WASHINGTON WATCH
On September 10, conservative Republican political activist Charlie Kirk was murdered while speaking at a rally on a college campus in Utah. The reactions to his death were immediate and sustained, reflecting the deep divisions that plague American society today.
While critics of Kirk’s extreme views on race, women, and gender issues were mostly respectful in their comments about his death, they were nevertheless subjected to online harassment and intimidation by Kirk’s devoted fans. Lists were made of those who posted remarks critical of Kirk’s positions on social media, with calls to their employers to have them fired. What has been more disturbing, however, is the extent to which Kirk’s supporters not only lionized the man and his work, but freely employed religious language (Christian, of course) to describe him.
One conservative Catholic Cardinal called Kirk a missionary and an evangelist, comparing him to St. Paul. Others compared his murder with Jesus’ crucifixion.
What I find most distressing about all of this isn’t just my disagreement with Kirk’s views. I deplore his statements on the inferiority or untrustworthiness of Blacks, Muslims, or Jews, or the need for women to be submissive to men, and so much more. No, my concern is the way religious language is being abused by Kirk’s supporters. For example, it’s fair for them to defend Kirk’s positions on matters of controversy or even to charge his critics with insensitivity for criticizing his views and work so soon after his murder. But what has been beyond the pale are accusations that critics of Charlie Kirk are guilty of “blasphemy” or “sacrilege.” Those terms have very specific meanings and refer to words or actions that are insulting to God or sacred things associated with the divine. Kirk is not divine and simply because he cloaked his conservative views with Christian language doesn’t make his message Christian.
We often use (or better, abuse) religious language in everyday life. We might shout “goddamn” when accidentally hitting a thumb with a hammer, or exclaim “Jesus Christ” when we are surprised. When we do this, we aren’t making a declaration of faith. Rather, we do it because our culture has endowed these religious terms with deep emotional content. When we use them, we are, in effect, saying nothing more than “I’m really mad,” or “I’m very excited.” In other words, using religious language to describe non-religious beliefs or actions is simply a way of adding emphasis.
The same is true when political speakers or movements use religious language in an attempt to validate or add emphasis to their views. This is the case with Christian nationalists— or for that matter Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or Buddhist nationalists. They are taking their political views and cloaking them with the divine in order to add emphasis. Having done this, they have the temerity to denounce those who challenge them as “unbelievers,” when in reality the beliefs they are projecting aren’t reflective of God’s will as much as they are of their own beliefs which they have imposed on God.
What we may have understood back then, at least implicitly, was that just because a person or institution used religious language to define or validate certain political beliefs or behaviour did not make that belief or behavior “religious.” In today’s highly polarized political climate we should remember not to abuse religious language believing that it adds weight and certainty to our politics, nor be sidetracked by debating religion. Instead, we should strip away the distracting veneer of religion and debate the merits of the politics that lie beneath.
While this matter of the abuse of religious language isn’t new, it is growing in frequency and intensity. Back in the 1960s, for example, Americans were deeply divided on matters of war and race. While Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and religious leaders associated with his Southern Christian Leadership Conference led protests and committed acts of civil disobedience demanding civil rights, they were countered by white Christian preachers in the south who warned of the dangers of violating God’s will by ignoring the punishment God had meted out to the “sons of Ham.”
And while New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman traveled to Vietnam to bless US troops as they battled “godless Communism,” a Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan led fellow clergymen and women in protests against the war, often resulting in their arrest and imprisonment (in one case, for burning the Selective Service files of young men who were to be drafted to serve in the military).
During this entire period, I do not recall the civil rights or antiwar leaders or the segregationists or pro-war hawks being described as Christian leaders. Neither did our media or political culture term the views they projected as Christian. And we didn’t become engaged in drawn out theological debates in an effort to determine which interpretation of Christianity was correct— that is, who were the “good” or “bad” Christians. Rather, we defined these individuals by what they did. There were either “segregationists” or “civil rights leaders,” “supporters of the war” or “anti-war activists.”
What we may have understood back then, at least implicitly, was that just because a person or institution used religious language to define or validate certain political beliefs or behaviour did not make that belief or behavior “religious.” In today’s highly polarized political climate we should remember not to abuse religious language believing that it adds weight and certainty to our politics, nor be sidetracked by debating religion. Instead, we should strip away the distracting veneer of religion and debate the merits of the politics that lie beneath.
