Is the bar now so low for Christians that we canonise anyone as a martyr, even when their public words revealed deep prejudice? Dying unjustly doesn’t make someone just. I know leaders worth following are rare, but hate wrapped in Bible verses, is still hate.
Even so, what kind of generation cheer for blood just because they disliked the man who bled? What emptiness must fill a person’s heart to find joy in death, to mock the breath leaving a body, simply because it came from the ‘other side’.
One desperate for a hero, blinds itself to injustice. The other drowns its conscience in cruelty, calling it justice.
It is deeply misleading to only highlight the good things he said, just as it is dishonest to focus solely on the worst. Reducing a person to either extreme, saint or villain, flattens the complexity of who they were and what they represented. To cherry-pick only their moments of grace is to ignore the harm they may have caused. But to highlight only their faults is to deny their humanity entirely. Both approaches serve agendas, not truth. We do not honour the dead by rewriting their story to fit our comfort. We honour them, and ourselves, by telling the whole truth, even when it is uncomfortable.
Whilst we selectively choose to highlight what this man said, someone’s dad is dead. He was not evil nor was he a saint, and he was not deserving of a death so senseless. My heart breaks for the children who lost their dad; I know personally that is not something anyone recovers fully from, let alone this horrifically. While the internet spins narratives and claims sides, their daddy is dead. Your propaganda is their grief.
The Harmony Edit 