What's Wrong With Boys
By Dr. R. Scott Clark - Posted at The Heidelblog:
Published May 25, 2026
The attack perpetrated by two teen-agers upon a San Diego mosque, on May 18 of this year, is just the latest in a string of violent acts that include the assault on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (April 25, 2026), the murder of Charlie Kirk (September 10, 2025), the attempted assassination of President Trump (July 13, 2024), the attack on a Poway Synagogue (April 27, 2019), and the Sandy Hook school shooting (December 14, 2012) to name just a few high-profile examples. The list could be much longer. Further, this pattern is not new but arguably reaches back as far as the Columbine shooting on April 20, 1999. These attacks had certain features in common. They were committed by young men who are described as alienated from others, expressing a high degree of nihilism—”the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless”—and hatred for others.1 Another adjective that occurs frequently in this context is incel, which is short hand for “involuntary celibates.” Two 2023 papers explored the rise of incels and how they become “violent extremists.”2 Robert Green and Allan Palombi write about a “black pill pipeline,” by which incels gather in online forums to commiserate over their frustration with the world. Their study found “community members progress from a sense of solidarity to hostile radicalism, where violence is encouraged and sometimes carried out.”3 The members of these groups feel powerless and through their participation in these groups “conclude that their rage and powerlessness can only be relieved through violence….”4 Green and Palombi describe a process whereby members become gradually indoctrinated. They begin by “red-pilling” (a phrase borrowed from the film The Matrix) and end by “black pilling,” a “nihilistic state that often includes rhetoric advocating violence…as the incels’ only recourse against an unfair social order that renders them invisible or seeks their humiliation.”5 Miriam Lindner comes to similar conclusions but interprets them through the lens of evolutionary biology.6Obviously, as in the most recent case, mental illness is a factor in such violence. One of the San Diego mosque shooters had been hospitalized before the attack for psychiatric issues and was known by the authorities to have threatened violence. Because of the possibility of an attack, his parents told the authorities that they had removed firearms from the house.7
There is another part of the story that hits close to home for those of us who confess the Reformed faith: two of these shooters were members of orthodox, confessionally Reformed congregations. As it happens I know both congregations and their pastors. These are not idiosyncratic congregations, they are not organized around any sort of ideology that might encourage young men to become violent. Both of them are ideal congregations demonstrating the marks of the true church: the pure preaching of the gospel, the pure administration of the sacraments, and the use of church discipline.8
How can it be that boys who have been raised in godly homes and churches, come to a place where they turn to violence?
