Could Political Violence Be Fulfilling Prophecy?

April 26, 2026 at the Washington Hilton Hotel more than 2,500 people were gathered for the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner; journalists, cabinet officials, members of Congress, and the President of the United States himself. By all appearances, it was a rare moment of pageantry and civility in an otherwise fractured capital. Then, gunshots rang out.

 

A man had sprinted through a security checkpoint just outside the ballroom, shotgun in hand, exchanging fire with Secret Service agents who chased behind him. President Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and cabinet members were rushed from the room. A Secret Service agent was struck in the chest, and thankfully, he was spared by his bulletproof vest.

 

The suspect, 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen of Torrance, California, left behind a written manifesto clearly stating his intent to target Trump administration officials, ranked by seniority. He described himself in the document as a “Friendly Federal Assassin.” And in a detail that should give every believer pause, his social media accounts were filled with anti-Trump and anti-Christian rhetoric alike. President Trump, having reviewed the manifesto, stated: “He hates Christians. That’s one thing for sure.”

 

This third failed assassination attempt of President Trump, something no other president has faced, points us to key Scriptures which paint a vivid picture of the times we’re living in.

 

The verse, tucked within the Olivet Discourse is Jesus’s own prophetic warning to His disciples about the character of the last days. This Scripture has a way of landing differently depending on the era in which you read it: “Because of the increase of wickedness,” Jesus said in Matthew 24:12, “the love of most will grow cold.”

 

Most not some, not a fringe but Most.

 

For years, many believers treated that verse as something that would happen someday, something for a future generation to reckon with, but look around at America in 2026, and it’s increasingly difficult to dismiss the possibility that we’re watching that prophecy unfurl in real time.

 

Although we are witnessing things take place in the natural realm (political in this case), everything originates in the spiritual realm, thus, this is a deeply spiritual issue.

 

What is happening in this country, from the visceral, almost tribal hatred that has come to define our public life isn’t fundamentally a political problem because politics is merely the stage on which a spiritual condition is being platformed.

 

The attack at the Washington Hilton is the most acute and recent example, but it’s not an isolated one. It’s the latest data point in a lengthening and alarming series.

 

What’s remarkable about the Cole Allen case isn’t only the violence itself, but what the manifesto reveals about the interior landscape of a man who was once, by his own account, a Christian believer. Trump noted that Allen “was a Christian, a believer, and then he became an anti-Christian,” a man who “had a lot of change” and had been “going through a lot.” His father is listed as an elder at a Bible-believing Reformed church in Torrance and yet something happened in this young man’s heart. Love, whatever measure of it he once possessed, grew cold.

 

In his manifesto, Allen even raised the question himself, anticipating the objection that, as a Christian, he should “turn the other cheek.” His rebuttal dismissed it entirely. Here was a man who hadn’t simply abandoned Christian ethics but weaponized Christian language to justify violence. That’s spiritual.

 

Consider the ferocity of the animus directed at a sitting president and the degree to which significant portions of the culture either celebrate it, excuse it, or meet it with indifference. In no way can we permit this to be viewed as normal. This is something extremely dark: a hatred so consuming that it strips away the basic civic and moral instinct that once told Americans, whatever their party, this is still a fellow human being and the leader of our republic.

 

Proof: the love of many is growing cold.

 

Another example for you. Back in the mid-1970s, America was hardly a paradise of unity. The nation had just endured Vietnam, Watergate, and the upheaval of the Civil Rights era. Political disagreements were fierce and sometimes violent. And yet, there existed a shared civic vocabulary.

 

The American flag flew above churches and union halls alike. It was draped across the shoulders of protesters and pinned to the lapels of conservatives. It was the one symbol that transcended the divide, because it belonged not to a party but to a people.

 

This, too, is gone now.

 

Today, if you are seen flying an American flag from your porch, or wearing one on your jacket, or displaying it on the back of your truck, a significant portion of those around will assume that you hold a specific set of political opinions.

 

The flag has been conscripted into the culture war. What was once a unifying symbol of shared identity has become, for many, a tribal marker.

 

Ask yourself: how does a nation arrive at a place where its own flag becomes divisive? The answer is found in Matthew 24: when love grows cold, the things that once bound people together lose their warmth and become weapons.

 

Scan any university campus or scroll through social media or watch the evening news and you’ll witness the resurgence of open antisemitism in America. For every person who calls themself a Christian, that should raise alarm bells.

 

The love of many has grown cold.

 

There’s another detail in Christ’s prophetic teaching in Matthew 24 and its parallel passage in Mark 13 that deserves attention. Jesus warned that in the last days, family bonds themselves would fracture: “Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; children will rebel against their parents” (Mark 13:12).

 

The Cole Allen case bears an eerie resonance here as well. It was Allen’s own brother who, alarmed by the manifesto sent to family members, called police to alert them on the very night of the attack. His sister described him to investigators as prone to radical statements and said his rhetoric constantly referenced a plan to do “something” to fix the problems he saw in the world. A family watched a son and brother radicalize and found themselves on opposite sides of a security line.

 

A similar dynamic is playing out in living rooms across America, not only in cases as dramatic as this one.

 

Therapists, sociologists, and family researchers have noted a significant rise in what is called “family estrangement,” adult children cutting off contact with their parents, sometimes with little warning and often over ideological disagreements.

 

The phenomenon has grown so widespread that it has generated its own industry of books, podcasts, and support groups. In many cases, the driving force isn’t abuse or neglect but political and cultural divergence. A son has been told by his therapist, his campus, and his social media feed that his parents’ values make them toxic. A daughter has absorbed a framework in which disagreement equals harm, and distance is prescribed as healing.

 

The breakdown of the family isn’t a policy failure, it’s a spiritual symptom.
The love of many is growing cold.

 

None of this is cause for despair. The very fact that Scripture anticipates these conditions is itself a form of comfort not because suffering is desirable, but because it means we aren’t navigating this age blindly. God knew this was coming, He told us and He also told us what His people are to do in such a season!

 

The answer isn’t to disengage from culture or to baptize one political party as the Kingdom of God. The answer is the one thing that Scripture consistently prescribes as the antidote to cold love: the cultivation of agape; the self-giving, cross-shaped love that does not depend on the lovability of its object.

 

The church must be the place where the door is open to the estranged son and the confused daughter, not to validate every idea they’ve absorbed, but to model a love that is warmer and stronger than ideology. The church must be the community that refuses to hate the president’s enemies and refuses to wish harm on the president’s critics, because the love of God makes no such exceptions.

 

The world around us is growing cold. That is precisely why the coupling of truth and love produce a warmth unique to the Body of Christ, a warmth that matters more now than it has in a generation.

 

Jesus didn’t end His warning with the chilling forecast but followed it with a commission: “But the one who stands firm to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come” (Matthew 24:13-14).

 

Cold love is the disease. The Gospel is still the cure.

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