Author’s Preface: This three-part essay reflects on how evil distorts the divine image in man, through culture, conscience, and the misuse of freedom. From Hollywood’s humanization of horror to the real-world confusion of identity and the theological mystery of sin, these essays seek to recover what our age has forgotten: that only grace can restore what pride has disfigured.

Part I: Hollywood’s Humanization of Evil

This first installment sets the stage for what follows. It revisits the themes I explored in “Gender Ideology and Violence: Cultural Confusion and the Spiritual Battle,” linking them to Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story. In light of Christian anthropology, this opening section examines how sin distorts both reason and imagination, showing how a culture that loses its sense of evil also loses its sense of God. Through this lens, Hollywood’s latest retelling of Gein’s crimes becomes a case study in how modern culture rebrands horror as empathy and recasts pathology as identity.

Dividing the essay into three parts allows each section to explore the same theological concern, the distortion of the divine image in man, from a distinct vantage point. Part I reveals how culture reshapes evil through storytelling, Part II exposes this distortion in lived experience and moral disorder, and Part III draws these threads together through a theological reflection on sin, grace, and redemption.

In my previous essay on the subject of gender ideology, “Gender Ideology and Violence: Cultural Confusion and the Spiritual Battle” (originally published in Crisis Magazine on September 9, 2025), I argued that the demonic roots of gender ideology first infiltrated Hollywood before spreading through academia, government, and even the family. As I noted there, philosophers from Aristotle to Aquinas remind us to begin with first principles, that is, to see things as they truly are. As St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, truth is the conformity of the mind to reality (adaequatio rei et intellectus). In other words, Aquinas affirms what modern philosophers refer to as the correspondence theory of truth.

To reject this alignment between intellect and being is to sever reason from creation itself. The Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms this same truth: “Man tends by nature toward the truth. He is obliged to honor and bear witness to it” (CCC 2467). When we refuse to see reality as it is, we not only distort reason but reject the moral order inscribed by the Creator. Yet in our age, this most basic act of recognition has been replaced by self-invention. Evil begins, as I wrote then, when we refuse to acknowledge the true nature of things. Gender ideology does precisely this: it denies the fundamental reality that we are created male and female.

Scripture and tradition affirm that our sexual identity is not an accident of biology but a gift that reveals something of God’s image. “Man and woman have been created, which is to say, willed by God,” the Catechism teaches, “in perfect equality as human persons, yet in their respective beings as man and woman” (CCC 369). Pope John Paul II likewise observed in his Theology of the Body that “the body, in its masculinity and femininity, becomes humanly beatifying only by means of this testimony.” To deny this order is not merely to misunderstand nature but to rebel against the divine intention written into it.

Hollywood has probably done more than any other force in popular culture to blur our moral vision. Aquinas defines prudence as “right reason applied to action” (recta ratio agibilium). When culture conditions the imagination to detach sympathy from truth, it undermines the very possibility of prudence. The result is what Benedict XVI described as the “dictatorship of relativism,” where emotion replaces judgment and compassion is cut off from moral order.

From Psycho to The Silence of the Lambs, filmmakers have used gender confusion to provoke shock, revulsion, and fascination. But tragically, audiences have often detached such films from moral consequence. In The Silence of the Lambs, this tension is captured in one of the film’s most chilling exchanges. Dr. Hannibal Lecter, both psychiatrist and killer, tells Clarice Starling with unnerving calm, “First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius.” I would argue that this is a prophetic warning. The moment Clarice protests that “transsexuals are very passive,” Lecter replies, “You’re so close to the way you’re going to catch him, do you realize that?” Even in fiction, the connection between violence, delusion, and gender confusion was glanced at but never truly confronted.

