How True Crime Can Reveal God | Matt Walsh & Andrew Klavan Discuss
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- One of the first things in my life that brought me to God when I was 19 years old was reading "Crime and Punishment," which is a story about an ax murderer. I try to get at what it is that an artist does that makes this evil world beautiful. - Is there beauty? Are there people producing truly beautiful works of art in this horrifically awful world? Andrew Klavan, the new book is "The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness," which is available right now to go buy on Amazon, wherever you buy books.

Drew, I have to admit, I haven't read the book yet because you have not sent me a special signed copy. So what's up with that? I'm coming in this week. I'll bring you one. Okay. All right. I'll find somebody to sign it to. I can't because I can't spend my own money on it. No, obviously. I wouldn't expect that of you. Yeah.

Well, I do plan to read it because I'm legitimately very interested. And looking just at the description, it says the book's all about finding joy and beauty in the world while still being realistic about the evil found in it. And that...

That resonates with me because I do find I do struggle with that sometimes. And by sometimes, I mean pretty much all the time. So how do we find, I don't want to give any spoilers away, but how do we find joy and beauty in this horrifically awful world that we live in?

Yeah, I think this is the thing. I think if you're an actual Christian, if you actually believe in the precepts of Christianity, after a while, it just comes to you that the world sucks. I mean, I think that's actually in the gospel. The world sucks, and it will continue to suck. And everything you do, nothing, at no point in the gospel does Jesus ever say, make the world a better place, because he doesn't believe the world can be a better place. He says, give all your money to the poor, but the poor you'll always have with you. You're always going to have trouble in the world. I've

But at the same time, we're told to rejoice, rejoice evermore. You know, I've told you these things so that the joy will be in you. So what I did was I studied famous murders, real crimes that were in their time. They were just huge. And each one of them inspired work of art after work of art. They inspired novels. They inspired poems. At one point, a murderer's hand was mummified and put in a museum, and famous poets wrote about the experience of seeing this murderer's hand.

And since art is about finding beauty in life, I mean, art can be about terrible, terrible subjects. Like Macbeth is about murder and betrayal and, you know, killing people to get to the throne. And yet at the end of the play, you think this is a beautiful play. This play has given me something new and fresh and light. And so by exploring the works of art about these acts of evil, I try to get at what it is that an artist does that makes this beautiful.

evil world beautiful and makes it creative and makes it something that actually expands our sense of joy. Because this is my experience of Christianity. My experience of Christianity is my vision of the world has gotten darker and darker, but I have become more serene. And that's a strange paradox. And I try to capture why it is that happens and what are the

what are the creative practices that we do in life that are like art? For instance, communion is very much like art. It's taking something solid and real and specific and finding God in it. It's finding God in bread and wine and very normal things. So that's a thing that people do that is actually a creative thing. Art itself is a creative thing in which we look at life and we suddenly think like, God, you know, that thing that happened in that

play in the Sopranos was incredibly ugly. And yet the Sopranos is a very beautiful experience. Watching the Sopranos is actually an uplifting experience because God is in the Sopranos. And so it's a question of like seeing God in the world as it is instead of as what we now call Christian art does,

prettying everything up. I mean, I don't know if you go to these Christian movies. I think if you're taking kids to the movies, they're fine. But if you're an adult and you go and see God's Not Dead, number five, this time he's really not dead, you know, you think like, this is awful. This has nothing to do with life. If that is your idea of Christianity, when you meet with real life, your faith will collapse. And so I kind of explore the way in which reading books like Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, watching a movie like Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock, actually is a much more

clear and uplifting engagement with God than some kind of prettified version of life. Yeah, that really is the, I mean, that's always been my, I think that's a lot of people's complaint about so-called Christian entertainment. And maybe it's, I don't, to be honest, I don't follow it closely enough. Maybe it's gotten a little better. I think it has gotten a little better and not to pick on God's not dead, but that is, it's one of the few of those types of films that I did watch. And I remember it's been a while, but one of the things that really bothered me about it, I mean, aside from

Not all the performance. Some of the performances are fine. But from my memory of it, it's like this atheist college professor, I guess, who's an atheist. And then someone presents, I guess one of the students or something, presents the arguments to him. And he's like persuaded by it. And then by the end of it, he, I guess, comes to God. It just felt...

I think dealing with someone, dealing with a Christian film that deals with someone who doesn't have faith or loses faith, that there's a lot of value in that. But it felt too neat. It felt too clean. It didn't feel like this is what actually happens in life.

