Sinners and Saints

Why We Cannot Whitewash the Dead

One of the oldest temptations of the human heart is to take those who have gone before us and sand away the rough edges of their lives. Out of grief or the desperate desire to preserve a certain story, we transmute flesh and bone into marble. A person becomes an emblem. A life becomes a symbol. And in this exchange, truth evaporates. What remains is not memory but myth.

This impulse is not new. It belongs to every generation that has had to speak of its dead. Families tell stories that leave out the estranged brother. Nations write histories that lionize founding fathers while suppressing the voices of those crushed under their vision. Churches remember their saints while editing out their complicity in injustice. It is our shared human instinct to make people larger than life in their glory and smaller than life in their weakness. And yet, I have been surprised, though perhaps I should not have been, at how little this impulse is being named in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s death. Many are choosing narrative convenience over the messy complexity that makes up every human life. Instead of remembering a person in full, we are retreating from the responsibility to name what was wrong, what was violent, what was distorted, what was shameful. These realities are politely excised, left on the cutting room floor so that a smoother story might play on the screen. The choice is not accidental. It is strategic.

I recognize the pull to slip into “eulogy mode” when someone dies. Death silences argument. It demands a kind of reverence. The moment someone passes, the noise of platitudes rises: “They died too young.” “They will be missed.” “A giant has fallen.” These are clichés, but they are seductive. These phrases arrive not because they are truly comforting but because they are available. They sit on the shelf of our cultural vocabulary, available whenever mortality demands we bring something to the table. But like a dish without seasoning, they neither nourish nor sustain. Instead, they soothe our conscience more than they honor the truth. They excuse our silence when a prophetic word might have been required, and they baptize our cowardice when confrontation would have been faithful. In repeating these refrains, we absolve ourselves from the hard work of honesty. We defer to sentiment, outsourcing moral evaluation to the buzzwords of condolence. We feel as though our duty is fulfilled simply by uttering something kind.

But what if we resisted that? What if we insisted on the dissonance? What if we, in the domain of grief, held space for the debate and argument that was alive and well before the body fell silent?

It is a dangerous proposition to tell the truth about the dead. People will accuse you of cruelty, of bitterness, of disrespect. They will say that God has the final word and we must not judge. But love does not come from lies. Love that requires amnesia is not love at all. To remember someone falsely is to betray both them and ourselves. We become co-conspirators in their distortions.

This is not an argument for cruelty masquerading as courage. The call is not to spit on graves or to deny the place of mourning. The tears, the flowers, the holy silence that attends loss. Grief is real, and God himself weeps. But lament cannot become license to lie. What I am pressing toward is the necessity of truth. Truth that does not tremble in the shadow of a funeral procession. Truth that refuses to treat death as a great reset button. If we sanctify falsehood in the name of grief, we will find that our mourning has not healed us but disarmed us, leaving us vulnerable to the very sins we dared not name. Every generation asks why the same sins repeat themselves, why the same poisons leak back into the bloodstream. The answer is embarrassingly simple: we chose sainthood where we should have wrestled with sin. We chose myth when what we needed was the complicated story of human beings who are capable of good, guilty of evil, and in need of grace.

Ironically, the scriptures bear witness to this very truth. They remember David’s victories and his violence, Peter’s faith and his failures. The biblical witness will not let us choose between truth and sentimentality. The Bible does not shy away from the jaggedness of human lives. And neither should we. If we claim that the gospel is big enough to redeem all things, then it must be big enough to redeem a true account of a person’s life, not a fictionalized one. To tell the truth about someone’s failures is not to rob them of dignity. It is to insist that dignity is rooted in being an image-bearer of God, not in a polished reputation.

And so, in speaking of Charlie Kirk, I resist the narrative of convenience. I insist on remembering what was distorted, what was violent, what was corrosive in his words and work. This insistence is not hatred. For we do not need to erase the wrong in order to acknowledge the loss. We can say both: This was a person of real influence, and their influence was destructive in profound ways. We can pray for his family. We can mourn a life cut short. And we can still tell the truth about what that life wrought. To do so is not easy. It is uncomfortable. But it is necessary if we are to be people of truth. And truth is the most faithful form of remembrance we can offer.