The tragedy of Henry Nowak raises a deeper question than guilt or innocence: what happens when a society abandons Christian anthropology and replaces it with a secular doctrine of human perfectibility? The shock of being told about the way in which Henry Nowak died, stabbed to death by a member of the Sikh community who combined murder with character assassination, leaves us wanting to hold somebody accountable and to blame them.
Obviously, his murderer is to blame. But that is not a sufficient solution because the police created such a gross injustice that we are shocked to our core at what this represents about what our society has become. It is also very tempting to blame the police. However difficult it is to control our sense of outrage and injustice, in the timeworn phrase, they too are casualties of a sort, for they were trained – in fact brainwashed – in the art of the new secular moral idealism that has replaced Christian philosophy and ethics. So our real enemy is not (just) the police, who committed this gross injustice because they were brainwashed by those who trained them, but rather the anti-Christian ethic that overcame Christian philosophy and culture.
