“A Call to Conscience”

The depravity of war as entertainment

Dear Friends,

Daylight Saving Time creates a distortion of expectation. The state of darkness in the evening, the timing of the moon across the night sky, and the tendrils of light at dawn all stay on their own schedules, even if we have shifted the hours we allocate to them.

This feeling of unfamiliarity, of being out of step, usually passes within a few days. But that same sensation of instability and disorientation is only deepening with the passage of time when it comes to the broader world in which we are living.

The war in Iran, specifically, is demolishing the balances we once hoped were real. It has shattered the idea that a president would not launch a war that the American people already strongly opposed at the moment of its onset. There was no public debate before it began, and no plans for what might unfold now that it is underway.

The greatest tragedy is the violence and death that are being unleashed. That will be compounded by the uncertainty and instability that will undoubtedly follow in the months and years ahead.

All of these horrific instincts are being fed and laundered through torrents of propaganda that our regime is using to “sell” the war to the American people. They are deploying the tropes and iconography of popular entertainment to turn the inhumanity of what is transpiring into the serotonin hits of video games and action movies.

With this in mind, I was struck by a statement from Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago. It is entitled “A Call to Conscience,” and I share it here with you in full.

As more than 1,000 Iranian men, women and children lay dead after days of bombardment from U.S. and Israeli missiles, the official White House X account on Thursday evening posted a video of scenes from popular action movies spliced with actual strike footage from their war on Iran. The clip was captioned: “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY.”

A real war with real death and real suffering being treated like it’s a video game — it’s sickening. Hundreds of people are dead, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, including scores of children who made the fatal mistake of going to school that day. Six U.S. soldiers have been killed. They are also dishonored by that social media post. Hundreds of thousands displaced, and many millions more are terrified across the Middle East.

This horrifying portrayal demonstrates that we now live in an era when the distance between the battlefield and the living room has been drastically reduced. The moral crisis we are facing is not just a matter of the war itself, but also how we, the observers, view violence, for war now has become a spectator sport or strategy game. Indeed, the prediction market Kalshi recently paid a $2.2 million settlement related to users who were unhappy with how the company paid out the $55 million wagered on Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s ouster after his was killed.

Journalists now use the term “gamifying” the war to describe this dynamic. What a profound moral failure, for gamifying strips away the humanity of real people. Let’s not forget, a “hit” isn’t putting points on the board; it’s a grieving family whose suffering we ignore when we prioritize entertainment, and profit, over empathy.

Our government is treating the suffering of the Iranian people as a backdrop for our own entertainment, as if it’s just another piece of content to be swiped through while we’re waiting in line at the grocery store. But, in the end, we lose our humanity when we are thrilled by the destructive power of our military. We become addicted to the “spectacle” of explosions. And the price of this habit is almost unnoticeable, as we become desensitized to the true costs of war. But the longer we remain blind to the terrible consequences of war, the more we are risking the most precious gift God gave us: our humanity.

I know that the American people are better than this. We have the good sense to know that what is happening is not entertainment but war, and that Iran is a nation of people, not a video game others play to entertain us.

Now is a time that demands moral clarity, and as Cardinal Cupich writes, a call to our conscience. We must speak out and protest, organize, and vote. We must repudiate the horrific pretenses under which this war is being waged and propagandized in our names.

This war of choice is the height of folly and hubris. And if we do not hold fast to the bonds of our common humanity, we will lose sight of the brutal costs our regime is inflicting upon the world, the rising pain, suffering, and instability that are being repackaged as entertainment.