That theme now returns with disturbing clarity in Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story (2025). The series, marketed as psychological insight, reimagines Gein not simply as a murderer and grave robber, but as a man struggling with sexual identity, a tragic figure whose pathology is softened through the lens of modern “gender exploration.” According to People magazine, the show introduces Gein’s fascination with Christine Jorgensen, one of the first publicly recognized transgender women, and stages an imagined dialogue between the two in which Gein confesses, “I think I’m transsexual.” Jorgensen, in this dramatized scene, reassures him that he is not transgender but “gynephilic,” a term referring to an erotic fixation on the female image.

The show’s creators later insisted that this distinction was intended to prevent conflating Gein’s crimes with transgender identity. But their decision to insert this narrative reveals something deeper about our era’s cultural condition: the instinct to reinterpret evil through the therapeutic categories of identity rather than sin. Such reinterpretation reflects the broader modern tendency to medicalize sin. As St. John Paul II wrote in Evangelium Vitae, “Freedom negates and destroys itself, and becomes a factor of destruction for others, when it claims to be autonomous and self-sufficient.” When moral disorder is reclassified as psychological confusion, the soul’s need for grace is replaced by the patient’s need for therapy.

As biographer Harold Schechter, one of the foremost authorities on Gein, has pointed out, such portrayals distort historical fact. Gein’s actions were not an early expression of gender dysphoria but a grotesque attempt to resurrect his dead mother through imitation. “He didn’t want to be a woman,” Schechter explains. “He wanted to wear one.”

Gein’s morbid imagination also reached beyond his own family history. He was reportedly fascinated by Ilse Koch, the infamous “Bitch of Buchenwald,” whose sadism in a Nazi concentration camp combined lust, cruelty, and a perverse artistry in human skin. His obsession with her reveals not merely mental illness but the same diabolical impulse that delights in the desecration of the image of God, echoing the satanic logic that animated the totalitarian horrors of the twentieth century.

This confusion, between pathology and identity, between perversion and personhood, has become emblematic of our age. As I have stressed in my previous article, Hollywood once exploited gender distortion for horror; now it redeems it through empathy. However, in both cases, it refuses to confront the reality at the heart of this evil: that confusion, when embraced as truth, desecrates the image and likeness of God within humanity.

The Catechism reminds us that “the divine image is present in every man” (CCC 1702), and that our capacity to know and love God is rooted in this likeness. When confusion becomes a creed, the image is not erased but defaced. It is precisely this defilement, this willful darkening of what God created to reflect Him, that lies at the heart of both Gein’s crimes and the culture that now seeks to rationalize them.

The Netflix Reframing: Sympathy Through Gender

Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story reveals a troubling shift in modern storytelling. What earlier generations would have recognized as depravity is now reinterpreted through the gentler language of trauma and self-discovery. Evil is to be pitied and explained away. Earlier depictions of Gein focused on the horror of his crimes: grave robbing, human-skin trophies, and the deranged effort to recreate his deceased mother. In this latest retelling, his pathology is presented as a confused search for self-understanding.

According to People magazine, the series introduces a fictional subplot in which Gein becomes fascinated by the real-life figure Christine Jorgensen, one of the first people to undergo sex-reassignment surgery. In a dreamlike sequence, Gein imagines speaking with Jorgensen on a ham radio, telling her that he believes he is “transsexual.” The imagined Jorgensen responds that he is not transgender but “gynephilic,” suggesting that his condition involves an obsessive attraction to femininity rather than a sense of being trapped in the wrong body.

Co-creator Ian Brennan later told Tudum that the writers wanted to avoid conflating Gein’s crimes with transgender identity. Ironically, in trying to make this distinction, they still frame his depravity through the modern vocabulary of identity. Whether Gein is labeled “transsexual,” “gynephilic,” or something else, the framework remains psychological rather than moral. The viewer is invited to see Gein as a confused man instead of a corrupted one. Even while denying that he was transgender, the show still turns pathology into identity and sin into syndrome.

