This blog has been silent for a long time. The last posts were in the early days of the Biden Administration. I quit posting because I wanted the existing content to stay up. It seemed for a couple of years, until I went silent online, that I was being de-platformed every few weeks, every mass email and post a mad dash of reshuffling servers and screen names to stay ahead of the censors. But, perhaps it is time to speak here again and there could be no more pertinent subject than the death of Charlie Kirk. There is a lot of talk about Charlie Kirk right now. He is the topic de jure.
Many years ago, I was speaking at a local church. My message was controversial. The gist of it was that it was time to quit worshiping the idol of politics and instead begin practicing true, active, confrontational, contra mundum, Christianity at every level of life and culture no matter the cost and then let politics follow our faith rather than letting our faith (and practice) follow politics and the culture.
At the end, as the audience was applauding, the pastor of the church stood up, silencing the crowd and astoundingly asked who I had voted for in the last election. I refused to answer. He became more aggressive in his questioning as the crowd went silent. At the end of the exchange, he told me that I hadn’t earned the right to say those things because I did not support Donald Trump or the GOP.
I was tempted to put the man in his place. He had bulldozed his way into a battle of wits unarmed.
I wanted to tell him that I began earning the right by giving eight years of my life in various levels of military service along with half an inch of one leg.
I wanted to tell him that I earned the right by spending three years on the lines in front of abortion clinics, getting assaulted by bought off policeman and earning a more or less permanent person of interest status by various agencies.
I wanted to tell him that I earned the right by serving two years as president of the Christian Legal Society on a virulently secular law school campus where open discrimination against Christians and Christian students was standard policy.
I wanted to tell him that I earned the right by spending fifteen years taking legal cases that nobody else would touch, even the well known national Christian organizations, because they were too messy and had poor PR value … and in the process made myself extremely unpopular with local judicial system who really wanted “those people” to just shut up, go away and not clutter their dockets with cases where the verdict was a foregone conclusion if they wanted to stay on the bench.
But I didn’t say those things because I was a guest in that man’s pulpit and I wouldn’t do to him what he was trying to do me.
Charlie Kirk earned the right to speak on that college campus the day he was shot. He earned it by his courage, going right into the mouth of the lion again and again and proclaiming the truth, engaging the enemy on his own ground and pulling minds out of the quagmire. Just like Dietrich Bonhoeffer whose pulpit and pen openly opposed the evils of National Socialism right up until the hours before he was executed, Charlie Kirk exhibited the same kind of courage.
Charlie Kirk took his Christianity out of the “Christian Ghetto” of evangelical culture and put it on display right in the middle of the enemy’s home ground. In a time where these issues are not even discussed from the relative safety of the pulpit, he debated them openly in the public square.
I continually ask myself and am now proposing this same question to my readers, “Have we even earned the right to have an opinion the Charlie Kirk tragedy? Where are we in the culture war, on the front lines or hiding behind our church walls?
The Charlie Kirk’s and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s of Christendom are our canaries in the mine shaft. So long as they are singing there is still hope. But when their voices go silent evil has triumphed.
Nations that kill their prophets do not long escape God’s judgment.
