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Andrew Klavan has been sounding an alarm that too many of our fellow citizens no longer live under the stabilizing light of faith, and his new book and video on the subject bring that warning straight to the American heartland. In The Kingdom of Cain Klavan traces how murder and moral collapse recur when societies lose their sense of the sacred and the image of God in man, a theme he unpacks by looking at murder in literature and history.
The numbers back up what Klavan and other observers are seeing: American religious life has been shifting for years, with fewer people identifying as Christian and more adults answering “none” when asked about religion, even if some measures have stabilized recently. This long-term weakening of religious affiliation and ritual leaves a cultural vacuum where civic virtue and responsibility once lived, and Pew’s recent landscape study documents that generational replacement is making America less Christian than it was a generation ago.
Crime statistics tell a complicated story, but the surge in homicides during 2020 and 2021 was real and painful for countless families, and while recent FBI data show a welcome drop in murders in 2023, those violent spikes exposed how fragile public order can become when moral anchors loosen. Analysts and law-enforcement reports agree the pandemic years saw an unprecedented rise in lethal violence, and though 2023 brought declines, many communities still reel from the human wreckage left behind.
Klavan’s point is moral, not merely statistical: Cain killed Abel because he could not bear the indictment of another man’s faith and virtue, and when faith disappears from public life we are left with more Cains and fewer Abels. That is not a poetic abstraction; it is an account of human nature that the left’s technocratic remedies will not fix, because law and policy cannot substitute for conscience and worship. Readers who want to understand the spiritual anatomy of violence will find Klavan’s literary tour both sobering and clarifying.
The political lesson is obvious to any conservative who still believes in ordered liberty and the family: weakening faith, tearing down stable marriages, and soft-on-crime agendas combine to hollow out communities and invite violence. We should celebrate every drop in crime statistics, but we should not fool ourselves that government programs alone built those gains; the rebirth of strong families, flourishing churches, and local civic institutions drove the safest American neighborhoods long before federal grants and bureaucratic plans existed.
So what should patriots do? Support your local house of worship, mentor young men who have lost a moral compass, demand accountability from public officials, and insist that schools teach character alongside civics and reading. The evidence — from sociologists, from clergy, and from common sense — is that rebuilding faith and family is the most reliable path to reversing the moral rot that breeds violence; this is the kind of grassroots, neighbor-to-neighbor work Klavan urges us to take up.
Andrew Klavan’s book and his warning about a crisis of faith are not an invitation to despair but a call to action for anyone who loves this country. We can restore decency and safety without surrendering liberty, but only if we stop treating faith as private and begin rebuilding the public virtues that made America exceptional in the first place. Read the diagnosis, then go to your community and start the remedy; the future of our towns and the safety of our children depend on it.
