I hope my readers will pardon me for writing another post related to Charlie Kirk.
Kirk’s death is terrible, as I wrote about here. I have shed tears over it.
Writing and talking about it too much in certain contexts can be exploitative and manipulative.
I don’t want to engage in either of these behaviors.
In this post, I’m not really going to talk about Kirk except to mention his name in passing a few times.
Rather, I want to focus on some of the martyr language people use about Kirk’s death.
Specifically, I wanted to examine some of the martyr language that the President and some politicians have used about this incident.
Something that concerns me is that after the horrible event, before we knew anything about the shooter, the President and several leaders in congress quickly blamed democrats for the assassination.
Sadly, some like-minded folks have followed suit calling for vengeance.
The police are still investigating the person who committed this act, but the picture emerging is an odd and complex one.
Thus far, it appears that the shooter’s motivations were more political than religious.
For example, at the crime scene, police found the word anti-fascist on a bullet, which suggests political, rather than Anti-Christian motivations.
It’s important to note that someone from the right could also be anti-fascist because fascism is a type of authoritarianism, and folks on both the right and left are concerned about authoritarianism.
For example John Kelley, a retired marine corp general and Trump’s longest serving chief of staff has critiqued fascist tendencies in the President’s administration.
In addition, it appears that the assassin was raised in a Republican family and that he was not registered to vote with any party. So it is hard to know exactly what his political ideology was.
The governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, also initially suggested that the assassin was indoctrinated by leftist ideology without giving clear evidence for why he believed this.
Recently, which I appreciate, he has been more cautious about discussing the motives of the shooter, as they aren’t yet entirely clear.
On the other hand, in a recent interview when the President was asked about the problem of radicalism on both sides of the political spectrum, he said, “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime.
They don’t want to see crime. Worried about the border. They’re saying, We don’t want these people coming in. We don’t want you burning our shopping centers. We don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street . . . The radicals on the left are the problem.”
There are many concerns I have about this quote.
However, for the sake of this post, what especially concerns me is that, once again, before the president knew the assassin’s motives, he assumed that the shooter was leftist and that he shot Kirk for anti-Christian reasons.
As such, the President promoted the idea that Charlie Kirk, who also happened to be a close friend of the President, is a Christian martyr who died at the hand of leftist extremists for being a Christian.
(By the way, I do indeed think Kirk’s assassin was not a Christian. But the evidence right now suggests he did what he did for political rather than religious reasons.)
In my last post, What We Do about Political Violence, I argued that when political violence occurs, many people believe their reactions to these tragedies are moral (i.e. motivated by consistent moral principles).
But they are, in fact, aesthetic (i.e. motivated by feelings of pleasure and displeasure.)
As such, many people respond to political violence by mourning violence against people they like and ignoring or celebrating violence against people they dislike.
In addition, if someone operates out of an aesthetic stance (again, a stance of feeling) they will assume that the people they like are good.
And they will usually assume that people they dislike are bad.
I believe this is what the President and some related politicians are doing right now regarding this recent terrible event.
They are solely letting an aesthetic stance guide their reaction to Kirk’s death.
Therefore, operating in the aesthetic mode, they assume that anyone who harms a republican—and they associate republicanism with Christianity—must be anti-Christian and a radical leftist.
There are a variety of problems with this stance, but I will address two.
First, there is nothing inherently violent or anti-Christian about championing leftist causes or even being a member of the radical left, if we define the radical left as being really into leftist political ideals. (It is always wrong to champion violence, right or left.)
In fact, it is possible to champion leftist causes; be a Christian; and to be a pacifist (i.e. to completely reject violence).
For instance, there are anarchists who are pacifists.
As such they are members of the radical left because they advocate communal ownership of land and business.
But they are pacifists, so they condemn all sorts of violence.
For example, Russian author Leo Tolstoy was a Christian anarchist and a pacifist.[1]
I also know some Christian anarchist pacifists personally.
As another example, historically Quakers in the United States were Christians who championed progressive causes like the abolition of slavery, universal women’s suffrage, and prison reform.
They were also pacifists.
They championed the above causes (which would have been considered leftist in their day) because they believed their commitment to Christianity required such political ideals.
Martha and William Wright, two Quakers who worked for abolition and women’s suffrage.
The point is that Christians can hold a wide variety of political beliefs, and a person doesn’t have to be a Republican or a Democrat to be a Christian.
