If you need any more insight into the depravity of the current administration, or if you want additional motivation to believe the worst about them, that they are (literally) heathens in Christian clothing, I suggest you consider these remarks by Stephen Miller at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service:

Our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion. Our lineage, and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello. Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture, they built the industry. … We stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble. And for those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us. What do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness, you are jealousy! You are envy! You are hatred! You are nothing! You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity. …

To our enemies, you have nothing to give, you have nothing to offer, you have nothing to share but bitterness. We have beauty, we have light, we have goodness, we have determination, we have vision, we have strength. We built the world that we inhabit now…You have no idea the dragon you have awakened.”

Theres’s no point in further speculation, as has exploded across the Internet, whether Miller plagiarized a speech by Joseph Goebbels. What should give us pause is that Miller clearly thinks along the same lines as Goebbels, whether he stole from him or not. Those lines are pagan ones. Not “Pagan,” in the modern sense of neo-Druid, polytheistic, “spiritual but not religious,” nature worship. No, Miller sounds like an ancient pagan, citing ancestry in Greece and Roman while notably omitting Judeo – Christian traditions (and non-European ones). Miller is, in other words, a particularly noxious, overheated version of what N. T. Wright finds to be a new paganism, worshiping Mars (the God of War) and Mammon combined with what Bishop Wright calls geo-imperialism. Bizarrely, Miller even adopts the image of the dragon, which reminds us Christians of the final battle in Revelation, as a symbol of the movement that Miller claims to represent, not the one he attacks. This is paganism pure and simple, as Ludwig Feuerbach (who called it “heathenry”) defines it. It combines politics and theology in support of the alleged superiority of a particular ethnic group, designating and even demonizing all outsiders and dissidents as “other.” 

What really jumps out at us, however, is Miller’s repeated reference to this ill-defined collection of “enemies” as “nothing.” That is, the left side of the political spectrum, if you want to use that shorthand, is populated not by human persons, but by things – and a particular kind of thing, the nothing. Miller’s claim that those he opposes lack even the essential quality of personhood should chill us to the bone. First, it is a legally radical proposition. Two of the most disgraceful Supreme Court opinions – Dred Scott and Korematsu – turned on a politically-motivated denial of constitutional “personhood” status to particular ethnic groups: Black slaves in the first instance, persons of Japanese ancestry in the second. In the Dred Scott case, Mr. Scott, a former slave, sued for a judicial declaration of his (and his family’s) freedom, having lived in a free state for many years. Chief Justice Taney wrote that a former slave was not and could not be a citizen of the United States and therefore was not a “person” entitled to “all privileges and immunities of Citizens in the several States,” as guaranteed by Article IV, Section 2 of the Constitution. In fact, Mr. Scott, not being a citizen, was not even a “person” with standing to invoke the Court’s jurisdiction. He was, constitutionally, nothing.

Dred Scott is widely regarded as the worst decision in the Court’s history. If so, Korematsu is a close second. At issue in that case was the constitutionality of Franklin Roosevelt’s order that the military could declare large exclusion zones in the interest of national security. The order was used to implement forced relocation of Japanese – Americans from the West Coast. Fred Korematsu, an American citizen of Japanese descent living in the East Bay area of Northern California, failed to comply with a military order that required persons of Japanese descent to report for relocation to camps away from the Pacific coast. The Court, on a 6-3 vote, upheld Mr. Korematsu’s conviction for failing to comply with a military order, dismissing his argument that the order deprived him of his Constitutional rights of liberty. Technically, the Korematsu court did not deny that Mr. Korematsu was a “person” under the constitution, it simply said that the demands of national security in wartime trumped his rights of due process and equal protection. In times of war, in other words, there are persons, and then there are persons. Mr. Korematsu, for the duration of the war, had to give up his personhood.

Both Dred Scott and Korematsu were eventually overruled. Nevertheless, the principle remains that access to Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights all depend on one’s being a person, a status that Miller now would deny to political enemies. (Miller should know better: Korematsu was overruled in a case that bears his boss’s name, Trump v Hawaii.) While Miller invokes an Athenian and Roman heritage, his vision of things fails to live up to even their pagan standards. Roman law, for example, recognized that all human beings, even slaves, were persons, although slaves were persons “subject to another’s right” rather than “persons of their own right.”

