“Now that everyone has seen the blatant white Christian nationalism on display at the Kirk memorial/political rally, here are some resources to help you learn more and resist more effectively.” This sentence was posted on X by Jemar Tisby, a protégé of the huckster Ibram X. Kendi. Tisby followed up that observation by helpfully pointing people to his own book, Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity with Racism, as a manual to combat the grave evils they had just witnessed in State Farm Stadium.
That Tisby would think to write and then publish this sentiment about Charlie Kirk’s memorial service shows the depths to which the Left has sunk. They are categorically rejecting the bonds of civic friendship that are necessary to keep our country whole. Instead of centering “whiteness,” they center race-based narcissism, envy, and pride, the modern Left’s unholy trinity.
I realize that using the term “they” angers people like Karl Rove, but there’s currently a political movement in America—the Left—that’s increasingly giddy as violence is being directed against their foes. Yes, only one leftist pulled the trigger—but the Left as a whole prepared the ground for that demonic action by constantly dehumanizing their political opponents by calling them “fascists,” “Nazis,” and worse, shouting down and even assaulting speakers on college campuses, and backing a massive network of far-left extremist organizations that are dedicated to upending civil society by any means necessary.
If the point of the Left’s project is humiliation, the way they carry it out is through a systematic assault on the basic ways of life that have been practiced in this country for hundreds of years.
Tent revivals, open-air preaching to the masses, altar calls, and seemingly miraculous, on-the-spot conversions are thoroughly American. The words of the King James Bible have been peppered in political speeches throughout our nation’s history, as has the imagery of America as the new Israel and Americans as the “almost chosen people,” in Lincoln’s weighty phrase. Preachers and politicians taught that the Good News of freedom from slavery and other forms of despotism flowed from the Good News of Christianity. Election sermons were given for centuries, especially around the time of the American Revolution (read Ellis Sandoz’s two-volume collection if you haven’t already done so). Even the blatantly unorthodox Benjamin Franklin raved about George Whitefield’s preaching in his Autobiography.
That these folkways have waned in recent times indicates that we’ve lost our way and should return to our traditions. But the Left wants us to draw precisely the opposite lesson: that our nation has been a racist hellhole for nearly the entirety of its existence, which is why our heritage should be rejected in toto.
I understand that the memorial’s lighting, music, and presentation may have struck some as gauche. Speaking for most of the press, the Atlantic’s Thomas Chatterton Williams admitted he never felt “so estranged from the surrounding culture as I am from the aesthetics and sensibilities of this movement.” But this is America, in which the sacred is often mixed with a little bit of the profane. That Williams is so out of touch with the people and the country he gets paid to write about is a perfect microcosm of the state of our elites—at least on their best days.
On their worst, however, one need look no further than Ta-Nehisi Coates, who called Charlie Kirk a “hatemonger” in the days after his murder. The eye-opening reactions from people like Coates and Tisby should be seen as the exact type of character the DEI regime produces. What were once considered vices or at least violations of social norms—untoward levels of pride and self-centeredness—became high principles in the new dispensation. Self-governing citizens were urged to transform into mini-tyrants, remaking the world as their untutored will dictates, as all public institutions and high places of culture cheered them on.
Civilized people would refrain from posting their nasty thoughts on the day a person was killed in cold blood. Openly reveling in the murder of a political opponent, as those who run our universities, largest public and private institutions, and churches have done on a mass scale, and peddling the absurdity that there’s rising violence on “both sides,” as our former vice president did in a conversation with Tim Alberta, should be thought unconscionable. Even the “I disagreed with Charlie Kirk but…” that too many smug academics have indulged in is in poor taste.
We’ve covered the “white” part of Tisby’s claim, but what about the bogeyman of “Christian nationalism”?
The endless denunciations of it had mostly subsided—the last raft of literature was published around a year ago—until the press began their fumbling efforts to describe the exotic scenes of prayer and preaching they witnessed at the Kirk memorial.
But whatever name you want to give it, the increasing popularity of phrases like “Christian nationalism” and “Heritage American” is a clear sign that more and more Americans want to return to America as it was before the Left began refashioning it into their own warped image. (And no, recovering our traditions and key political principles does not necessitate returning to the exact social conditions of the past.) The terms matter less than the obvious fact that our countrymen are deeply unsatisfied with being under the care of the god of liberalism.
A people looking to recover what they’ve lost means a people in the midst of discovering the will to act. That is the most crucial source of hope in our nation today.