The unspeakable atrocity of innocent people being shot to death by a deranged mass killer continued last week. Two children were murdered and 18 other people wounded in an attack at a Catholic church in Minneapolis. The media coverage gradually devolved, as it always does, from conscientious reporting and outraged commentary to the usual money-driven spectacle. The Left called, as it always does, for gun control; the Right seized on the fact that the shooter was, apparently, a trans person. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan memorably said that he was returning his “entrance ticket” to God because he could not accept that He would allow the suffering of a single child. In America, the abomination of murdered children is quickly absorbed into helpless routines of commerce and cultural conflict.

And yet no one made the connection between the killing in Minnesota and Trump’s dispatch of the US military to Washington DC for the sake of preserving, he declared, law and order. Trump made it clear that he wasn’t stopping at DC, announcing plans to send the military into other cities, all liberal, as it happened, like Chicago and New York. But aside from sending condolences to the people stricken by the violence in Minnesota, Trump said not a word about mass shootings in America. The street crime Trump claims he wants to extinguish, as he has extinguished illegal border crossings, has been a feature of organized humanity since people began to congregate in numbers larger than two. The mass slaughter of innocent people for no other reason than that someone wanted to slaughter them — that is something new. Isolated detachments of soldiers are not sufficient to stop it. You would need soldiers everywhere.

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If Freud was right, and depression is anger turned inward, then the statistics showing that a majority of Americans are clinically depressed might mean that, for some, homicidal rage takes the form of depression turned outward. The simple fact is that the origins of a mass shooting are buried in an individual psyche; they are impossible to prevent. That is perhaps why Trump is deploying American troops to American cities has not met the sort of resistance one might have expected. Rather, there is a feeling, among even the most liberal of us, that in a society where the mass killing of children, of innocents, has become a common occurrence, safety has to come from somewhere. I don’t know a single liberal not horrified by Trump’s profligate use of the American military to do the job of American police. But I don’t know many liberals who are either over the age of 50, or not the product of wealth’s elevations and exceptions (or both), who don’t, on some deep instinctual level, welcome the sight of a soldier in the context of a civil society that has become increasingly unstable.

That doesn’t mean that America has become increasingly violent. As the liberal media is at great pains to point out, and justifiably so, crime rates have declined over the past few years. It just so happens that the regions where they remain elevated are in the West and the rural South. Crime is far higher in MAGA states like Tennessee, or Alabama or Mississippi, than in even the most violent blue cities.

But the reality of crime matters far less than cultural attitudes toward crime. For if violent crime is higher in the South than in the North, the way people think about crime in the two regions is radically different. In the South, antisocial behavior is habitually contrasted with the values of law and order, values rooted in the moral frameworks of family, religion and patriotism. The North, where the causes of crime matter more in terms of policy than crime per se, is regarded by the South as downright libertine. Telling the Right that their own regions experience more crime than the places in the country Trump is portraying as being under siege by criminals is irrelevant. In the eyes of many Republicans, those liberal places are under siege more by their “permissive” attitudes toward crime than crime itself.

If, however, the different parts of the country have different perceptions of their experience of crime, they all share the same condition. America’s rate of violent crime far exceed countries in Western Europe and East Asia. Taken as a whole, the United States is a violent place. All the while, the vast economic displacements of the past 30 years have introduced their own violence, as what remained of a manufacturing economy gave way to an information economy, which has now been subsumed by the digital world. In a situation of rapidly mutating norms, crime is not merely a fact, but the symbolic shadow of a wider malaise.

It is one of the peculiarities of being an American now that you don’t have to live in a city with a high rate of crime, like Washington or Chicago — or Memphis or Birmingham — to feel personally threatened. The presence of predation on the internet; the screen-abetted withdrawal of people into themselves; the dissolution of shared cultural experiences into countless, private streaming niches; the fractures produced by identitarianism; the blurring of fact and fiction, the personalizing and customization of the justice system; the displacements of human experience and human labor by AI — you could live miles away from anyone, yet still feel as as if you were living in an urban crime zone. It is no wonder that “weaponized” has become such a popular expression. When the most disparate experiences become turned into “weapons,” it means that mass murders — soul-murders, psyche-murders, feeling-murders, status-murders, murders by money, trauma, gaslighting, “subtle acts of exclusion” — are happening all around us.

