Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk and his memorial service

I don’t want to keep banging on about this, because two weeks ago all I consciously knew about Charlie Kirk was that he was affiliated with Jerry Falwell Jr. around the time Falwell made spiritual shipwreck. My impression of him is more favorable now (mama was right: you’re known by the company you keep).

I suspect that Charlie will stop occupying our mind-space relatively soon. Meanwhile, here are some observations I think trenchant.

False note

Some “Evangelicals” are reportedly are starting to style Charlie Kirk as a Christian martyr. Rachel Roth Aldhizer gives examples and cautions that they’re playing with fire.

I have a more fundamental objection: the hagiography should stop not because of dangerous eventualities, but because it’s false.

Not every Christian who is murdered is a Christian martyr, and a Christian martyr is not a murdered Christian who is liked by lot of people, even a lot a people who are good at wordcraft.

Rather, a martyr must be murdered because of his Christian faith. The “tell” in this “Christian martyr” tale is the pronoun “they.” “They killed Charlie because ….“

No, “they” did not, and so far as we know at this point, based on very sketchy information, “he” didn’t either. What little we know points toward the lone shooter perceiving Kirk’s politics as hate-filled.

Plus ça change …

In most secular colleges and universities the largest evangelical organization was Campus Crusade for Christ, founded in 1951 by Bill Bright, a conventionally right-wing Presbyterian, to evangelize students and instruct them in conservative religion and politics.

Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals. Is Turning Point USA the new Campus Crusade?

Erika Kirk

Erika Kirk set a stellar moral example yesterday despite immense emotional and political temptation to be vindictive. All but uniquely for a MAGA Republican, her country is better today for her public influence.

Then the president spoke.

“He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them,” Donald Trump said of Charlie Kirk, seemingly praising the dead. Then he veered off-script: “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry. I am sorry, Erika.”

He joked that maybe she could convince him that hating one’s enemies isn’t right, which turned her moving statement of Christian witness into a set-up for a punch line. The crowd laughed. When it was over, Mrs. Kirk embraced him.

I’ve heard of political “big tents,” but I’ve never heard of one big enough to accommodate two moral systems that aren’t just contradictory but irreconcilable. “Christ’s message, followed by its very antithesis,” philosophy professor Edward Feser wrote of the contrast between Kirk’s and Trump’s remarks. “It’s almost as if the audience is being put to a test.”

Almost, yeah.

It’s been many years since I read the gospels, but I do remember Matthew 6:24: “No one can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other.” That’s the test. Many American Christians, possibly including Erika Kirk, seem to reject the premise.

Nick Catoggio

The audience failed the test. They cheered Erika Kirk, but also cheered Trump, who logically they should have booed.

MAGA theology laid bare

Many people who saw or read about the rally were puzzled by what they perceived as a contradiction. How can you cheer love and hate at the same time? How can you worship Jesus and cheer such a base and gross description of other human beings, people who are created in the image of God?

My reaction was different. Finally, I thought, curious Americans who tuned in got to see MAGA theology more completely — and what they witnessed was the best and worst of MAGA Christianity.

…

The objection to Trump isn’t so much that he’s aggressive — Abraham Lincoln was aggressive against the Confederacy, just as Franklin D. Roosevelt was aggressive against the Axis powers — but that he’s malicious and unjust. And when Trump says that he hates his political enemies, it’s a confession that he’s governing through his basest desires.

David French

The attack on free speech

Our fundamental bargain

Every generation of Americans must come to terms with the fundamental bargain of free speech: we agree that we won’t use the mechanism of the state to punish speech we don’t like and will talk back instead … Every generation has to accept the deal that they’re going to refrain from censorship to protect their own right to speak. Plenty of us still don’t accept that bargain, but if a critical mass of people don’t accept it, then it stops working. Free speech is Tinker Bell; if enough kids don’t clap, she dies. Or as Learned Hand put it more poetically: “liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.”

Popehat

That was then, this is then plus a few months and an opening to act more fashy

Then there’s the Big Guy. In his inauguration speech this year: “I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America. Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents.” Trump now: “The [networks] give me only bad publicity, press. I mean, they’re getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away.” And this: “That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!”

Andrew Sullivan.

Plutocrats in the C-Suite

One of the lesser-noted disturbing developments (because of all the higher-profile more “urgent” news) is the takeover of a vast swath of our media by family of billionaire Trump supporter Larry Ellison.

