Charlie (11 thoughts on our collective reaction to a death).

Call it by name : murder.

Name it accurately, name it specifically, and if you don’t know, say you don’t know. If something is something, call it that something. If you don’t know something, don’t say you do. Charlie Kirk’s death was a murder. Call it that. 

Beyond that, we don’t know. So don’t call it things beyond what we know yet. 

That one guy Jesus.

If you’re a Christian, that means you follow Christ. If you follow Christ and try your best, then you can’t ignore his teachings. The ones about love and such. Such as: we’re all children of God.

Charlie Kirk. George Floyd.
Every age in between and above and below.

You can’t cherry pick. A human being died. The nature of most peoples’ lives is more nuanced than clickbait titles and even incendiary and horrific quotes accurately attributed to them. 

Please read Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card’s masterful follow-up to Ender’s Game. Charlie Kirk lived a life-view that many of you cherish. I, along with many others, do not cherish or like the life-view he presented, and…

…and I also recognize his worth as a human being and he is both unworthy of adulation and hero-worship and undeserving of unmitigated vitriol and contempt. 

Consistency.

Why is the flag at half-mast? No. Not okay with that. His death was awful. Horrific. Inexcusable, indefensible, no qualifiers needed. I condemn. Most on the left, as well as his many opponents politically, have condemned. As they should. 

Did Republicans condemn over the murders of Melissa Hartman and her husband? The attempted ones of John Hoffman and his wife? The arson on Governor Josh Shapiro? The kidnapping and muder plot of Governor Gretchen Whitmer? The hammer attack on Paul Pelosi and planned horrific torture and murder of his wife, Nancy Pelosi? 

Where were the condemnations then? Matter of fact, where are the condemnations from the right now?

Your hero, not mine.

He was a husband, father, hero to half the country. Not a hero to the other half, including me. That is no disrespect to his family.

It means that I did not align with his views, many of which were exlusionary and, in my opinion, based on understanding of the Scripture, antithetical to the Gospel’s teachings. He is not a hero to me. I mourn his death, as a child of God and a human being worthy of living life and of a base level of dignity; a dignity he denied many during his own life. The fact remains: I accord him respect and dignity. 

I not look at him as a hero. I refuse to be bullied into treating him as such. He was a political operative, a partisan player, a massively influential figure who cast a giant shadow. He was most absolutely not a statesman or a figure with any pretense to representing America at large. We should mourn him as a victim of gun violence and political hatred. 

The dogwhistler on high.

You cannot talk about political hatred or incitement to violence without speaking of the man he helped elect a second time. You cannot. Cannot. There is no moral high ground for the right wing to claim institutional victimhood on this. 

Call it by name : insurrection.

January 6. If you averted your judgment to this, passively or aggressively, then you are complicit in endorsing political violence at the highest level. If so, do not speak to the world with a posturing tone of morality about how discourse and civility have gotten out of hand. 

Unequivocal.

There is no defensible position for supporting what happened to Charlie Kirk. Full stop. 

Authoritarianism 101.

The Vice-President and his big buddy are vowing to go after the leftists responsible for so much political violence. This is straight - straight - from the strong arm playbook:

you take an incident, an awful incident,
blow it up,
refuse any responsibility,
vow revenge,
and make it “necessary” to go after your enemies by all means necessary.

The inconvenience of the New Testament today.

Vengeance? Why? From who? Where are the Jesus-followers, the ones who wear tee-shirts compositing the Son of God - Jesus - with the President, when it matters? When it matters to ask the most important questions:

How do we help save souls?
How do we love?
How do we forgive?
How do we break the cycles of violence and power and hate that dominate? 

Blessed are the who? 

Bless Charlie Kirk. He was no peacemaker. A debater, for sure. Certainly no peacemaker. Let’s not have saints: who is? Again, it is no disrespect to state that he was a flawed human being, as we all are. 

No saints.

How is his legacy so easily explained away, so defended, so forgiven, how are so many so quick to explain the context of what he meant and define him as a towering, unifying “good Christian man,” when he spoke so violently of the many people and groups he did accord a base dignity to - people such as MLK, movements such as Civil Rights, policy that placed people and not power as the important objective? 

Again, it takes no disconnect on my part to state the many ways I disagreed with him and did not understand or respect his positions:

Positions that he defined for many, many people; positions that went on to strip positions and dignity away from millions, at public policy, ingrained level. 

A human.

These things are true: it is sad. He was a man, with a family, and with many who loved him and many who respected him. His passing is sad. Now: what can we learn from it, and how can we move forward? 

It takes an unconscionable, indefensible act of intellectual and logical hypocrisy to call for war against the left. If you want war, say you want war. But again, call something what it is:

If you want war, say: I want war. I want to go to battle. Don’t say: they started it.

They didn’t. 

The circle must be broken so it can be whole again and a fresh cycle can begin. This is not a statement in advocacy of civil war.

It is a statement in advocacy of true civility: the according of a base level of dignity to facts, to history, to the pursuit of truth, to a consistent Gospel-driven Christianity, and to people.

Homo sum humani nihil a mi alienum puto. 

We are all people, are we are all children, we are all flawed, and what we need is to lean on each other and for those of with faith convictions, on a consistent interpretation of that faith that fights for an inclusive existence for all, all God’s kids. 

That’s all of us.