Even more shocking in the context of Mr. Miller’s rant is how it ignores the fundamentally Christian notion of personhood. Persons,¹ by the German Catholic philosopher Robert Spaemann, translated into English (in his spare time) by Oliver O’Donovan, is a book that I come back to repeatedly. The subtitle is “The Difference Between ‘Someone’ and “Something’.” The subtitle alone could form a rule of life for us. People, even those that we have no connections with, and, yes, even our enemies, have the same ontological status that we do; as Kant memorably said, they are subjects, not objects.

Spaemann’s wonderful book reaches what seems a common-sensical conclusion: all human beings are persons – someone – rather than things, and all non-human creatures are not. Non-human creatures are entitled to respect and care, but they are not persons, with the rights of a person. Spaemann, however, says that it is not mere similarity between human beings that constitutes personhood. “It is not similarity of others to myself that is in view, but the same incomparable uniqueness. Human beings, qua human beings, may be more or less similar; but as persons they are not similar, but equal – equal in their distinctive uniqueness and incommensurable dignity.”  (The emphasis is Spaemann’s, not mine.)

This is contrary to much current moral philosophy, notably from Derek Parfit and Peter Singer, that define personhood in terms of a certain minimal capacity, especially mental.² This suggests that severely disabled humans, for example, don’t count as persons. But Parfit and Singer’s work, melancholy though it may be, doesn’t come with the vicious edge that Miller’s tirade does. Miller’s form of depersonalization is a common rhetorical trick for political extremists to provoke violence. Hutu radio stations, in the days before the Rwandan genocide, referred to Tutsis as “cockroaches.” Nazis referred to Jews as “untermenschen,” “subhumans.” It’s also part of a larger, insidious strategy. Spaemann argues that the first and most important duty we owe to another person is to treat them, to “notice” them (in Spaemann’s term) as a person. Failing to do so, Spaemann says, amounts to a form of murder, because it reduces them to a thing. Miller’s rant suggests a policy that would do just that. Political enemies are worthy of notice only in the process of eliminating them.

By coincidence this past Sunday’s lectionary text was the parable of Lazarus and the rich man in the 16^th Chapter of Luke’s gospel. The homily delivered by the priest at our service said that the takeaway is that our profoundest obligation to other persons is to notice them, to pay attention to them, an obligation that the rich man disastrously neglects. The rich man, in other words, loses sight of Lazarus’s personhood. Spaemann says that personhood is always the quality of uniqueness within the interrelated field of other persons. “To take note of a human being as a person is precisely this: to take note of the a priori relational field that personality constitutes. Only in the context of this field do we discover ourselves as persons.” Poor people are still persons, as are those that think differently from us.³ Miller, on the other hand, wants to pay attention to his perceived enemies only to vaporize, to disappear them. In so doing, according to Spaemann, he loses sight of his own personhood.

Despite the context in which he spoke, Miller’s message is not only pagan, it is blatantly anti- Christian. Whatever you think about Charlie Kirk, Miller dishonored his memory. Listen to these words, again from Bishop Wright: “Christian nationalism is impoverished as it seeks a kingdom without a cross. It pursues a victory without mercy. It acclaims God’s love of power rather than the power of God’s love. We must remember that Jesus refused those who wanted to ‘make him king’ by force just as much as he refused to become king by calling upon ‘twelve legions of angels’. Jesus needs no army, arms or armoured cavalry to bring about the kingdom of God. As such, we should resist Christian nationalism as giving a Christian facade to nakedly political, ethnocentric and impious ventures.”⁴

We should afford Miller the dignity that he would deny his enemies. We should pay attention to him. We should take seriously what he says, and not dismiss it as a mere, in-the-moment emotional outburst. Miller strikes me as cold-blooded if nothing else. We should all be clear-eyed about that.

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1. Oxford University Press 2006. ↩︎
2. While Spaemann argues unequivocally that all human beings are persons, he says at the end of the book that he could see, as our scientific understanding of the universe increases, that other species (perhaps even ones we know, such as porpoises) coming to be regarded as persons. ↩︎
3. As a sidenote, we remember that in Citizens United, the Supreme Court granted First Amendment personhood to corporations, a status Miller would no doubt defend vigorously. ↩︎
4. N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies, Zondervan, 2024. ↩︎