Sometimes a book comes along that delivers a jolt to the mind and spirit. Most readers have surely experienced this sensation. You leave the dishes in the sink, you stay up late, and your brain is buzzing with a million thoughts, all because the words on the pages are electricity rather than paper and print.

In his new book, “The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness,” Andrew Klavan flips this switch immediately when he quotes from the New Testament, “Rejoice evermore,” then asks, as untold numbers of others have asked before him: “But how can you rejoice in a world of so much darkness?”

A screenwriter, novelist and columnist, Klavan has produced mysteries and thrillers in which murder plays a central role. In “The Kingdom of Cain,” however, he analyzes four actual murderers and their motives, the literature and films their crimes inspired, and the godless philosophies and psychoses that drove these criminals. The murderers are Cain, the killer of his brother Abel; Pierre Lacenaire, a thug and a thief who helped murder a con man and his mother in 1834, and who behaved in court as a sophisticate without a trace of contrition; Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who in 1924 murdered a teenage boy as an experiment in Nietzschean power and self-will; and Ed Gein, the Midwestern killer and body snatcher who was arrested in 1957 in his home, which he had decorated with human bones and skin.

Klavan then links these murderers and their crimes to literature and film. Dostoevsky read the sensationalist accounts of Lacenaire and incorporated those into Rodion Raskolnikov in “Crime and Punishment”; Leopold and Loeb accounted for several works of fiction, including Alfred Hitchcock’s film “Rope”; and Gein’s cruel atrocities came into play in such films as “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Psycho.”

But Klavan doesn’t draw the curtain there. He turns to the atheism of philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and most importantly, the Marquis de Sade. Having erased God, each of these men and others sought a replacement for a supreme being, but eventually concluded, as Klavan tells us, that power, desire, and the will are all that truly matters. Sade’s sadism, Nietzsche’s ubermensch, and Foucault’s deconstruction of culture and tradition were their proposed substitutes for Western civilization’s Judeo-Christian morality. The 20th century experiments in fascism and communism, which left more than 100 million dead in their wake, offer stark proof of what happens when such ideologies replace God.

This poisoning of the roots of the Western moral code affects all of us, believers and non-believers alike. A case in point: “Your truth is not my truth,” which is today’s banner of relativism, destroys a common sense of right and wrong as effectively as an Adolf Hitler or a Joseph Stalin, all without bloodshed. Adrift on these restless, godless waters, many people create their own morality. An extreme example would be the terrorist who sets off a bomb in a marketplace of strangers. He may regard himself as a saint, justified by his self-generated code of righteousness. Worse, he may deem himself a sort of god, inventing his own creed and dispensing justice in his cause.

“Make America Great Again!” is a worthy goal, but America never will become great again until it becomes good again. We may tout the world’s most powerful military and highest income and standards of living, but without the common moral principles that have long guided the citizens of our country, that power can as easily be used for evil as for good.

Andrew Klavan, who was 50 when he was baptized as a Christian, sees that when so many people embrace the philosophies of the kingdom of Cain, living without love of God and neighbor, such power will eventually turn to dust. In our dark age of nihilism and subjectivism, he understands that only truth, beauty and love can light up that darkness and prevent that outcome.

More than 200 years ago, another American understood the mechanics of this formula. In 1798, John Adams wrote these words in a letter to the men of the First Brigade, Third Division, of the Massachusetts Militia:

But should the People of America, once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another and towards foreign nations, which assumes the Language of Justice and moderation while it is practicing Iniquity and Extravagance; and displays in the most captivating manner the charming Pictures of Candour frankness & sincerity while it is rioting in rapine and Insolence: this Country will be the most miserable Habitation in the World. Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image Credit: Public Domain Pictures