Yeah, I mean, it's just like women watching romantic comedies. Nothing wrong with sitting back and enjoying a romantic comedy. But if that's what you think love is going to be like, you're going to be sorely disappointed. And nobody is going to live up to that experience. It's just not the way the world works. In God is Not Dead, and I hate to pick on these films because I think they serve a purpose. I think they've collected the audience that attracts talent, and that's why they're getting better. But at the same time, at the end of that film, the guy is...

converted and gets hit by a car and he dies and everybody goes, "Well, hallelujah, at least he converted before he got hit by a car." And my thought is, could we call his wife first? You know, could we at least be sad that the guy got hit by a car? Could we at least engage in real life? One of the things that brought me to God, one of the first things in my life that brought me to God when I was 19 years old was reading "Crime and Punishment," which is a story about an ax murderer who kills two women for no reason, just because he thinks it can be done.

And I remember reading that scene and I was living in a world and I was in university. I was at a place where they were teaching us that morality was relative.

And I remember reading that scene and thinking, there is no planet in which this is good. There's no planet. You can be in a planet where everyone's an axe murderer. Everyone thinks this is good. It's still not good. You simply cannot make that argument. That changed my life. I mean, that changed the actual trajectory of my life and turned it toward God. Now, if I walked into a Christian bookstore and I said, have you got that book about the axe murderer who gets rescued by a prostitute? You know, they'd kick you out into the street. And so that

What I'm trying to make the argument about is God is the God of this world. And so if you read art that is honest about this world, even if it's about nightmares, you're going to find God in that work, even if the artist himself is not a believer. And so in exploring books like, in exploring stories like Psycho, Silence of the Lambs,

books like Rope, another Alfred Hitchcock picture, and Crime and Punishment specifically, and some of Nietzsche's philosophy, what you find is that, look, society, there's no question, has been on a trajectory of unbelief. It's been moving more and more in the direction of unbelief. And in that experience, artists who write beautifully about the world as it is

have been telling us what the results of that are. You know, one of the murders I study is the murder by a guy named Ed Gein. Do you know this murder, this story? I mean, this is the 1950s Wisconsin, the middle of nowhere. And 1950s were kind of looked on as the sort of heyday of American life.

He was killing women and digging up some dead women and dressing in their bodies, dressing up in their bodies so he could turn himself into a woman. That was the inspiration for first the novel Psycho and then the film Psycho. And it's also the inspiration if you've seen Silence of the Lambs. And all of those films that are inspired by those things, like the slasher movies, all speak into that moment. They speak into that version of sexuality where our sexuality is just

body outline so if I change my body outline if I change the way I look I've changed in fact my soul and that's an absurdity but it actually makes sense if there's no God it makes perfect sense if all we are is meat and and so I explore in the way the way these movies not only look at men trying to become women which is in both psycho and in Silence of the Lambs but also the rules of psychiatrists which

which hilariously change over time. In Psycho, which is early on in the first introduction of psychiatry to the mass audience, the psychiatrist is the expert. He comes on at the end of the movie and he explains the whole thing. This is what happened. In his mind, he was mother. He had a problem with his mother, blah, blah, blah. By the time we get to the movie Halloween, which is kind of based on Psycho,

You have a psychiatrist come on and say, I treated this killer. I can't do anything with him. He's evil. It's evil. I have no weapon against evil. So the psychiatrists started to change. By the time you get to Silence of the Lamb, the psychiatrist is the source of the evil. The psychiatrist is Hannibal Lecter. And what makes him evil is that he treats people like meat. He eats them, you know, so he's a complete materialist in the psychiatric, uh,

ideal that came out of Freudian materialism has been completely turned around. The artist sort of caught on to the fact that even though therapy itself may not be a bad thing and talking to somebody is not a bad thing, the philosophy that went into psychiatry that was going to replace the priest and the confessional and solve your sins and absolve you of your sins was false. And that

That idea is the one that seeped into society and was really kind of defined what our society looks like today. And so artists writing about murder is not the same thing as murder. Artists writing about murder is an act of creation. And creation, in my mind, is always the telos of love. I mean, the reason you have love is because love is creative.

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You wrote a book a couple of years ago, The Truth and the Beauty. And then this book deals with finding beauty in a broken world, finding it in art that deals, the art itself deals with murder and really dark things. So this is obviously a theme that you revolve around quite a bit. And so I want to talk about beauty a little bit because you don't hear beauty defended very often. In fact, there seems to be, as I know you've noticed,

and are dealing with in a lot of these books, this kind of campaign to destroy beauty, to uglify things, you know, ugly art, ugly buildings. You know, they make buildings that are, even the churches that used to be beautiful, they take steps to make them less beautiful. Ugly people, there's a lot of very ugly people that seem to be going out of their way to make themselves ugly with, you know, mutilating themselves with piercings all over the place and tattoos on their face and all these kinds of things. Why is that?

