Who Do You Love? (on assassination in America) by Rachel Wagner
Tombstone hand and a graveyard mind
Just 22 and I don't mind dying
Who do you love?
Bo Diddley
After Kirk’s assassination, an acquaintance I hadn’t spoken to in over 30 years popped up on social media to lecture me about Kirk’s death. He spun an us-versus-them narrative about “liberals” who “twist” reality to their own ends, and scolded me for asking if Kirk led a good life. To be honest, I hadn’t paid much attention to Charlie Kirk before. I’m horrified by his assassination because I already understand that in today’s America, any of us could become the victim of a shooting. What kind of world is this that a young man could sit outdoors at a public venue and find a bullet lodged in his neck?
We ought to be horrified by Kirk’s assassination. We also ought to be horrified by the regular assassination of Black people by police officers, of government officials by armed intruders, of praying children by radicalized young men, of women by their husbands, of influencers by disillusioned fans, of homeless people by Fox newscasters who think they don’t deserve to live. We live in a culture soaked in blood. What we don’t agree on is why.
I’m uncomfortable with the this-side, that-side set of accusations—not because I think blame plays no role, but because the meanness of the discussions indicate something deeper about American life. On Wednesday, mere hours after Kirk was killed, Trump said to reporters:
The absurdity of our inability to talk about gun violence is manifest in Trump talking about genitals instead of bullets. Genitals did not kill Charlie Kirk. A gun did. And while of course there was a person holding the gun, our inability to decide what in the killer’s past “caused” him to shoot Kirk is evidence that the emotional triggers for his rage may be less important than the fact that he was filled with rage and had a trigger to pull.
The stakes are high. For Kirk and his followers, Kirk represented the idea that Christianity is defensible in today’s world, that it is a good thing to argue for singular moral values. But at the Kennedy Center vigil for Kirk, a speaker said that Charlie Kirk had “recruited and trained and educated a generation of happy warriors…And we do well to be reminded that the best way to honor his memory and to honor his unmatched legacy is to live as Charlie did." Kirk’s wife Erica used war language in her own eulogy, saying that her “cries will echo around the world like a battle cry” and citing Kirk’s motto to “never surrender.” The use of violent metaphors after the terrible violence of the assassination is striking.
For those who felt threatened by Kirk’s politics and religious beliefs, the violence of his death (rightly or wrongly) was overshadowed by the damage his views did during his lifetime. Kirk argued against empathy, and spoke in support of Jim Crow laws. He spoke disparagingly of Black women’s intelligence, and argued against feminism. His support for guns was justified by claiming that we are not responsible for how safe others around us might feel.
Some of Kirk’s remarks seem like they were zingers for attention. He called the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 “a huge mistake.” He called gender affirming care for transgender people “a throbbing middle finger to God.” It is impossible to pretend that Kirk did no harm to anybody with his inflammatory words and his call for political action against his foes. It also takes extreme mental gymnastics to forget the sight of Kirk being brutally murdered in the afternoon sun in a college courtyard. What does it mean that the internet erupted, nearly immediately, in frame-by-frame analysis as people tried to determine if the murder was a “hoax?” What do we make of the replay, over and over, of what is essentially a snuff video on mainstream social media, impossible to avoid?
I feel such grief. I felt it before Kirk’s murder, and yes—his death adds to it. My grief is about our inability to love one another. It is about the fact that we no longer even know what love is.
After my old acquaintance chewed me out for asking what kind of life Charlie had lived, I told him if he ever found himself hungry, I’d buy him food. Homeless, I’d help him off the streets. Lonely, I’d listen. And I would. I’d also call him out if his side of that conversation involved hate-filled language about other people, including LGBTQ people, Black people, immigrants, refugees, women.
This is the jackpot question we are all dealing with now, right? Can you be there for someone who won’t be there for you? Can you love someone who hates you? I don’t want anyone to ever die the way Charlie did. Nobody should. To put it in Christian terms, Charlie was shortchanged on the chance to learn more kindness for those he had hurt. The assassin had no right to take that from him.
In America, the possession of a gun makes some people think they have been appointed judge and jury when they have not.
If I saw Charlie living on the street in Oakland or Manhattan and he was rolling around in a rusty wheelchair, and he asked me for something to eat, I’d take him to dinner. I’d give him money for clothes. I’d loan him my phone so he could call his family and maybe they would come pick him up. I’d help him to the nearest shelter and hope to God Trump’s administration hadn’t dismantled it with lack of funding. And I’d do this even if he were saying horrible things about other people. Because whether or not we love others is up to us. Those of us with aging parents who were abusive when we were young know this story all too well. How will you be kind and loving to those who have wronged you? Because what you do for them says something about who you are.
Jesus said something like this and I think he’s right. He said we will be judged by what comes out of our mouths, not what we put into them (Matthew 15:11). We shouldn’t judge others by what they eat, what they wear, what genitalia they have or don’t have, who they love, or what they look like. We should judge them by how they live, and what they say because that is a reflection of their core values. But “judge” here doesn’t mean execute. It means assess; it means decide if you agree; it means stake out your own moral values without harming others.
I think most people today are pretty quick to think they should do the judging—in whatever way harms the judged one the most. Kirk judged other people based on stereotypical presumptions and unkind assessments. After his untimely death, he is being judged by those he hurt. These groups are fighting over which matters more: Kirk’s divisive legacy or his violent death.
I certainly understand the grieving, especially if what they saw was a hero of moral fortitude in a confusing world. But Charlie Kirk had another side to him. The pain he caused is likewise swirling about within the larger universe of grief at what America has become under MAGA’s watch. Trump has just promised to send troops to Memphis, Baltimore, and to Louisiana after sending them to Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles. When asked how Americans might "come back together" after Charlie Kirk's death, Trump said: “I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less.” Shouldn’t the terror and grief we all feel right now be the problem, not the solution?
