The Funeral

MAGA Confronts a Turning Point

"My husband Charlie he wanted to save young men, just like the one who took his life...On the cross, our savior said, 'Father, forgive them, for they not know what they do.' That young man. I forgive him. I forgive him, because it was what Christ did. It’s what Charlie would do. The answer to hate is not hate. The answer — we know from the Gospel — is love and always love. Love for our enemies, and love for those who persecute us.”

—Erika Kirk

“I hate my opponent and I don't want the best for them…I'm sorry, Erika — now Erika can talk to me and the whole group and maybe they can convince me that that's not right — but I can't stand my opponent.”

—Donald Trump

Well, that clears things up. I was fearing a Nuremberg rally on Sunday in Arizona, a transformation of Charlie Kirk into Horst Wessel, the Nazi martyr. But it was a lot more complicated, and moving, than that. Because Christians aren’t Nazis. They are conflicted humans, writhing in anguish between what Jesus taught…and what, too often, the church has practiced. There were terrifying vengeance-is-mine moments in Arizona, but there were also moments of faith and forgiveness, none more than Erika Kirk’s, a moment that reflected and reified the time, ten years ago, when the black congregants of Mother Emanuel Church forgave Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who assassinated nine of their members.

Too often the essence of humanity is compromised by ideology. It is a natural tendency. It has been the eternal struggle of the Christian church and the Muslim Ummah; the Old Testament Jehovah, whom Jews worship, came equipped with fire and brimstone, armor and a sword. Jesus walked barefoot, in rags; he instructed his followers to do the same. He “hung out,” as Charlie Kirk said, with the poor. He would have been entirely uncomfortable in the riches of the Vatican and Joel Osteen’s gospel of prosperity. He did not preach from the pulpit of a mega-church; his was, as an evangelical once told me, a church without walls.

Charlie Kirk had elements of both grace and vengeance. He lived for debate—though it was a sound-byte truncated sort of a debate, in which his cleverness destroyed the myopic weakness of campus lefties. He came with a sword. He tried to live the teachings of Jesus, but lapsed too easily into the abyss of hatred. I would have liked to see how he would have fared in a debate with fellow believers, those who found piety through intellectual struggle like Jerry Brown and Abraham Joshua Heschel. Which side would he be on?

That was the struggle that played out at his funeral. There were moments of high moral vision. Some of the speakers—J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, even Tucker Carlson—seemed aware of who Jesus was and what he taught. It was easy to admire the rhetoric but hard to listen to. The divide between what they said and how they roll is blatant, the stuff of monumental hypocrisy. But at least they tried. They aspired toward grace. And then there was Stephen Miller, who was terrifying. He said to his imagined enemies

“You have no idea the dragon you have awakened. You have no idea how determined we will be to save this civilization, to save the West, to save the republic…”

He said:

“You have nothing, you are nothing, you are wickedness, you are jealousy, you are envy, you are hatred… you can build nothing, you can produce nothing”

He said:

“Erica is the storm. We are the storm and our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion"

He said:

“You thought you could kill Charlie Kirk. You have made him immortal. You have immortalized Charlie Kirk. And now millions will carry on his legacy… You cannot defeat us. You cannot slow us. You cannot stop us. You cannot deter us”.

Let us not put too fine a point on it: this is the voice of pure evil, of retribution. One wonders what indignities were visited upon Miller in the corridors of Santa Monica High School. He remains a child, who has taken on the gratuitous viciousness of the cool kids. Vengeance is his. And Trump’s…

Ahh, Donald. The widow smoked you. She was a tough act to follow; she should have been the last act. But you always go last as President, and you have never seemed more empty and pathetic, trying to be gracious—interspersing a eulogy with various imagined political triumphs and vows to cancel your enemies. A day later, Trump’s people figured out that God was a Player, a fantasy source of succor for his cult. Here was Monday’s blast email:

Since the day I returned to the White House, I have felt the mighty hand of God guiding this movement. His Word reminds us: “If God is for us, who can be against us?”

Actually, that was the Apostle Paul, a converted Pharisee, a tortured vessel involved in the Church’s first internecine battle—in Jerusalem, against the Jewish followers of Jesus, led by Jesus’s brother James, and Simon Peter. James is a problem for many Christians. If Mary was a Virgin, where did he come from? Turns out, The Greatest Story Ever Told is a glorious myth, filled with great metaphoric truth—with the teachings, which were mostly about giving everything to the poor, the impossible standard imparted to his followers. The literal truth of the Bible is aspirational. Jesus didn’t have to raise the dead; he tried to raise the living. His was a scapegoat sacrifice, the most powerful and sacred religious ritual in the ancient world. The scapegoat always carried with him (or, more often, her) the sins of society.

Did Charlie Kirk rise to the level of being MAGA’s scapegoat sacrifice?

There have always been two roads: the path of vengeance and the less-traveled path of forgiveness and grace. I have never seen the dichotomy laid so bare as it was in a football stadium in Arizona on Sunday, which makes this—whether we like it or not—a moment of the utmost significance.