MAGA
Confronts a Turning Point
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"My husband Charlie he wanted to save young men, just like the one
who took his life...On the cross, our savior said, 'Father, forgive them, for
they not know what they do.' That young man. I forgive him. I forgive him,
because it was what Christ did. It’s what Charlie would do. The answer to
hate is not hate. The answer — we know from the Gospel — is love and always
love. Love for our enemies, and love for those who persecute us.”
—Erika Kirk
“I hate my opponent and I don't
want the best for them…I'm sorry, Erika — now Erika can talk to me and the
whole group and maybe they can convince me that that's not right — but I can't stand my opponent.”
—Donald Trump
Well, that clears things up. I was fearing a Nuremberg
rally on Sunday in Arizona, a transformation of Charlie Kirk into Horst Wessel,
the Nazi martyr. But it was a lot more complicated, and moving, than that.
Because Christians aren’t Nazis. They are conflicted humans, writhing in
anguish between what Jesus taught…and what, too often, the church has
practiced. There were terrifying vengeance-is-mine moments in Arizona, but
there were also moments of faith and forgiveness, none more than Erika Kirk’s,
a moment that reflected and reified the time, ten years ago, when the black
congregants of Mother Emanuel Church forgave Dylann Roof, the white supremacist
who assassinated nine of their members.
Too often the essence of humanity is compromised by
ideology. It is a natural tendency. It has been the eternal struggle of the
Christian church and the Muslim Ummah; the Old Testament Jehovah, whom Jews
worship, came equipped with fire and brimstone, armor and a sword. Jesus walked
barefoot, in rags; he instructed his followers to do the same. He “hung out,”
as Charlie Kirk said, with the poor. He would have been entirely uncomfortable
in the riches of the Vatican and Joel Osteen’s gospel of prosperity. He did not
preach from the pulpit of a mega-church; his was, as an evangelical once told
me, a church without walls.
Charlie Kirk had elements of both grace and vengeance.
He lived for debate—though it was a sound-byte truncated sort of a debate, in
which his cleverness destroyed the myopic weakness of campus lefties. He came
with a sword. He tried to live the teachings of Jesus, but lapsed too easily
into the abyss of hatred. I would have liked to see how he would have fared in
a debate with fellow believers, those who found piety through intellectual
struggle like Jerry Brown and Abraham Joshua Heschel. Which side would he be
on?
That was the struggle that played out at his funeral.
There were moments of high moral vision. Some of the speakers—J.D. Vance, Marco
Rubio, even Tucker Carlson—seemed aware of who Jesus was and what he taught. It
was easy to admire the rhetoric but hard to listen to. The divide between what
they said and how they roll is blatant, the stuff of monumental hypocrisy. But
at least they tried. They aspired toward grace. And then there was Stephen
Miller, who was terrifying. He said to his imagined enemies
“You have no idea the dragon you have awakened. You have no idea how
determined we will be to save this civilization, to save the West, to save the
republic…”
He said:
“You have nothing, you are nothing, you are wickedness, you are jealousy,
you are envy, you are hatred… you can build nothing, you can produce nothing”
He said:
“Erica is the storm. We are the storm and our enemies
cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our
passion"
He said:
“You thought you could kill Charlie Kirk. You have made him immortal. You
have immortalized Charlie Kirk. And now millions will carry on his legacy… You
cannot defeat us. You cannot slow us. You cannot stop us. You cannot deter us”.
Let us not put too fine a point on it: this is the
voice of pure evil, of retribution. One wonders what indignities were visited
upon Miller in the corridors of Santa Monica High School. He remains a child,
who has taken on the gratuitous viciousness of the cool kids. Vengeance is his.
And Trump’s…
Ahh, Donald. The widow smoked you. She was a tough act to follow; she
should have been the last act. But you always go last as President, and you
have never seemed more empty and pathetic, trying to be gracious—interspersing
a eulogy with various
imagined political triumphs and vows to cancel your enemies. A day later,
Trump’s people figured out that God was a Player, a fantasy source of succor
for his cult. Here was Monday’s blast email:
Since the day I returned to the White House, I have felt the mighty hand
of God guiding this movement. His Word reminds us: “If God is for us, who can be against us?”
Actually, that was the Apostle Paul, a converted Pharisee, a tortured
vessel involved in the Church’s first internecine battle—in Jerusalem, against
the Jewish followers of Jesus, led by Jesus’s brother James, and Simon Peter.
James is a problem for many Christians. If Mary was a Virgin, where did he come from? Turns out, The Greatest Story Ever Told is a glorious
myth, filled with great metaphoric truth—with the teachings, which were mostly
about giving everything to the poor, the impossible standard imparted to his
followers. The literal truth of the Bible is aspirational. Jesus didn’t have to
raise the dead; he tried to raise the living. His was a scapegoat sacrifice,
the most powerful and sacred religious ritual in the ancient world. The
scapegoat always carried with him (or, more often, her) the sins of society.
Did Charlie Kirk rise to the level of being MAGA’s
scapegoat sacrifice?
