What’s Wrong With Boys?

by on May 25, 2026 | Comment

The attack perpetrated by two teen-agers upon a San Diego mosque, on May 18 of this year, is just the latest in a string of violent acts that include the assault on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (April 25, 2026), the murder of Charlie Kirk (September 10, 2025), the attempted assassination of President Trump (July 13, 2024), the attack on a Poway Synagogue (April 27, 2019), and the Sandy Hook school shooting (December 14, 2012) to name just a few high-profile examples. The list could be much longer. Further, this pattern is not new but arguably reaches back as far as the Columbine shooting on April 20, 1999. These attacks had certain features in common. They were committed by young men who are described as alienated from others, expressing a high degree of nihilism—”the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless”—and hatred for others.1 Another adjective that occurs frequently in this context is incel, which is short hand for “involuntary celibates.” Two 2023 papers explored the rise of incels and how they become “violent extremists.”2 Robert Green and Allan Palombi write about a “black pill pipeline,” by which incels gather in online forums to commiserate over their frustration with the world. Their study found “community members progress from a sense of solidarity to hostile radicalism, where violence is encouraged and sometimes carried out.”3 The members of these groups feel powerless and through their participation in these groups “conclude that their rage and powerlessness can only be relieved through violence….”4 Green and Palombi describe a process whereby members become gradually indoctrinated. They begin by “red-pilling” (a phrase borrowed from the film The Matrix) and end by “black pilling,” a “nihilistic state that often includes rhetoric advocating violence…as the incels’ only recourse against an unfair social order that renders them invisible or seeks their humiliation.”5 Miriam Lindner comes to similar conclusions but interprets them through the lens of evolutionary biology.6

Obviously, as in the most recent case, mental illness is a factor in such violence. One of the San Diego mosque shooters had been hospitalized before the attack for psychiatric issues and was known by the authorities to have threatened violence. Because of the possibility of an attack, his parents told the authorities that they had removed firearms from the house.7

There is another part of the story that hits close to home for those of us who confess the Reformed faith: two of these shooters were members of orthodox, confessionally Reformed congregations. As it happens I know both congregations and their pastors. These are not idiosyncratic congregations, they are not organized around any sort of ideology that might encourage young men to become violent. Both of them are ideal congregations demonstrating the marks of the true church: the pure preaching of the gospel, the pure administration of the sacraments, and the use of church discipline.8

How can it be that boys who have been raised in godly homes and churches, come to a place where they turn to violence?

Bad Company

The studies are right that the online world can be deeply corrupting. I believe now that hitherto I have not sufficiently appreciated the Apostle Paul’s warning, “Do not be deceived: “Bad company ruins good morals” (1 Cor 15:33). Never has it been easier to find bad company. Before the smartphone and before the internet we had to look for it physically. Today, it is as close as the Discord app on one’s smartphone.

The potential for such corruption, however, does not come from outside of us but from inside of us. Our Lord said, “it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person” (Matt 15:11). The truth about every man and all men, to borrow a phrase from the Remonstrants, is that the fall corrupted everything and everyone and especially us human beings. We speak of “depravity,” i.e., the corruption of all of our faculties brought about by the fall of our first parents, Adam and Eve.9 We were created “good and after his own image, that is, in righteousness and true holiness” in order that we “might rightly know God” our Creator, “heartily love him, and live with him in eternal blessedness, to praise and glorify him.”10 By nature, however, after the fall, “we are wholly incapable of any good and prone to all evil.” This is true of us unless, by the free, sovereign grace of God, “we are born again by the Spirit of God.”11

The Apostle Paul warned Pastor Timothy that the sorts of things we have witnessed over the last twenty seven years are a mark of the last days, i.e., the days between the ascension of Christ and his return:

But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people. For among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth (2 Tim 3:1–7).

The language of verse two, “abusive , disobedient to parents, and the adjective ungrateful” and the phrase in verse three “without self-control” and, the adjectives from verse 4,”treacherous, reckless” seem apropos as does his warning about those who have “the appearance of godliness” but not its power. Where, before the internet, people may have physically crept into households today they do it digitally, via smartphones. “Always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth” describes a certain type of social media user who may be particularly susceptible to being “black pilled.”

Out Of The Rabbit Hole

There is a saying online, “go touch grass.” It means, “you need to get offline and reconnect with the real world of sense experience.” In our time, as AI blurs the line between the online and the world we experience with our senses, especially for generations that have grown up with smartphones, gaming, and virtual reality, it is not clear that we all agree any more as to what counts as the real world. There is some good news in this regard. There are reports that there is a movement among some member of Gen-Z (or Zoomers, i.e., those born between 1997–2012) to switch from smart phones (e.g., the iPhone or an Android phone) to flip phones. They are recognizing that they are addicted to their smartphones because, as Rachel Hale writes (paraphrasing psychiatrist Yann Poncin), “smartphones impact the brain in three key ways: impacting productivity and prioritization, depleting the brain’s cognitive patience and threshold for tolerating frustration, and rewiring the brain’s pleasure pathways and dopamine release.” Poncin says

Your dopamine system, over time, over multiple events, is getting set in a way that to trigger dopamine release and a feel good release, you actually now need this phone, because nothing else in life is regularly going to give you that level of dopamine satisfaction.12

