Conservatives Expose Cultural Cults, Restore Moral Order

People are assembling themselves around ideas and figures that deserve clear-eyed rejection, and this piece walks through those movements, why they feel like cults, and what it says about a society that has lost its taste for truth. I argue that anguished crowds latch onto narratives that turn the indefensible into sacred causes, and that this pattern shows up across politics and culture. The examples here range from sympathetic reactions to violent actors, to celebrating abortion, to normalizing assisted death, to conspiracy-driven defenses of the accused, and to campus cheers for terror. Each case exposes a civilizational hunger for ritualized meaning where moral clarity is absent.

Something has cracked in modern moral life, and it is not mere indifference. When apathy rules, people stay home; what we are seeing instead is restless devotion hunting for altars to serve. That devotion turns public sorrow and anxiety into organized worship of causes that a decent people would immediately find repulsive. The phenomenon is widespread and oddly consistent: a craving for any narrative that sorts pain into enemies and saints.

When anguish stops being neutral it becomes ravenous; it needs stories that organize the pain and name villains. Strip a people of a love for truth, and those appetites will be fed by counterfeits every time. The public ritualizing of transgression—cheering, canonizing, defending—begins to look less like politics and more like religion gone wrong.

And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth.

Distress and perplexity are not just news copy; they are psychological states that push people toward collective solutions, even if those solutions are morally bankrupt. Consider the spectacle of crowds rallying for accused killers, cheering names, or demanding mercy for perpetrators while forgetting victims. Empathy untethered from truth consistently flows toward the transgressor and away from the person harmed.

We have watched a cultural shift where tragic exceptions have become celebratory norms. Not long ago politicians described abortion as rare; today some states have erased gestational limits and treat the procedure as an unrestricted right. Laws and culture have moved in lockstep, and rituals have sprouted to sanctify the practice—marches, slogans, merchandise, and public boasts that reframe what used to be treated with solemn regret into a proud identity.

That transformation is not accidental. When policy becomes liturgy, moral inquiry is closed off and ritual replaces conscience. Celebrating acts once described as tragic teaches a generation to value spectacle over sober moral reckoning. What began as pleas for mercy in hard cases has hardened into a devotion that shields itself from moral scrutiny.

Look north for a warning about where compassionate death can lead when legal bounds relax. Canada’s medical assistance in dying was sold as mercy for the terminally ill, and a decade later MAiD accounts for a striking share of deaths. Many who choose it cite feeling like a burden, not unbearable pain, which says something chilling about how a wealthy nation comforts the vulnerable with death rather than community.

The move to expand assisted death to include mental illness shows how a policy that began as limited mercy can metastasize into something normalized and then celebrated. Questioning the trend gets you labeled heartless or obstructionist, which is the cult dynamic: dissent is treated as heresy, and the new ritual is enforced by social pressure.

Distrust of institutions can be healthy; skepticism has kept liberty alive. But skepticism curdles when it demands rejecting verified evidence to sustain a favored story. Calling the accused killer of a public figure a “total patsy” after footage and testimony place him at the scene is not simple doubt. It is turning evidence into blasphemy to preserve a comforting fable.

For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.

That passage names what we see: an appetite for narratives that confirm pain instead of confronting truth. When followers prefer fable to fact, movements form that reward loyalty with certainty and punish doubt with ostracism. The victims of crimes are recast as suspects, and the accused are draped in martyrdom to feed the crowd’s need for meaning.

Campus responses to mass murder showed the same pattern: a failure of moral polarity where atrocity is rebranded as liberation and killers are celebrated as resistance. That inversion is not ignorance; these are credentialed people making a moral choice to invert right and wrong. When institutions teach that atrocity can be reframed as virtue, they train citizens to venerate the indefensible.

And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie.

The sequence matters: rejecting the love of truth comes first, and delusion follows as consequence. A society that treats truth as oppressive will be handed over to deceptions that satisfy its hungers. Expect more movements to arrive and to fuse their vocabularies, demanding conformity and punishing refusal.

The right response is not louder tribalism but fidelity to truth married to mercy. That is the countercultural calling: to name evil without hatred and to love sinners without lies. Anguished people will seek altars; make sure the one you tend points to an honest standard, not to the next counterfeit savior.