In early March 2026, a woman named Emily Austin told a reporter she finds betting on world leaders “so fun.”^[1]

She was not talking about a political game or a thought experiment. She was talking about Kalshi, a prediction market platform where she and thousands of others had placed financial bets on whether Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei would “lose power” by a certain date. When he was killed in an Israeli military strike, Kalshi froze $54 million in trades, citing its policy against transactions that settle on death. Users flooded social media demanding their winnings. Some were furious. Emily Austin was apparently just having fun.

That word is worth sitting with. Not outrage — fun. It is the most honest thing anyone said in the entire article, and it is the entry point for a question that goes somewhere most of us would rather not follow.

Tragedy and the Gospel: Where the Arc Leads

The Kalshi controversy is not an anomaly. It is an endpoint. To understand why, you have to trace the arc that led there — and that arc began long before anyone thought to bet money on a foreign leader’s fate.

True crime is one of the dominant entertainment genres of the last decade. According to Edison Research, 89% of U.S. podcast listeners age 13 and older have consumed true crime content.^[2] It consistently ranks among the top categories across streaming services and podcast platforms. Disaster coverage, tragedy footage, and catastrophe content reliably outperform positive content across every engagement metric. We do not just tolerate suffering as part of the news cycle. We seek it out. We binge it. We discuss it at dinner parties and recommend our favorites to friends.

The prediction markets represent the next logical step in that progression. Over $500 million was wagered on Polymarket — Kalshi’s largest competitor — on trades tied to the timing of American strikes against Iran.^[3] People were not simply watching the news. They had financial positions on it. The difference between a spectator and an investor is not just a matter of money. It is a matter of what the event means to you. For the investor, the question is no longer “what is happening to these people?” It is “what is my position on this?”

The Kalshi moment did not create this. It revealed it.

What We’re Really After

The appetite for tragedy is not simply morbid curiosity. Research on true crime consumption points to something more complicated and more sympathetic than mere ghoulishness.

Psychologists Amanda Vicary and R. Chris Fraley found that true crime functions partly as a survival mechanism — particularly for women, whose higher engagement with the genre is tied to self-protective information gathering.^[4] By understanding how crimes happen, who commits them, and what warning signs look like, consumers process threat information in a controlled, low-risk context. The fascination is not irrational. It is, in a certain sense, prudent.

Mortician and author Caitlin Doughty offers a broader diagnosis. Western culture has systematically removed death from ordinary life — sequestered it in hospitals and funeral homes, professionalized the handling of the dying, and produced a society with almost no honest categories for engaging mortality.^[5] True crime partly fills that vacuum. It lets us brush up against death and suffering at a managed distance, feeling the weight of it without bearing the cost.

Journalist Rachel Monroe, whose work has documented the cultural obsession with true crime for over a decade, puts the problem plainly: “Empathy can curdle into voyeurism; a desire for justice can cross the line into demands for vengeance.”^[6] The same distance that makes tragedy feel safe to consume is the distance that erodes the capacity for genuine moral engagement. We watch others’ catastrophe to feel the weight of mortality without full exposure. The trouble is that the more we practice that posture, the more natural it becomes.

Prediction markets are what happens when that posture is taken to its logical extreme. Financial self-interest becomes the interpretive grid through which human events are processed. Suffering acquires a price. And the person placing the bet is not watching from a distance — they are participating, in the most transactional sense possible, in the outcome. Profit calculation quietly displaces moral perception. Not through malice. Through habit.

This is worth naming carefully: the problem is not evil people doing evil things. It is ordinary people finding it fun. That is the harder thing to reckon with, because it implicates all of us to varying degrees. Most of us will not bet on wars. But most of us have consumed suffering as entertainment. The difference is one of degree, not of kind.

When Suffering Loses Its Weight

There is a name for what happens when the distance between ourselves and others’ suffering becomes habitual. The biblical tradition calls it hardness of heart, and it describes not a dramatic moral failure but a slow erosion — the gradual diminishment of the capacity to feel what another person’s pain actually costs.

Distance is not neutral in Scripture. The parable of the Good Samaritan turns entirely on the question of who crosses the road. The priest and the Levite do not assault the wounded man; they simply pass by on the other side (Luke 10:31-32). Their failure is the failure of proximity — the choice to remain observers rather than participants. The Samaritan’s defining act is that he “came to where he was” (Luke 10:33). He closed the distance. That is what neighbor love looks like, and Jesus tells the parable precisely because it is the hardest thing to do.

Against the entire posture of the distant observer — and certainly against the posture of the investor — stands the central claim of the Christian faith. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). God did not observe human suffering from a safe position. He did not assign it a probability or take a financial position on the outcome. He entered it. The Incarnation is the definitive refusal of spectator theology — the declaration that God absorbed the full cost of proximity to a broken world, including death.

The shortest verse in the New Testament may also be one of the most theologically loaded. Standing at the tomb of his friend Lazarus, knowing what he was about to do, Jesus wept (John 11:35). He did not weep because he lacked information. He wept because genuine solidarity with suffering requires genuine grief. To be truly close to another person’s pain is to be moved by it — not as a performance, not from behind a screen, but as the honest response of one who is actually present.

That posture is not available to the spectator. It is not available to the investor. It is only available to the person who has crossed the road.

A Different Posture

The Christian tradition has always had categories for engaging tragedy that the surrounding culture has not. They are not comfortable categories. But they are honest ones.

