What happened in Charlottesville, where one person was killed and 19 injured when a car ploughed into a group of people protesting against a white nationalist, right-wing rally, has shocked America. It's a tragedy, but a tragedy with several different layers. Aside from the suffering of the injured and bereaved, one of these is the inability to agree on who was responsible.
Franklin Graham said on Facebook it was demonic: 'this boils down to the evil in people's hearts. Satan is behind it all.' Earlier in his post, though, he blames the city council who voted to remove a statue to the Confederate hero Robert E Lee and gave permission to hold the demonstration in the first place.
To be clear, the vote to remove the statue was part of a process of acknowledging the dark side of Southern nationalism, which sees a civil war fought in defence of slavery viewed with a sort of rosy nostalgia for the good old days. The right-wing demonstrators who turned up in their hundreds to protest are right down with that; they were the best of times, and the sooner they're back the better. Franklin Graham appears to think the city council shouldn't have provoked them: well, some bears need poking.
But another layer is the failure by President Donald Trump to say the right words at the right time. He condemned the violence on 'all sides', without acknowledging that it was specifically far-right-violence. These are the people who like what he has to say and voted for him in large numbers because of his hostility to Muslims.
Trump has shown himself to be an unpredictable president who can never be relied on to say or do the right thing. Is it just because he's tone-deaf, and simply doesn't understand what's appropriate, like a clumsy teenager in room-full of adults? Perhaps; but the worry is that his apparent tone-deafness on the campaign trail, when he repeatedly made statements that would have seen any other candidate automatically disqualified, harmonised extremely well with that large part of the electorate that voted for him.
So the real fear – and it is a genuine fear – is that what Charlottesville showed was not an awful aberration in American life, in which a few neo-Nazis disrupted for a few hours the civilised, liberal tolerance of the nation. There are lots of these people and perhaps the Trump presidency has legitimised and invigorated them. When the governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, told them to 'go home', he was too late: they're already home. This is America now. And when clergy line up to denounce what happened, when politicians from all sides condemn racial bigotry and hatred, they're swimming against the tide rather than with it.
Now, it's possible to argue that this is overblown. In 1928 the Ku Klux Klan marched in Washington, 40,000 of them and a 'wonderful spectacle', according to Pathé News. That sort of demonstration is unthinkable today. America – and the world – has come a long way. But what the Charlottesville violence has highlighted is that in some sections of society, those old instincts are alive and well. It's 'blood and soil'; this land is 'our' land – not yours if you are black, Jewish or a Democrat.
What drives them? A sense, perhaps, of incoherent grievance, of not having a place in the modern world – the usual.
But more to the point, how should they be resisted? Not by caving in to them. If cities think it's right to remove monuments glorifying the Conferedacy, they shouldn't pause for fear of upsetting the far right. And Trump's supporters need to get over their feeling that any criticism of him is unjustified and politically motivated: sometimes the critics are right. And most of all, Christians need to be wholeheartedly committed to tackling the ideology behind the far right, wherever in the world it is. It works by demonising people, blaming them and hating them. It has nothing to do with Christ.
Follow Mark Woods on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods
