Blue State Blues: The Bible and the Struggle with Suicide

I don’t know what drove DJ and dancer Stephen “tWitch” Boss to take his own life this week at the age of 40, nor do I know how I will explain it to my children, who enjoyed his Instagram dance videos with me.

Every suicide is tragic, but when the victim seems to have been happy and successful, it is even harder to understand.

The best we can try to do is learn something, and perhaps this is a warning about where we are, as a society.

Boss was loved — both in general, and by those close to him. And yet he found no way to resolve whatever was troubling him — whether mental illness, or emotional turmoil, or some private failure that he could not bear to endure.

There are public resources available to help those suffering from suicidal thoughts (such as the 988 hotline, here). Certainly those who loved him would have been willing to help him; they must feel devastated.

The suicidal impulse seems like a product of our contemporary society, and in some ways it is, but it is also as old as humanity itself.

The Bible discusses it, in several places.

The prophet Elijah — one of the greatest, said in Jewish tradition to be the herald of the Messiah — so despairs of his own failings that he asks God to take his life: “Enough, now Lord take my soul as I am not better than my forefathers,” he pleads (I Kings 19:4).

Similarly, in the book of Job, the central figure of the story yearns for death after he loses his family, his home, and his health. In fact, he wishes he had never been born in the first place: “Would the day in which I was to be born be lost” (3:2).

And the prophet Jonah, suffering in the heat as he watches God show mercy to Nineveh, the enemy’s capital, prays: “And now, O Lord, take now my soul from me, for my death is better than my life” (4:3).

God responds to these prayers in different ways.

In Elijah’s case, God sends an angel to provide food and drink for him, which restores his spirit — perhaps a suggestion that sometimes our emotional problems have physical causes.

In the story of Job, the ailing man is visited by friends, who comfort him and provide counsel.

And in the book of Jonah, God gently chides the resentful prophet by showing him that there is a much bigger picture.

Different cases require different kinds of intervention. The larger point, however, is that suicidal impulses are not new, and the Bible reminds us that even the greatest among us may wrestle with such feelings.

That does not mean the Bible has all of the answers, but it can be a source of comfort.

I don’t know what Boss believed, or whether he sought answers from the Bible, but I would say that in general too few of us know we can do so.

My daughter came home from school a couple of weeks ago and told us that her fifth-grade teacher had asked whether any of the children were familiar with the famous story in Genesis of Abraham sacrificing his son (or nearly doing so). She was the only one who raised her hand — a fact that I found shocking.

The Bible tells stories that, together with other traditions, form the basis of our civilization, our ideas about life, of right and wrong.

We are raising children that, even (perhaps especially) in prosperous communities, have no familiarity with basic religious texts. Unless they are told, they may never hear that God created them and loves them. Small wonder they seek new identities, or even new bodies.

It is difficult to understand why tWitch did what he did. But perhaps there are other deaths we can prevent, if we provide our kids what used to be a common heritage.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.