The Cult of the Sympathetic Killer

Last Thursday morning, outside the Plymouth Superior Courthouse in Massachusetts, hundreds of demonstrators, most of them women dressed in pink, held hands and rallied in support of Lindsay Clancy, the Duxbury mother on trial for strangling her three children. Cora was five years old. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months. Her attorney does not dispute that she killed them. The dispute is only over whether she should be held responsible.

The shirts in the crowd carried slogans. “Believe.” “She Needed Help.” “Peace For Lindsay.” When her defense attorney arrived, the crowd broke into applause, with some shouting that he was a fighter for women’s rights. Toward the end of the rally, the supporters formed a circle, recited the Lord’s Prayer, and made hearts with their hands. They prayed the prayer of Jesus Christ at a rally for a woman who took the lives of three image-bearers of God, and nobody in the circle seems to have noticed anything strange about it.

The rally organizer explained the draw this way. “I think that every one of us women believe that it could be any one of us,” she said. Sit with that sentence for a moment, because it is the skeleton key to everything that follows. Not “there but for the grace of God go I,” the old confession of a sinner who knows his own heart. Something else entirely. An identification so total that the victims dissolve from the story altogether. Three dead children become set dressing in a drama about maternal struggle, and the woman who killed them becomes its heroine.

A Pattern, Not an Anomaly

If Plymouth were an isolated eruption of misplaced feeling, it would be a curiosity. It is not isolated. Two weeks from now, jury selection begins in the Manhattan murder trial of Luigi Mangione, the man accused of shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the back on a New York sidewalk.

The judge has taken the extraordinary step of ordering an anonymous jury. Why? Because, as Fox News reported, individuals identifying themselves as Mangione supporters have engaged in hostile public statements outside the courthouse and announced their intention to approach prospective jurors. His admirers wear green to his hearings in honor of the Nintendo character who shares his name, as though a man’s execution outside a Manhattan hotel were a video game and the accused killer its lovable protagonist.

Before that, the pattern ran through the streets in murals. George Floyd, a man with a lengthy criminal record who died in police custody, was rendered in iconography that would have embarrassed medieval hagiographers, complete with halos and angel wings.

Michael Brown was transfigured into a martyr through the “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative, a story so thoroughly demolished that even President Obama’s own Justice Department concluded it never happened. It did not matter. The canonization had already occurred, and canonizations, once performed, are not subject to fact-checking.

These cases are not legally identical. Floyd and Brown died at the hands of police due to their own horrible choices. Clancy and Mangione stand accused of killing others. Postpartum psychosis is a real and terrifying psychiatric emergency, and whether Lindsay Clancy meets the legal standard for insanity is a legitimate question for twelve jurors in Plymouth. That is what courts are for.

But the jury deliberating an insanity defense is not the phenomenon under examination. The phenomenon is the fandom. The pink shirts. The green shirts. The murals. The TikTok edits and the prayer circles and the applause for defense attorneys as though they were rock stars. The question is not whether any individual defendant deserves due process. Everyone does. The question is why a civilization keeps forming spontaneous cults of veneration around the perpetrators of its most shocking acts while the victims vanish from memory like breath off a mirror.

The prophet Isaiah saw this civilization coming twenty-seven centuries ago.

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!

Notice that Isaiah does not describe people who abandon moral language. He describes people who keep the language and reverse the polarity. That is exactly what we are watching. The crowds in Plymouth are not nihilists. They believe themselves to be deeply, exquisitely moral. They speak of compassion, of awareness, of believing women. The vocabulary of virtue is fully intact. It has simply been rewired to flow toward the transgressor.

The Explanations That Explain Too Little

The secular diagnoses are not worthless, so let us grant them their due. Social media has industrialized parasocial attachment; millions of people now form intimate one-way bonds with strangers, and an accused killer with good cheekbones and a livestreamed trial is simply content. True crime has trained a generation to consume atrocity as entertainment, complete with fan theories and merchandise. Therapeutic culture has replaced the language of sin with the language of trauma, and in trauma-speak there are no evildoers, only the insufficiently supported. And in Mangione’s case, genuine public fury at the health insurance industry found a face to project itself onto.

