I stepped in poop this morning. It wasn’t outside, which would have made more sense, if I had been heading out in the dark to fetch the newspapers. I remember the days when I lived at home with my Mom and Dad. If I was the first one up in the morning, I would often go out and grab the newspapers—the Auburn Journal and Sacramento Bee. My folks used to spend the first hours of the day at the breakfast table, with coffee and newspapers. I would join them sometimes—my Dad would hand me the Bee’s Scene Section, which always had feature stories and Dear Abby and Ann Landers.
Nope. I stepped on poop inside the house, as I staggered out of bed and headed to the bathroom. I’m not sure which beloved pet left the pile for me. I’m guessing the cat.
Some days are like that.
Some weeks are like that, too.
It was yet another rough week in our national news cycle, marked by the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was killed at a college event he was hosting in Orem, Utah. His murder was tragic; all politically motivated shootings are, as are school shootings and domestic violence incidents. There was much initial vitriol from conservative commentators, who assumed that Kirk’s assassin was someone who identified with the political left. President Trump blamed the shooting on “the radical left.” Elon Musk posted that “the Left is the party of murder.”
The tone changed a little when it was announced that the alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, was actually raised in a Republican, gun-owning family. U.S Representative Nancy Mace, who repeatedly uses slurs against transgender people, initially said that “Democrats own this, 100 percent,” but later, after Robinson was arrested, wrote, “We know Charlie Kirk would want us to pray for such an evil, and lost individual like Tyler Robinson to find Jesus Christ. We will try to do the same.”
There’s a lot of scripture quoting going on right now, lots of prayers. Mace posted on her Instagram account that “Kirk was a GIANT OF HIS GENERATION (capital letters are hers). She followed with a Bible verse, “Surely the righteous will never be shaken; they will be remembered forever (Psalm 112:6).
There’s another side to all this Bible quoting , though, where other, less conservative Christians are landing. Kirk, who said that Martin Luther King Jr. was “awful” and called George Floyd a “scumbag,” did not seem to talk much about some things that seemed to be important to Jesus: loving your neighbor as yourself, caring for the poor, welcoming the refugee.
Theologian Candice Benbow wrote on Instagram, “I worry that we are witnessing the veneration of a white supremacist in real time. And, given that it’s happening at a moment when this country’s history is being whitewashed, it’s really no surprise. What is surprising is our active participation in that veneration in service of some performance of piety and moral superiority.”
She had a lot more to say after that. Her recent Instagram post is worth a read for sure.
I do not know what those of us who revere Martin Luther King Jr. will be called to do in these strange days—those of us who also love transgender folks, who think that ICE’s actions have been despicable, who do not think that Charlie Kirk should lie in honor at the Capitol Rotunda (as was recently proposed by Mace). What does laying down our lives for our friends mean now? Some of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s most famous quotes come to mind: “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die,” and “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless.”
There is all of this—and there is also the need to go to work and get my car’s oil changed, to cook dinner and grocery shop and clean up the poop that I stepped in this morning.
I am a little overwhelmed right now. And my knee has been hurting. All of this is very sobering.
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