Charlie Kirk: “This is a very, very important point. Did you ever fear that, if you did something wrong, your mother would, quote, ‘kill you’?”
George Janko: “My mom would beat the brakes off of me.”
Kirk: “That’s biblical.”
~Charlie Kirk, “Parents Need to Learn How to Discipline Their Kids” video, 2024
*****
The Book of Proverbs tells us in Chapter 11, Verse 10 that, “When the wicked perish, there are shouts of joy.” There is a deep, uncomfortable truth in this verse. We saw this in the collective sighs of relief and happiness expressed by exvangelicals and homeschool alumni after the passing of evangelical parenting teacher James Dobson. Dobson’s advocacy and teachings long terrorized children in evangelical families and encouraged their parents to act abusively. His “focus on the family” was responsible for widespread family alienation and breakdown among evangelicals. With his passing comes the realization that, while his teachings may persist, he can no longer actively harm us. There should be joy in that. It’s only human.
At the same time, I don’t celebrate death. It’s not that I think we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead or that I think being sensitive to his family’s grief necessitates whitewashing his legacy. There’s never a good or comfortable time for these conversations. And it’s not that I don’t celebrate liberation. I live for liberation. Again, I am glad Dobson can no longer actively harm children and their families.
But I also mourn that Dobson now will never be held accountable and responsible in this life for the harm he caused. He will never see or acknowledge it. He will never have to apologize to the victims and survivors of his teachings. He will never hear their stories. He will never pay for their therapy or medical bills or engage in other forms of restitution and justice. He will never see his organizations sued and bankrupt.
Death can end harm, but it does not heal. This is one reason why I struggle with the morality of something like the death penalty—even when applied to the worst among us, like mass shooters, child molesters, and rapists. Cases like those test my patience with non-violence and make me support violence in self-defense. For example, someone taking out an active shooter, a child fending off parental abuse, or a woman physically harming a man trying to rape her are all moral uses of violence, in my mind.
At the same time, I realize there’s often a significant difference between violent self-defense and killing a violent person. While it can seem like a quick and easy fix for the state to end the life of a harmful person, killing another human being ends a lot more than harm alone. This is why I also do not celebrate extrajudicial killing—even if the people killed are acting violently, like mentally ill individuals killed by police, alleged drug traffickers in boats killed with bombs, or Charlie Kirk killed by a white terrorist*. While I am not a pacifist, my support for violence only extends to self-defense. (We do not know much about Kirk’s assassin yet that is free from misinformation, but he doesn’t appear to have shot Kirk out of necessity for self-defense.)
Having said all that, I have no patience for the many lectures being offered recently on the morality of violence by some Americans, especially among the Christian Right, who have not said a word about the constant and normalized violence our country inflicts on its own children as well as children of other nations. As the brilliant Dr. Chrissy Stroop writes, “You cannot fix the problem by telling everyone to trust institutions that have already failed, and you cannot fix our violent, conspiratorial gun culture by dishonestly lecturing society about ‘political violence’ and ‘free speech’ in a way that regards only fascists’ lives and speech as valuable and obscures the very real problem of political violence carried out and/or inspired by the regime.”
In other words, intentionally selective outrage is not the answer.
The fact is, many of you have no problem with violence. You “beat the brakes off” your own children and your love of hitting children is why the United States is still the only member nation of the UN that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. You put your children in churches and organizations—like the Southern Baptist Convention, the Catholic Church, and Boy Scouts—known for child sexual abuse and rape. You incarcerate more children than any other country in the world. You only stopped the death penalty for children 20 years ago, in 2005. You support the American-funded genocide and famine ravaging Palestinian children, calling children “future terrorists” who deserve violence. You terrify children with the threat of eternal hellfire.
Political violence isn’t just the violence of so-called “lone wolves” (the vast majority of whom are rightwing extremists, but you never acknowledge that or call for reforms based on their extremism; in fact, you hide the evidence and even look the other way when American neo-Nazis exploit lax homeschooling laws to raise their children to love Adolf Hitler). Political violence is also the violence of our communities, organizations, and governments who desecrate our human rights on a daily basis. It is the violence sacralized by churches against women, children, and queer people; it is the violence white America still considers right and justified in inflicting on Americans of color through segregation, lynchings, and rape; it is the violence perpetrated by police against vulnerable people and by ICE against immigrants and citizens alike.