Harold Schechter has shown through decades of research, the real Gein was not wrestling with gender but consumed by pathological grief and a warped attachment to his mother. His actions were driven by delusion, not dysphoria. Schechter explained that Gein did not want to be a woman; he wanted to wear one. His infamous “female suit,” stitched from the corpses of local women, was not an act of self-expression but an attempt to bring back his mother through grotesque imitation.

By reinterpreting this psychosis through the lens of identity, Monster reveals more about our own age than about Gein himself. Modern culture has lost the ability to name evil as such. Everything must now be filtered through the language of woundedness and misunderstanding. Within this framework, sin becomes sickness and guilt becomes victimhood.

This confusion is not compassion. It is the sentimentalization of sin, a distortion of empathy that replaces repentance with self-excuse. By humanizing monsters, Hollywood erodes moral discernment. What began as entertainment has become moral pedagogy, shaping how society perceives evil itself.

But Gein’s story does not exist in isolation. His depravity, and the culture that has learned to pity it, has echoes far beyond his Wisconsin farmhouse.

Part II: From Gein to Gender Ideology

The Continuum of Confusion: From Gein to Speck, Williams, and Maxheleau

This second part turns from Hollywood’s distortions to the real-world continuum of psychosexual and spiritual disorder. Beneath these tragic stories lies a theological truth: that the human person, created in the image of God, can either reflect or distort that image through the misuse of freedom. As Aquinas teaches, sin is not merely the breaking of moral law but the disintegration of right order within the soul (Summa Theologiae I–II, Q. 85, A.1).

Ed Gein’s story sits within a broader pattern of male violence entangled with sexual distortion and identity confusion. Although each case, which I will examine below, is distinct, they reveal a deeper disorder: a rebellion against the limits of human embodiment and the complementarity of the sexes.

One of the most unsettling examples of this continuum appears in the Netflix series itself, which portrays Richard Speck, the Chicago mass murderer who killed eight student nurses on the night July 13-14, 1966, as feminized and as an admirer of Gein. This portrayal is largely fictional, yet it mirrors a deeper truth about Speck’s real descent. Years after his death, a secretly filmed prison video showed him with female-like breasts, long hair, and makeup. Investigators later revealed that he had smuggled hormone pills into prison, leading to his physical transformation. According to Dr. Marvin Ziporyn, the psychiatrist who became Speck’s only confidant, this grotesque metamorphosis was not mere indulgence but, in a perverse way, self-inflicted punishment. Ziporyn believed that Speck sought to experience the same degradation he had once imposed on his victims, to feel, if only fleetingly, what it meant to be used, humiliated, and stripped of dignity. As one commentator in the A&E Biography observed, Speck’s transformation was perhaps “the justice he gave himself,” a degradation that no court could have devised.

Yet such punishment was not redemptive. It was despair masquerading as remorse. The Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us that true expiation requires conversion of heart, not self-destruction: “The satisfaction that we make for our sins, however, is not so much ours as though it were not done through Jesus Christ. We who can do nothing of ourselves can do all things with the help of him who strengthens us” (CCC 1460). Speck’s misery, his degradation and emptiness, revealed not repentance but alienation. He enacted, in bodily form, the loss of the divine image within himself. Even his suffering became disordered because it was divorced from grace. What remains most chilling is not his inhumanity, but the fact that he was human, a soul who, having rejected the good, could only punish himself in imitation of the very evil he had done.

A similar duality appeared in the case of Colonel Russell Williams, a highly decorated Canadian Air Force commander whose crimes shocked Canada and the world. He was no ordinary officer; Williams had even piloted the Queen of England during a royal visit to Canada, which made his double life all the more shocking. Beneath his image as a disciplined officer, Williams was secretly breaking into homes, stealing women’s and teenage girls’ lingerie, photographing himself in their undergarments, and eventually escalating to sexual assault and murder. He meticulously documented his cross-dressing in thousands of self-portraits, sometimes wearing the very garments of his victims. Williams’s story reveals a disturbing mixture of control and disintegration. Like Gein, he attempted to appropriate femininity, not through empathy but through domination and imitation. The symbolism is unmistakable: the desire to possess womanhood becomes the desire to consume it.

