The Christian Response to Violence Isn’t More Violence

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, some of the loudest voices have claimed the name of Christ while stoking militancy and fear. Phil, Kaitlyn and Skye discuss how Christians don't put our hope in defeating our political enemies here and now. Our hope is in the resurrection of the dead & the life of the world to come, which frees us to reject the world’s weapons and tools of power & choose the way of Jesus instead. (From Holy Post 687: Charlie Kirk & the Conflict Entrepreneurs)

Phil: The right grows angrier at the left, and the left grows angrier at the right. Take, for example, this statement from Matt Walsh at The Daily Wire, one of the largest media outlets on the right. He said, “Charlie tried to have conversations with you on the left and you killed him for it. You're killing us in our churches. You tried to kill our president. You killed one of our greatest advocates.”

In The Federalist, John Daniel Davidson wrote: “The Left is a violent, revolutionary movement that wants all those who oppose it dead. It's incompatible with American constitutionalism. Charlie Kirk's assassination should confirm what we already should have known. We cannot share a country with the left.”

Kaitlyn: Wow. 

Skye: What's the plan? What are you gonna do with the 150 million Americans?

Phil: Well, Stephen Miller is putting together the plan that we’ll take your money, we’ll take your power, and maybe, if you've broken the law, we’ll take your freedom.

Skye: This is like—they make it sound as if people who vote on the left, who vote Democratic, are some tiny fringe minority of guerrilla warriors secretly undermining the country. We're talking about 49, if not 50% of Americans. What are you gonna do, saying you can't share a country with them?

Phil: I mean, the number of tweets I've seen that just say, how could we, how could we cooperate with those people? They want us dead.

Kaitlyn: The part that is really terrifying to me, and so unchristian, is—I think it's still Matt Walsh—after the “you're killing us in our churches, you tried to kill our president” line, he said: “It's too late to turn the temperature down. This is not a time to hold hands. It's a time for justice. This is a time for good to fight back against evil. It is time for the righteous to prevail.”

Skye: That's the "conflict entrepreneur" idea Cox was talking about. He's using this tragedy to ferment more anger, to get more views and more clicks.

Kaitlyn: What they're doing is destroying families, churches, and neighborhoods.

Skye: Exactly.

Kaitlyn: And it doesn't just take physical violence for it to be devastating. It happens when families are split apart. When churches are destroyed.

And this is the most confounding thing to me about Christians saying stuff like this, the most anti-Christian part is this idea that it's too late to turn down the temperature, the idea that human political disagreements can be ratcheted up to the level of existential risk. We talked about this in the lead up to the election - the idea that disagreements could escalate to such a degree that violence is justified.

That's so anti-Christian, because it assumes that here and now is all there is. And so if resources are scarce, I have to fight for them. If there are battles that need to be won, I need to destroy the other side. And we've completely lost the beauty of the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. The resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, the return of Christ, should motivate you to say, I don’t need to say it’s too late to turn the temperature down. It’s not up to me. I am not the good fighting back against evil. Like it says in Romans 12: "leave wrath up to God. As far as it depends on me, I live at peace with everyone." It's bizarre that the people who talk so much about life after death and the return of Christ miss the real political import of that.

Skye: Or the people who are quickest to claim Christian identity are the least likely to follow the example of Christ in the midst of persecution.

Kaitlyn: Which is not just kindness and turning the other cheek for no reason. It's that I have the freedom, because I believe all things will be made right in the end regardless of whether I secure that here and now.

So I have the freedom—even if I face an opponent as bad as Matt Walsh describes, even if they’re going to kill us in the streets—the Christian response would be: I believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. So I don’t resort to the means the world uses to get the goals I have in mind. I resort to different means.

Skye: It’s MLK’s quote: “I will not hate you.”