I think that's a great question. And I think the reason is that beauty and truth are very deeply connected. As Keith said, beauty is truth, truth, beauty. And what he meant by that is not necessarily that there aren't two things that are beauty and truth. What he meant is that true beauty, not just prettiness, is something that connects you to God. It connects you to the meaning of the world. And when you look at something that is truly beautiful, and I'm not talking, like I said, I'm not talking about something that's cute or pretty like daisies, anything like that. I'm talking about that thing that really reaches into your soul and grabs you.

The reason it grabs you is because you're seeing an order in things. You're seeing a kind of creativity and a creative mind in things that connects you to it, that you are not separate than it. You are actually part of that creation. And I think that that is the experience of beauty. The Kingdom of Cain ends with, if I may say so, I think it's one of the best 30 pages I ever wrote. It's a walk through a museum to look at famous paintings. And what happens is we get further and further away from God.

And it ends with returning to the Pietà, Michelangelo's statue of Mary holding the dead body of Christ. And my question about this is, if you take this moment, which is the saddest moment in human history, it's not just the saddest thing that can happen to anybody, the death of a child. I think that's worse than self-death. I think that there's no greater sadness than that. But it's also the death of God, you know? And if you look at this beautiful statue,

of this tragedy, the question that immediately comes to my mind is if a man can take that tragedy and turn it into something beautiful, what is God making of this world, this world that we're living in now? And I think that that, I think the reason that beauty has been rejected is because it is the answer to the question

If there's a good God, how can there be so much evil in the world? And the answer is simply, even though we have to accept it on faith, the answer is simply we're living in a design that is beautiful, even though that beauty includes the ugliness and the evil that we have chosen to do and the evil of a broken world. I think that to stifle beauty is to stifle God. I think to stifle beauty is to stifle the heart of man. And I think to stifle God is to stifle the heart of man. And I think that that has been an absolute result

result of the slow loss of faith. I think that it is not just

It's not just that people have lost their connection to God, but they're determined to take it away from you and me as well. And I think the only way you can do that is to destroy beauty because the minute you see it, the minute you see beauty, you think like, wait a minute, just a minute, there's something more here than meets the eye. And especially when you come upon, one of the things I write about in the book is coming upon the beauty of clouds from the position of an airplane,

And they think like this was here before we could fly up and see it. You know, it was here waiting to become beauty. It wasn't beauty until we could see it and find that connection that we find in the beautiful. And when you see that, you think like, gee, maybe, you know,

We matter. We matter because we bring this creative spark to life by perceiving life. But maybe we're not the end of the value chain. Maybe there's some value to us beyond even what we think and even our desires. I think that this is a real thing, Matt. I think the...

attempt to squelch God, to silence God, is a genuine movement. I have been in meetings in Hollywood where somebody will point out that faith-based movies make a ton of money. And people will say, yeah, but we don't do that. We're not going to do that. Yeah.

And you think like, I thought you were all about money. Yeah, but not that. We're not so about money that we'd actually talk about God. That's going too far. We don't want to go that far. And this is really true. I mean, you go to university and you want to read about literature. Almost all literature at some level is about the spiritual. It's about evil. It's about God. It's about who we are, what we're doing. You can't find that class in most Ivy League schools.

universities anymore because they're determined to bleed it out of the culture. And I think it's a real movement. I think it actually, of course, like all these movements, they think they're doing something good and just and beautiful. But I think it is an actual attempt to silence the voice of God and make sure that you don't find him. In the book you talk about, you've already mentioned Dostoevsky, Hitchcock. You just mentioned the Pieta, which I think is, for my money, the most beautiful and impressive work of art

Perhaps ever produced by mankind. And so when I think in particular about that sculpture, there's a certain kind of sadness that comes with it because I think there's no one capable of producing that now. I don't know if there's anyone in the entire world that could do anything close to that. Is there anyone within, you know, maybe that just form of art has died off.

Even in the particular modern mediums, film and television,

Is there beauty? Are there people producing truly beautiful works of art even in the modern day in those mediums? I think we're in this kind of amazing moment, the last five years, where art flatlined. And that doesn't mean there were no good works. There are always good artists around. There are always going to be individual good works. But I think that the arts in America and possibly in the West flatlined because we had squeezed every human thing and every godly thing out of them.

That can't last. I don't think that that can go on forever and I think I can feel it starting to change right now. If you go back to the last upsurge of really good work, a lot of it was on television around 2000. There were some really good shows on television that were kind of exciting, kind of a reinvention of the long-form storytelling. They were all about bad men. They were all about the Sopranos, the SHIELD, Breaking Bad, all about rogue men.

