Reciting What’s True to Diffuse a Politics of Hate

May we strive together, despite our many differences.

To some degree, I agree with what my colleague Nick Catoggio wrote Thursday: Recitations of obvious moral truths make for bad, uninteresting, and sometimes demeaning writing. Few people need to be told that Wednesday’s assassination of Charlie Kirk was evil. Or that it is perverse that two small children will never be tucked into bed by their daddy again, and that his widow will never be able to greet him when he walks through the door. That his life ended because someone disagreed with his politics or religion or ideology is depraved.

But even if few among us need to be told these things, it is still good for us to hear them over and over, to tell ourselves over and over. After every mass shooting, after every fresh example of political violence, after every round of one side recriminating the other side for not holding up their end of the social contract, we need to hear what is right, what is true, what is good. That need is why we commit to memory lines of poetry, passages of literature, and—for religious believers—particular verses. Because when crisis arrives and the world presses in on us, we must work to remember what we’re about and what we hold to. Sometimes those things hold us more than we hold them, but only when we know them in our bones. So we keep telling ourselves and each other what’s true and good.

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.

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. 

Kirk’s death is a fresh reminder of all those tensions, and how they have bubbled beneath the surface for years, sometimes spilling into the open.

I never met or talked to Charlie Kirk, so all I know of him comes from what he said publicly and what others who did know him have said of him. But, both of us being Christians, I suspect our answers to certain ultimate questions about creation, identity, destiny, meaning, and morality would map onto each other in most cases. On some of the most divisive moral issues of our time, we held to the same beliefs—that life begins at conception and deserves legal protection, and in the traditional Christian views on sexuality and marriage. I’m sure nearly all of Kirk’s supporters would agree. But much of the populist, nationalist, and MAGA playbook he embraced seems to me to be utterly incompatible with a Christian ethic. Most notably, the bearing of false witness that so much of the MAGA movement has done in any number of areas. To understand what I mean by all this, see this Dispatch piece by Paul D. Miller and this remembrance of Kirk by his friend David Bahnsen. Others, including my friend Warren Cole Smith, have written to agree with Bahnsen that Kirk was growing and maturing in his faith, that he was not the same young, brash provocateur he was earlier in his career. I hope they’re right and trust their judgment.

My point isn’t so much to detail my critiques of Kirk and his work. It’s to demonstrate that though we shared theological commitments, the disagreements I had with him on practical matters—the outgrowth of those theological commitments—were vast. It wasn’t until I talked with people in my own church this week and others who share my own political convictions that I realized how many people—even those I thought were mostly politically disengaged—followed and supported Kirk. So here’s the crux of my angst: How do people who agree on so many foundational questions—who we are, who God is, what is wrong with the world and ourselves, and how does it all get fixed—diverge on such substantive, consequential questions? Why are political disagreements among Christians so deep even as we hold to the same theological convictions?

These are questions I’ve wrestled with since 2016, and my angst has only grown since. I’ve told friends since then that I’m not sure there will ever be a clear resolution to these questions for me. That we will have to live in the tension and figure out the best way through. The question we can answer is how to do that.

Kirk’s murder may be a new and deeper wound, but it isn’t singular. Things were bad in 2020, too: fights over COVID response, racial strife following George Floyd’s death, and the election (and its aftermath). At the time, I was an editor with a Christian news magazine, directing coverage of, among wider controversies, how Christians were wading through the tensions. As you might expect, we heard about it when our readers disagreed with our coverage. Meanwhile, my own church navigated these issues as well, with plenty of opinions throughout the congregation about each. Some members were subscribers to my magazine, and there were many Sundays I dreaded going to worship for fear of stepping into a fight I wanted no part of on the Sabbath. I will say that rarely happened, but my own angst was frequent.

Yet an image from those hard days remains fixed in my head: Our congregation takes Communion every Sunday. We all shuffle down to the front of the sanctuary, row by row, to servers holding the bread and the wine. They hand it to us and we take it—often grouped in our families. In my Reformed tradition, Communion has a vertical dynamic. It is spiritual nourishment—a regular reminder of the Last Supper Jesus had with his disciples and of the feast he promised for his people at the end of the ages. In a sense it is a recommitment to our faith, but it really is more about remembering Jesus’ commitment to his people, through his sacrifice.

But there is also a horizontal dynamic. We don’t take communion by ourselves at home. We take it during a worship service with fellow believers—our brothers and sisters in the faith who are struggling with whatever trials and angst they bring to worship. We stand shoulder-to-shoulder with each other, partaking together. As a church officer, I often help serve communion, usually speaking words like “Christ’s body broken for you, Christ’s blood shed for you,” when each person takes the bread and wine from me. You cannot not be unified in that moment—despite your differences, divides, and disagreements. Unity does not mean total agreement on all issues, of course. But we are nourished by the communion with one another, even as we are nourished by the communion with and by Christ. The bond between brothers and sisters in the faith stretches much deeper and is forged more strongly than anything that can be rent asunder by temporal disagreements—even when those disagreements are substantive and consequential. The bread and wine help us to love not just Christ but one another. 

In his 17th-century meditation on spiritual battles, The Christian in Complete Armour, Puritan William Gurnall reflected on what biblical scholars call Jesus’ “High Priestly Prayer” in John 17. “Jesus told His children what they must look for at the world’s hand — all kinds of tribulation,” Gurnall wrote of Jesus’ prayer for unity among his followers. “Yet he did not pray so much for their immunity from suffering as He did against contentions amongst them. … In a word, saints who live in strife and contention are sinning against the strong prayers Christ Himself uttered on their behalf.”

The common bonds of Christianity that should transcend division should be obvious to us believers. So much of our present age—from the perverse incentives of our politics to soul-bending effects of the digital landscape—encourages brothers and sisters to forget those bonds. Whatever my disagreements were with Charlie Kirk, his willingness and eagerness to discuss and debate people face-to-face was a blow against some of these corrupting elements. He was killed in part as a result of that willingness. It is less clear now, though, that we as Americans have bonds that transcend our division. The bonds have frayed. Or perhaps we’ve only forgotten they are there. 

The heaviness of Kirk’s murder could be a reminder, if we heed it. Lots of writers this week have grappled with with why this particular act seems so significant, even when we’ve endured so many other acts of violence and evil before. I think Peggy Noonan gets at it in her Wall Street Journal column this week:

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.”