I usually read Peggy Noonan’s weekly “Declaration” in the WSJ with sympathetic skepticism, but in her September 27-28 column on the memorial service for Charlie Kirk in Glendale, Arizona, entitled “Charlie Kirk and the New Christian GOP,” I felt that she was really on to something. Her references to the new Christian spirit in the GOP and in traditional America as a whole are focused not on filling churches on Sunday (although that may happen as a consequence), but on reaffirming the core values of the Judeo-Christian tradition that has distinguished the USA from the first from its British and European roots, and that is concerned less with church-related activities than with a real sense of the mutual concern and support of the American community in obedience to the fundamental moral principle of “love thy neighbor as thyself.”.
When Noonan quotes Kirk’s widow Erika’s words for her husband’s assassin, “That young man—I forgive him,” she provides the answer to all the absurd and hateful accusations of “genocide” generated by the Gaza war: this is true human speech—the language of love, not resentment. Noonan’s main point is that Christian faith and its spirit of love for one’s fellows is no longer merely tolerated by the Republican Party—and by extension, by all those who reject the Left’s epistemology of resentment—but understood as the foundation of our civilization and our politics, not merely as an article of faith but an ethical value.
Hopefully under Erika’s direction the continued growth of Kirk’s Turning Point movement will indeed bring about a genuine spiritual renewal in sizeable percentage of the American public, returning the “Overton window” of our political dialogue to a position where opponents are treated without contempt and foul language, let alone assassins’ bullets. For to honor Kirk’s spirit, we must recognize and denounce, as charitably as his widow but above all as effectively as possible, the epistemology of resentment and its products, in politics as well as in religion.
Noonan’s and Erika Kirk’s words inspire me to attempt once again to formulate these affirmations of faith in terms that come as close as possible to demonstrating their human truth on the one hand, while justifying their paradoxical “absurdity”—to use Origen’s term—on the other.
When so-called Christians let themselves be tempted by antisemitism in its “red-green” variant, they should recall that John Paul II called the Jews the elder brothers of Christendom. And just as there could be no Christianity—and no Western civilization—without the Hebrew Old Testament, so there could be no extension of monotheism across half the world without the New. For all the Church’s skepticism about credo quia absurdum est, it is indeed the heart of Christian belief—what merit would there be in a faith that is simply believable? To believe in Jesus’ resurrection is to believe in an event inconceivable in terms of our worldly experience, yet, for a Christian, carried out by God the Father for the explicit purpose of obliging us to accept it as real, which means accepting the ambiguous, meager evidence for it, not as “proof” to show the skeptic that it really took place, but simply as an unproblematic sign of its reality.
The point of religion, of its coevality with the sign(s) of language, is to remind us that the originary truths expressed by and through language are those that affirm the solidarity of the human community. Humanity’s scenic existence allows us, as Sartre’s “translation” of the Hindu-Buddhist vision of néant/nothingness/emptiness into Western terms as freedom makes explicit, a space of free contemplation that separates us from the objects of our concern and the desires they inspire, a space within which we can not merely contemplate them but freely judge their moral value while communicating about them with our fellow humans.
As I tried to show in Chronicle 841, the very fact of our existence, that the physical forces that make up the universe came to produce beings like ourselves, capable of evaluating their own fate and of creating moral laws to ensure, as best they could, that they would not become the agents of their own destruction, means that we are entitled to interpret the resultant of these forces as the equivalent of a cosmic Will that seeks the welfare of our species. For our very existence on Earth demonstrates, at the very least, that the universe, which we are free to call the product of will of God, is such that intelligent, soulful creatures like ourselves, with an intuition of good and evil, can come to exist.
So, to return to Noonan’s optimistic appreciation of the Kirk memorial, we should take this as proof of the essential goodness of human existence, and make use of the spiritual facilities we have attained, whether or not transcendentally inspired, to maintain our faith in this goodness, and as a consequence to combat, by means as peaceful but also as resolute as possible—as in Erika’s quoted remark—the resentfulness that ultimately reflects hatred of our own species and a desire for it to perish.
For whether or not we “believe in God,” as Pascal put it, we are all willy-nilly “embarked” (embarqués), forced to make Pascal’s bet that our lives can be worthwhile, meaningful in at least the sense that as humans—who as far as we know are the only creatures in the universe to make moral judgments—we can judge them thus. So that, in consequence, it is our duty to encourage our fellows to work toward the success of the human enterprise by encouraging love rather than resentment toward, and in, our fellows.
In this context, without taking anything for granted, we should nonetheless avoid assuming that the jihadist mentality that governs Hamas and its allies is the definitive essence of Islam. Islam has less resentful offshoots in which loyalty to Allah is not synonymous with a battle to the finish between the abode of Islam and the “house of war.” In the present situation, I think it is sufficient that we support the positive Christian outlook that Kirk always manifested, rejecting as firmly yet as charitably as possible the resentment embodied in the red-green alliance, and taking every opportunity to denounce the historical lies that are central to the myths of Islamic historical firstness in Jerusalem and elsewhere. These are indeed arguments best made by Christians, whose claim of supersession never required anything like the historical falsifications that provided the supposed justification for the murderous Al Aqsa Flood pogrom. For Christianity conceived itself from the start as a supplement—a younger brother—to the Torah’s original revelation of monotheism, rather than as supplanting what Wikipedia calls, following the Koran, “earlier and corrupted revelations from the same God.”
Only a living Christianity can defend Western civilization from those who would destroy it, and we can take heart from the fact that, as it mourns the death of its founder, TPUSA appears to Noonan and the other observers whom she quotes as full of life and energy. Thus I find real encouragement in her conclusion that this memorial celebration “wasn’t just a memorial; it was a stepping forward in a new way of Christians and the Republican Party.”