“No Man is an Island”

James Dobson passed away on the 21^st of August this year.  When I heard the news it was the first time in years I had heard his name.  The last time I heard his radio program, Focus on the Family, was probably in the 1990s.  Dobson was a prominent evangelical leader, although he was a psychologist by profession rather than a minister.  His father, James Dobson Sr., had been a minister in the Church of the Nazarene, one of the Wesleyan Holiness denominations, as had his grandfather and great-grandfather.  Dobson initially achieved celebrity status among evangelicals for advising parents to avoid the culture of permissiveness encouraged by the majority in his chosen profession and raise up their children with boundaries and discipline.   His first book, Dare to Discipline (1970) which is probably still his best known, was, as is evident from the title, on this subject.  In the decades since, he fought on several other fronts although   generally those which pertained to the type of issues that are categorized as moral and social, in the emerging culture war as it was dubbed in the early 1990s (1) around the time I first heard of him.

I first heard of Dobson’s passing, not through the news, but through a social media post by a former classmate with whom I had attended Providence College (formerly Winnipeg Bible College, now Providence University College) in the mid to late 1990s.  This post, and several others from the same former classmate whose name out of charity I shall omit, thoroughly disgusted me.  He did not merely disregard the ancient proverb de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est but went out of his way to do the very opposite of it.  He took hearty delight in Dobson’s death and was positively rejoicing over it. 

I was reminded of this by the reaction of several American leftists to the murder of Charlie Kirk yesterday.  Kirk, the 31 year old founder and director of Turning Point, USA, was shot in the neck on stage during a question and answer session at an event at Utah Valley University.  He died from the wound later in the afternoon.  Kirk belonged to the Calvary Chapel Association, a Pentecostal group that separated from the Foursquare Gospel and from which the Vineyard movement would later separate.  Like Dobson, he had been a culture warrior.  Since youth was his target audience he made a lot of use of social media, he had a podcast and as of earlier this year a televised talk show.  He was also the author of a number of books.  He is probably best known, however, for going to university and other campuses and promoting his own views by, among other things, challenging overconfident progressive students to informal debates.

I am not going to reproduce the responses of the leftists here.  Chaya Raichik has reposted several on her Libs of Tiktok account on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, the link to which you can find in the footnote. (2)   These are generally social media posts, exalting in Kirk’s assassination in a way similar to how my former classmate rejoiced over Dobson’s death.  In the news media, progressive commentators have made remarks to the effect that Kirk brought it on himself by the views he held and expressed.  Matthew Dowd, for example, said that Kirk’s “hate speech” had brought about “hateful actions” which remark itself brought about Dowd’s termination as a commentator on MSNBC.

You would think that liberals and leftists would take a break from accusing others of “hate speech” for basically saying things, usually true, about groups they think should be protected from criticism, when in the act of making remarks that essentially excuse a murder.  You would be wrong. 

I am not going to pretend that I was a big fan of Charlie Kirk.  The principle of de mortuis nil nisi does not require that. I agreed with him on most of the issues the liberals and the left hated him over – he was anti-abortion and anti-birth control, pro-gun, anti-CRT and DEI (Critical Race Theory and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), etc.  He had all the qualities, however, that I had found obnoxious and grating in American Republicans even before the MAGA movement degenerated into a deranged personality cult.

One of the more obnoxious of those qualities was the assumption that everyone was either an American Republican or some kind of liberal, leftist or progressive.  Watching the disgusting manner in which people in the latter categories have been celebrating Kirk’s murder makes me all the more glad that this assumption is entirely baseless and false.  As a Canadian who finds the thought of his country become further Americanized utterly repugnant and as a dyed-in-the-wool monarchist and royalist I could never have any sympathy with American Republicanism but I have far less sympathy with the kind of politics that teaches people to be so totally devoid of class as to celebrate the deaths of their political opponents.  Liberalism and leftism are beneath contempt.

I direct any liberal or leftist who may have come across this essay to the poem by John Donne from which the title has been borrowed.   The third and final is the operative stanza. Now let us conclude with the traditional Requiem prayer for the late James Dobson and Charlie Kirk.  Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May their souls and all the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen. — Gerry Lincoln

 (1)   The culture war itself, and the expression “culture war”, had both been around much longer, but it was in the early 1990s that the expression became attached to the thing itself as a kind of semi-official label.