As Thomas Edsall notes in the linked article, this sort of thing is one of the ways Hungary’s Viktor Orbán built an illiberal democracy. They still have elections; they still have free speech; but anti-Orbán speech faces hurdles because Hungarian media are controlled by Orbán supporters.

Donald Trump is a much nastier man than Viktor Orbán. His instincts, unchecked by Congress as they are, are likely to take us to a place that makes Hungary look like paradise.

Chew on this

[T]he most trenchant point about the Kimmel saga was made by civil-rights lawyer Matthew Segal. “In my opinion, when companies or institutions cave to Trump despite the law being on their side, they are not misunderstanding the law,” he wrote. “They are making educated guesses that the U.S. is heading in a direction where, in practice, the law won’t matter.”

…

Go to court, one might say. Okay—but court is expensive, takes a long time, and risks winning the battle but losing the war. That’s Segal’s point: Even if Disney had prevailed in a legal battle with the FCC, our vindictive president would have looked for other levers of federal power to pull to damage the company. Keeping Jimmy Kimmel on the air and then turning around to find that the FCC has canceled your multibillion-dollar merger out of spite is the definition of a pyrrhic victory.

Nick Catoggio. I can’t say that’s entirely wrong, but this may be a better explanation. As to Jimmy Kimmel in particular, this too is relevant:

If CBS and ABC, two networks that have lately bowed to the president, gave half a hoot, they would easily have prevailed on First Amendment grounds if they put up a fight.

That is, if they prized their network TV businesses sufficiently as businesses, as opportunities to display stewardship, or even as instruments of influence. But they don’t.

Their network news and late-night talk shows are money-losing artifacts of an industry model their parent companies have no intention of investing in or taking risks for.

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Miscellany

A well/ill (choose one) founded fear of persecution

Hannah Kreager, a “trans woman,” fled Tucson for Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and promptly filed for asylum. Kreager had discerned which way the wind was blowing, and it was not propitious:

“If this had been just George Bush or some run-of-the-mill Republican president, I wouldn’t have left,” Kreager said. “I’d have stayed, written to my legislators, and protested because that’s what you do in a democracy. But this feels like an authoritarian regime.”

Rupa Subramanya, The Americans Seeking Refuge from Trump in Canada.

I don’t think Donald Trump feels any personal animus against transgender people, but he knows that quite a few in his base do feel such animus, and he panders to them periodically. Moreover, he is busily demolishing the rule of law in America, and one doesn’t know where he’ll turn next. I can’t say a fear of persecution is less than well-founded, although the Canadian government may, for diplomatic reasons, have trouble admitting that.

Trump lied, children died

The Trump administration has claimed that no one has died because of its cuts to humanitarian aid, and it is now trying to cancel an additional $4.9 billion in aid that Congress already approved. Yet what I find here in desperate villages in southwestern Uganda is that not only are aid cuts killing children every day, but that the death toll is accelerating.

Stockpiles of food and medicine are running out here. Village health workers who used to provide inexpensive preventive care have been laid off. Public health initiatives like deworming and vitamin A distribution have collapsed. Immunizations are being missed. Contraception is harder to get. Ordinary people are growing weaker, hungrier and more fragile. So as months pass, the crisis is not easing but growing increasingly lethal — and because children are particularly vulnerable, they are often the first to starve and the first to die.

It’s difficult to know how many children are dying worldwide as a result of the Trump aid cuts, but credible estimates by experts suggest that the child death toll may be in the hundreds of thousands this year alone — and likely an even higher number next year. In short, President Trump’s cuts appear to be by far the most lethal policy step he has taken.

…

Let me introduce Trump to the mothers of children that his cost-cutting has killed.

Nicholas Kristoff (Gift Link)

We are all gatekeepers now.

Comparing the top-down “gatekeeper” suppression of the full Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination to the easy access to videos of Charlie Kirk’s assassination:

The gatekeepers are long gone and will never return, but we can’t live as a healthy society without them. We prove this every day.

So you have to be the gatekeeper for your family. You have to be the gatekeeper for yourself. You have to hit delete as the stain tries constantly to creep in, you have to look away and guide others to look away. The school has to be a gatekeeper (removing smartphones from class is a gatekeeping action).

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan.

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite social medium.

