"I can't breathe." The handcuffing of a murder victim & the death of our culture.

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:19]I can't breathe became one of the defining moral slogans of our age. Yet in the death of Henry Novak on the streets of Southampton in England, the phrase returns with a horrible irony. A dying man lay handcuffed on the floor whilst the police, those trusted with protecting the innocent, were too brainwashed to recognize where the real danger lay.

[00:00:46]Before writing about the death of Henry Novak, I forced myself to watch the footage of his murder through the police cam that was in fact released today. And it makes it very difficult to write dispassionately, but we have to try.

[00:01:03]I think the difficulty with Henry's death is that it raises a deeper question than guilt or innocence. It raises the question of what happens when a society abandons Christian anthropology and replaces it with a secular doctrine of human perfectibility.

[00:01:22]You see, part of the shock of seeing Henry's death, his murder, is that we attempted to want to blame the seek who murdered him, to blame the police, who wouldn't believe him, to find some kind of person to hold to account for what is both tragic and obscene. Obviously, his murderer is to blame, but that isn't a sufficient solution for the position we find ourselves in because the police created such a gross injustice that we're shocked to the core of what this represents about what our society has become. So, it's tempting to blame the police, but however difficult it is to control our sense of outrage and injustice in the timeworn phrase, they are well, I won't use the word victims, they are casualties of a sort, for they were trained, in fact, they were brainwashed in the art of the new secular moral idealism that has placed replaced Christian philosophy and ethics.

[00:02:28]So, our real enemy is not just the police who committed this gross injustice because they were brainwashed by those who trained them, but rather the anti-Christian ethic that overcame Christian philosophy and culture.

[00:02:43]We might want to claim that the tragic death of Henry Novak, stabbed and misrepresented, handcuffed and injured, is the final outcome of this terrible philosophy of ethics, secular moral idealism. in the way they the way that Henry said he couldn't breathe because he was drowning in his own blood. Nor can we breathe in this philosophical atmosphere in which we and our values are drowning. The real enemy we're struggling against needs to be given a name and that's not an easy process.

[00:03:16]Let's do what we can and identify it as secular moral idealism.

[00:03:23]Secular moral idealism is a belief that human beings are morally perfectable through education, through legislation and social engineering. It seeks to abolish what we might call the universal human phenomenon of fear of the other.

[00:03:37]Because such fear offends against the humanist assumption that people can be educated into virtue and compelled by law to behave accordingly.

[00:03:47]Christianity takes the opposite view which is one reason secular moral idealism idealism finds Christianity so difficult to tolerate and attacks it wherever it can. Christianity believes that human beings are not perfectable and therefore require both restraint through law and transformation of mind and soul. The conflict before us therefore is not merely political. It's anthropological and theological. It concerns what kind of creatures human beings actually are.

[00:04:19]Let's look at the fiction of racism.

[00:04:22]This is dangerous and difficult. So, let's begin by doing what has recently become almost impossible. That is to examine critically the modern concept of racism. This is high-risk commentary indeed because racism has become one of the gravest sins, one of the deepest heresies that anyone living in a culture formed by secular moral idealism can commit. And yet the concept itself has become increasingly vacuous. The emperor of racism has no clothes. He is naked and dangerous. The problem is not that people are incapable of hostility towards others. Clearly we all are. The problem is that racism has become an elastic and politically charged category that is invoked constantly but defined only vaguely if scientifically at all.

[00:05:12]There is no scientific definition of race itself. Stop a moment. You may not have known that but it is the case.

[00:05:20]Science has failed to define what race is. And therefore there is no stable foundation upon which the modern moral panic surrounding racism can comfortably rest. What has happened instead is that racism has become a shorthand impossible to define precisely and impossible to recognize consistently for that great blasphemy against humanistic optimism.

[00:05:44]Fear of the other. It is time. It is long past the time that the church found some courage and confronted this confusion with robust intellectual energy. If we continue to surrender to these conceptual ambiguities and distortions, we will never be able to confront the deeper shortcomings of secular moral moral idealism itself. And it is constructing a prison in which we are being captured and held.

[00:06:13]Let's look at the return of thought crime. Worse than the instability of the concept of race is the fact that this elusive distinction has increasingly morphed into thought crime. And so our society combines two dangerous errors.

[00:06:26]First, it attempts to criminalize something whose boundaries remain hopelessly uncertain. And second, it presumes that it possesses the ability to look inside the mind of the accused and discern evil intent.

[00:06:40]The danger of thought crimes is that they become the superstructure upon which authoritarian societies are built.

[00:06:47]Police states build themselves on thought crime. They are a political and psychological mechanism for attributing moral and political guilt despite the fact that we cannot see inside one another's heads, let alone read each other's souls. The distinction between action and motivation is notoriously difficult to determine with certainty.

