What we know is that political violence thrives when people are dehumanized. Healing begins when we treat one another, not as enemies or ideologies, but as neighbors and fellow citizens, worthy of respect and compassion.
While we lament and deplore Charlie Kirk’s death, our faith invites us to see Kirk’s death as both a sign of the times and a call to Christian discipleship. Kirk’s death points us to what we have lost as a nation and how we might begin to recover and regain our bearings as we navigate these fractured times.
Like others on both the right and left, Kirk had become a caricature of our current moment in which political posturing and culture wars have all too often replaced political discussion and compromise. In a culture dominated by those caricatures and often influenced by the dark spaces of the internet, Kirk’s death is even more tragic and demands a deeper response than outrage at an individual. To paraphrase Utah governor Spencer Cox, it requires that all of us who call ourselves Americans—especially those of us who follow Jesus Christ—figure out how to disagree better.
The Episcopal Church, in its catechetical and liturgical materials, teaches that the “peace of God that passes all understanding” is not a passive peace that buffers us from the world, but rather it is the peace that “makes us peacemakers.” We can live that peace as peacemakers when we take seriously the Christian Science Monitor’s exhortation to “not return evil for evil, when the answer to violence is justice and love.”
We do that by offering an alternative vision for public life rooted in the dignity of every human person and the repudiation of fear as the driving force in public life. In short, we must come to disagree better, to be a people of peace, to resist violence by making peacemakers. In Kirk’s death, we can see our most authentic self as a nation in this moment. We must remind ourselves and others, there are good people on both the right and the left. These are not groups of people with monolithic belief systems.
As Episcopalians, we are people of prayer. Still, this week and all too often, we have again been called to speak differently: to raise a prophetic voice in common and in witness, rooted in our convictions about the dignity of each human being and the reconciling love of Christ. It is time to pray and to speak—to pray in lament and to speak the truth, without fear or favor, about the way ahead.
This is not the time for partisan responses, but for faithful witness. As Episcopalians, we have more important work to do than contribute to the noise and rancor of polarized discourse. The witness of our tradition, rich in common prayer and sacraments, civic engagement, and incarnational theology, must rise above the din.
Even if Kirk’s own words incited violence and sought to harm others, there remains for the Christian no defense for his death.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was an opponent of violence. He believed that violence “never brings permanent peace” because it only creates more problems, and rather than solving them, it leaves a hardened bitterness and hatred, rather than constructive and stable relationships. For this reason, King was committed to nonviolent resistance as the only method for gaining reconciliation, redemption, and the “beloved community”. King’s philosophy of nonviolence was a “redemptive” approach to opposing injustice. It was a commitment to the courageous, loving, and faithful pursuit of justice, even through suffering, if necessary, to overcome injustice without humiliating the oppressor.
What King sought to teach us was that the cry against the assassination of Charlie Kirk is the same call as when we cried out against King’s own assassination.
We are, after all, a people formed by a liturgy that teaches us to confess our sins, to pass the peace, to pray for those in authority, and to seek the good of our communities and our world. These aren’t hollow pieties or turn-of-the-century platitudes. They are the formational practices of a moral people who are called to “proclaim by word and example the dignity and the divine lovingkindness of all people.” Moreover, it calls us to pray for our leaders – all of them.
Silence is not an option. A condescending, dismissive, or quiescent response is not an option. We must refuse as Christians to dehumanize those with whom we disagree or those who disagree with us. As followers of Jesus, we must resist with all our power the false economies of ideology, of political platforms, of tribal party loyalties that treat human beings as ideological pawns, as “reasons” or “excuses” or “indications” of some other purported reality.
The Baptismal Covenant that we make and renew challenges us, “to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves,” and “to strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.” It is time, as Episcopalians, to speak these words without our fingers crossed behind our backs.
We must, with one voice, speak—and not just of the wrongness of violence, but of the sacredness of every life, including those about whom we most profoundly disagree.
We must raise our voices as a Church, across our differences: a voice for dignity; a voice of lament; a voice of hope; a voice of holy resolve. This is the vocation of the Church in our fragmented age: to be a people of prayer, presence, and prophetic witness and courage. To allow acts of political violence to become normalized—to keep ourselves from speaking, because of tribal loyalties, with a single voice of lament and hope—is to betray our identity as Christians and our vocation as Anglicans.
The cry we make for the safety of our LGBTQ+ siblings and their deaths, the cry for our brother and sister immigrants abused and killed by ICE, the cry for the deaths of Sandra Bland, Kaylin Gills, Trayvon Martin, and former Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman, the cry we raise against the mob of January 6, and the cry we raise because of the killing of Charlie Kirk is the same! Violence is the way of this world, and it is the calling card of the powers that be rather than the Lord of Life and the King of Peace, Jesus. But it does not have to be.
The via media of Anglicanism we Episcopalians hold to, the complex commitments we hold to both justice and mercy, to Scripture and reason, to the traditions of our faith and to context—give us important tools for this work. We must model the way forward: to name the dignity of each life, and to condemn violence as the language of politics in our democracy. And as we do this work, may we remember the counsel of our Book of Common Prayer when we pray “for our enemies, and those who wish us harm,” that we might not be overcome by the spirit of retribution but by the Christian witness of Christ’s peace.
The murder of Charlie Kirk is a grief for his family, for the community of Young America PAC, and for our nation. But it is also, we are convinced, a call to the Church—not to claim him as some partisan icon, not as a martyr, not as someone who deserved to be killed – instead, we name his humanity, to insist that violence cannot, must not, be the language of our life together in community nor our democracy. In his death, as in so many others, we are reminded of how precious and precarious our life together is.
May we, as members of the global Anglican communion and as Episcopalians, commit ourselves afresh, to the work of reconciliation, and to the bold, joyful, and unrelenting ministry of Christ’s peace in a time that so desperately demands it.
The Rt. Rev. C. Andrew Doyle
IX Bishop of Texas