The psychological toll of Williams’s crimes extended beyond his victims. Dr. John Bradford, one of Canada’s leading forensic psychiatrists and an internationally respected expert in sexual deviancy, developed severe post-traumatic stress disorder after reviewing the extensive video evidence of Williams’s assaults, a rare breakdown for a man who had previously analyzed killers like Paul Bernardo and Robert Pickton without incident. His experience echoed the impact of the Moors murders in 1960s Britain, where investigators studying Ian Brady and Myra Hindley’s crimes were similarly scarred by exposure to pure depravity. The collapse of such a seasoned expert echoed the aftermath of the Moors murders in 1960s Britain, where investigators studying Ian Brady and Myra Hindley’s crimes were similarly scarred by the experience of witnessing evil too closely.

Evil of this kind does not stop at the immediate act of violence; it radiates outward, wounding everyone it touches. Theologically, such trauma among investigators and witnesses is a sober reminder that evil leaves no one untouched. As the Catechism teaches, sin “wounds the nature of man and injures human solidarity” (CCC 1849). To stare too long into darkness without the light of grace is to risk being darkened by it.

This moral contagion of evil, its power to corrupt not only the sinner but the surrounding world, sets the stage for understanding other modern cases where psychological collapse and moral confusion intertwine.

This disintegration of moral order corresponds to what Saint Augustine called libido dominandi, i.e., the lust for domination. When desire becomes detached from charity and truth, it seeks power and self-gratification rather than communion. As Augustine showed in The City of God, the human will to dominate is the cause of all wars and crimes. Williams’s need to control and possess reflects this ancient diagnosis of sin as the misuse of freedom.

Another disturbing example, was the 2005 triple homicide of the Maxheleau family in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. At the time of his crimes, Daniel Maxheleau was thirty years old, a solid tennis player, and chartered accountant, who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia after brutally stabbing his parents and younger sister to death. He was found not criminally responsible because he believed, he was pregnant and that his family intended to harm his unborn child. Later reports revealed that his psychotic state worsened when he stopped taking his prescribed medication. Even during treatment, he continued to experience recurring identity delusions, at one point believing he was a police officer with the Sûreté du Québec. Maxheleau’s delusions were not ideological but clinical, yet they echo the same spiritual pattern of inversion. His belief that he could conceive life within himself stands as a tragic parody of creation, a literal confusion of biological and metaphysical identity. The tragedy was made all the more unsettling by its proximity: Maxheleau played tennis at my local club and, although older, had competed in some of the same tournaments I played in. Several friends even remembered practicing with him. That local connection served as a sobering reminder that such distortions are not distant phenomena but can surface within the most ordinary circles of life.

While Maxheleau’s psychosis was medical in nature, his delusion also points to the fragility of human reason after the Fall. As Aquinas explains, human nature suffers “wounds” through sin: the reason, will, and appetites are left “destitute of their proper order” (ST I–II Q. 85, A.3). The disorder of the mind mirrors, in another key, the disorder of the will that permeates a fallen world. The Catechism likewise acknowledges that mental illness can diminish responsibility but never erases the reality of evil in human history (CCC 1735).

These cases differ in cause and character, but all exhibit a symbolic rejection of the created order. The masculine principle of protection becomes possession, and the feminine principle of receptivity becomes desecrated imitation. Each of these men sought, in his own distorted way, to embody what he could not authentically be. The resulting violence was not merely physical but metaphysical. It was an assault on both the meaning of manhood and womanhood.

Christian anthropology holds that man is both body and soul, a unity called to image divine communion. To sever that unity through imitation or perversion is to strike at the very sacramentality of creation. In a 2011 address to the Pontifical John Paul II Institute, Pope Benedict XVI reminded us that “the body also has a negative language… If we know how to listen, [our human bodies] speak the language of true love.”

