There is a book within me I have yet to write: The Battle Against Unbelief. It is the battle of our times. You’ve heard it a thousand times. “You can’t believe anything these days.” If I were the devil, I couldn’t have orchestrated the cultural sentiment any better.
It manifests in multiple contexts in this post-COVID age of artificial intelligence and fake news. To distrust is the fashion of our day. The cultural stream flows toward unbelief, and the devil is having a feast.
The anniversary of the 2023 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel gives us a great opportunity to think about the issue, since it is a prime example of this spiritual cancer eating at us. Conspiracies abound about what happened on that day. Did it even happen?
Wasn’t it all planned by Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? For filmmaker Igor Lopatonok, it “all sounds like a [sic] biggest false flag operation to kill sacred victims and ignite a war.” He wrote on X, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but [sic] smell of the fish is unbearable!” He has 5.7K likes and 2.5K reposts. Pink Floyd’s frontman Roger Waters was also skeptical, saying it might have been a “false flag operation.” Popular social media lightning rod, Nick Fuentes, shared his skepticism as “a little suspicious in light of how the Likud government will benefit politically from this crisis both domestically and internationally.”
And those are just a few examples. If you get your news from social media, which an alarming amount of people do, there is a serious chance you don’t know what to believe—on anything. Tucker Carlson is even skeptical of what happened in World War II. Was Hitler really the bad guy?
The facts of October 7 are indisputable. On October 7, 2023, about 6,000 Hamas terrorists invaded Israel from Gaza and massacred an estimated 1,200 people. They shot, burned, raped, dismembered, or decapitated Israelis, including women and children, and even babies. They also took 251 hostages. All while celebrating and posting videos (warning: link contains intensely graphic images) online.
When you see the facts, you can only break down and cry. How have we allowed such evil to thrive in our world? How have we allowed any argument to distract us from that reality?
But facts are small obstacles to the power of unbelief. The allure of skepticism seducing our culture made Candace Owens’ malicious conspiracies about the killing of Charlie Kirk the number one podcast in the nation at one point. The spread of unbelief pays well, as you act as an agent of “the god of this world,” as 2 Corinthians 4:4 describes the devil himself.
Belief is their real enemy. Christians are known as believers, after all. Which is why we must rise up against the Spirit of the Age with force. We cannot go along with the streams of culture; we are alive in Christ. As Chesterton said, “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”
We must stand against the great tide of unbelief. This October 7th gives us a great opportunity. Speak up against the atrocities of that day. Do not be intimidated by the TikTok mob. Do not be distracted by the latest podcast conspiracy. Fight for truth. Let the words “Never again” remain alive within our souls.
And never forget what the battle truly is. As Thomas Watson once said, “Unbelief is a root sin, and the devil labours to water this root, that the branches may be fruitful.”
This is the evil we must strive to root out from within our hearts and our culture. Let us honor the victims of October 7th and their families by recommitting ourselves to this noble fight.
