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Fox News Host Jessie Watters: “Everybody’s accountable and we’re watching what they’re saying on television and who’s saying what,” Watters said, naming “the politicians, the media, and all these rats out there.”

In 1942, Fritz Hippler made the film “The Eternal Jew” as Nazi propaganda. The film compares Jews to rats that carry contagion, flood the continent, and devour precious resources.

Luke 6:27-29: “²⁷ ‘But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, ²⁸ bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you…’”

Charlie Kirk, August 21^st, 2025: “President Trump is going out on patrol tonight in <Washington> DC. Shock and awe. Force. We are taking our country back from these cockroaches. <It is> Just the start.”

In 1927, the Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer ran a cover article with an image of Jewish rats being gassed under a tree. The quote under the picture read, “When the vermin are dead, the German oak will flourish once more…”

Luke 6:45: “⁴⁵ A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.”

The Parable of the Good Samaritan

Luke 10:25-29:

²⁵ On one occasion, an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

²⁶ “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” Jesus replied.

²⁷ <The expert in the law> answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

²⁸ “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”

²⁹ But <the expert in the law> wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

It is easy to love your neighbor when that person is a friend, or family, or someone who shares your beliefs. It is easy to love a person who attends your church or shares your political views. The purpose of this interaction between Jesus and the expert in the law is that the Jewish people had been instructed by the prophets, 600 years earlier, to love everyone as their neighbor. Over the centuries, the Jews found that command too tricky to keep, and so they made exceptions.

A great example is the commandment from Exodus 20:13, “You shall not murder.” The commandment is not a prohibition on killing; it forbids murder. It is murder if you kill your neighbor. It is not murder if you kill someone who is not your neighbor (or not human).

The purpose of Nazi propaganda that described Jews as rats and vermin was to make it clear to Germans that Jews were not their neighbors. It was not murder to kill a Jew in Nazi Germany. What does Jessie Watters have in mind when he calls his political enemies rats? Hopefully, we do not have to find out.

If there is flexibility about who is and who is not your neighbor, then it can be justified to kill the people who fall into the “not my neighbor” category. Who did the Jews want to kill? Well, as it turns out, there were many people they did not consider their neighbors and wanted to kill. At the top of the list was the Samaritans.

For 600 years, the Jews’ most hated enemies in the world were the Samaritans. The Samaritans had built a rival temple to the one in Jerusalem. They claimed that the events of the Bible took place at their holy site, Mount Gerizim, and not in Judea.

The Jews’ hatred of the Samaritans went back centuries. It began in the 570s BCE when the Samaritans led the Babylonian army into Judea, which destroyed the first Jewish temple and exiled the Jews from their homeland. To a first-century Jew, if there was anyone in the world who was not your neighbor, and whom it was totally fine to kill, it was a Samaritan.

When Jesus responds to the law expert’s question, “And who is my neighbor?” he challenges him, and us, to think of the relationship between the Jews and Samaritans.

Luke continues with the parable at 10:30-37:

³⁰ In reply, Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when robbers attacked him. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. ³¹ A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. ³² So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. ³³ But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. ³⁴ He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. ³⁵ The next day, he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’

<Jesus asked the law expert:> ³⁶ “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”

³⁷ The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”

Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

The phrase “Good Samaritan” is often misused to describe instances when someone does a good deed, such as wading into floodwaters to rescue a baby from a car. That is not what it means to be a Good Samaritan. You do not need a parable to tell you to help a baby.

We need a parable to remind us that the only path to salvation, whatever you think ‘salvation’ means, is through loving the people you feel justified to hate. The law expert is looking for an excuse or a way out. He is hoping Jesus will tell him that there are exceptions regarding who his neighbor is.

But Jesus admonishes him and says that everyone is your neighbor. The person you hate the most in the world is still your neighbor. If you call yourself a Christian, you must ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ because that is God’s ultimate commandment to his Christian followers.

Charlie Kirk, for his part, rejected the idea that we should love our neighbors above all else. He said that “Empathy is a made-up new-age term that…does a lot of damage.” He responded to the Good Samaritan story by saying that the Bible also says we should stone homosexuals to death.

As an aside, Kirk was referencing Leviticus 20:13, “¹³ ‘If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”

This passage gets misused and abused by people who want to justify their hate biblically. Leviticus 20 rattles off a list of incestuous “do not’s.” Do not have sex with your father’s wife, your daughter-in-law, a woman and her mother, your sister, your aunt, your brother’s wife, and so on. Aside from the one about man lying with man, it is easy to see what is being forbidden: Do not have sex with your close family members.

The passage telling men not to lie with men is not saying that homosexuality was forbidden. The word homosexuality did not even exist when Leviticus was written. No, the passage is in the middle of a rejection of incestual relationships and is saying that, in addition to forbidding all the male-female incestual relationships, it is also prohibited to have similar relationships to the list provided with male family relations as well.

Theologian K Renato Lings presents a better translation of Leviticus 20:13: “Sexual intercourse with a close male relative should be just as abominable to you as incestuous relationships with female relatives.”

Charlie Kirk was an intelligent person who could easily have known this. He could have used his enormous platform to try to explain that Christianity and the Bible do not hate gays or any other group of people. Instead, he chose the lazy trope to reject compassion and to demonize people he disapproved of. That is a good summary of my view of most of Kirk’s body of work as a public figure: Lazy, hateful, unhelpful.

Charlie Kirk, January 2024: “If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder if she’s there because of her excellence or because of affirmative action…”

Luke 18:9-14:

“⁹ To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: ¹⁰ “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. ¹¹ The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. ¹² I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’

¹³ “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

¹⁴ “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

I found it interesting to compare the messages in Luke with what Kirk and other outspoken Christians have had to say. It is easy to judge them for their hypocrisy. They sound like the Pharisee thanking God that he is better than the detestable others he sees all around him. Kirk’s hatred of blacks, gays, trans people, and so on is easy to admonish through scripture.

Kirk’s death will not change anything. There will always be terrible people who get a large platform and then use it to say horrible things. The Charlie Kirk-sized hole in that economy will be filled in short order by a new, terrible person. So long as people want to listen to hate, there will be people who are happy to spew it.

For me, the lesson is what I can do about myself and how I process things. Can I keep my pride in check and resist being like the Pharisee? When I think about Kirk being killed in an act of gun violence, how satisfied am I with that? What emotions are stirred in me when I think about his cause of death in relation to his own words from April 2023: “I think it is worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”

The challenge for me, and anyone else who despised Charlie Kirk for every hateful thing he said and did, is to forgive him and to love him as we love ourselves. Remember that the next Charlie Kirk also must be forgiven and loved, even as they spew hate and foment division.

If enough of us model love and forgiveness, even and especially to our enemies, then people like Kirk will find no space and will be forced to change or disappear. I believe that is the only way out of the mess we are in.