“Look! He is coming with the clouds,
and every eye will see Him,
including those who pierced Him.
And all the families of the earth
will mourn over Him.
This is certain. Amen.” Revelation 1:7

Something has shifted in our culture, and I don’t know that the discourse is getting to the heart of the matter. Short-form content cannot bear the burden of the complex spirit of human experience and life; its essence is validation seeking. It does not seek the truth, as the fathers of rhetoric did in their thoughtful orations and debates. They condemned polititians for their enslavement to constituents, and today we have millions of pseudo-politicians whose dopamine addictions hunger and thirst for likes and engagement. This can’t be the motivation behind our dialogues. Sometimes I wonder if we have the attention spans for real communication anymore, to read or to listen to an argument in its entirety and then to consider our own before we reply.

I am grieved by the death of Charlie Kirk. I am grieved on so many levels. The absolute horror of it should send us to our knees, yet we watch it through our screens and feel so detached. The fact that there is a whole host of people who are actual murderers and infiltrate our schools and public places should at the very least cause us to pause before we post the very same hate-filled rhetoric on which those murderous souls supped. 

I do not believe this detachment to the sacredness of human life is a mental disorder that is confined to those who take a gun to a college campus and shoot it into a crowd of 3,000 people and kill one of them with intent. I believe it is a spiritual disease that if there was a test for it, we would find a positive confirmation in everyone who stands up for the deaths of unborn babies, who celebrates the death of someone who did not commit a crime, and who shouted “Crucify him!” on that day so long ago. 

It is a root of sin that is contiguous and spreading, a cultural zeitgeist that believes ideas are worth killing someone for. The idea that God created them male and female, the idea that there should be no legislation that forces people to affirm one race over another, the idea that people in our country illegally should be taken back to their own country. The idea of the future burden a “clump of cells” could place on a woman. The idea that there is only one way to heaven, and it isn’t by being a good person. 

While some of these ideas are worth dying for, an idea is never justification for killing a person. If there weren’t such high stakes, this would almost be comical that we have to explain this. What were Charlie’s crimes? The idea that people should have the right to bear arms? Should everyone who believes in gun rights be shot to death? It is scary knowing that there are many liberals who would not answer that question with an instant and outright NO.

I have friends on both sides of politics. I would hope that I could talk to them about these matters without them wishing me dead. I would hope that if I died a senseless death, they wouldn’t wait two minutes and then make a post on social media that basically claimed I had it coming. 

The difference I see between the left and right is that when someone speaks out against conservatives, calling them Nazis, celebrating their deaths, or defaming their God, our answer is not to curse them and wish them dead. For the health of your own party, if for nothing else, the left should be asking themselves why so many shooters are in the anti-gun party instead of feeling smug that of course Republicans are the ones having assassins after them. Maybe the reason many mass killers are transgender, far left, or God-less is that there is such a thing as real evil, a real enemy, and a real sin condition that Christians know a little bit about. From the outside looking in, liberalism is a party of chaos, where truth is uncertain, where vitriol is the language and bloodshed is the action to take. It is a party of mental health crises that I believe have less to do with how the “dominant” culture treats those who are different than to do with a lost and unwell way of thinking. It is all connected.

I have my undergraduate degree from a Christian university, and I have my master’s from a very liberal university. I have sat under teaching and around tables with people who think like me and people who think very differently. I have been at various points on the political spectrum over the years. And while most of my professors and colleagues were very kind and empathetic people, I did notice in general that my liberal friends’ rhetoric was ironically more intolerant than my conservative friends’. They put the ideas about people over the actual people. It’s this weird paradox where free thinking has been idolized to the point of ideas being enough to kill for.

Ideas are going to be sinful, but it isn’t our ideas that make us sinful. People are conceived in sin. It is a part of our human nature, and if you don’t believe that, ask yourself if there has ever been a person born (save One) who didn’t do something bad. The human heart is selfish. It lusts. It lies. It hates. We may have put Jesus to death for His ideas, but what He really died for was our hearts. His selflessness for our selfishness, His purity for our lust, His truthfulness and faithfulness for our lying. His love for our hate.

Believe what you want to about Charlie Kirk. I am merely suggesting the radical(?) idea that we not kill people for things they say, and that we not make language a crime worthy of the death penalty.

May we mourn over every death. May we mourn over our country torn apart by hate. May we mourn for those who are lost and afflicted by sin, in need of a Savior.