When every perpetrator is explained, contextualised and rehabilitated, the victims become an inconvenient detail. We live in an age that has become strangely embarrassed by the existence of evil, and people call good evil and evil good (Isaiah 5:20).

Consider Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother who does not deny killing her three children. She claims she was suffering from postpartum psychosis. Now, I’m not saying mental illness isn’t real. I’m not saying courts shouldn’t take mental illness into account. But something rather peculiar has happened outside the court where Lindsay Clancy is on trial.

From Perpetrator to Icon: The Lindsay Clancy Case

Clancy has become, in some circles, a feminist symbol — a kind of patron saint of the oppressed mother. And every day, crowds of women dressed in pink have gathered outside the court to yell support for the mum who killed her kids.

Cora, aged 5, Dawson, aged 3 and little 8-month-old Callen were strangled to death by their mum… and yet this perverse display of compassion finds perfectly sane women rooting for the woman who killed them. This is what happens when a civilisation loses the vocabulary of evil. We stop asking, Who did what? and start asking, What social forces made them do it? The perpetrator becomes a patient. Then a victim. Then, if the political conditions are right, an icon. And once evil has been sufficiently contextualised, there is nothing left to condemn.

A society that can’t distinguish between policeman and criminal, victim and perpetrator, innocence and guilt, eventually becomes incapable of defending the innocent. Compassion is a virtue. Understanding is a virtue. Mental-health treatment is a virtue. But compassion without moral judgment is sloppy sentimentality. And sentimentality is a remarkably poor defence against evil. Evil doesn’t disappear because we stop calling it evil. It just becomes harder to stop.

The circumstances that exist in the world today, lawlessness and apostasy in many of the denominational churches, that have abandoned the inerrancy and authority of the Bible, line up with Biblical end times prophecies. Tribulation is ahead for those who proclaim the truth about God and His commandments, and that Jesus is the only way back to a relationship with our Heavenly Father.

“Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake. And then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” Matthew 24: 9-14

“Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” John 14:6

Will you be one of those that endures to the end proclaiming the truth about God the Father and Jesus?