When examined together, they demonstrate that confusion about identity, when left unchecked or unhealed, can devolve into the macabre. Hollywood may portray such distortions as tragic misunderstandings, but in truth, they represent a deeper revolt against reality. The same confusion that now parades as liberation can, in its extreme forms, express itself as destruction.

These are not isolated pathologies. They are mirrors held up to an age that has lost its grasp on what it means to be human.

Hollywood’s Ideological Revisionism

Hollywood has long been more than a mirror of society; it has become a “moral” teacher. Through its stories, it defines what is acceptable to feel, what is permissible to desire, and what must never be questioned. In recent decades, its narratives have shifted from portraying evil as corruption to reinterpreting it as confusion. The latest retelling of Ed Gein’s story follows this pattern exactly.

In Monster: The Ed Gein Story, horror is transformed into empathy. The creators claim to humanize their subjects by showing them as victims of trauma or repression, yet this “humanization” is selective. It often strips away moral responsibility and reframes moral evil as psychological injury. The Gein of Monster is not a man accountable for his crimes but a misunderstood soul searching for identity and meaning. Such a portrayal may appear compassionate, but it replaces moral realism with therapeutic relativism.

I must admit that even I found myself pitying Gein at moments while watching the series. The tragic portrayal of his lonely childhood, his mother’s religious torment, his father’s severe alcoholism and absenteeism, and his descent into madness evokes a sorrow that is difficult to resist. And yet, the tragedy of his life and his mother’s influence, however pitiable, should not blind us to the depravity of his crimes. Beneath the trauma and isolation lies the brutal truth of moral responsibility. Gein’s wounds do not erase his will. His suffering does not nullify his choices. To acknowledge the humanity of his struggle is not to excuse the inhumanity of his acts.

This is precisely where Hollywood’s moral sleight of hand becomes most dangerous. It invites compassion without discernment, pity without judgment, and emotion without truth. In doing so, it trains audiences to sympathize with evil rather than to confront it. By softening depravity into confusion, filmmakers invite viewers to interpret evil as misfortune instead of rebellion. The result is an inversion of values where sympathy replaces justice and pathology becomes a kind of secular redemption.

The series goes further still, subtly glorifying Gein’s influence. In its closing scenes, Gein imagines his mother finally smiling upon him, assuring him of her love and praising him for leaving behind a “legacy.” That legacy, as the show presents it, is his supposed cultural impact, the chain of violence and fascination he inspired in other killers and in the investigators who later studied them. The narrative shifts from horror to homage, implying that Gein achieves a kind of immortality through the very evil that should have condemned him. The show depicts a fictionalized sequence in which Richard Speck and Jerry Brudos, the so-called “Lust Killer,” idolize him, while later murderers such as Ted Bundy are portrayed as having been shaped by his necrophilic obsessions. It even dramatizes imagined meetings between the real-life FBI profilers Robert Ressler and John Douglas, who would go on to pioneer the art of criminal profiling at Quantico. In reality, Douglas later recounted that when he tried to interview Gein, the killer was too incoherent for any meaningful exchange. The man who could barely articulate a sentence is thus recast as a dark muse, a founding myth of modern criminal psychology and popular culture.

This transformation from monster to myth is not innocent storytelling. It sanctifies notoriety and makes transgression seductive. The viewer is left not with moral revulsion but with a strange sense of awe at Gein’s influence. Evil becomes generative, its reach celebrated rather than condemned. By elevating Gein’s legacy above his repentance, the series turns moral collapse into cultural contribution.

What is lost in this exchange is not only moral clarity but also spiritual understanding. Evil in its most profound form is not merely the failure of psychology; it is a distortion of the soul. To reduce Gein’s crimes to the outcome of trauma is to overlook the darker mystery that threads through his story: the deliberate desecration of the human body, the obsession with the feminine as object and idol, and the inversion of creation itself. These are not only signs of madness but of something profoundly spiritual, even diabolical.

