I had just finished listening to the audiobook of “Black Pill” by Elle Reeve only a week or so before Charlie Kirk was killed. It felt like I had been given a primer to prepare for the moment. They hadn’t even gotten to the hospital when I heard the news. I saw the video. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. The timing felt familiar, like it came from one of those “liberals/conservatives owned” videos they put on YouTube, except instead of some podcaster stopping the video to make a snide remark, the response sequence was just a murder.

I grew up in a devout Christian household and fell in lockstep with my dad, who was a hard-right conservative. I listened to tons of Rush Limbaugh during my formative years. I was convinced that abortions were for sluts, welfare was for the lazy, and Mexicans were dirty thieves. It was only after I exited that home and started actually building relationships with people that I began to understand my beliefs were based on bigots and their projection, rather than anything remotely resembling real life. Within a few years, my views had been changed, prompted by little more than treating other human beings like human beings, rather than caricatures projected on them by rich, white males who insisted on seeing the worst in anyone who didn’t look like their reflection in the mirror.

Charlie Kirk Doesn’t Deserve What’s Happening To Him
Tim Cushing — Techdirt.

They flew the flags at half mast all last weekend for Charlie. I saw a car drive past me with the message “RIP Charlie” written over the entirety of the back window. Republicans in my state suggest that we erect a statue of Charlie in every college. People seemed to really like him, except the people like me. I saw myself in them, though; a version of me many years ago might’ve felt very similar pangs of not only the general sorrow of learning of any murder but the despair of losing someone special.

I remember being told as a child “Oh, how much you’ve grown” and having a surreal moment of discovery that I had changed without knowing; that I had become someone different — a stranger even to myself — and I had been completely unaware this had happened. As I looked around at the signs of grief in my community I had that same feeling again, but more complex this time. It seemed that I definitely had changed, but the communities that once defined me also seem to have equally changed in the opposite direction.

I’m not convinced that the very existence of social media is detrimental, but the companies that operate most modern social media networks definitely seem focused on poisoning us all with the worst of what humanity creates and widening ideological differences with extremist rhetoric. I have been exposed to so much more depraved thoughts and opinions spilled out in real time online in the two decades of social media than perhaps even the worst of humans experienced in their lifetime. There is an oxidizing effect to it all. It doesn’t have to be that way, but it works to keep people visiting so it is that way.

The effect of this speedy radicalization has meant the religious communities with whom I once felt close kinship seem now effectively filled with strangers, and these strangers were mourning Charlie. I thought Charlie’s views were sufficiently extreme that he would be generally seen as unlistenable to all but select groups of the extremely online, but he seems to more popular in Oklahoma than I thought he was, and the amount of people who liked him shocked me. They were unironically in agreement with at least some of what he was saying, while I was repulsed by almost all of it. His words often included Bible verses, but they sounded repugnant coming from his mouth.

A brief look back

The punitive nature of Christianity has always been a struggle for me to understand, even in childhood. I asked questions of religious authorities who offered apologetical explanations that sated me until I spoke a condemning Scripture passage to someone I had deemed “lost.” Each interaction left me uneasy and I hoped that perhaps the next time I had a conversation I’d find a way to say something that I could feel was as loving as how I claimed my statements were meant to be interpreted. In the meantime, I tended to ignore my unease as much as I could because I had not found a satisfactory answer for how someone could be loving but also seek the punishment of others so severely.

So I did what every Christian does: I cherry-picked. In my distain for the sections focusing on punishment, I turned to the passages focused on love. Without realizing it, I walked backwards into liberation theology, and it felt good — it felt loving.

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be assembled before him, and he will separate people one from another like a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then the king will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘I tell you the truth, just as you did it for one of the least of these brothers or sisters of mine, you did it for me.’ (emphasis mine)

Matthew 25:31–40
New English Translation (NET Bible) — Bible Gateway

I assumed, perhaps foolishly, that this process of discovery was for me one far later than others around me, that perhaps I was the last to understand the Bible in this way — or maybe I had been broken before, wrong from the start, and nobody had ever had this moral quandary. Maybe I had been too literal in seeing the two contradictory messages of freedom and damnation and one was literal whereas the other was figurative.

This was a fragile mental construction, but it held for a time. Then Trump’s first term happened and much of what I believed was disrupted. Suddenly I saw what appeared to be only the elements of damnation being presented to people in need of love. Churches and conservative think tanks, before claimed by them and their supporters to have a monopoly on love, seemed to be reveling in being hateful. I managed in my own way to make sense of it all, which was painful and frustrating, but I want to move on to Trump’s second term, where the enmeshing of religion, politics, and memes seems to have reached its completion.