Curated gems

The rest of the story

This has always been a staggering irony of the Snowden story: the primary attack on him by U.S. officials to impugn his motives and patriotism is that he lives in Russia and thus likely cooperated with Russian authorities (a claim for which no evidence has ever been presented), when the reality is that Snowden would have left Russia eight years ago after a 30-minute stay in its airport had U.S. officials not used a series of maneuvers that barred him from leaving.

Glenn Greenwald, ‌As Anger Toward Belarus Mounts, Recall the 2013 Forced Landing of Bolivia’s Plane to Find Snowden. Indeed, in 2013, the U.S. used another series of maneuvers to divert Bolivia’s presidential jet and force its landing in Austria, with the President aboard it, on the basis of false suspicions that Edward Snowden was on it.

“France has apologised to Bolivia after Paris admitted barring the Bolivian president’s plane from entering French air space because of rumors Edward Snowden was on board.”
Spain also ended up apologizing to Bolivia. Its then-Foreign Minister cryptically admitted: "They told us they were sure… that he was on board.” Though the Spanish official refused to specify who the "they” was — as if there were any doubts — he acknowledged that the assurances they got that Snowden was on board Morales’ plane was the only reason they took the actions they did to force the plane of the Bolivian leader to land.
Given that it was only the U.S. which was so desperate to get their hands on Snowden — they had already used Vice President Biden to lead a highly coercive effort to threaten countries with punishment if they gave him asylum — few doubted where this false intelligence originated and who was behind the unprecedented act of forcing a presidential plane to land. Indeed, all of this was so glaringly obvious that not even the U.S. government was willing to deny it.

So you might want to modulate the outrage at Belarus — or ramp up the skepticism about our own purity.

Parachute efficacy randomized control trial

Parachute use did not significantly reduce death or major injury (0% for parachute v 0% for control; P>0.9). This finding was consistent across multiple subgroups. Compared with individuals screened but not enrolled, participants included in the study were on aircraft at significantly lower altitude (mean of 0.6 m for participants v mean of 9146 m for non-participants; P<0.001) and lower velocity (mean of 0 km/h v mean of 800 km/h; P<0.001).

Conclusions Parachute use did not reduce death or major traumatic injury when jumping from aircraft in the first randomized evaluation of this intervention. However, the trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground, suggesting cautious extrapolation to high altitude jumps.

Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial | The BMJ. For possible applications, see Slate Star Codex.

Is the Vice-President "Asian"?

If you work in a massage parlor, you likely come from, and are in, a very different economic situation from the one Kamala Harris has inhabited most of her life … What does Harris’s life have to do with theirs, when it comes to any of the stuff that matters? …

In theory, of course, the connection is that Harris is part-Asian, and the victims (well, the ones mentioned in the Politico story), were Asian. But I feel like I should be putting that term — ‘Asian’ — in scare quotes. These particular victims were mostly Korean. So on paper Harris, like the victims, has “Asian heritage.” But I ask you in good faith: What the hell does this mean? The distance from the part of India where Harris’ mother is from to Seoul is about 3,300 miles. These are entirely different civilizations. Even the most racially ignorant rube would be unlikely to mistake someone of Indian descent with someone of Korean descent. And of course even here the language is extremely slippery, because India, in particular, is quite ethnically and linguistically complicated, as one would expect of a gargantuan country of almost 1.4 billion people.

…

I’m just not sure there’s any way to conceive of a concept of ‘Asianness’ that 1) includes both Kamala Harris and the victims of the massage-parlor murders and 2) doesn’t horseshoe into something redolent of old-school racism or Orientalism.

Jesse Singal, On Kamala Harris’s Privileged Upbringing And Why It Matters

He’s right. I, too, have been bothered by the inclusion of Indians as "Asian." Not in common parlance, they’re not.

I’ll second what the self-loathing woman said

Keira Bell was a troubled fourteen-year-old living in England. Daughter of an unemployed, alcoholic mother, she was distressed by the physical changes brought on by puberty. Her mother and others suggested that perhaps she really wanted to be a boy. Keira adopted their idea. At age fifteen, she was referred by a government psychologist to the Gender Identity Development Service. By age sixteen, she was being given a drug regimen of puberty blockers. The National Health Service continued its ministrations with a double mastectomy at twenty. After that surgery, Bell came to some realizations: “I recognized that gender dysphoria was a symptom of my overall misery, not its cause.” Looking back, she says, “I had so many issues that it was comforting to think I really had only one that needed solving: I was a male in a female body. But it was the job of the professionals to consider all my co-morbidities, not just to affirm my naive hope that everything could be solved with hormones and surgery.” Bell sums up: “I was an unhappy girl who needed help. Instead, I was treated like an experiment.”