That’s because Christianity is about committing your life to Christ, not joining a particular political party.
So when folks suggest that Kirk’s assassin must be leftist and must have clearly done his deed for anti-Christian reasons, this is misleading.
It automatically equates anti-republicanism with anti-Christian sentiment, which is not a logical entailment.
In addition, it equates violence with leftist political beliefs, which is also not a logical entailment.
The second reason some martyr language around Kirk’s death concerns me is because it suggests that violence is primarily or even solely a problem of the left. As such, it seems to excuse problems of violence on the right.
Of course, some people on the left do advocate violence, and this is immoral.
But violence also occurs on the right, and this is certainly immoral, too.
For example, followers of President Trump attacked the capitol to overturn the election, injuring dozens of police officers and killing one in the process.
When President Trump became president, he pardoned the people involved in this attack, including those who attacked police officers.
In addition, several politicians on the right have received donations from, and attended assemblies by, self-avowed white supremacist and anti-semite, Nick Fuentes.
For example representatives Marjorie Greene Taylor and Paul Gosar have both attended events run by Fuentes.
Fuentes regularly and publicly praises Hitler (who was a clear fascist) and as recently as 2022 said, “All I want is revenge against my enemies and a total Aryan [white] victory.”
The enemies he was referring to were people in the Jewish community.
Supporting such a person encourages violence.
And it is immoral and inexcusable for any politician to associate with or receive funds from such an individual.
As such, it appears the President mainly condemns violence on the left and overlooks or excuses violence on the right.
By the way, while people on the right and left can behave in both violent and inappropriate ways, this is not an excuse to say, “Well, the other side does it, too. This is just the way things are.” (This is in fact a reasoning error called tu quoque.)
The moral response is to hold any person accountable when they behave in such a manner, whether they share our politics or not.
That’s because we all share a common call to be moral, and all of us are imperfect in this calling. So, we need to hold each other (including those who vote like us) accountable.
And in light of things we share in common, let me return briefly to Kirk’s death.
I think many people mourn Kirk’s death mourn for moral reasons. They mourn because Kirk was a human being with hopes and dreams and a family.
We share common humanity. As such, his death is terrible.
But I think some people mourn Kirk’s death primarily for aesthetic reasons.
That is, they use Kirk’s death to enforce the idea that they (and people like them) are the good guys.
And people not like them are the bad guys.
Once again, this is an aesthetic, not a moral stance.
And this is the problem.
The more politicians operate from an aesthetic rather than a moral stance, the more they fuel partisanship, as well as an Us. vs. Them view of the world.
This is exactly the view that foments violence.
Understanding our shared humanity, and our shared vulnerability, interrupts the violence.
This weekend, I spent some time watching videos of Charlie Kirk.
I watched them because I always want to try to understand people and make sure I portray them as accurately as I can when I write and speak about them.
Kirk and I disagreed on a lot of things politically[2], and a lot of his videos were painful for me to watch because of the ideas he espoused.
But there was one video of him that touched me deeply.
Kirk was answering questions and debating various college students on a college campus.
One young man came up to the mic to ask Kirk a question. In the process, he got flustered and had a minor panic attack.
In a moment of empathy, Kirk said, “It’s okay. It takes a lot of courage to come up here and ask a question.”
A moment later, the young man was able to ask his question, and he said to Kirk, “I think I may have misunderstood you, and I think I may agree with you on some points.”
Kirk replied, “The media wants to divide us. But we have a lot more in common than you think.”
Kirk and I probably disagreed on which folks in the media are trying to divide us.
But in that particular moment I couldn’t have agreed with him more.
People all along the political spectrum want basically the same thing.
We want to be safe.
And we want to belong.
We want to live meaningful lives with people we love.
Granted, we often conceive of very different ways of achieving these common goals.
And granted, there are indeed people in the world who are violent, evil, and cruel.
But most of us are good-hearted people trying to do our best.
And that is why some of the martyr language around Kirk’s death concerns me.
It is because some people use this language purposefully to fuel partisanship.
As Kirk himself said, “The media wants to divide us. But we have a lot more in common than you think.”
The more we consistently hold to moral principles grounded in human dignity, rather than operating out of an aesthetic stance, the more we heal these divides.
You might also like this post:
When Does the Right Become Dangerous? It May Surprise You.
By the way, aesthetics can help us be moral when approached properly, which you can read about here:
Is Follow Your Heart Good Advice?
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