All true. All insufficient. These explanations describe the machinery of the cult, but not its direction. Parasocial attachment could just as easily fasten onto victims; the internet could have made folk heroes of Brian Thompson’s widow or filled Plymouth with mourners for Cora, Dawson, and Callan. It did not. The energy flows one way, toward the accused, with the reliability of water running downhill. Machinery explains how a current moves. It does not explain why the riverbed slopes in only one direction. For that, you need theology.

Empathy, Orphaned

Here is the argument in brief. Empathy is a Christian inheritance. The pagan world did not weep for the condemned; it packed the Colosseum to cheer their deaths. It was the Gospel that taught the West to see the criminal, the leper, and the prostitute as souls of infinite worth, because Christ received them. But Christianity never offered mercy as a standalone product. Mercy was married to truth, compassion to repentance, grace to the frank acknowledgment that sin is real and evil is evil. The sinner was loved; the sin was named.

Our culture kept the mercy and threw away everything that gave it shape. What remains is empathy orphaned from truth, and orphaned empathy does not distribute itself evenly. It gravitates toward whoever presents the most compelling narrative of victimhood, and in a grievance culture, the transgressor almost always has the better narrative.

The dead cannot tell their story. Brian Thompson cannot explain himself to TikTok. Three children in Duxbury cannot organize a rally. The perpetrator, meanwhile, arrives with a backstory, a diagnosis, a systemic critique, a face. A society that has abolished sin has not abolished its hunger for saints and martyrs. It has only changed the criteria for canonization from holiness to grievance.

Paul described the terminal stage of this disease in his letter to the Romans, writing of those who suppress the truth about God.

Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.

Have pleasure in them that do them. Paul is not describing the criminal. He is describing the audience. The applause. The fan edits. The green shirts and the pink shirts. Romans 1 ends not with the transgressor but with the spectators who celebrate him, as though the Holy Spirit anticipated the comment section by two thousand years.

What Comes Next

What follows is speculation, and I will label it as such, because speculation presented as certainty is its own form of calling darkness light. But Scripture invites the watchman to read the times, and the times are legible.

Jesus, describing the days before His return, told His disciples that “because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.” We tend to read that verse as predicting an age of pure callousness, and wonder how it squares with an era drowning in professed compassion. But cold love and counterfeit love are not opposites; they are the same disorder viewed from two sides. Love waxing cold toward the victim is precisely what makes room for manufactured warmth toward the perpetrator.

Paul completes the picture in his second letter to Timothy, prophesying that in the last days men would be “without natural affection.”

The Greek word is astorgos, the death of the instinctive love that binds mother to child and neighbor to neighbor. A crowd of mothers rallying for a woman who strangled her babies is not an excess of natural affection. It is the void where natural affection used to be, filled with something that wears its clothes.

If this reading is correct, expect the trajectory to steepen. Expect jury nullification to graduate from fringe fantasy to open movement; the Mangione judge is already fortifying his courtroom against it. Expect political violence to find ever-larger constituencies ready to explain it as systemic critique, and each new secular martyr to be canonized faster than the last. And expect those who decline to worship at these shrines to be recast as the real villains, deficient in the only virtue the age still recognizes.

None of this licenses despair, and none of it licenses cruelty in response. The Christian answer to counterfeit compassion is not the amputation of compassion. Postpartum psychosis is real; mothers drowning in darkness deserve rescue before tragedy, not merely sympathy after it. The grieving deserve comfort and the accused deserve justice under law.

What the believer cannot do is accept the age’s central demand, which is to choose between mercy and truth as though God had not joined them together. The Psalmist says mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other. A culture that divorces them will keep producing crowds in pink, praying the Lord’s Prayer outside a courthouse, unable to remember the names of the children.

Our task is to remember. Cora. Dawson. Callan. And to call evil evil, gently, firmly, and without apology, while it is still legal to do so.