And I think the reason for that is because when you outlaw masculinity, only outlaws can be masculine. And I think that we have reached a point through feminism. I mean, it's a whole other subject of why we want to extinguish women. But I think we want to extinguish women because of what they represent and what they stand for, what motherhood stands for, what tenderness stands for, what generosity stand for. But because we have tried to eliminate women, men have no role. And so we're trying to reinvent feminism.

good men in art and good men in life without giving up feminism. And I don't think that can be done. I think feminism needs to go right out the window. I think it's a wholly destructive force. It's not that some of the problems that feminism was called upon to solve didn't exist. Some of those problems did exist, but I think feminism is a destructive force. And I think this is

attack on the existence of women, the idea that you and I could put on a skirt tomorrow and declare ourselves women and women would just have to accept that, that's an amazing thing. You know, that movie Barbie was a huge hit. And in the middle of Barbie, somebody says, well, men hate women and women hate women. It's one thing we all agree on.

Nobody even noticed the line. Nobody even talked about it. I mean, I did. I talked about it, but I didn't read any articles about it. It was just like, oh yeah, that's true. And I thought if we live in a society where men and women hate women, we're living in a sick society, which is actually what I believe we're in. I think we're in a moment of real mental illness, of cultural mental illness.

I don't think it can last, or at least the culture that does it can last. So it's a question of whether we're going to rediscover the underlying truth of existence or we're not, you know, and we're going to disappear. But I think it's a real thing. You know, I think when you say that, the attempt to extinguish beauty, it's a real thing. Yeah, a real effort. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Before I let you go, I did have, and this is a little bit out of left field, sort of related but not really.

But since I have you, I do have a quick bone to pick with you that I'm just going to throw at you right now. Because a couple of, and we're talking about films, so it is a little bit related. A few days ago, you put out a video on your YouTube channel where you're ranking Westerns. Yes. And I watched the whole video, and I agreed with many of your rankings. However, the movie Open Range, you didn't even, was not in your rankings at all. It was unranked. Oh.

And that, to my mind, that's probably my favorite Western of all time. So I'm just waiting. What does he think of Open Range? We'll get the S tier. And you didn't even mention it. So what's up with that? I want to plead innocence here. When they put out the caption on that video, it said, Claven's list of great Westerns or something like that. It was not. I was given the Westerns and had to judge them ad lib as they were coming over. I didn't make the list. The list was culled from...

the internet. And so they just were pouring them at me and I stopped midway because it was just going too long. So I didn't leave out open range. I didn't leave out, you know, the, uh, the searchers or anything like that. I mean, it was just, those were the ones I was given to talk about and I liked open range, but I,

I'm surprised that you liked it that much. I thought it was a really good Western. I really liked it, and I'd probably give it an A, but I don't think it was one of the great Westerns of all time, was it? You know what I liked about it so much is, well, for one thing, it reminded me a lot of Lonesome Dove, which is one of my favorite things that's ever, you know, favorite movie. Yeah.

So it reminds me a lot of that, but also it has, you know, I'm what, what I love about Westerns. I think everyone loves about Westerns is, uh,

Sometimes you have Westerns that will play with the formula a little bit, but I like the formula, which is... And it has to end with a shootout. And I agree with you because you talked about Tombstone and how it feels like it trails off at the end. I felt the same way. I watched it actually recently for the first time. I'd never seen it. And doing the big shootout and then it goes on for 45 minutes. The shootout is at the end. And Open Range, I think, has maybe the greatest...

shootout, maybe in film history, but at least in Western film history. Yeah, no, it's great, great shootout. The scene where they bury the dog is great. The girl is great. I mean, it's got a lot, and Kevin Costner is always worth watching. I mean, it's like he does, he's one of the few people who still does movies like that and did them for quite some time.

But I didn't leave it. I just want to say I didn't leave it out. I was getting hit with this on X. People saying, why did you leave out this and why did you leave out that? I didn't leave out or put in anything. I was given the list and then had to comment on it. That was the thing. That was the way the system worked. So I plead innocent to this. And I will do penance if I have to. But I think that it's only fair to say that...

I think we should fire the people who did it and name them publicly and possibly chase them through the street hurling rotten vegetables at them. Yeah. Well, you can tell me the name of the person off there and I'll go find them. Okay. I'll write you. Okay. Well, Andrew Clavin, the book, The Kingdom of Cain, Finding God in the Literature of Darkness, which is available right now, and you should go pick it up. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it. Great to see you. Thanks a lot.