On September 10, conservative Republican political activist Charlie Kirk was murdered while speaking on a college campus in Utah. The reactions to his death have reflected the deep divisions that plague American society today.
While most critics of Kirk’s extreme views on race, women and gender issues were respectful in their comments about his death, they were nevertheless subjected to online harassment and intimidation by Kirk’s devoted fans.
What has been most disturbing, however, is the extent to which Kirk’s supporters have lionised the man and his work, 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.
And they denounced Kirk’s critics accusing them of “blasphemy” or “sacrilege”.
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, “blasphemy” and “sacrilege” are terms with very specific meanings and refer to words or actions that are insulting to God or sacred things associated with the divine.
Kirk was 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 – shouting “goddamn” when accidentally hitting a thumb with a hammer or exclaiming “Jesus Christ!” when surprised. These words are not declarations of faith.
Rather, we use these terms in this way because our culture has endowed them with deep emotional content. 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. Too often they have the temerity to denounce those who challenge them as “unbelievers”, when in reality the beliefs they’re projecting aren’t reflective of God’s will as much as of their own beliefs which they’ve imposed on God.
While this matter of the abuse of religious language isn’t new, it is growing in intensity.
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 southern white Christian preachers 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 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 don’t recall the civil rights or antiwar leaders or the segregationists or pro-war hawks being described as Christian leaders.
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, 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”.
Nor did this define, by itself, the religion to which they adhered.
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