Until September 10, few South Africans had ever heard of a right-wing American activist called Charlie Kirk.
At least that’s what I thought until a bullet from a Mauser 98, a popular hunting rifle, cut through his neck to end the life of the 31-year-old firebrand.
What happened next stunned me. Across social media, there was an outpouring of grief in our country for the man.
Die Burger posted a large photograph on its front page: Charlie Kirk: Martyr or Trump acolyte?
AfriForum laid a wreath at the American embassy in Pretoria.
Christians of all stripes, especially evangelicals, could hardly contain their emotions in online media.
I am employed to work with puzzles, to try to figure out complex things in the social world.
However, his one had me baffled and for two nights I could not sleep.
The man was, after all, a vile, foul-mouthed racist who persecuted anyone who did not think like him.
His Professor Watchlist, for example, was aptly described as a digital hit list that terrorised academics who challenged white supremacy or gun culture or Christian nationalism, wrote Howard University’s Prof Stacey Patton, one of his victims.
But his hateful politics stretched beyond universities.
The Civil Rights Act, the struggle of blacks in the US for basic rights, was “a huge mistake”.
Martin Luther King Jr, the head of that movement, “was awful”.
Justice Katenjie Brown (Harvard) and Michelle Obama (Princeton) lacked “brain processing power” and took white jobs.
“Prowling blacks” go around targeting white people “for fun ...that’s a fact”.
LGBTQ+ people were a “social contagion” and Jews were replacing white Americans with non-white immigrants.
What person with an ounce of decency could possibly be enamoured of such a repulsive character?
Why would a sizeable slice of South Africans, white conservatives and black evangelicals, pour their hearts out in public as they mourned this man?
Then, at 39,000 feet it suddenly hit me.
Kirk offered South Africans a return to a past that democracy took away — one in which your Christian goals (the Bible) and your political goals (the flag) became the same thing.
He was our proxy for attacks on employment equity (affirmative action, in his country) and that deep resentment of black progress — in this case, from a college dropout.
You could, through Kirk, demonise Muslims, stereotype blacks, and insult gay people without consequence.
In SA, you would be demolished in the court of public opinion if you said that “If I see a black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he is qualified”.
But what about his support among black evangelicals in SA? Good question.
One of our most dangerous assumptions is to think that apartheid was unilaterally bad for black people.
We were Christian nationalist’s long before the term was popularised in America, as apartheid melded faith and politics into one.
We made public school assemblies church meetings (some still do).
Afrikaans universities opened their council and senate meetings with prayer and Bible reading.
We executed those accused of capital crimes, criminalised gay people, marginalised Muslims, and gave succour to the government of God’s people, Israel.
Kirk would plant himself in the middle of a huge and largely supportive audience, and answer questions.
A slick and successful populist, he was skilled in the arts of political sophistry.
He gave simple answers to the complex problems of a bewildering world mixing the public profession of his faith in Christ with a series of provocations targeting familiar outgroups of the conservative right.
Image conscious, his public profile represented for the Christian right the wholesomeness of fundamentalist family: a strong husband, a dutiful wife, obedient children.
A media-savvy influencer, he projected his branded message onto the screens and into hearts and minds of especially young people around the globe in ways that made them think he was their friend: “Charlie said this, Charlie said that” I would hear even among those close to me.
Here’s the rub. How does one explain his peddling in cruelty and lies?
How does he get away with such decidedly un-Christian behaviour?
Even those with a cursory knowledge of scripture would see the contradictions between his well-publicised disdain for empathy (“I can’t stand the word empathy ... it does a lot of damage”) and the fruits of the Spirit or the Sermon on the Mount.
Here’s what lies behind Kirk’s brand of malice and mendacity.
To his followers, Kirk was the 21st century Christian gladiator, marching as to war, this gun-promoting activist of the right.
A conservative relation, perhaps unwittingly, revealed this thinking to me in response to my criticism of Kirk on Facebook: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness in this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6 v 12).
A good friend, a PhD in theology was equally flummoxed when he asked of such thinking: “Is evangelicalism poisonous by its very nature ... turning a drunk into a believer but cutting off his ability to think?”
The answer is, yes. But not only Christian evangelicalism for this is also true of its ideological cousins in Islamic or Jewish or Hindu fundamentalism.
In that world, cruelty can be justified in the quest for the restoration of a utopian world that once was, even if it had never been.
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