Here is the From a Faith Perspective column for July 26th 2026.

All money depends on trust. When we accept dollars in exchange for our labor, property, or services, we surrender something of immediate value in return for tokens—or electronic account entries—that we expect others will accept later. Money is, in that sense, a social promise.

But not all monetary promises are equally well supported.

A dollar has little intrinsic value as paper, and a bank balance is only an electronic record. Yet the dollar is embedded in a large and accountable economic system. Employers pay wages in dollars. Merchants state prices in dollars. Taxes must be paid in dollars. Banks clear dollar payments, courts enforce dollar-denominated contracts, and government institutions act to preserve the payment system. Deposit insurance, banking regulation, fraud laws, and established procedures provide at least some recourse when things go wrong.

Cryptocurrency attempts to create monetary confidence without that institutional foundation.

Its supporters often say that cryptocurrency does not require trust because transactions are controlled by mathematics and recorded on a distributed blockchain. That is only partly true. The technology may allow participants to verify that tokens have been transferred according to the software’s rules. It does not establish what those tokens are worth. Nor does it guarantee that anyone will accept them tomorrow.

The value of most cryptocurrencies is almost entirely a market phenomenon. A token is valuable because people are willing to exchange ordinary money, goods, or services for it. Its price depends on scarcity combined with demand.

Scarcity alone, however, does not create value. Many things are scarce and valueless because nobody wants them. Moreover, although the supply of one cryptocurrency may be limited, there is no practical limit on the number of new cryptocurrencies that can be created. Promoters can introduce another coin, give it an impressive name, describe it as technologically revolutionary, and attempt to manufacture demand.

Unlike commodities, most cryptocurrencies have little or no intrinsic utility. Wheat can be eaten. Oil can produce energy. Gold has industrial and decorative uses. Land can support housing or agriculture. A share of stock represents an interest in a business that may own assets and earn profits. A bond represents a legally enforceable promise of repayment.

A cryptocurrency token ordinarily represents none of these things. It may permit access to a payment network or some other digital service, but ownership usually provides no claim on productive assets, earnings, interest, or physical property.

The purchaser is therefore making a wager: that future buyers will place as much or more value on the token than the current buyer does.

There may be situations in which cryptocurrency provides a practical advantage. It can transfer value across borders, operate outside ordinary banking channels, or permit transactions when governments or financial institutions are unreliable or restrictive. In such cases, a user may be purchasing access to a useful transfer mechanism.

But for someone who has no practical reason to bypass the banking system, buying cryptocurrency is primarily speculation on its future price. The buyer is not purchasing a productive asset. The buyer is betting on continued confidence.

That confidence is especially fragile because the network is amorphous. The software and transaction records may be distributed among thousands of computers, but there is no central institution responsible for maintaining the token’s value. No board of directors owes a fiduciary duty to holders. No central bank stands ready to support the market. No insurer guarantees that the assets will be restored after theft. No customer-service department can reverse a mistaken payment.

The technology offers a narrow promise: if the network continues functioning, it will maintain a record of transactions according to its rules.

That is not a promise that the currency will remain valuable.

Cryptocurrency also depends heavily on the conventional economy it is sometimes said to replace. Exchanges need bank accounts. Computers require electricity and internet service. Miners and software developers generally pay their expenses in national currencies. Owners usually measure their gains and losses in dollars. Most buyers enter and leave the cryptocurrency market through commercial exchanges connected to regulated financial institutions.

Thus, cryptocurrency borrows stability from the very legal, banking, communications, and energy systems it claims to bypass.

The exchange mechanism itself can fail in several ways. A cryptocurrency exchange may collapse through theft, fraud, insolvency, or mismanagement. Customers may discover that the exchange did not possess the assets it claimed to hold. A token may continue to exist on its blockchain but disappear from major markets, leaving holders unable to sell it at any meaningful price. Software defects may permit theft or permanently lock up funds. Governments may restrict the gateways through which cryptocurrency is converted to ordinary money.

A technically functioning blockchain can therefore record ownership of economically worthless tokens.

Cryptocurrency markets are also vulnerable to manipulation. In a pump-and-dump scheme, organizers acquire a little-known coin, promote it aggressively, and create the appearance of rising public interest. Social-media posts, fabricated news, celebrity endorsements, or claims of secret information attract new buyers. As the price rises, the organizers sell their holdings. The collapse comes after they have taken their profits, leaving later buyers with the losses.

The lack of recourse compounds the danger. Cryptocurrency transactions are generally irreversible. A person persuaded to send funds to a scammer cannot call a bank and stop payment. Although public blockchain transactions can often be traced from one digital address to another, tracing an address is not the same as identifying its owner or recovering the money.

