On a humid Charleston evening ten years ago, a ninth-grade dropout with a bowl haircut named Dylann Roof walked into a Bible-study class at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church, home to the oldest historically Black congregation in South Carolina. Roof, twenty-one, carried a .45-calibre Glock semi-automatic and eight magazines of hollow-point bullets. He settled into a seat near Clementa Pinckney, the church’s pastor and a state senator, who was leading a discussion of a parable from the Gospel of Mark. Around them sat a dozen parishioners, all Black, mostly women decades older than Roof.
Roof had set down his creed on a website he called “The Last Rhodesian”: a lonely, seething hatred of Black people, Jews, Asians, and Hispanics. He posted photographs of himself holding a Confederate flag and standing at Sullivan’s Island, where hundreds of thousands of Africans had once been sold into bondage. “We have no skinheads, no real K.K.K., no one doing anything but talking on the internet,” he wrote. “Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”
In the Bible-study class, Roof sat quietly for forty-five minutes. When the assembled bowed their heads in prayer, he stood, drew the Glock, and began to fire—pausing only to reload, then firing again. He loosed some seventy-five rounds. Tywanza Sanders, a young barber who had come with his mother, collapsed to the floor. As he lay dying, he asked, “Why are you doing this?”
“Y’all are raping our women and taking over the country,” Roof replied.
He spotted a woman praying under a table. “Shut up. Did I shoot you yet?”
“No,” she said.
“I’m going to let you live,” he told her, “so you can tell the story of what happened.”
What lingers in memory from Charleston, beyond the horror of the massacre, are the funerals that followed—above all, Barack Obama at the service for Clementa Pinckney, closing his eulogy by singing the first verse of “Amazing Grace.” That unscripted hymn may have been the most moving moment of his Presidency. Yet another moment was still more poignant, and, for many, beyond comprehension. Two days after the murders, at Roof’s bond hearing, the families of the dead spoke through their grief. They did not renounce him. They forgave him.
Felicia Sanders, Tywanza’s mother, addressed Roof directly: “We welcomed you Wednesday night in our Bible study with open arms. You have killed some of the most beautiful people that I know. Every fibre in my body hurts, and I will never be the same. But, as we say in Bible study, we enjoyed you. May God have mercy on you.” The daughter of Ethel Lance, who died at the age of seventy, told him, “You took something very precious away from me . . . but I forgive you.” Obama later said that the “decency and goodness of the American people shines through in these families.”
It was impossible not to recall those words of mercy while watching the memorial service, last Sunday, for Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist assassinated this month as he spoke at Utah Valley University. Tens of thousands of people filled a stadium in Glendale, Arizona, to honor him. Kirk was thirty-one, with a wife and two small children. The service lasted more than five hours, but the moment that stilled the crowd came when his widow, Erika, spoke of her husband’s killer in the language of absolution. “That man, that young man, I forgive him,” she said. “I forgive him because it was what Christ did and is what Charlie would do. The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the gospel is love and always love—love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us.”
President Donald Trump, who spoke next, embraced Erika Kirk, but at the microphone he all but rebuked the spirit of her forgiveness. Charlie Kirk, he said, in the course of a self-regarding and vengeful ramble, “did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent. And I don’t want the best for them.” Other Administration speakers, including J. D. Vance and Stephen Miller, echoed Trump, not Erika Kirk. Retribution, division, grievance—this is the official language of the regime.
At the start of Trump 1.0, the journalist Salena Zito wrote in The Atlantic that the press took him literally but not seriously; his supporters took him seriously but not literally. The line was meant to suggest how out of touch the press was. Trump himself told Zito that his true aim was, in her words, to “bring the country together—no small task.”
Of course, this was never the case, and each week brings fresh evidence of the darkness we are being led into: the attack on the rule of law, the weaponization of the state against the President’s enemies, the erosion of civil liberties, the colossal Trump-family grift. The assault is relentless. In the days after the memorial, Trump managed to “unite” the country by renewing his threats against Jimmy Kimmel, a comedian guilty of nothing more than making fun of him; by pushing through a last-minute indictment of James Comey; by convening a press conference where he pronounced on the science of autism—“based on what I feel”—in a manner so reckless that it was guaranteed to sow confusion and anguish among parents desperate for clarity; and by informing the United Nations that America is “the hottest country anywhere,” that he deserves Nobel Prizes for ending “seven unendable wars,” that the U.N. is a useless organization, and that climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” We look forward to next week.
It is not easy to reconcile the act of forgiveness with some of the positions Charlie Kirk once took. They were in moral opposition to the civil-rights-era spirit that infused the parishioners of Mother Emanuel. But his instinct to argue, to engage, left open the possibility of evolution. Trump is long past that horizon. His appetites and his animosities only deepen. Hope lies not in expecting a late-in-life conversion experience in the Oval Office but in carrying out the ordinary work of civic life—in persuading neighbors, friends, even family who have supported Trump to reconsider their decision, one hard conversation at a time. Grace is not weakness but resolve, the Charleston families believed, and politics, too, depends on a willingness to coax one another toward better ground. In that work of persuasion, of politics—slow, imperfect, yet necessary—we attempt to close the distance between what we are and what we might still become. ♦