Lament is the posture of taking suffering seriously enough to bring it before God without pretending it is smaller than it is. The Psalms are saturated with it. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” the psalmist cries. “Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?” (Ps. 22:1). This is not the language of a person watching from a distance. This is the language of one who is present to suffering — their own and others’ — and refuses to manage it into something more palatable. Lamentations exists in the canon precisely because Scripture itself makes room for honest, unmanaged grief — because some things cannot be processed at arm’s length. They must be named, fully and honestly, in the presence of the God who entered them.

This is a genuinely different posture than consuming tragedy as content. The lament tradition does not offer resolution quickly. It does not supply the satisfying narrative arc — villain identified, crime solved, episode complete — that makes true crime so easy to binge. It sits in the darkness and refuses to leave until the darkness has been honestly faced. That is uncomfortable. It is also the only honest response to a world where suffering is real and the people experiencing it are not characters in a story but image-bearers whose pain has weight.

The apostolic instruction is equally direct: “Weep with those who weep” (Rom. 12:15). Not observe. Not analyze. Not consume. Weep. The command assumes proximity — you cannot weep with someone you are watching from behind a screen. It assumes cost — grief is not efficient or comfortable. And it assumes solidarity that is grounded in something other than curiosity or entertainment value.

None of this means suffering is the final word. The gospel’s distinctive contribution is not just that it takes suffering seriously — it is that it answers it. “Death has been swallowed up in victory” (1 Cor. 15:54). Because Christ passed through death and rose, tragedy is ultimately answerable. This does not make suffering trivial or easy to bear. It makes it bearable. We can face it honestly — in lament, in grief, in genuine solidarity — without needing either to consume it from a distance or be undone by it. The sequence matters here: lament first, hope second. The resurrection does not bypass Good Friday. It comes through it.

How we relate to suffering in the media we consume is a formation question. Habits of consumption shape the capacity for solidarity. The person who has practiced processing tragedy as entertainment for years will find the cost of genuine proximity higher than someone who has not. This is not a reason for guilt. It is a reason to be honest about what we are practicing, and what it is doing to us.

Getting Close

Return to Emily Austin for a moment. She found it fun. And the honest response to that is not contempt — it is recognition. The distance the culture has cultivated is seductive precisely because proximity to suffering is genuinely costly. To weep with those who weep requires something of us. To cross the road requires us to stop, get close, and accept that what we find there will change our plans. Most of us, most of the time, would rather stay on the other side. The prediction market and the true crime playlist are not signs that something uniquely wrong has happened to our generation. They are signs that the oldest human temptation — to remain safely uninvolved — has found new and remarkably efficient forms.

The gospel does not pretend otherwise. Christ did not enter our suffering because it was easy or because it cost him nothing. He entered it because we needed someone to cross the road. His death and resurrection secured not just our forgiveness but our formation — the possibility of becoming people who are shaped by his posture rather than the culture’s, who have learned to get close rather than stay safely behind the screen.

The question the prediction markets and the true crime playlists and the disaster feeds put before us is not primarily a question about media consumption habits. It is the question the Samaritan answered with his feet. In a world full of suffering, are we learning to get close — or are we getting better at watching from a distance?

---

Questions for Reflection

• When you encounter tragedy in the news or in media, what is your instinctive posture — curiosity, grief, analysis, entertainment? What does that reveal about what you have been practicing?
• The Good Samaritan’s defining act was closing the distance. Where in your life is God calling you to cross the road rather than pass by on the other side?
• How does the Incarnation — God’s refusal to remain a spectator to our suffering — change the way you think about your own posture toward others’ pain?
• In what ways have you allowed the consumption of tragedy at a distance to substitute for genuine solidarity with people who are actually suffering?
• What would it look like in your specific context to practice lament honestly rather than processing suffering as entertainment?

Prayer Points

• For Those Who Are Suffering: Pray for people whose tragedies have become content — crime victims, war casualties, those caught in geopolitical crises — that God would protect their dignity, surround them with genuine human presence, and bring them comfort that no screen can provide.
• For Personal Formation: Pray for grace to examine honestly what habits of media consumption are shaping your capacity for solidarity, and for the courage to practice the costly posture of proximity rather than the comfortable posture of the spectator.
• For the Church: Pray that local churches would become communities genuinely formed by the posture of the Incarnation — willing to cross the road, bear the cost of proximity, and weep honestly with those who weep rather than observing from a comfortable distance.
• For Cultural Discernment: Pray that God would awaken in his people a deeper awareness of how the culture’s habits of tragedy-consumption are shaping their moral perception, and that believers would be known as people who respond to suffering with presence rather than with a position.

---

^[1]Drew Harwell, “Prediction site freeze over Iran sparks outrage,” Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, March 8, 2026, p. 1G.

^[2]Edison Research, “The Infinite Dial” (2024 edition), https://www.edisonresearch.com/the-infinite-dial/

^[3]Harwell, p. 1G.

^[4]Amanda M. Vicary and R. Chris Fraley, “Captured by True Crime: Why Are Women Drawn to Tales of Rape, Murder, and Serial Killers?” Social Psychological and Personality Science, vol. 1, no. 1 (2010), pp. 81-86, https://www.amandavicary.com/VicaryTrueCrime.pdf

^[5]Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014).

^[6]Rachel Monroe, “‘True crime’ makes entertainment of someone else’s tragedy,” CNN Opinion, January 17, 2023, https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/17/opinions/idaho-students-murders-true-crime-monroe-ctrp/index.html