Cryptocurrency may prove durable as a specialized transfer technology, a speculative collectible, or a niche financial instrument. But those possibilities should not be confused with a dependable currency or a prudent store of household savings.

All money is based on confidence. The important question is what supports that confidence. National currencies rest on broad systems of law, taxation, commerce, banking, and public accountability. Cryptocurrency rests largely on software, market liquidity, and the expectation that other people will continue to want the tokens.

A person buying cryptocurrency should therefore understand exactly what is being purchased. Unless the buyer needs its particular transactional capabilities, the purchase is not an investment in productive value. It is a bet that confidence will persist, the network and exchanges will remain accessible, and someone else will later pay as much or more for the token.

That bet may succeed. It may also fail without warning—and without anyone being responsible for making the holder whole.

Certain deaths linger in public memory not only because they are tragic, but because they expose something broken in the relationship between authority and the people it serves. The shootings at Kent State University in 1970 became one such moment. Four students were killed by National Guard troops during a protest. Some of the students were demonstrators, others were simply walking to class. In the aftermath, investigations showed confusion, fear, poor command judgment, and—most importantly—a mindset in which armed force was deemed appropriate against civilians who were perceived as disorderly, threatening, or insufficiently compliant.

Kent State was not only about a single bad decision. It revealed the danger of militarized thinking applied to civilian situations: when troops trained for combat are deployed to manage protest, dissent, or ambiguity, the threshold for lethal force drops, and tragedy becomes more likely.

The death of Ms. Good should give us pause in a similar way.

Whatever the ultimate findings of investigations, what is already clear is that a routine encounter escalated to lethal violence within seconds. A civilian—by all accounts not posing an imminent deadly threat—lost her life during an enforcement action. The justification offered relies on a familiar framework: noncompliance equals danger; danger justifies overwhelming force. This is the same logic that haunted Kent State.

Militarized law enforcement is not defined solely by equipment—armored vehicles, tactical gear, or assault-style weapons. It is defined by mindset. A militarized mindset treats uncertainty as hostility, resistance as aggression, and civilians as potential enemies. It emphasizes domination over engagement, control over communication, and force over patience. In such a framework, the goal is not to resolve a situation safely, but to “neutralize” it.

History shows that this mindset is especially dangerous in civilian contexts. Ordinary people do not behave like trained soldiers. They freeze, panic, misunderstand instructions, argue, hesitate, or comply imperfectly. When law enforcement is trained to interpret those human responses as tactical threats, the margin for error collapses—and the cost of error is paid in blood.

Kent State shocked the nation because it shattered a comforting assumption: that authority, even when armed, would exercise restraint when dealing with its own citizens. The students were not foreign combatants. They were not insurgents. They were young people in a public space. The realization that lethal force could be used so indiscriminately forced a reckoning about how power was being deployed.

We should resist the temptation to see Ms. Good’s death as an isolated incident, or to wait for legal proceedings alone to settle its meaning. A Kent State moment is not defined by a verdict; it is defined by recognition. Recognition that something larger than one individual decision is at work. Recognition that narratives of threat, cultivated over years, can prime institutions to respond with violence first and reflection later.

This recognition matters now because militarization has expanded far beyond crowd control. Federal, state, and local agencies increasingly operate as if they are entering hostile territory when engaging with the public. This posture is reinforced by political rhetoric, by entertainment that glorifies decisive violence, and by internal cultures that reward dominance rather than de-escalation.

The danger is not merely to those who are targeted by enforcement actions. It is to everyone. Once lethal force becomes normalized as a response to ambiguity, no one can be certain where the line truly lies. Kent State taught us that even proximity—not participation—offers no protection when fear governs judgment.

If we fail to treat moments like this as warnings, history suggests what follows: hardened positions, defensive justifications, and gradual acceptance of what once would have been unthinkable. A society that does not pause after such deaths risks training itself to look away.

Calling this a “Kent State moment” is a caution. It is a reminder that the line between order and oppression is crossed not all at once, but incrementally—each time fear is allowed to override restraint, and each time violence is excused as unavoidable rather than examined as preventable.

The question before us is not only what happened to Ms. Good, but what we are willing to learn from it. History has already shown us the cost of failing to do so.

Trump wants to take the US to war to recover and dominate the world’s largest oil reserves.

Venezuela, which once welcomed American energy companies, has the world’s largest oil reserves. President Trump wants access to them again. He wrote on social media that U.S. operations there would continue until the country returned to the United States “all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”

That helps explain the last three months.

