I saw this tweet by William Wolfe and Charlie Kirk this morning—Wolfe tagging Trevin Wax, demanding to know why he was quick to comment on George Floyd but has nothing to say about Iryna Zarutska. If you’re not aware, Zarutska was a white Ukrainian woman, a refugee of the Ukrainian war, who was brutally murdered by a black man, a 14-count repeat offender, in Charlotte.

Kirk framed it as pastors who wept over Floyd, but shrug without a mention at Zarutska. And before I go any further, let me say that I’m not fully endorsing Kirk or everything he does. But I found his question legitimate and, frankly, intriguing. So let’s answer it.

So, why do men like Trevin Wax—or JD Greear, or David Platt, or Russell Moore, or Ed Stetzer, or any of these other “top-notch” evangelical leaders—rush to the microphone for one death but sit silently for another?

The answer is as simple as it is damning: bad theology. In short, they have a martyrdom complex. Let me explain.

These people have been discipled to see all suffering through the lens of their own imagined persecution, and therefore only narratives that implicate themselves matter to them. They don’t see suffering through the eyes of the actual victim, but through the funhouse mirror of their own bad theology. If the blood doesn’t splatter back on them, they simply don’t care.

This theological framework didn’t come out of nowhere. They have all been heavily influenced by John Piper-esque “hedonism” theology and this is the rotten fruit of his theological orchard. Piper has long baptized what he calls “Christian Hedonism,” but in practice it is little more than a re-packaged asceticism—a system where glory is found not in the joy of obedience to Christ, but in manufacturing elaborate ways to “suffer for the gospel.”

And Piper’s disciples, like Trevin Wax, have taken his cue with gusto. Remember Piper’s now-infamous seven-point dodge to the question, “Can I shoot my wife’s assailant?”

Instead of a clear, biblical answer—“Yes, protect the innocent”—Piper delivered a meandering homily about how perhaps allowing the rape of your wife might be a more profound way of “showing Christ is more precious than life.”

Honestly, what sane man talks like this? What shepherd tells the flock to open the pen and let the wolves in?

It’s not courage, nor is it faith. It’s not even denying one’s self for the glory of God. It’s a sanctified fecklessness dressed up as piety. And it has infected the entire Evangelical complex. Wax and his tribe rush to lament George Floyd not because they love George Floyd, but because Floyd’s death offered them a chance to play martyr.

To bow, to confess, to weep, to demonstrate their own “complicity” in America’s original sin.

It implicated them, and it caused them suffering, and put them on their faces so others could stomp on their heads, and therefore it became precious.

But Iryna Zarutska? A white woman brutally murdered by a repeat criminal? That’s just a tragedy without theological utility. It doesn’t implicate them, so it doesn’t interest them.

This is the pattern, over and over again. They invent noble suffering where none exists, and ignore real suffering when it does. They manufacture persecution in woke laboratories—crying over imagined accusations of racism, basking in the applause of their secular inquisitors—but when true evil strikes, when a woman lies dead at the hands of a predator, they fall silent.

Because in their framework, there is no room for boldness, no room for justice, no room for righteous defense. There is only the perpetual theatre of their own supposed humility.

It is worth asking, what does this theology produce? It produces pastors who will allow their wives to be brutalized for the sake of some “higher witness.” It produces seminary elites who see martyrdom not as a gift when God ordains it, but as a commodity to be hoarded, polished, and displayed.

It produces men who, when the world demands crocodile tears, will oblige with rivers. But when the world demands courage, will scurry back to their bookshelves, clutching their worn-out manifesto of hedonic suffering.

So yes, Wolfe and Kirk are right to notice the silence. And the silence is deafening because it is intentional. It is the silence of a theology that only cares when the narrative implicates itself.

It is the silence of a generation taught that true godliness is to look helpless, to look implicated, to look like a martyr. And in that silence, women like Iryna Zarutska are abandoned to the grave while the Evangelical elites polish their halos and pen another blog about racial lament.

Because in the end, for men like Trevin Wax, it’s not about suffering for Christ. It’s about suffering for show.