Hollywood’s revisionism operates under a secular creed. By transforming moral evil into psychological struggle, it eliminates the need for repentance or redemption. Sin becomes self-expression, and grace becomes unnecessary. This is why the entertainment industry so easily sanctifies its sinners: it baptizes confusion in the waters of empathy but never in the waters of truth. In this world, even the monstrous must be affirmed.

It is precisely here we encounter the oldest temptation of all: the urge to replace grace with self-redemption. Augustine called it superbia (pride) that seeks to make the self its own saviour. As he explains in The City of God, pride is “the craving for undue exaltation,” the soul’s attempt to become its own end rather than cling to God (XIV.13). From that insight, Christian tradition has long summarized his teaching: pride made angels fall, and only humility can raise men to God.

At the conclusion of the eight-part series, the filmmakers underscore the far-reaching influence of Gein’s depravity on films such as Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. Throughout the series, scenes from these movie sets are interwoven to highlight Gein’s supposed impact on their stories. At the height of artistic license, the finale openly glorifies his “legacy.” It shows a young, terrified man wandering near Gein’s grave after several youths attempt to desecrate it. He then witnesses spectral visions of Norman Bates from Psycho, Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs, before finally seeing Gein himself pick up a chainsaw and vanish into the distance. What was meant to close a story of horror instead becomes a grotesque tribute of an image of evil marching into myth rather than being condemned to oblivion.

It is worth remembering that a society that consumes such stories gradually loses the capacity for moral clarity. It learns to interpret evil through the lens of sentiment rather than truth. Compassion detached from justice becomes a counterfeit virtue, a form of moral anesthesia that dulls the conscience. When audiences are trained to weep for monsters but not for their victims, the soul of a culture is already half asleep.

What began as artistic license has evolved into ideological catechesis. By romanticizing transgression and erasing accountability, Hollywood catechizes its audience into a false gospel of empathy without repentance. Yet true mercy, as the Christian tradition teaches, cannot exist without truth. Christ’s compassion never excused evil; it called the sinner to conversion. In losing that distinction, modern storytelling has not enlightened us but blinded us to the reality of evil itself.

In the end, Gein is not damned but immortalized. The monster walks again, this time through the imagination of an age that calls evil art and confusion compassion. Christian anthropology reminds us that man cannot be understood apart from his relation to God. As St. John Paul IIs stated in Redemptor Hominis: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light.” When culture forgets this, it inevitably glorifies its own darkness.

Part III: The Inversion of Creation

This installment lifts the argument from cultural critique to theological reflection. It explores how Gein’s acts, and modern gender ideology, reflect a deeper metaphysical rebellion against creation, culminating in a moral and spiritual synthesis.

The Theological Meaning of Gender Inversion

What lies beneath the fascination with figures like Ed Gein is not only psychological disturbance or cultural decadence but something deeper and more ancient: the spiritual inversion of creation itself. The biblical understanding of man and woman as reflections of God’s image has always stood as a visible sign of divine order. In Genesis, sexual difference is not a social construct but a sacred mystery. Male and female together reveal the fullness of humanity as willed by God. To distort that harmony is to attack the created order at its foundation.

This rebellion against embodiment finds its modern echo in transhumanism, namely, the belief that technology can transcend human limits and perfect our nature through self-engineering. Beneath its promise of progress lies the same ancient temptation: to replace dependence on God with mastery over creation, to trade incarnation for imitation.

Gein’s crimes, however grotesque, reveal this metaphysical rebellion in its most extreme form. His desire to wear the flesh of women was not merely an act of insanity but a desecration of embodiment. He sought to merge with what he could not be, to seize life and identity through imitation and violation. Theologically understood, such acts are parodies of incarnation. Where Christ takes on flesh to redeem humanity, Gein mutilates flesh to deify his obsession. The sacred becomes profane, and the image of God in the human body is reduced to a costume.