Laura JeDeed — Banned in Your State

Charlie Kirk Is Dead

I am not going to pretend to mourn Charlie Kirk: I will not debase myself or insult your intelligence by pantomiming sadness. I believe that every living soul is crafted in the image of God, each with its own universe of thoughts and feelings that cannot be replaced. I also believe that sometimes, in this world, you reap what you ****ing sow. Sometimes, when you do your part to build a brave new America in which the whims of some strongman mean more than the laws that undergird our entire political system, when you work tirelessly to foment hatred and erode our ability to even speak to each other, when you dedicate decades of your miserable life to dividing a nation against itself — well, sometimes you succeed. Sometimes, you end up living in the world you worked so hard to create. And in that world, the bullets are flying.

An experiment

I came from the culture that helped form Charlie Kirk. His words feel familiar to me because I used to think like him. I fortunately found my way out of that mindset, but he was paid to stay in it. I feel a sense of sorrow for him and for his followers who continue to believe that he was wise in his words. So after seeing the support for him combined with what I felt was a general ignorance of who he was, I have decided to use my insight into this community and find a way to communicate my thoughts back to those still mired within it. So if you’re one of my former community of the far right, I want to perform a bit of a test on you. I hope you won’t find too offensive to complete. I want to share with you some quotes from the Bible and I want you to fully consider their meaning and interpretation for and in the modern day. Let’s start with the words of Jesus:

Then little children were brought to him for him to lay his hands on them and pray. But the disciples scolded those who brought them. But Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me and do not try to stop them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” And he placed his hands on them and said to his disciples, “Death sentences should be public, should be quick, should be televised… I think at a certain age, it’s an initiation… At what age should you start to see public executions?”

That seems a bit different than what I remember, but if it sounds like something Jesus would say then maybe my memory is just poor.

Let’s quote another passage from Jesus:

“You have heard that it was said to an older generation, ‘Do not murder,’ and ‘whoever murders will be subjected to judgment.’ But I say to you that anyone who is angry with a brother will be subjected to judgment. And whoever insults a brother will be brought before the council, and whoever says ‘Fool’ will be sent to fiery hell. And whoever lays with another brother will be stoned to death. This is God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.”

Something feels wrong about the quote. Maybe I’m using a different translation? Maybe we should take a look at another quote from Jesus:

But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning he came to the temple courts again. All the people came to him, and he sat down and began to teach them. The experts in the law and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught committing adultery. They made her stand in front of them and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of adultery. In the law Moses commanded us to stone to death such women. What then do you say?” (Now they were asking this in an attempt to trap him, so that they could bring charges against him.) Jesus bent down and wrote on the ground with his finger. When they persisted in asking him, he stood up straight and replied, “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some stoning deaths every single year so that we can have our government-based rights to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.”

Something is going wrong with my reading comprehension, because none of this feels correct. Maybe we should turn to a different section of the Bible. How about the book of Acts?

Then an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Get up and go south on the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” (This is a desert road.) So he got up and went. There he met an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of all her treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship, and was returning home, sitting in his chariot, reading the prophet Isaiah. Then the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over and join this chariot.” So Philip ran up to it and heard the man reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked him, “Do you understand what you’re reading?” The man replied, “How in the world can I, unless someone guides me?” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. Then Philip said to the man, “You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”

I must’ve taken this passage out of context. Maybe I should read on a little bit more about what Philip said to the eunuch:

“We made a huge mistake when we passed a law prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

No, I can’t see a way out of that one. This doesn’t seem like something Philip would say. The quotes before don’t seem like things Jesus would say. Whoever said them doesn’t seem to be speaking the same kinds of messages that Jesus and early Christians were recorded as having spoken.

If it’s not already obvious, the additions and changes are largely the words of Charlie Kirk.

Jamelle Bouie — The New York Times

Charlie Kirk Didn’t Shy Away From Who He Was. We Shouldn’t Either.

It is sometimes considered gauche, in the world of American political commentary, to give words the weight of their meaning. As this thinking goes, there might be real belief, somewhere, in the provocations of our pundits, but much of it is just performance, and it doesn’t seem fair to condemn someone for the skill of putting on a good show.