Some years ago, I asked Paul McHugh, former chief of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, what could stop the medical profession’s adoption of the monstrously destructive transgender ideology. He replied, “When these kids grow up and realize what has been done to them, the lawsuits will be ruinous.” Bell did exactly that. In 2020, a panel of High Court judges issued a unanimous verdict to the effect that Bell’s treatment amounted to an unscientific experiment with life-altering consequences. The Court severely restricted the use of puberty blockers and hormone treatments for children under sixteen. The clinic is appealing the ruling.

It is my hope that people like Keira Bell find the right malpractice lawyers and win billions of dollars in damages. For those severely harmed by the transgender mania, this would be a good start toward something like justice.

R.R. Reno (emphasis added).

Everyone other than "desisters" are labeled "transphobic" for hesistancy about the trans mania, but perhaps desisters can escape with nothing worse than "self-loathing."

Diary this one for a month from now

France, Debray notes, has obligingly assimilated such anglicisms as gender studies, Gay Pride, revenge porn, and #MeToo, along with the collective self-loathing they are meant to carry with them. Since Debray has always been attentive to the role of privilege and guilt in his own early revolutionary enthusiasms, this is a subject that interests him greatly. “The stigma of being a bourgeois oppressor was not irremediable,” he recalls. “You could join the Communist party, a trade union, or a guerrilla commando in Mozambique. But white privilege? Where do you go to get over that? The dermatologist?”

Christopher Caldwell, ‌Régis Debray, Radical Conservative

As I read this fascinating profile (probably paywalled for another month or so), I kept thinking "ironic distancing" of Debray from his revolutionary past, and Caldwell himself eventually so characterized it.

If Debray carries a lesson for his twentieth-century readers, perhaps it is that the French radical tradition really is a tradition, as dedicated to rules, rituals, and reverence as any other.

The sure-fire short-cut to Heaven

My favorite part of Matins may be what I call martyr wordplay. Example:

On this day the holy Martyr Seleucus, having been sawn asunder, was perfected in martyrdom.
Verse: Without a groan, Seleucus bears the sawing
And so saw the saw as a short cut to Heaven.

I’m not kidding. Many of the Martys, while not seeking out martyrdom, welcomed it when it sought them out. I’m just following their lead — in enjoying the wordplay.

Like Mother, Like Daughter

England truly, and enduringly, is "the Mother Country." It’s like — wow! — a parallel universe!

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

Clippings, 2/16/19

1

If you subscribe to First Things, don’t miss Baptism of Blood in the March edition. If you don’t, save the link for 30 days or so and the paywall will drop:

[W]hen they saw the video and knew with certainty what had happened, their confidence returned: “We now have a holy martyr in heaven, so must rejoice—nothing can harm us anymore.”

Which explains why the families handled the video with a complete sense of ease. There was an iPad in every household on which one could watch the full-length, uncut, unedited video. Malak’s mother was the only one who refused to look at the screen, while all her family’s young men, cousins, and brothers stared at it, apparently undisturbed, pointing out the men they recognized, as they had often done. There could have been no better place to watch the video—surrounded by the men’s families and runny-nosed children, in rooms adorned with images of the crowned Twenty-One …

What would the murderers say about their video being shown like this? Would it surprise them to see how unflappable these simple-minded, poor folk were? Would they be able to see that their cruelty had failed to achieve the intended goal, and that their attempt to intimidate and disturb hadn’t succeeded?

Written of the families of the 21 Coptic Martys, beheaded by Muslim terrorists on a beach in Libya, and referring to a terrorist propaganda video of the rehearsed slaying. I immediately acquired an Icon of these Holy Martys and made it a point to join Copts in Matins and Liturgy two years ago.

(First published in micro.blog)

2

America Is Torn Between Trump’s Fibs and Progressives’ Fantasies.
The president is a master of little lies, but the left rejects the big truths that sustain politics and culture.

