Do we defend Christian deaths over non-Christian deaths?
As in the people who profess Christianity (never mind their actions, so long as their "anti-" politics align with ours) are sacrosanct and not to be touched? We should value their lives (to be rescued, given refuge, grieved, held precious) over non-Christians?
There's an attitude of "well, when they target a Christian, they target all of us" in our thinking. Anyone who publically claims to be a Christian must and should be defended. Even if they don't show love. Even if they don't preach peace. Even if they're individually a rather repellent person who we wouldn't really want to have a beer with, or let babysit our kids. They're a Christian and therefore we have to be sad/angry/outraged that they're dead.
Are we angry because a "good Christian man" has died? Or are we scared because we think we're becoming targets?
Because there were Christians in Gaza too. Which has been bombed down to the bones. Many of the people in the US who've died through police or public violence in the last decade were Christians, or, at least, church-going. The fact that they didn't publically speak about their faith in ways that we can track on social media...well...are you going to apply that to your fellow churchgoers? Or only to the ones who you resonate with?
Was Kirk a "good Christian man" because he was a good Christian man, or was he a "good Christian man" because you see yourself in his life? Because you idolise the aggressive and argumentative style of "gospel" that embodies the Reformed Evanglicalism so prevalent in the modern western faith? Because you wish you were the kind of guy who argues with people a decade younger than you in such a way so that they lose their temper and you come out looking cool and authoritative? Because saying "the world needs Jesus" is easier than saying "maybe we need to treat people like they're essentially decent people"?
(This is where Calvinism becomes a stumbling block; because sin may make us untenable to God, but people need to be far less demanding when it comes to us simply being human among each other.)
Is it truly godly anger that drives us? Or just self-interested fear? I generally learn towards self-interested fear when it comes to humanity. 99.999999999% of us are not very godly. And the remaining miniscule percentage is not anyone on social media, because if you were more godly, you'd be somewhere else where there is no social media, giving your life to something other than outrage posting (or, indeed, social media posting at all, which is inherently performative and self-interested).
Ever noticed how it's mostly Christian men on social media, making posts? That's because their far more godly wives are out there doing the work and don't have the time for doing more than reading through their feed and liking pictures of places they haven't been (yet). And that is also probably why God kept me from being married.
And here's a thought. What about "bad Christian men" dying?
In the last few years, a number of Christians have died whose lives turned out to be rather less godly than Christians like to consider. Or their fruit was often rotten and worm-filled. Ravi Zacharias. James Dobson. Charlie Kirk. Just to name a few.
There's a lot of "well, they were a Christian, so the evil they did didn't matter", and a lot of "well, they did evil, so they can't have been a Christian". And in the midst of it, I've found a new strain of thought burgeoning: that we hope they found a God in His heaven who was beyond their limited comprehension of Him on Earth, and that they understand the bindings they put on others in being able to meet God, and that they understand what they have done.
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