I am sorry if you are distressed and disturbed by the state of American politics and rhetoric. But this is the world many of you either wanted (even lusted for) or did not raise a finger to stop until it was too late. Some of you directly contributed to this state, calling your ideological opponents “demons” or “groomers” or “pedophiles” or whatever evil superlatives you could imagine. Some of you stood idly by when these accusations were thrown about with abandon, robbing the words of their utility and fracturing the public square. I don’t say this to blame you for any particular act of violence, or to simply highlight that the fruit of your hands and words and deeds is distressing and disturbing. Those are superficial critiques. I need you to understand a deeper, but harder, truth here: it’s been distressing and disturbing in the United States for decades, centuries really. And you have ignored, whitewashed, and even mocked and glorified the violence.
I know this personally because I and my friends and peers have been screaming at the top of our lungs for over a decade and a half about the violent radicalization occurring in the United States through homeschooling and most of you have said or done nothing about it. Dozens of homeschool alumni have shot up families and churches. Hundreds of homeschooled children have been abused and tortured to death by parents who were taught that they have the right of supreme rulership over their children and must violently break their wills.
And we’ve done absolutely nothing to address this nightmare. In fact, in the last decade and a half, states have only further deregulated homeschooling. Today, only two states prohibit registered sex offenders or convicted child abusers from homeschooling. Instead of protecting children, we are passing “parental rights” laws that impede child access to any support systems outside of their families, even suicide hotlines and medical care in public schools. We’re going backwards on children’s rights. We’re intentionally sealing families off from accountability in order to normalize familial violence on a mass scale—enabling and empowering violent parents to make every single day of their children’s lives an absolute hell with no chance of rescue. That is the endgame of parental rights.
Violence begins in families. What parents model for their children regarding the use, misuse, and abuse of power has widespread ramifications far beyond the family. James Dobson understood this. That is why he focused so much on shoring up authority and hierarchy in families and why he supported Donald Trump: his ideal family was a mirror image of his ideal church and government. In the Dobsonian-Trumpian worldview, a sexualized saying like “Daddy’s home” can serve simultaneously as the essence of the gospel promise, the essence of biblical parenting, and the essence of good government.
This is true for many of you as well. I know how you like to parent. You envision yourselves as holy dictators, like adults are the stand-ins for God Almighty in children’s lives. You parent like children need to immediately and cheerfully submit to adult power, most especially fathers’ power. You parent as if children fearing their parents might “kill” them is “biblical”—like the Binding of Isaac is Abraham’s proudest moment as a father.
So, unless you are willing to look at the root of violence in your own families or respect the human rights of other families’ children, I cannot take your concerns about violence seriously. Because you don’t really, actually, truly dislike violence. Let’s stop dancing around that fact. Our faith and country’s bloodlusts are the stuff of legends and I have seen you celebrate those very facts on so many occasions. I have seen your coloring books meant for children, celebrating Abraham about to slay his own child. I witnessed the floating border wall with deadly circular saws that Texas erected to keep out immigrant families. I saw you write “Finish them!” on artillery shells that tore apart the bodies of Palestinian children.
You long for heaven—because hell will be full of your enemies, burning alive forever beneath you. You describe God’s grace as “the holy rape of the soul.”
No, it’s not violence you hate.
You just hate when the violence grows up and returns home like the prodigal son with a gun, ready to massacre his own family.
*****
*I disagree with Ta-Nehisi Coates in his provocative, recent Vanity Fair piece, “Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause,” when he writes that, ”Words are not violence.” I do think people too often confuse criticism and disagreement with hate and abuse. But words absolutely can be abusive—and abuse is violence. This is why emotional abuse (which includes verbal or written abuse) is one of the four main, recognized types of child abuse, along with physical abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect. Words are not physically violent, but that does not erase their ability to damage and destroy another human being, including physically—or their potential to incite people to physical violence. As seen in this piece’s epigraph, Kirk promoted adults beating children, and striking fear in them, as biblical and right. That, along with Kirk’s advocacy for executing former President Joe Biden, are two of many reasons why I include him on this list of examples.