[00:07:09]Yet secular moral idealism increasingly insists we can do exactly that.

[00:07:15]The modern sin of racism has therefore become a politicized version of the universal human experience of fearing the unknown.

[00:07:24]I'd like to introduce what I'm calling the moral Janus effect. I've long looked for a phrase to try and express this and this is as close as I can get. So my apologize if it's not as refined as it should be. The thing is, if we are to unravel this ethical confusion, we need to recognize what we might call moral dualism. I'm calling it the Janus effect. Every moral principle has two sides to it.

[00:07:50]Janus was a Roman god who looked both ways. The god of doorways, the god of beginnings and transitions. We might invoke him as a reminder only that every moral principle contains within it the possibility of both vice and virtue, wisdom and folly. So in the case of fear of the other, there is a perfectly sensible form of caution towards strangers which we are hardwired to possess and which is frequently dismissed as racism when a stranger approaches us. There is no immediate way of knowing whether he comes as a friend or a foe, a threat. Prudence therefore requires caution until we understand who the stranger is and what his intentions may be. Fear of the other in this sense is not irrational. It's very sensible.

[00:08:38]It's part of the way human beings have been equipped to deal with uncertainty and danger. But this should not be confused with the lazy fear of the other, which can't be bothered to discover the virtue that may lie beneath unfamiliar customs, unfamiliar clothes, unfamiliar tastes and habits or smells.

[00:09:01]That is a sin of laziness. more than it is of hatred, that might morph into hatred. Neither of these responses constitutes racism in any meaningful sense, and each must be judged according to its own merits or demerits. The Janus principle reminds us of prudence and prejudice can look superficially very similar, while morally being very different indeed.

[00:09:26]Christianity has its own ethic for dealing with the fear of the other, whether legitimate or illegitimate, and it is expressed in the invitation to love our neighbors as ourselves. But the neighbor is almost by definition somebody we know. We may not like them.

[00:09:42]They may irritate us. They may annoy us or even damage us, but we know them.

[00:09:47]I've had neighbors who do all of those things. They're not the same as the stranger. It would be foolish to construct a moral law that simply said, "Love the stranger as yourself," because that would deprive us of the ability to discover whether the stranger had our best interests at heart or had come to destroy us. Much depends upon context. A stranger may be vulnerable alone, or he may come as part of an invading army.

[00:10:16]Let the listener understand.

[00:10:18]A neighbor, however, is someone whom we've come to know. The profoundity of the biblical command to love our neighbor is rooted in the Christian understanding that our neighbor is made in the image of God.

[00:10:31]Not because our neighbor has virtue of their own, but because God has invested himself in that person's creation and preservation.

[00:10:40]The recognition of God in our neighbor is expressed through the requirements to offer love. Not because the neighbor has earned it, but because God has associated himself with the neighbor's existence.

[00:10:53]One of the reasons Henry Novak lay bleeding in the street and was handcuffed by police who falsely attributed racist motivation to him is that we as Christians have surrendered too easily to the moral blackmail of secular moral idealism.

[00:11:10]It is our fault, too. We have accepted a confused and increasingly incoherent understanding of racism in place of something much more challenging, more complex, more demanding, and more serious. Our institutions have in turn been trained to enforce that ideology in its contemporary woke form.

[00:11:31]No lasting good will come from this terrible tragedy. If we end up blaming Sikhs as a community, though the murderer was a seek who weaponized racism against his victim, or the police as an agency, though they surrendered to moral myopia and practiced injustice, or even those idologues who have imposed secular moral idealism, upon the agencies of our culture, though they are creating a police state, against the very people they were engaged and charged to protect us.

[00:12:05]We should instead honor the death of Henry Novak by finding the courage to engage in a renewed philosophical and theological argument with those who have succumbed to the seductions of secular moral idealism and its belief that human beings can be perfected through education, legislation and ideological conformity. The deepest conflict between us therefore is not between races, cultures and religions. It is between two rival visions of the human person.

[00:12:35]It is between secularism and Christianity. It is between Rouso and Marx on the one hand and Jesus on the other.

[00:12:44]Russo and Marx insist that human beings are perfectable through education, legislation, and social engineering.

[00:12:51]Jesus came because human beings are fallen, capable of both virtue and vice and therefore in need not merely of instruction but of redemption of being saved. The tragedy of Henry Novak should remind Christians that whenever we abandon the biblical understanding of human nature, we do not become more compassionate, we become more vulnerable to illusion, and illusions when armed with institutional power eventually demand victims. If this death teaches us anything, it is that the church must recover the confidence to proclaim once again the truth about man, sin, judgment, and salvation. Only then will we possess the intellectual and moral resources to resist the next injustice and to repudiate a system that is being constructed on injustice before we are finally and completely imprisoned.