Political violence is not merely an act of unspeakable evil; it tends to spread like a virus. Violent rhetoric often precedes it. Excuses it. Once those who disagree with us are identified as dangerous, an enemy, threatened, demeaned through name-calling and labeling, actual violence seems to be almost required. And more rhetoric after the fact prepares the way for further acts, especially if revenge rather than justice is promised and sought.
We should be telling each other this week to weep with those who weep.
Kirk’s public, graphic, disturbing assassination is evil on its face. It’s also sweeping in its magnitude. It reopens wounds that now are deeper and wider in the American body, and it reveals anew how deep the divides are between us. And not just chasms between those who think that publicly shooting a man in cold bold is justified and those who know it is evil. Look at what we spew at each other on social media (pick a platform, pick a post—there are many). Some on the left cheered Kirk’s murder online or even in person at vigils. Some political leaders on the right are now pledging to use the power of the state to come after the “they” whom they deem responsible for this week’s hate and violence.
In such a cultural setting, it can be difficult to know how to even converse about such things. To me as a follower of Jesus, every person, no matter how misguided or heinous their ideas, values, and ideology, is made in God’s image. That conviction is a bulwark against both rhetorical and actual political violence. A bulwark for which there are no exceptions.
Michael Reneau, former editor of World magazine and managing editor of The Dispatch has written an insightful essay on the assassination of Charlie Kirk. “Reciting What’s True to Defuse a Politics of Hate,” is worth pondering with care, and is a worthy model of Christian speech in a troubled, violent, and hateful world.
But Kirk’s death also evinces much more personal divides. Kirk was a Christian figure, but he was also a political figure, and his influence peaked at a time when many of us are questioning the degree to which our politics and our faith are unhealthily fused together. In addition to grieving a man’s murder, I’m also grieving the distance between myself and fellow believers—with whom I share my Protestant, evangelical faith. They are people with whom I agree theologically, but, to borrow the words of a friend, they are people who will dismiss whatever I might want to say about Kirk (or anything else) because I work for a publication committed to classical liberalism and traditional conservatism. Because we believe the populism that’s overtaken most of the right in the last decade leads to bad places (and in many cases, I’d argue, is unbiblical). But I have been guilty of the same with brothers and sisters in the faith—dismissing them as unserious or given over to political fervor instead of listening, instead of taking up the spirit of face-to-face interaction that Kirk embodied, literally, unto his death. Thus it seems impossible for us to talk to each other. Instead we talk to our own camps, and at or about fellow believers from any other camp.
Reneau writes eloquently about the divisions that should not be. And he issues a call to the people of God to be willing to follow Jesus into countercultural lives of love. We will be misunderstood, and even hated, but that isn’t surprising since Jesus warned us it would occur. And Jesus demonstrated what love looks like, even unto death itself in an act of 1st century political violence.
If Americans do love each other less, we need something to teach and help us to love one another again, despite the furor. So now is precisely the time to keep repeating to ourselves the moral platitudes we should already know yet need to hear again and again. That murder is always evil. That Americans do have bonds that can transcend our real and consequential differences in everything from sexual mores to tax policy. And that feeding each other’s malice will only end in tragedy. As my friend Michael Wear has put it: “It is not just the act of violence but the spirit of violence that must be opposed. It is not just the action to harm another which must be opposed but the desire that harm would fall to another. If we do not have the courage to pursue a politics of love, our political heart will become consumed by hate.”
Please read Reneau’s essay. Discuss it in study classes, and over meals with friends and family. It is a clarion call to faithfulness.
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