The smoke was still rising from the ruins of a Michigan Mormon temple when the vultures began to circle. Before the names of the dead are even released, before the wounded are even stitched and stabilized, Twitter’s amateur brigade of moral virtue signalers had already sharpened their talons.
Tragedy had scarcely had time to breathe before it was converted into currency. The blood wasn’t even dry, and yet—predictably, inevitably—someone had to use it as a cudgel to scold “fellow Christians” for failing to embrace the counterfeit gospel of Mormonism as they weaponize the dead as props in a theological guilt trip.
Twitter is littered with these self-appointed moral superiors, perched upon a soapbox of sentimentality, declaring that if you don’t call Mormonism Christianity, you must not care about human suffering. This is the rhetorical double-dealing, the twisting of grief into a gag order against heresy, the conversion of compassion into complicity. It is emotional blackmail dressed up as piety.