Tragedy is not a Christian form of literature. Rather, it is pagan, and sometimes in modern forms it is very anti-Christian. Tragedy assumes that the universe is hostile to man. It does not see man as a sinner nor the universe as God-created and God-ruled. Instead, it sees man as a victim. The chorus in Sophocles’s Oedipus the King declares, “Alas, ye generations of men, how mere a shadow do I count your life! Where, where is the mortal who wins more of happiness than just the seeming, and, after the semblance, a falling away? Thine is a fate that warns me, — thine, thine unhappy Oedipus — to call no earthly creature blest.”

The tragic view of life precedes the breakdown of culture because it encourages the belief that life is perverse and hopeless.

Modern state plays, movies, television, and novels are much given to presenting tragedies and teaching an anti-Christian religion thereby. Life is presented as meaningless or perverse. Man does not have a chance, nor is it his fault that he fails. —R.J. Rushdoony