In this sense, Trump’s war on the liberal cultural of negativity toward America might well turn against him if it is successful. Once negativity as a dominant cultural attitude subsides, his appeal starts to fade. The media’s relentless apocalypticism, its “weaponization” of everything under the sun, is what has people cheering, across the political spectrum when Trump sends troops into American cities. When America’s cultural institutions, from the media, to high and popular art, to higher education, constantly cry that the sky is falling, people are going to turn to whatever figure or force promises protection. Imagine that proverbial visitor from another planet, but one who comes with their family, and has a human biology. Within two hours of experiencing the news, our extraterrestrial immigrants would hear that climate change is bringing total destruction, the next terrifying pandemic is right around the corner, the races hate each other, men and women hate each other, something called artificial intelligence is wiping out the quality of being human, and your child’s genitalia are not as permanent as you thought they were back home. And because it is so hard to keep up with all these encroaching terrors, crime — the primordial human fear of being killed or violently assaulted by another human — embodies all of them.

If a few more car accidents than the average was enough for some people in Spain to wish for the return of Franco, violence in America is exponentially more consequential. As the perception of chaos rises, calls for safety, stability and protection will become naked and intense. A mighty state teetering atop a failing society, America cannot exist much longer without the imposition of order; from one side or another. As a parent leads a child across a busy road, American democracy will soon be guided by the firmest hand.

Recruits would receive instruction in military operations and Latin — a clear political signifier as the Vatican tries to prohibit Latin mass to the chagrin of the Church’s more conservative elements. The St Louis Post-Dispatch reported that the online application for the militia, which has since been taken down and disavowed by Ascension, also included references to “platoons”, “hand-to-hand combat” and even featured a sketch of the “bright white uniforms”. While Legionnaires would not serve as armed guards at the church, they “could be called upon by the Pastor of the Parish to take up arms defensively” if the congregation were threatened.

Amid national controversy, Ray walked back his call to arms, citing his distress at dwindling congregations and the closure of churches. He had hoped, he said, to “create an organisation for young men to push themselves mentally, physically” through practices “modelled after the military”. While regretting his use of the term “militia”, Ray explained that the “current state of the Church in the West is equally regrettable and I’m sure we can all agree that we are in desperate times”.

While Ray might sound like a local eccentric, his push is in fact part of a wider trend in the US. This has seen increasing numbers of churches gathering armed security forces, variously described as “safety ministries” or at the more explicit end offering “Christian warrior training”.

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Attacks on places of worship are nothing new, and are a very real consideration for even the most pacifist flock. Historically, they have been associated with hate crimes against black protestant congregations, primarily in the Deep South, as opposed to wealthy, predominately white Catholic congregations, such as Chesterfield. But as the proportion of Americans who identify as white Christian dwindles, they are feeling increasingly under threat.

This is borne out in a report on violence against churches in the US published earlier this year by the evangelical group the Family Research Council. It declares that “hostility against American churches is not only on the rise but also accelerating”. Identifying some 436 incidents against churches in 2023 — more than double the number in 2022, according to their records, and more than eight times the number in 2018 — it warned that these are “destructive and have the potential to intimidate a religious community”.

The fear is an understandable one. Unfortunately, though, the Family Research Council is far from an impartial or authoritative source. Controversially designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Centre in 2010 for its hostility to LGBT issues, the Council conceded in its report that “the motivations for many of these incidents remain unknown”, however, it believes that “the rise in crimes against churches is taking place in a context in which American culture appears increasingly hostile to Christianity”.

Only, there is a wider political context: the so-called decline of white Christian America. This idea is often rehearsed within elements of the Right-wing media, with claims that immigration policies are changing the racial and religious makeup of the country.

In this vein, the Family Research Council report, though widely cited, does seem to be more political than scholarly. It does not list the methodology of its research, nor classify incidents. Perceived hostility and violence are considered one and the same. One example cited in the report is of a “Vote No” sign being pulled from the ground and thrown in a bin outside a Cincinatti Church, while fires with unknown causes are lumped in with established arson.