Hans Urs von Balthasar in The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. I: Seeing the Form observed, when beauty is detached from truth and goodness, it “falls into mere sensuality and becomes an idol.” In Gein’s desecration of the body we see precisely this aesthetic inversion—the beautiful form of the human person reduced to spectacle, the incarnational mystery mocked by imitation.

This inversion of meaning is the signature of the demonic. The devil cannot create; he can only imitate and corrupt. He mimics the divine order while inverting its purpose. In this sense, Gein’s “female suit” becomes a blasphemous icon, a symbol of how modern humanity, divorced from God, tries to reconstruct identity through possession rather than participation in grace. The same spirit animates the ideological movements that deny the created reality of man and woman, seeking instead to reconfigure nature through will and desire. Both arise from the same metaphysical error: the belief that self-definition can replace divine design.

This is precisely the lie of Lucifer, who sought to exalt himself above the Creator and found only ruin. Every act of self-deification, whether in the laboratory, the operating room, or the digital code, reenacts that same cosmic rebellion. As St. Maximus the Confessor observed, man’s vocation is not self-creation but theosis, union with God through humility.

As C. S. Lewis warned in The Abolition of Man, “The man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who can really cut out all posterity in what shape they please” (p. 24). When humanity claims the right to remake itself, it ceases to be human and becomes what Lewis called “men without chests”: creatures who have discarded the moral center that once linked reason to virtue.

It is no coincidence that the age of technological self-creation coincides with a culture increasingly fascinated by mutilation, transformation, and hybrid identities. What once appeared only in the fantasies of the deranged now finds expression in policies, surgeries, and social movements that deny any fixed human essence. The body is treated as raw material to be reshaped, while the soul is neglected or denied altogether. In this sense, Ed Gein becomes not an isolated monster but a prophetic warning, a distorted mirror reflecting a world that has forgotten what the body means.

This theological lens also explains why Hollywood’s treatment of Gein is more than artistic negligence; it is spiritual blindness. To portray evil without acknowledging its spiritual dimension is to strip it of its meaning and power to instruct. By glorifying Gein’s influence rather than condemning his sin, the series unintentionally celebrates the demonic principle that evil can create as well as destroy. But as Christian theology reminds us, evil has no creative power. It can only deform what already exists.

Gender inversion, in its cultural and ideological forms, thus becomes a microcosm of the same rebellion against creation that marked the Fall. When the serpent told Eve, “You shall be as gods,” he invited humanity to seize what can only be received. Modern man repeats this ancient error each time he tries to define his own nature apart from God’s design. Whether through Gein’s desecrations or the self-mutilations sanctified by contemporary ideology, the same principle is at work: the will to remake reality in one’s own image.

To confront this crisis, we must recover the theological truth that identity is not constructed but conferred. Our being is a gift, not a project. We do not invent ourselves; we are called into being by the One who is Being itself. Every attempt to sever the self from the Creator leads not to freedom but to disintegration. As Christ taught, “Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25). The paradox of faith is that identity is not found in self-expression but in self-surrender.

What we see in Gein and in the culture that mythologizes him is a tragic parody of redemption. It is the imitation of resurrection without grace, transformation without truth, and mercy without repentance. Against this false gospel, Christians must proclaim again that truth and mercy are one in Christ, and that the only lasting transformation is the renewal of the soul through grace.

As St. Irenaeus wrote, “The glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man consists in the vision of God” (Adv. haer. 4.20.7). True renewal is not self-creation but the restoration of the divine image through participation in that vision.

The Christian Response: Gratitude, Vigilance, and Moral Clarity

If the life of Ed Gein and the culture that continues to romanticize him teach us anything, it is that evil is never merely external. It lurks in the depths of human freedom, waiting for confusion to give it form. We cannot view Gein’s depravity as something alien to humanity, as though we were immune to its roots. The Christian understanding of sin insists on this humility: “There but for the grace of God go I.” Each of us bears within the potential for both sanctity and self-destruction. The line between good and evil runs not through history or ideology, but through every human heart.

