The public execution of Charlie Kirk has been on repeat for the last couple of weeks. The circumstances leading up to the death of Charlie fall somewhere in the middle of killing and murder, depending on which side you align your ideology with. Killing can be justified; we do it all the time, and for some, this was a killing of a dangerous man with dangerous ideas. For others, this was an assassination and murder of a political and religious leader.
My immediate reaction was one of horror, and I grieved the circumstances and public spectacle of dying in that way. I don’t believe this was a good way to resolve political differences, and I will always land on the side of where we must give voice to those that have something to say. My freedom ends at your freedom, and I do not condone hateful speech, but speech alone should not be the reason to kill, as my moral conviction would place that on the side of murder.
That said, the conflation of religion and politics muddies the water with Charlie, as political speech can and does lead to acts of violence. Religious speech is as prone to violence as well, and history is rife with accounts of genocide and the worst acts against humanity in the name of God. Because Charlie was both political and religious, we need to reckon with how dangerous it is to straddle both, especially in the public sphere. I do not believe Charlie was a prescient danger; however, I can see where his ideas could feel threatening because they married the political and religious, a powerful combination.
The best historical example we have of a powerful political and religious figure is Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the Christ. As I wrestled with my feelings about Charlie, I recalled how the State and the Church responded to Jesus’s ministry and life. The State (Rome) found no fault with Jesus and gave in to political pressure from the Church to execute him on their behalf. Even though we are not an Empire, we can categorize the public sphere as a government space as that is where government meets the people in our country. Political ideas are exchanged in public and even though it’s not a perfect corollary, for my argument, political speech is akin to the Roman State in Jesus’s time.
I think there is an important distinction to make when it comes to Charlie, between the murder of a professed follower of Jesus, and the killing of a politically active member of the Republican Party. Both are terrible, but we can learn from the way Jesus was able to navigate being blameless while sharing dangerous ideas targeted to a specific group. His religious ideas still got him killed but the call for his execution was done by the Church. The State was a participant and gave into political pressure, but the public was not offended by his ideas enough to take action against him.
Charlie wasn’t killed by the Church. You could make a case that politics is a form of religion, but he was killed in the public square for an ideology that primarily comes from the Church. We don’t know the true motivation of the killer yet, it could have been both politically and religiously motivated, but the point I am trying to make is that there is a distinction between the two and Jesus navigated it perfectly.