Hale reports that some Zoomers who are ditching their smartphones are deliberately working to get together, in the real world, to socialize. This is a very good trend. It has been clear to me for sometime that unhappy boys who retreat to their computers and phones, are more likely to go down the 4Chan, 8Chan, Reddit, and Discord rabbit hole, thereby reinforcing the misery of others and being taught by others to think of themselves not as sinners saved by grace but as victims of an unjust world. Boys who accept this narrative are heading for trouble. In this self-identity, the nihilistic incels overlap with conspiracy theorists, who convince themselves and others that “the Jews” are responsible for all their problems and for all the ills of the world.13 In other conspiratorial circles, MAGA is responsible for all evils.14

In general, boys need socialization with real people, in the real world. They need to be outdoors and active. They need to be accomplishing things. What they do not need is isolation and immersion in artificial online communities, which can be populated by people with whom parents would not want their children socializing in real life. It is past time for Christian parents to take control of their children’s online world. Your children will not like it but being a real parent is more like being a cop than it is being a buddy to one’s children. It is also time for parents to realize that college is no longer necessarily the path to social and financial success. In some cases, it may be a path to depression, isolation, self-hatred, and nihilism. Too many faculty and administrators who populate colleges and universities are themselves miserable. They see themselves as victims of an unjust society over which they are powerless and they seek to recruit young people to that view of the world. This is not true of all faculties and schools and there are still good places to send one’s children to college but they must be chosen carefully and they may no longer be selected principally on the hope that a prestigious degree will lead to prosperity. What does it profit a family if a child gains a prestigious degree and loses his soul? A two-year community college degree and an apprenticeship as an electrician or as a plumber may be far more beneficial for a young man than four years in college.

Boys need godly, mature men in their lives. Ideally, Dad should be the first of those.15  To know what a Christian man is, boys need a model. They need a father and other godly men to come alongside them to guide and correct them. I am deeply grateful for a number of men who invested time in me, who provided guidance, without which I might never have come to faith (thank you Bob Rung for speaking to me about Christ) and without whom I might not have learned what it is to be a Christian father. Without the society that adult male leadership provides, boys will be feral. They need to see responsibility and duty fulfilled and they need to be taught to take up their duties and responsibilities when it is their time. Underneath and behind the nihilism and despair fueling the rage that we see manifested in acts of violence is Narcissism. It is only when we realize that God put us here not to be served but to serve (Mark 10:45) that boys are properly oriented.

Finally, young men need the gospel. Addicted to dopamine hits, gambling, and porn, some of them despair of ever being free. They see themselves as so broken and so lost that they are beyond hope, beyond forgiveness, and beyond love. Many of these acts of violence are really murder/suicides. By doing them they know that they will be noticed and, in the sick society they have joined (and internalized) they even see themselves as heroic, as in the case of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooter. When they do them, they know that they may be killed and they seem to want it. They need to hear the law, to learn the greatness of their sin and misery—most of them need little convincing about their misery—and they need to know that the grace of Christ is greater than all their sin, including their addictions. They need to know that impenitence is the path to hell but they also need to know that Jesus receives the filthiest sinner who turns to him in faith. They need to know that the church is not for the righteous but for sinners just like them. They need to know that there is hope for them, that “if God is for us, who can be against us?” (Rom 8:31b). They need to know that, in Christ, we are a new creation (2 Cor 5:17)

There is a way forward. Our boys need not take this dark path but we must pay attention and know that Satan is like a roaring lion, prowling and seeking whom he may devour (1 Pet 5:8). We are in a spiritual battle for the souls of our boys and we need to respond with the weapons of the Spirit (Eph 6:13–18). We may be thankful that we have great and powerful weapons, like prayer, because the one who hears our prayers is most great and most powerful. We should take comfort that, in Christ, “you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4).

notes

  1. s.v., “Nihilism,” Oxford English of Dictionary, Third Edition
    (Oxford University Press 2010, 2024).
  2. Carrie Stetler, “Study Reveals How ‘Incels’ Become Violent Extremists” (September 20, 2023); Anna Lamb, “The Rise of ‘Incels’” (October 18, 2023).
  3. Stetler, “Study Reveals.”
  4. Stetler, “Study Reveals.”
  5. Stetler, “Study Reveals.”
  6. Anna Lamb, “The Rise of Incels.”
  7. Shelby Bremer, “Year Before Shooting, Father Removed Guns From Home of Islamic Center Teen Gunman” (May 22, 2026).
  8. These categories are drawn from Belgic Confession art. 29.
  9. Heidelberg Catechism, 7.
  10. Heidelberg Catechism, 6.
  11. Heidelberg Catechism, 8.
  12. Rachel Hale, “These College Kids Are Swearing Off Smartphones. It’s Sparking a Movement.” (USA Today, June 6, 2025)
  13. R. Scott Clark, “Conspiracies: The Temptation of Cultural Gnosticism,” Heidelblog, November 17, 2025. Clark, “A Major Problem With Conspiracy Theories (Part 1),” Heidelblog, December 22, 2025.
  14. A man in my town was recently severely beaten by his neighbor apparently because the neighbor was offended by his display of American flags and pro-Trump signs. He pleaded not guilty yesterday to attempted murder among other charges. Update: The Escondido Police published a publicity release just now (approximately 5:00 PM May 25. 2026) notifying the community that Mr Sheron died today. On January 9, 2020, several members of pro-Trump rally were attacked by members of Antifa. Those Antifa members were prosecuted and, in 2024, several were convicted and some were jailed.
  15. R. Scott Clark, “Big,” Heidelblog, January 20, 2014.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

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  • R. Scott Clark
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    R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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