Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
(Marc Antony, in Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 2)
I am not Marc Antony. Nor was Rush Limbaugh Julius Caesar. And I certainly am no William Shakespeare. So my quotation of the Bard is meant to be taken literally, not with the biting irony of the original. For the man who died yesterday was, despite his massive influence, certainly unworthy of anything resembling genuine praise.
The great American writer Mark Twain once quipped, "Some people bring joy wherever they go, and some people bring joy whenever they go." To be sure, there were many who experienced a kind of joy in hearing of his death, just as many others felt grief. But this begs the question, how should a Christian respond to the death of a wicked man?
And make no mistake: Rush Limbaugh was a wicked man. Notwithstanding Paula White's tweet that Limbaugh "shared [his] faith openly" and the various encomia issued by Franklin Graham, Liberty University's Falkirk Center, and the various arms of the vast right-wing media empire (on which, see John Fea's post here), whatever "Christianity" expressed by Limbaugh―and before he died he did express his faith in terms of a "personal relationship" (a red flag for me) with Jesus―was to the very end unaccompanied by repentance for his manifold public transgressions of the past 30 or so years.
Limbaugh, you recall, was one who coined the term "Feminazis" for women who desired and fought for equality in the home and in society. In the 90's he called first daughter Chelsea Clinton a "dog." In 2012 he called Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute" for testifying in favor of healthcare provisions for birth control. If anything, his racism was even worse. He raged against proposed reparations for African Americans as if such were an affront to white people who had "earned" their station in society. In 2001, in an ill-fated stint on Monday Night Football, he dismissed Eagles' Pro Bowl quarterback Donovan McNabb with these words: "The media has been very desirous that a Black quarterback do well. There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn’t deserve.” Earlier he admitted to saying the following: "Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?" This, of course, was all prelude to his propagation of the "Birther" myth that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and thus was disqualified from holding the Presidency.
Limbaugh's ire was also directed at environmentalists who decried clear-cutting old growth forests ("trees are nothing but crops") and scientists (climate change is a "hoax;" COVID-19 is nothing but "the common cold"). Moreover, he was a proponent of Trump's Big Lie of a stolen election and claimed that the Capitol Riot of 1/6 was just people "taking selfies" and not as bad as the protests against racism last summer.
Indeed, it really isn't fair to principled conservatives to call Limbaugh a conservative. He was, if anything, more of a grenade-throwing anti-Left crusader, whose emotion-laden rhetoric and ire were based in white male grievance and directed to similarly aggrieved people who felt their position on the social and economic pecking order threatened by the cultural changes dating back to the 1960's. An important observation, usually unrecognized, was pointed out yesterday by Jonathan Chait in the New York Intelligencer:
Yet his show was curiously devoid of any skill at argument. I am a big believer in listening to opposing arguments and attempting to understand them. I regularly read organs like National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and many others to understand how counterparts on the right see the world (and I do the same for those to my left).
Limbaugh’s program was useless in this regard. He could blather for hours without going from a premise to a conclusion. His only tools for processing opposing points of view were assertion, mockery, and resentment. Limbaugh liked to call himself smart, but he was a lifelong stranger to reason. He hid this weakness with a remarkable ability to gab smoothly and seamlessly.
And therein, as far as I am concerned, is his legacy. He tilled the ground for the rise of Donald Trump and the latter's hijacking of a Republican Party whose Cadillac now, in the words of Neil Young, "has got a wheel in the ditch and one on the track." For Donald Trump is nothing if not Rush Limbaugh―without the wit or charm, of course.
How should a Christian respond to the death of such a man? The first thing that needs to be said is that none of us is God. Nor can any of us claim a priestly "bind and loose" capacity to determine the spiritual state of an individual. Such, thankfully, is above all of our pay grades. The author of Hebrews writes, "Man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment" (Heb 9:27, NIV). God is a just judge, but he is also a merciful God who has been "propitious" (hilasthēti) to us in his Son, Jesus Messiah (cf. Luke 18:13). We can not presume, let alone gloat in the demise of one we consider wicked or our enemy. After all, as the exilic prophet Ezekiel records, God himself takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked (Ezek 33:11; cf. 18:23). If not, then a fortiori, neither should we. Not only do all of us have to face God's judgement seat―and I would remind Christian workers of Paul's words on this matter in 1 Corinthians 3―but all of us without exception are, as Paul reminds us, "by nature children of wrath," saved only by an unconditioned gift of God's "grace" (Ephesians 2:1-10). Self-righteousness may be the default condition of people both on the Left and the Right (for different reasons, of course!), but it has no place in a Christian who rightly understands him- or herself.
Nonetheless, once we have ensured that we rightly understand and evaluate ourselves, it is imperative, as Fred Clark reminded us yesterday, that instead of refraining from speaking ill of the dead, that we make sure to speak honestly of the dead, lest we fail to learn from, or teach others to avoid making, their mistakes. And this is especially important in the case of Limbaugh, who was idolized by far too many "ditto-head" American Christians. The reputation of our Lord and the advancement of the gospel are far too important to do otherwise.
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