A lot of you have been asking me about Charlie Kirk.
At the heart of the tensions around his death is this question: how do we reliably work out what is true, about ourselves or the world?
Until the 1500s Western culture discovered the truth using the whole human person – faith and reason, body and soul, and our emotional life.
Then in the 1500s the Protestant Reformation rejected reason and said we could only know the truth by faith alone. In the 1600s modernity reacted by rejecting faith and embracing reason, embracing the mind but rejecting the body, as the way to finding out the truth. Then in the mid-20th century, postmodernity went one step further: to know the truth it rejects not only faith, and the body, but even reason itself, which leaves us with only one way of being able to reach the truth – through our feelings.
This, along with sin, is why our society is now so divided. It’s not mainly due to particular individuals. It’s because it is impossible to have a united society based on feelings, as feelings change all the time, everybody’s feelings are always different to everyone else’s, feelings are often an unreliable measure of reality, and detaching feelings from truth leads to inventing things which are not real. We are not merely who or what we feel we are.
So what does Jesus think, and feel, about this?
In last Sunday’s entrance antiphon we heard: All that you have done to us, O Lord, you have done with true judgement. This means that the way to enter into the truth is to place ourselves in the hands of the Lord, who judges everything perfectly.
In the first reading Jesus says: they drink wine by the bowlful, and use the finest oil for anointing themselves, but about the ruin of Joseph they do not care at all. To enter into the truth, we have to care about each other. This is the virtue of piety, the foundation of all the virtues, the duty of reverence, respect and listening to God, our neighbour and nature.
In the second reading Jesus says: As a man dedicated to God, you must aim to be saintly and religious, filled with faith and love, patient and gentle. Free speech is always loving: if it is not loving, it is not free. Cancelling someone is not loving someone. Impatience is not loving. Unkindness is not loving. Losing our calm is not loving.
Free speech is only exercised when we calmly, patiently and logically make our point using evidence, with the greatest courtesy. People who shout or interrupt or insult or make disrespectful gestures, rather than making a rational argument, are not exercising free speech – they are being rude, and they are showing the weakness of their argument by using power, rather than courteous dialogue, to control the outcome.
This is why so many influencers talk about empowerment and oppression and revolution, and why they use tactics of power and intimidation and name-calling, rather than reasoned dialogue – as they believe reality is based on power, unlike Christians who believe reality is based on love – on the gift of self. Being is gift.
Jesus also says this: Fight the good fight of the faith and win for yourself the eternal life to which you were called when you made your profession and spoke up for the truth in front of many witnesses.
In other words, love is not running away from conflict. This is cowardly, as well as unhealthy: love means caring enough to have the courage to fight for the truth. This does not mean we should be provocative or careless: free speech is also prudent speech. We need to choose our words and pick our battles carefully. But God expects us to pick some. A key source of trouble in the world is not people with different views, but rather those who don’t stick up for the truth.
The last thing that Jesus says is this: “If they will not listen either to Moses or to the prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone should rise from the dead.”
In other words, free speech requires one more thing: to be able to peacefully accept that no matter how passionately we believe something, many people are still not going to agree with us – partly because often we are wrong. The world does not revolve around what you think. The world revolves around the Lord, and what he thinks, and does, which is always good and wonderful.
So let us extend to others the same freedom the Lord extends to us. Because the salvation of the world is not that everyone agrees with us, but rather that we ourselves are totally at one with what Jesus thinks and is doing.
