In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). These texts compel us into disciplined sanity under God’s divine sovereignty.

The Church says the same in her public teaching. Gaudium et Spes teaches that peace is far more than the absence of war and must be built upon justice and a rightly ordered society. Benedict XVI taught that politics itself is inseparable from the question of justice and therefore from ethics. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church teaches that the Church’s social doctrine illuminates society precisely because the Gospel speaks to the human person and to public life as such.

In other words, the Church does not retreat into a private devotional corner while media insanity stokes cultivated frenzy. The Church stands firm that Christ is Lord over man, nations, and history.

Do not get disheartened, my friends. This week has been ugly, overheated, and intellectually embarrassing. Oh, at times, so embarrassing. Yet Christ is Lord, and media cycles will burn out very quickly. The Church has seen everything, including wars and outrageous actions. She outlived them all because Jesus Christ, the true Messiah and eternal Son of God, lives. Keep your head and keep your prayer and fasting constant. Live the faith steadily and, perhaps equally important, don’t lose your sense of humor. A little jocularity helps when the circus insists on calling itself statesmanship.

Above all, keep your eyes on the Lamb who was slain and who lives eternally, because this whole scenario may still unfold in ways none of us can yet map, yet the final verdict already belongs to Him: “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever” (Rev. 11:15).