Earlier this month, US conservative 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 his 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 dismissed.
More disturbing, however, is the extent to which Kirk’s supporters not only lionised 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 Christ’s 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 black, Muslim or Jewish Americans, 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 criticising his views and work so soon after his murder. But beyond the pale are accusations that critics 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.
Americans 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.
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 Rev 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 Cardinal Francis Spellman travelled to Vietnam to bless US troops as they battled “godless communism”, a Jesuit priest named 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 anti-war leaders or the segregationists or pro-war hawks being described as Christian leaders. Neither did US media or political culture term the views they projected as Christian.
And Americans 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, Americans defined these individuals by what they did. There were either “segregationists” or “civil rights leaders”, “supporters of the war” or “anti-war activists”.
What Americans 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 behaviours did not make that belief or behaviour “religious”.
In today’s highly polarised political climate, Americans should remember not to abuse religious language believing that it adds weight and certainty to their politics, nor be side-tracked by debating religion. Instead, Americans should strip away the distracting veneer of religion and debate the merits of the politics that lie beneath.
