Rev William Barber, a left-leaning pastor and social activist, has condemned last week’s “brutal, ugly” murder of Charlie Kirk while calling for a broader denunciation of political violence on all sides.
Barber, leader of the “Moral Monday” events staged by Repairing The Breach, a pro-social justice group, also appeared to criticize the rightwing political activist’s brand of Christianity.
Barber spoke out against the killing of Kirk – an ally of Donald Trump – during an online event commemorating the anniversary of one of the most notorious acts of political violence in US history, the bombing of a Black church by members of the Ku Klux Klan on 15 September 1963.
Three 14-year-old girls and another aged 11 were killed when an explosion caused by 19 sticks of dynamite attached to a timer ripped through the 16th Street Baptist Street church in Birmingham, Alabama, at a time when the city was a focal point of the Black civil rights movement.
Martin Luther King, the late civil rights leader who Kirk once criticized as “awful”, described the bombing as “one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity”.
Implicitly linking that event to recent violent episodes, Barber, the founding director of Yale Divinity School’s centre for public theology, said: “This past week, there was a brutal, ugly, on-camera assassination of brother Charlie Kirk and we must all despise it.
“Despise that it left him dead, his wife heartbroken without a husband, and his children without a father. All of us should be bothered. I know about what it means to have folk say they want to kill you or assassinate you. All of us should denounce it and pray for the family and stand against this viciousness and violence of his murder.”
But contradicting a narrative peddled by Trump and his supporters that all such violence emanates from the political left, he added: “If you didn’t get bothered by the political death that’s happening in this country – the political violence and the public violence – until the other day, this must be challenged too, according to our deepest faith tradition.”
In June, a Democratic state lawmaker in Minnesota and her husband were shot dead at their home by a man posing as a police officer. The suspect, who was later found to have a hit list of Democratic targets, is believed to have been a supporter of Trump.
Barber contrasted Trump’s attempts to blame political violence solely on leftwing rhetoric with his infamous boast during the 2016 presidential campaign, when he said he could shoot someone in New York’s Fifth Avenue without losing support.
“We must cry against threats of political violence in all of its forms, even things like a president saying, ‘I can stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and I wouldn’t lose any followers,’” said Barber.
Barber also challenged the rightwing Christian beliefs espoused by many of Trump’s supporters, including Kirk, labelling it “religious nationalism”.
“Religion [or] morality that claims love for God, or love for justice but says nothing about injustice, a kind of national religion that asks God to bless the nation without the nation facing her sins and her violent public policy – this is religious nationalism, and it’s not true faith, according to the scriptures.
“It’s dangerous to a society, because it is the kind of attempt to use morality to consecrate immorality. It is a dangerous kind of religion because it is an attempt to sanctify wrong.”
“The prophet says that the sins that any true faith must name in any era, the sins that moral movements must challenge the nation to get rid of, and to face is, using religion as a cover for injustice.”
He also denounced, without naming him, Brian Kilmeade, a Fox News Host, who provoked a storm of online outrage after suggesting on air that mentally ill homeless people should be given an “involuntary lethal injection”.
“You can’t ignore this,” Barber said.
Kilmeade subsequently apologized for his remarks.
Barber and fellow activists have been arrested three times in the US Capitol this year after trying to stage Moral Monday demonstrations against the economic impact of Trump’s policies in the rotunda area.
