I know I said I was bored with the subject, and wasn’t going to say anything else, but I just turned another rock over, and there are bunch of interesting little grubs under it.

I was just listening to a podcast where the discussion was about whether pastors who neglected to preach on Charlie Kirk’s assassination were derelict in their duties to their congregations. Mark Driscoll went so far as to say people should leave all such churches. Oddly, he didn’t say anything about staying with your church and finding a new pastor. It’s almost as if he, a pastor, were loathe to let anybody think that could be an option.

Now, I am not a pastor, and I will not tell anyone what I think their pastor should be doing. I believe local flocks have local needs, and the Holy Spirit can mind His people best through locally-minded shepherds. But I am a Sunday School teacher, a member of a church, a regular old run-of-the-mill Christian, and a congenital contrarian, so I’ll speak from that position.

The Sunday after Kirk’s death, many of the pastors and teachers I know spoke about the situation. Many others did not, or if they did, they only mentioned it in passing, and prayed for his family. I listened to my father’s sermon online, and he went on with the message he already had on his heart, with a passing mention for Kirk. I was sick last week, so I did not get a chance to teach my class that Sunday. If I had, I had no intention of talking about Charlie Kirk. We’re going through the book of Proverbs right now. We would have certainly prayed for his family and for God’s will to be done going forward.

I believe it is my role as a facilitator to give my younger brothers and sisters the tools required to rightly divide the Word of Truth. They can apply that understanding to political or current events on their own. I was, perhaps to my shame, massively relieved to find that I had a nasty head-cold so that I didn’t have to hear about Charlie Kirk during church that day. I simply cannot handle the push–the lockstep messaging that gets handed down through media, that everybody repeats as if it were their own. I feel the same on patriotic holidays, after massive news stories, and on Cinco de Mayo. Believe me, I am as uncomfortable with myself and my own tribe of cranks as I am with the mainstream.

I’m an equal-opportunity doubter.

Another Sunday School teacher had asked if it would be OK to speak to my children about the assassination, and I would have been fine with it if we’d been there. I trust her intentions and sense. I also believe I’ve given my children the aforementioned tools for discernment that I try to impart to my own class. And they are genetically mine, so not likely to be terribly manipulable. Whatever is spoken about politics or current events in the Sunday School room will be something they can parse quite well. I hope all of the students are so adept at weeding out the politics from the reality. I also think that the other Sunday School teacher could be more right than I am, or could have a good word for the children, who know about it already and need to process it somehow, so it really isn’t a problem for me if other teachers feel differently than I do. The Holy Spirit is ultimately in charge of all of us, and I trust that He’ll bring us all home in His own way and time.

I’m looking at this on two levels at once, but one of them has to supersede the other.

As I said before, I believe, and evidence is plentiful, that Kirk was killed because he had been a useful political tool, but was slowly waking up to the fact that he was controlled by people who do not serve Christ. As a Christian, he was beginning to catch on that he was trying to serve two masters. He was becoming uncontrollable, and he had to be taken out. In that way, in my mind, he has become a legitimate martyr for the Savior. I honor him as such.

But the public and shocking way that he was killed–and I am not immune to feeling very strong emotions about it, even when they are not the precise emotions that I’m expected to have–tells me that though he is a martyr, his death was fully intended by the Enemy to be used to move Christians in a particular direction. They have no problem taking difficult people out by pillow or car accident when they don’t want it talked about, but they chose to do this in a spectacular way, even possibly enhancing the images with AI to really stun a public that watches too many horror movies to be impressed with a normal amount of blood.

My sadness is for the life lost. But my anger is due to that feeling I’m getting, once again, that someone is attempting to manipulate me.

Here comes the Push.

Not twenty-four hours after his death, I started to get messages from other teachers and mothers and friends about how they’re doing this or that thing to further Charlie’s message. I saw everybody on the political “right” jumping in, gleeful at the potential for grift, to pick up his “bloody” microphone–people who cannot possibly understand his faith, but would love to ride on his political coattails for as long as they can be ridden.

I just don’t like it. It’s a gut thing. As my mom said the other day, with some frustration, “Oh, you never like anything.” It’s true. I’ve lamented in these pages before how wearying it is to never find myself on the comfortably correct page. But here we are again. Because, while on one level Charlie Kirk did indeed take that blow for Christ, on another, we all stand to be manipulated and used by the narrative that is even now being written about it. And that narrative is being written–in fact has already been written, and is now being read to us–by enemies of Christ.

They are whipping us into a hysteria.

As with covid and any other happenings that the media gets into a frenzy about, Christians need to be wary. We left a church because they refused to see the evil behind the masking and separation and the jabs. (That post is worth a read if you have a little extra time, especially if you are a pastor or deacon.) I was proud of those Christians I knew who were able to see through the lies, whether instantly or eventually, and I expect those same brothers and sisters will manage to both calm themselves and those under their influence so that they won’t be manipulated further.

Charlie Kirk believed in Christ. But his platform was a political one, and was so mixed up with the politics of other people who do not believe in Christ, and in fact actively despise Christ, that we should not join any movement, take any stance, give any money, or do any deed which is pressed upon us as “for Charlie”. We cannot allow our love for a brother to override our skepticism of the political ends to which we are surely being brought. I do not profess to know what these ends are–not in the shorter term, at least–but it is glaringly obvious that there are some. As with covid, any pastor or teacher that makes a big deal of this inside church walls, devoting unnecessary attention or emotion to it, could be (unwittingly, I hope) adding the authority of his position to designs of Christ’s enemies. Again, there may be a pressing need within some congregations to have it addressed in some way, and I’m not saying every pastor or teacher is doing this. But teachers should tremble to think how they might get this wrong.

It has always been my nature to stay on the edge of the herd, even the finest herd, so that when the stampedes start, I can step off and figure out what to do. This has the characteristics of another stampede, much like the Great Toilet Paper Run of 2020, and I want nothing to do with it.

Since Charlie’s death is so fresh, and so much is coming to light about the reasons for it, I think Christians should allow time to gain better perspective on it, rather than rushing out to declare ourselves part of some “movement”.

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