Debates around Charlie Kirk’s assassination swing from what he was, and what he was not. Among the multiple centres is the validity of his theology, and in South Africa, there are additional debate points on matters of race. In this light, the past week, there have been mainly three discussive points, perhaps more.
Rebecca Davis, whose article appeared in the Daily Maverick on 14 September, represents one group of South Africans. She argued that South Africa has more pressing issues — from pit latrines and socio-cultural based violence, to realities of pregnancies of 10-year-old girls. Rebecca then locates Charlie Kirk in the category of what she refers to as internet wars, downplaying its relevance in the face of “real wars” which South Africa faces.
A second camp finds reference in Charles Matseke, who, writing for Eyewitness News, insists that the reactions to Kirk’s assassination, in South Africa at least, underscore the brazen versions of racism. Matseke further faults the civil religion form of Christianity which he blames for the vagaries of colonialism and apartheid.
Then there are those who cleave to the AfriForum narrative. Beyond laying a wreath at the US embassy in Pretoria, AfriForum went as far as drawing parallels between what they view as hostility against conservative thought in America and in South Africa.
Just how legitimate are these positions particularly if we examine issues from a socio-political fulcrum? Analysis of Rebecca’s view reveals commitment to nationalism — namely, South African identity disconnected from a global franchise of the social, the political and the economic. If we follow her view to a logical conclusion, that internet wars are simply toxic imports in a country with too many other pressure points, it follows that we should never have been concerned with Covid, or Trump’s tariffs,or cross-border diseases. In so doing we would have to deny the obvious — that in the 21st century, all oceans meet. And in South Africa, oceans meet as literally as they do figuratively.
Charles Matseke, on his part, recycles the exhausted arguments about what is already known — that racism is alive and well. Borrowing from Feuerbach, Marx and Engels, he argues that civil Christianity is a human invention and a tool of social oppression. Like these philosophers, Charles lays his axe at the foot of Christianity, almost cutting down that tree of the knowledge of good and evil. These efforts have never gone beyond wishful thought.
While AfriForum claims to promote civil rights, in reality, it is committed to white denialism of history — successfully translating white resentment to political capital. In 2018, AfriForum’s chief executive, Kallie Kriel, and his deputy, Ernst Roets, effectively persuaded the global alt-right enterprise that white farmers were being murdered as a targeted group in South Africa. AfriForum, along with the global alt-right, have managed to sustain the decadent discourse that, when people of colour face racial discrimination, they simply misinterpret, and exaggerate cultural variations — especially white cultural preferences and aversions.
For this neo-conservative coterie, freedom to preserve “culture” is a right worth living and dying for. In this camp, all means are employed, including the deplorable tool of ad hominem (play the man) if you can’t engage intellectually. Challenge this absurdity and you are the game, you are the real racist. Or God’s judgment is invoked on you, all of which I had to contend with, in the wake of Kirk’s murder. Most of Kirk’s arguments easily situate him within this alt-right camp.
What about Kirk’s brand of Christian theology? Close analysis points to a sort of theological nationalism, deeply entangled with cultural morality and crude forms of capitalism. Granted, Charlie held the orthodox position about the redemptive implications of the death and resurrection of Christ to those who believe. As a Christian theologian, I agree with him on the biblical foundations of family values, and that no matter how uncomfortable, God’s truth is objective.
But I part ways with Kirk on his compartmentalisation of faith as something to believe, mix with culture and Western values, then publicise it as the gospel way of life. Part of the perversions of Kirk’s gospel further related to racial denialism, the vicious dismissal of migrants as intruders and the homeless as simply lazy. There is nothing remotely gospel about this sort of abhorrence of “the suffering other”.
Christ’s gospel must be full of truth and grace. The schism between theological right and theological left is partly advanced by selective treatment of one of both. For the theological right, truth is treated without much grace while the theological left employ almost in wholesale grace without truth.
Back to Kirk. He did not invent societal norms or right-wing conservatism and its underbellies of moral deficiency, along the lines of “love the Lord your God, love yourself and love your country. Do not love or favourably regard your neighbour”. But he affirmed them. He used his tools of trade under the collective safety of right-wing conservatism rather than individual striving for truth, grace and righteousness.
Like Friedrich Nietzsche I fault Kirk of herd mentality, and of misleading the gullible into his kraal. Ironically, this herd is now fiercely committed to defend their man, by any verbal means possible rather than gracefully defend God’s Truth.
Based at the University of Pretoria, Dr Jason Musyoka is a theologian and a political economist. These are his personal views.
The American right-wing Christian nationalist, media personality and ally of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement was shot dead on 10 September
