Despite my pagan name, I was raised in the Catholic tradition, sent to catholic schools, and, before I discovered sex, aspired to the priesthood. The prospect of God, I thought only logical, after all, if I were to die and be wrong, there would be no afterlife from which I could eternally regret my mortal one. But as I matured, I started to realize you can’t logic your way into faith. I didn’t actually believe in God. I wanted to. I read the bible. I absorbed the morality of Jesus of Arimathea, but I didn’t feel the divinity alight within me. When I was scared, I didn’t find comfort in a church. When I was lost, I didn’t feel the tug of an empyrean hand at my shoulder. When I wanted to hurt myself in my youth, I didn’t keep going because Christ embraced me, but because I’ve always felt my life didn’t belong to me. 

“Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.”  Henry David Therau wrote that in a plea to the nation with the hope they’d steel their souls with the same stuff that made that of the old warrior. Brown, that day, was put to death for his siege of the armory and adjacent plantation at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. From the position of the Ferry, he planned to free and arm the captive slaves and roll them across the state, burning down plantations and picking up newly freed black men as they went. 

The raid did not go well for Old Brown. An unscheduled train that he refused to take hostage telegraphed the national guard at the next stop, and within a few hours,  seventeen of his men, and one of his sons, lay dead. Once subdued, Brown, crazed silver hair still stained with a mix of the blood of militia men and his boy, was asked why he was there. He said, “I pity the poor in bondage that have none to help them; that is why I am here, not to gratify any personal animosity, revenge, or vindictive spirit. It is my sympathy with the oppressed and the wronged, that are as good as you, and as precious in the sight of God.”  

Brown’s surviving son would write to carry on the legacy and sate the curiosity of the throngs of fans his legend minted.  A quote from a collection of these writings, Cloudsplitter: “Recalling those days long ago, having seen all of the civilized world an ordinary man needs to see… Wherever we lived, we were like an island in a sea of chicanery, godlessness, disorder, and willful ignorance… My brothers and I were taught not to lord it over others less fortunate than we, less disciplined, less inclined to sacrifice on the common wheel. Father only made demands of us that he made of himself, and made no demands of others but accepted those as he found them…He knew all the ways of men and women… He was not one who shut his eyes to the licentious or lascivious. He never warned another man or woman off from speech or act because he was too delicate of sensibility, or too pious, or too virtuous to witness the thing…He merely elected to live a different way. He knew what got on between men and women, or men and men. Nothing people did with or to one another shocked him. Only slavery shocked him.”

Seated on straw and gunpowder at the floor of the fated armory, Brown was a man alight in holy fire.  He knew that he was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. He was a man whose faith kept his heart in time with the beat of the moral universe, and he knew slavery’s hour was at hand. Mere weeks after Harper’s Ferry, the abolitionist movement exploded across the North. A year and some change after his hanging, the first shots of the Civil War were fired. 

In the ten days that have followed the shooting of Charlie Kirk, a monsoon of hagiographic material has made landfall in our nation. Gavin Newsom, who sells himself as a levee against the tides of the Trump administration, Charlie’s boss, lauded Kirk’s “passion and commitment to debate.” Speaker Mike Johnson eulogized him 6 days ago, saying, “Charlie was a happy warrior…he never hated anyone…he believed in scripture [and] was a Christ follower, and tried to model that in every single thing that he did.” Charlie, in his own words, said he would like to “be remembered for (his) faith.” But in the moments before Charlie was killed, he was in the midst of race-baiting, a far cry from old John Brown. 

Just prior to the shot, he was engaged in his professed past time of “spirited debate”, discussing with a data Tik Tocker, Hunter, the severe outlier that was trans shooters. Charlie favored squinting at the statistical smudge and seeing some great kaleidoscope of societal sickness. Jesus used to wash the feet of prostitutes. Brown never questioned who he broke bread with. Charlie misrepresented data so that he could make trans people out to be the all-grooming, all-shooting, and –if you believe the conspiratorial musings of Tim Pool– all-knowing scourge of the earth. 

Indeed, the life Kirk lived up to those moments, too, was incongruous with the piety we see professed in the maelstrom that’s carried on in the wake of his passing. Kirk was an avid zionist and ultimately uncritical of their ongoing atrocities; in fact, he relished the violence.  At an event, Charlie waxed humorously, “It’s funny. I used to say, hey, if you, as a gay person would go to Gaza, they would throw you off of tall buildings…. Now they don’t have any tall buildings… maybe don’t kill Jews, you stupid Muslims.” I’ve always found this talking point revealing. Not only because the only reported cases of gays being thrown off of buildings were in Syria by specifically ISIS, or even just because it’s deployed to grant permission to commit violence against muslims broadly, but it’s laced with the threat that gay people had better count themselves lucky that some people at least suffer them enough to let them live. 

Almost to prove that the violence of the state of Israel was the entire point for him, Charlie’s enmity would not turn its foul gaze away from even the Jewish people. During his podcasts, he would soft peddle the great replacement theory, until one time he decided to completely hard peddle that shit; “The philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country.” Kirk would say into a hot mic that he himself owned and turned on. 

Charlie railed against giving black people a leg up in any professional capacity. He’d let his shadow out bit by bit in his podcast studio. Maybe the fabled chair he sat in was just so damn comfortable he couldn’t help but ruminate on multiple occasions about how uncomfortable he would be with a black pilot, a black surgeon, a black person in customer-fucking-service…It almost seemed as though there was no space for black people in the world that Charlie saw, because Charlie saw black people as “prowling” inhuman predators, and any attempt to join the ranks of polite [white] society was an affront to his senses. 

If you don’t believe me, then you could ask his staff. The culture at the institution Charlie helmed dripped with the same bile that trickled down from its founder. In 2015, a national field director of Turning Point USA had to be let go after texts saying, “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all…I hate blacks. End of story” were leaked in the media. An advisor to the group anonymously published a screed bellowing about how black people had “become socially incompatible with other races.” At the University of Missouri, a TPUSA chapter president, after three black athletes were killed elsewhere and school had been called off, tweeted, “If they would have killed 4 more n-ggers we would have had the whole week off.”

 “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit” – Matthew 7:18

Charlie sought to lay down his own law and cloak it in the divine The modern religious subject seeks to “save the sinner” not through the spread of virulent love but as a matter of edict , whether you like it or not, whether God likes it or not, and perhaps they’ll enjoy it more if you struggle a bit.  The God they worship is not a communion of all living, breathing things with one another, but a sword to cut down their mortal enemies. They heretically see themselves, their temptations, and their fears as the sole node of consciousness in the universe. Their temptations, their fears, animate their politics, and that demonstrates how isolated they are from the creation they pantomime marveling at. They’re isolated from the love of their God, even more so than the unbelieving poor they drag into their miserable lot. 

The very same day of the Kirk assassination, a white supremacist young man shot up another school. A day after his death, five historic black colleges shut their doors to the public because of an onslaught of threats they had received. Days later still a young black man was found hanged on the campus of Delta State, in Mississippi. John Brown once said that, “The physical condition of the slave was the moral condition of the free,” meaning that no one was truly free until all people were as free and safe as we are. 

I look at John Brown, and I feel a pang of regret that I don’t have in me the light of a God shining so resplendent. I look at Charlie Kirk and I remember why it’s impossible to feel the presence of such a light in these times. The man was so venally impressed with the circumstances of his birth and doggedly hateful towards others for theirs that one wonders if he believed in heaven, a place where we shed our earthly bodies to join the embrace of eternity, less than I do.