However, acknowledging this truth should not lead to moral paralysis. Pity must never replace discernment. Compassion is not the same as moral blindness. To look upon Gein’s misery or any sinner’s suffering with sorrow is right; to excuse it is not. The Christian response must hold both mercy and justice together. The same Christ who forgave the adulteress also commanded, “Go and sin no more.” His mercy was never sentimental. It was always ordered toward conversion.

In this light, even the most depraved figures of history can serve a paradoxical purpose. Their lives, stripped of illusion, expose what happens when humanity forgets who it is. The murderer who desecrates the body, the ideologue who denies human nature, and the artist who glorifies confusion all participate in the same tragedy: the rejection of truth. But for those who still have eyes to see, their downfall stands as a warning that truth cannot be escaped without consequence.

We should also remember that moral responsibility is not erased by psychological suffering or cultural conditioning. To be wounded is not to be absolved. Christ Himself suffered incomprehensibly, yet His suffering produced only love. The contrast is stark and instructive. The more we meditate on this difference, the more clearly we perceive the distinction between compassion rooted in truth and compassion corrupted by sentimentality.

It is also here that gratitude becomes essential. To recognize the horror of sin and the fragility of the human condition should lead us to thanksgiving, not despair. We must count our blessings that we have not been consumed by the same delusions, addictions, or compulsions that enslaved men like Gein, Speck, Williams, or Maxheleau. Each of their stories reminds us how thin the veil can be between order and chaos, sanity and despair, virtue and vice. Gratitude keeps us anchored in humility; it reminds us that freedom and grace are not earned but given.

Finally, Christians must remain vigilant in discerning how the spiritual crisis of our age manifests not only in culture but now also in technology. The fascination with gender inversion, identity dissolution, and moral ambiguity is not merely sociological; it is theological. It is the visible manifestation of a deeper rebellion against truth itself. The devil, as Scripture tells us, is the father of lies. He thrives on confusion and inversion, on persuading humanity that what is broken can be made whole through self-creation rather than divine grace.

Our task, then, is to see clearly and to speak truthfully. We must not avert our gaze from evil, nor be seduced by its aesthetic disguises. We must resist the false mercy that excuses sin and the false freedom that destroys the self. And we must remember, above all, that no darkness, however deep, is beyond the reach of redemption. Christ’s light exposes evil not to humiliate the sinner, but to heal him. Yet that healing can only begin when we recognize evil for what it is.

The rise of transhumanist ideals only magnifies this illusion; humanity, in its dream of merging flesh and machine, seeks salvation through self-fabrication rather than grace, a pursuit no longer confined to theory but increasingly shaping how people confront mortality itself.

The cultural fascination with conquering death through technology has already begun to move from theory to practice. A recent example is Suzanne Somers’ husband, who unveiled an AI clone of his late wife, a digital recreation designed to preserve her likeness and voice indefinitely. It is a small but telling sign of an age no longer content with resurrection but intent on replication, mistaking technological mimicry for immortality. That, however, is a subject for another day.

In the end, the tragedy of Ed Gein’s life, and of the culture that has mythologized him, is not only that evil destroyed him, but that it continues to enchant others. The only antidote to that enchantment is truth illuminated by grace. For Christians, the answer is never fear or condemnation, but fidelity, fidelity to truth, to moral clarity, and to the God who alone can make the wounded whole.

In this sense, the story of Ed Gein and the modern dream of transhumanism converge at the same tragic horizon: both seek transcendence without God and end in distortion. Yet where Gein’s violence disfigured flesh, the new technocratic impulse seeks to rewrite spirit. As I argued in my Crisis Magazine article, “The Illusion of Self-Creation,” this drive to engineer identity and conquer mortality apart from divine grace is humanity’s oldest delusion dressed in digital form. Against both stands the Cross—the only true path of transformation—where suffering becomes love and creation is redeemed, not reinvented.