People hear the phrase spiritual warfare and assume I am talking about something symbolic, theatrical, or supernatural in the most cartoonish sense. I am not. I am talking about the practical and ongoing assault on human conscience that is happening in plain sight.
I am talking about a world that is steadily training people to accept cruelty as normal, dehumanization as policy, confusion as reality, and despair as intelligence. I am talking about systems, narratives, and power structures that require people to become less tender, less honest, less courageous, and less human in order to function inside them without breaking. That is what spiritual warfare looks like to me now.
From missing elders, to ICE, to the devastation of war in the Middle East, to the constant stream of fear, propaganda, brutality, and indifference that structures daily life, we are not only living through political crisis. We are living through a crisis of conscience. We are living through an assault on the soul’s ability to recognize what should never have been normalized.
That is the part I think many people still fail to understand.
The deepest violence of this moment is not only what is being done to people. The deepest violence is what prolonged exposure to it is doing to the rest of us. It is what happens when horror becomes routine, when suffering becomes content, when human beings become categories, and when grief gets flattened into discourse. It is what happens when people can look directly at cruelty and still ask whether the tone of the objection was the real problem.
A culture is under spiritual attack when it can witness suffering without reverence. A society is under spiritual attack when compassion is mocked as naïve but brutality is defended as practical. A people are under spiritual attack when detained migrants, bombed children, grieving families, disappeared women, and shattered communities are reduced to talking points in somebody else’s performance of certainty.
Once suffering is translated into optics, strategy, messaging, or collateral damage, something sacred has already been violated.
I am not interested in a spirituality that can identify darkness only when it arrives draped in mythic imagery. Darkness is often much more polished than that. It arrives as bureaucracy, ideology, convenience, branding, exhaustion, and the dead-eyed language of necessity. It arrives through systems that ask us to tolerate the intolerable, excuse the inexcusable, and protect institutions more fiercely than we protect actual human beings.
That is spiritual warfare in functional terms. It does not only wound bodies. It distorts perception. It corrupts language. It deadens empathy. It teaches people to adapt to what should horrify them and then to call that adaptation maturity. It rewards numbness, punishes tenderness, and recasts moral injury as realism.
Of course, people feel sick. Of course, people feel disoriented. Of course, so many people feel that something is wrong at the level of the soul. Something is wrong at the level of the soul.
We are being trained to become harder than we should be. We are being trained to accept what should revolt us. We are being trained to mistake emotional shutdown for wisdom and silence for sophistication. We are being trained to believe that caring deeply is unsophisticated, that outrage at cruelty is embarrassing, and that maintaining one’s humanity in public is somehow less intelligent than learning to narrate atrocity in a calm and respectable voice.
I reject that completely.
Any force that requires us to become less human in order to survive it is not merely political. It is spiritual. Any system that disconnects us from truth, mercy, courage, and the sacred worth of other people is engaged in spiritual warfare whether it uses religious language or not.
That is why resistance must also become spiritual in the most practical sense of the word. Telling the truth is spiritual work. Refusing dehumanizing language is spiritual work. Feeding people is spiritual work. Protecting the vulnerable is spiritual work. Remaining capable of grief is spiritual work. Keeping your heart open without surrendering your discernment is spiritual work. Refusing to let cruelty become ordinary is spiritual work.
I do not believe the great crisis of this era is only geopolitical. I believe it is moral. I believe it is spiritual. I believe the real battle is over whether we will remain human while the world keeps offering rewards for becoming colder, quieter, more obedient, and more willing to look away.
That, to me, is what spiritual warfare means now.
It is the fight over whether conscience will survive contact with power.
It is the fight over whether truth will survive propaganda.
It is the fight over whether love will survive fear.
It is the fight over whether we will still be able to recognize one another as sacred after being trained, for years, to do the opposite.
And I think that battle is already here.