Venezuelan Navy Escorts Vessels After Trump’s Blockade Threat

The Venezuelan government was said to have ordered the escort, according to two people familiar with the matter. It was not immediately clear whether the vessels were subject to U.S. sanctions.

America’s current mad monk Rasputin, Stephen Miller, is driving this. The NY Times quotes him, “American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela,” he wrote. “Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property. These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries and drugs.”

It’s not in anyone’s long-term interest to develop more cheap fossil energy sources. But It’s had to see that when big oil’s political and economic influence is at work.

As an aside, who believes that the drug cartels of South America need oil money to sell their products in US cities and towns? It is our addictive society that creates the demand, and our affluence that provides the money to buy them. Oil money subsidy? Nah. The free market works just fine for the cartels. They just need a little graft to move the product and recover the proceeds of the sale. There’s talk that presidents, and bitcoins are useful.

Live by the Sword, Die by the Sword

The murder of Charlie Kirk is tragic. Violence has no place in a democracy, and it should have no place in human relations at any scale. Full stop.

Yet we must also admit that this killing is not a bolt from the blue. It is the grim, predictable consequence of a culture that has allowed violent rhetoric to flourish and has winked at those who carry it into action. The sword that Kirk and his allies unsheathed — as a metaphor, as a political weapon — has now cut back.

Charlie Kirk was one of the loudest voices of the MAGA era. Through Turning Point USA, he amplified messages that vilified opponents, questioned elections, and stoked resentment. He portrayed politics not as a contest of ideas but as a war for the nation’s survival. For his followers, this was energizing. For his critics, it was destabilizing.

The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, was no progressive. Early reports suggest he was influenced by a strain of extremism so far to the right that Kirk himself appeared too soft, too compromised. His rifle carried inscriptions, grim slogans, a private catechism of radicalization. This was not an act of the left striking the right — it was the fringe consuming its own.

Violence does not erupt in a vacuum. It is cultivated. In the years since January 6th, a Republican president pardoned those convicted of storming the Capitol. Some Republican leaders have called them “hostages” and “political prisoners.” Ashli Babbitt — shot while attempting to breach the Speaker’s Lobby — has been elevated to the status of a martyr and patriot.

These choices are not mere symbolism; they are signals. They tell followers that violence in service of the cause is not just forgivable but honorable. They transform criminality into heroism, and they dare the next zealot to go further.

Democratic leaders have not been perfect — property damage during protests was at times excused or underplayed — but the left has neither endorsed nor executed a systemic pattern of pardons or promises of immunity for violent actors. That is the asymmetry we face: one party increasingly normalizes force as a tool of politics, while the other still clings, however imperfectly, to peaceful government of, by, and for the people.

I remain amazed at the restraint shown by the Capitol Police and other law enforcement officers on January 6th. Facing a mob intent on violence — some wielding weapons, many screaming threats — the officers mostly refrained from drawing or firing their weapons. They absorbed beatings, chemical sprays, and broken bones, buying time for lawmakers to escape and for order to be restored. That was discipline. That was courage. That was a commitment to life over death, even when threatened with death themselves.

Do we owe a similar discipline in our words as we react to Charlie Kirk’s death? It is tempting to say that he courted violence and met the fate his rhetoric invited — to make “live by the sword” a kind of cosmic justice.

But democracy requires us to reject vengeance as a political language. We can condemn Kirk’s divisive speech and the politics he championed without celebrating his death. To do otherwise mirrors the very logic we oppose: that political differences should be settled by force.

A Warning and a Plea

This killing is a warning: the flames that leaders stoke cannot be so easily controlled. The sword, once drawn, swings in all directions. Those who call their opponents traitors should not be surprised when someone decides to treat them as such.

We are approaching a breaking point. If we wish to save democracy — not just its machinery but its spirit — we must disarm our speech as well as our hands. We must demand of leaders that they model restraint, that they stop rewarding extremism, that they make clear that violence, whether from left, right, or fringe, is intolerable.

Charlie Kirk’s death should not become a rallying cry for revenge. It should become a moment of clarity: that no one, not even our fiercest opponents, should be gunned down for what they believe. The sword must be sheathed, for all of us.

Notes

1. Killing of Charlie Kirk – Wikipedia summary of events
2. Charlie Kirk shooting suspect captured after manhunt – Reuters report
3. Accused sniper charged in Utah – AP News coverage
4. Bullet casings carried political messages – Daily Beast investigation
5. Rhetoric around January 6th pardons and martyrdom – NPR analysis