A more credible study by the nonpartisan A-Mark Foundation put the violence in better context. They identified 59 attacks targeting congregants, clergy, or staff at houses of worship of all faiths between January 2012 and December 2022. Shootings caused 74 of 79 deaths, while 40% of perpetrators suffered from mental illness.

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Moreover, the A-Mark report found that when it comes to motivation for attacks on places of worship, Christians aren’t the main target. “Only 18% of attacks targeting Christian or Catholic places of worship were motivated by racial, ethnic, or religious hatred,” the authors said, while “attacks targeting Jewish (93%) and Muslim (83%) houses of worship were overwhelmingly motivated by antisemitic or Islamophobic hate”.

This is not to say that the fear felt by members of Ascension Catholic Church, or any other Christian congregation, is not real, but it is being stoked disproportionally by politicians and media figures — as well as by for-profit church security training and protection organisations.

The founder of one such company, Dwayne Harris of Full Armor Church Safety Solutions, told UnHerd that he launched the firm in 2017 as a response to “certain incidents that were occurring in the news” such as the Charleston church shooting. An ordained Pentecostal bishop and law enforcement officer, Harris says that the most common incidents at churches are lone actors in crisis, often due to mental health, however he believes that “cultural shifts and tendencies towards violence and disruption” in wider society have created a sense of fear that exacerbates these issues.

A competitor in the industry, Joe Puckett of the Church Security Academy, referred me to a recent video he posted on YouTube alerting US churchgoers to the threat of ISIS-K, a particularly active branch of the terrorist group believed to be responsible for recent attacks in Russia and Afghanistan. Puckett says that churches tend to come to him “afraid of their skill level and how they can defend themselves” against “the traditional lone wolf attack”. Increasingly, however, he says that “we’re afraid of some of these groups that are here” and that “it might be multiple people that are attacking us at one time”.

There is no evidence that ISIS-K, based in Central Asia, has any presence in the United States, however, the idea that terrorists are coming over an unsecure Southern border with Mexico is a common refrain on the Right and from Republican Party politicians, including Donald Trump.

Religious studies professor Matthew D. Taylor at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies believes that in certain Right-wing Christian circles, creating this climate of anxiety helps to justify retaliation. “Very rarely do people conceptualise themselves as violent aggressors”, he says. But the MAGA ecosystem, he explains, helps to rationalise taking-up arms as a defensive posture, because other groups are posing the greater threat.

Catholics and other denominations may be keying in on the trend, but Taylor says that is driven by a Charismatic-Pentecostal movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), increasingly influential within the Republican Party and counting Trump’s spiritual adviser, Paula White Cain, in its numbers.

“The NAR movement is spiritually accelerationist” Taylor says, claiming that “the current system is corrupted, false and demonic — and that their opponents are so totalitarian and tyrannical that they must be opposed”. Prominent Right-wing Christian influencers are helping to translate these political themes into spiritual terms, “claiming we need a great revival — which is intrinsically political and Right-wing in their theology — to reset American culture”.

The critical doctrine emerging from the NAR movement is the concept of “Spiritual Warfare”. Here, cosmic enemies are everywhere, helping to create a climate of fear and hostility, placing “true believers” on a permanent war-footing. From there, the idea of starting private militias helps fellow travellers to “disinvest in the system”, Taylor says, which risks creating suspicion for American democracy.

“When you start saying that we need to physically protect ourselves against our political opponents, and that they are a threat to our very existence, there’s no room for compromise” Taylor warns. “There’s no room for democratic negotiation if you claim the other side is out to destroy you. It’s violence all the way down.”

As America’s burning political climate collides with a mental health crisis and untrammelled access to guns, the idea of armed church militias is a dangerous thing. Places of worship are already high-profile targets for violence. But a greater risk for conflict, however, may be coming from inside the house. At a time when many conservative Christians feel that they are under siege by the secular, liberal world around them, taking up arms could feel like their only protection.