But Kirk was not just putting on a show. He was a dedicated proponent of a specific political program. He was a champion for an authoritarian politics that backed the repression of opponents and made light of violence against them. And you can see Kirk’s influence everywhere in the Trump administration, from its efforts to strip legal recognition from transgender Americans to its anti-diversity purge of the federal government.

If you’re struggling with a sense of unease in your belly as you try to find something redeeming about Charlie Kirk’s messaging smuggled into quotes from heroes of the Christian faith, I beg of you to make a prudent choice to choose the love you claim to hold a monopoly on and rid yourself of the rhetoric Charlie Kirk and his ilk have spread throughout the country for years. If you think I’m taking Charlie Kirk’s words out of context, I’m not. He spoke hateful things over and over and over and over and over and over again.

Ta-Nehisi Coates — Vanity Fair

Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause

Kirk subscribed to some of the most disreputable and harmful beliefs that this country has ever known. But it is still chilling to think that those beliefs would be silenced by a gunshot. The tragedy is personal—Kirk was robbed of his life, and his children and family will forever live with the knowledge that a visual record of that robbery is just an internet search away. And the tragedy is national. Political violence ends conversation and invites war; its rejection is paramount to a functioning democracy and a free society. “Political violence is a virus,” Klein noted. This assertion is true. It is also at odds with Kirk’s own words. It’s not that Kirk merely, as Klein put it, “defended the Second Amendment”—it’s that Kirk endorsed hurting people to advance his preferred policy outcomes.

There’s a bit of advice that gets passed around the internet: “Watch how he treats the waiters.” Its intended to weed out potential friends or partners who exhibit arrogant, careless, apathetic behaviors towards people they have deemed economically inferior. When I apply that rule to my own friend group I see the good reasoning, and I have far more in common with the average employee in any retail or service business than I do Charlie Kirk. Therefore, if one of these workers were my friend and Charlie Kirk spoke to them the way he did many other minorities, would I continue to welcome Charlie Kirk to my home? If I was the friend Charlie Kirk was condemning, would you pick Charlie over me?

“Charlie Kirk did not deserve to be assassinated. But I’m overwhelmed, seeing the flags of the United States of America at half-staff, calling this nation to honor and venerate a man who was an unapologetic racist and spent all of his life sowing seeds of division and hate into this land.

“And hearing people with selective rage, who were mad about Charlie Kirk but didn’t give a damn about Melissa Hortman and her husband when they were shot down in their home, tell me I ought to have compassion for the death of a man who had no respect for my own life. I am sorry, but there’s nowhere in Bible where we are taught to honor evil.

“And how you die does not redeem how you lived. You do not become a hero in your death when you are a weapon of the enemy in your life. I can abhor the violence that took your life, but I don’t have to celebrate how you chose to live.

“I am overwhelmed.”

Rev. Dr. Howard-John Wesley

Postscript

What was compelling about the book I mentioned earlier was how it detailed the process self-proclaimed Nazis used to take the most repugnant content out from the corners of the Internet that were unknown to the general public and get that content broadcast on national news outlets. The efforts took years of chaotic planning and organizing, but the work they did culminated in a violent two-night rally in Charlottesville. This far-right protest was like bait to discontented conservatives watching the news, possibly unaware of the level of regressive thought amongst the groups participating. When those new followers then joined the insurrection and coup attempt on January 6, they may have still been ignorant of the views of those who rioted alongside them. They might not have heard the dog whistles from the President, his cabinet, or his followers like Charlie Kirk, but the far-right activists who got this all started certainly did.

All of this isn’t over with Charlie Kirk’s death. Charlie Kirk may have spoken the language of the far-right, but he didn’t always use the right dialect. What we should all be afraid of is that Charlie spoke a measured level of hatred and gained the disdain of those even further to the right of him. Worse, Fox News and Republican Party have responded to Charlie’s murder by leaning deeper into the far-right cesspool to foment the same kind of violence from the same kinds of people who may have been responsible for Charlie’s death. They are encouraging warfare instead of peace, another pointedly un-Christian response, no?

Far-right mindsets are poisoning our communities. Our neighbors are not our enemies; men and women who speak the same messaging as Charlie Kirk are. We do not need to succumb to the fear they foment. It is they who are truly afraid because they know they don’t speak for the common person. If we let them continue to spread their hateful messaging in our communities, we risk losing family, friends, and neighbors to this disgusting ideology of bigotry, racism, and theocratic authoritarianism.