Saintly Speech

The conversation around Mr. Kirk’s public stature has become confused. While his murder is clearly a moral evil, his public veneration is unwarranted.

We are daily confronted with demands to accept as exemplars faith-based witness and speech that hardly reflects the resurrected love at the heart of the gospel.  

This is understandable – our capacity to engage thoughtfully across difference has all but disappeared. Our discourse is abusive, reactionary, and has been reduced to sophistry, a perfunctory debate devoid of meaning and care.

But serious discourse is not mere debate – there is a difference between rhetorical flare and genuine discussion. The former revels in the fanciful weaponization of language while the latter seeks understanding.

Discourse that seeks understanding, that aims to bring greater knowledge, that is open to the possibility of changing one’s mind, is philosophical activity. We might argue that it is, at least for religious individuals, theological too.

What one thinks, how one speaks about their fellow human beings, and how one treats the most vulnerable, shows us a great deal about their character. Mr. Kirk regularly attacked LGBTQ+, especially transgender, folks. Professor watchlist, a project of his Turning Point USA project, publicly listed university professors who were deemed “woke”, regularly leading to threats of violence and death against those who had been unwittingly added.

Mr. Kirk assailed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and blamed the veneration of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for our nation’s racial strife. His superficial analysis of the complex realities of race in this nation led him to dismiss and denigrate the murder of George Floyd, and his embrace of “replacement theory” leaves him guilty of the sin of antisemitism.

Responses to this kind of rhetoric range widely. If one is already inclined to agree with Mr. Kirk, then his polemic seems decisive. If one is the direct target of his attack, then his discourse is threatening and violent. Still others, trained to disregard his erroneous reasoning, simply ignored him – what passes for “sophisticated” argumentation in the far-right circles that Mr. Kirk traveled in would not constitute a passing grade in any introductory logic course.

What has quickly emerged, though, is the realization that there are seemingly two versions of Mr. Kirk. This bifurcation is due in part to the algorithmic processes of the internet that often reinforce what one already believes and the tendency to compartmentalize, especially in certain Christian traditions, what happens “during the week” from what happens on Sunday morning.

The notion of the “sinners’ prayer”, the idea that “once saved” means “always forgiven”, has turned out to be a pernicious development within American Christianity. In the Christian context, grace is a central theological claim. The problem for us today is that our concept of grace has been emptied of its content. Instead of a Christian faith that transforms our fears into faith, that calls us into a daily process of growth, that challenges us to embrace God’s ever-expanding view of who gets to be included (everyone!), we have come to treat salvation as mere fire insurance.

Instead of a Christian faith that demands discipleship, that reflects the commandment “to love your neighbor as yourself”, that understands that the “renewing of our minds” means that our actions and the things we say should reflect our actual commitment to God (to the best of our ability), we are left with a shallow and perfunctory understanding, a glib faith that in the case of Mr. Kirk, was used only in service of the partisan politics of the far-right.

The harder truth is this: despite what social media may have us believe, there was only one Charlie Kirk, and his views reflect some truth of his character, a truth that reveals a person who held positions that were in deep conflict with the New Testament, the theology of the Church, and the teachings of Christ.

Speaker Johnson, in his initial reaction to Mr. Kirk’s murder, claimed that “this is not who we are.”

Unfortunately, his analysis is narrow and untrue.

Political violence is not simply the act of silencing difference.

It is also the passing of budgets that fail to feed the hungry, that deny access to healthcare, that fund wars of aggression and destruction, and that indulge the very worst of our xenophobic tendencies.

Our very founding as a nation is bathed in blood, in our act of revolution against Great Britain, in our genocide of the indigenous population, and in the enslavement of our black siblings.

It is in this light that the veneration of Mr. Kirk is problematic. Public saints, secular or otherwise, serve to unite, and it is clear, in both the style and content of his rhetoric, that Mr. Kirk’s aim was domination and supremacy, goals that undermine the beating heart of our failing constitutional order and are anti-thetical to Christian faith.

Moving forward will be challenging. Thursday’s House resolution rightly condemns the assassination of Mr. Kirk, but it is fraught in its effort to whitewash his legacy. Representative Gabe Amo’s (D-RI) statement naming the complexity of this moment is sobering and insightful.

While it is abundantly clear that Mr. Kirk’s legacy cannot be the turning point that unites the American people around the necessity of civil public discourse, it is true that we must rediscover public conversation that is honest, sincere, and transformative.

We must dare to imagine a political process that serves the diverse plurality that makes up the American people and does so without denying our common humanity.

And, for those of us who are people of faith, we must push beyond the temptation of a cheap faith whose only aim is to determine the boundaries of who’s in and who’s out.

Time is short and there is a dearth of leadership.

But we have no other choice.