The problem with such a headline is that one may merely shake one’s head in vigorous affirmation without reading it:

My father … served for many years as an aide to Gov. and later Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. One night in 1979, he announced Rockefeller’s death before the television cameras. He thought it his duty as a gentleman to lie about the circumstances, and he never got over the shame of that lie.

…

Mr. Trump works with huckster falsehoods—the flashy superlatives of a car salesman. The progressive left works with conceptual falsities. Voters in 2020 will decide which style of lies they prefer.

Mr. Trump composes his reality after the manner of a Renaissance painter’s pentimento, except that he works at the speed of Twitter , making adjustments as circumstances shift. He slaps new paint over old facts when they become inconvenient. Mr. Trump’s abuses, he and his followers believe, somehow come right by coalescing in a larger truth—the mythic America that radiated from my father’s old Saturday Evening Post and came to its apotheosis in the Neverland of Dwight Eisenhower’s 1950s.

The progressive left embraces new visions of perfection—tamer in its methods than its 1930s predecessors, but sometimes outdistancing them in the fusion of dogmatic correctness with a fairly advanced decadence. Progressives are busy reinventing the Kingdom of God on Earth, trying to make their version as different as possible from his. They contrive elaborate new genders, for example—ones the deity didn’t think of. They invent vocabularies, terms ecstatic and bristling—“cisgendered,” “heteronormative,” “intersectionality”—designed to bully reality into compliance.

Their version of the kingdom mixes hopes of social justice with sexual nullifications and revenge fantasies. In my mother’s time, the far left in its dreams crushed capitalism and ushered the workers into paradise. Today they sweep white civilization and toxic males into the dustbin of history.

3

It was also exhilarating to see a congresswoman confront a figure who has pleaded guilty to misleading Congress before, and who helped cover up and minimize the slaughter of more than 800 civilians, including children, in El Mozote, El Salvador … [T]hat Abrams would go before the House and not be called to account for his past record would be an outrage. Making the powerful uncomfortable is what the Congress is supposed to do.

…

Now look at [Congresswoman Ilhan] Omar. She didn’t just push back on AIPAC’s distortion of American foreign policy, she reiterated a classic anti-Semitic trope that American Jews buy influence, period. She didn’t just confront Elliott Abrams, she refused to let him answer anything but loaded “yes” or “no” responses. And last week, for good measure, she demanded an investigation into the decision by USA Powerlifting to ban transgender women from competing in women’s powerlifting contests, because of the unfair advantage that developing a male body for most of your life will give you in lifting weights. The organization instituted the ban after a young trans woman, JayCee Cooper, smashed the state record for women’s bench press in Minnesota, beating her nearest female rival by a mile, only a year after joining the sport.

If the Democrats want to fight the next election on the need for a radical rebalancing of the economy in favor of the middle and working class, for massive investment in new green technology, for higher taxes on the superrich, and for health-care security for all Americans, they can win. If they conflate those goals with extremist rhetoric about abolishing everyone’s current health insurance, and starting from scratch, as the Green New Deal advises, not so much. If they insist that men and women are indistinguishable, that girls can have penises and boys can have periods, as transgender ideology now demands, they’ll seem nuts to most fair-minded people.

…

Are they really capable of fucking this up once again? The answer that is emerging in the first months of the new Democratic House is: of course they can.

Do not miss Andrew Sullivan’s Friday offering, on a single topic for a change. He had me howling in laughter at the hapless progressives, but then brought me crashing back to earth.

I won’t spoil it for you.

4

Socialism is … more frequently praised than defined because it has become a classification that no longer classifies. So, a president who promiscuously wields government power to influence the allocation of capital (e.g., bossing around Carrier even before he was inaugurated; using protectionism to pick industrial winners and losers) can preen as capitalism’s defender against socialists who, like the Bolsheviks, would storm America’s Winter Palace if the United States had one.

Time was, socialism meant thorough collectivism: state ownership of the means of production (including arable land), distribution and exchange. When this did not go swimmingly where it was first tried, Lenin said (in 1922) that socialism meant government ownership of the economy’s “commanding heights” — big entities. After many subsequent dilutions, today’s watery conceptions of socialism amount to this: Almost everyone will be nice to almost everyone, using money taken from a few. This means having government distribute, according to its conception of equity, the wealth produced by capitalism …

The “boldness” of today’s explicit and implicit socialists — taxing the “rich” — is a perennial temptation of democracy: inciting the majority to attack an unpopular minority. This is socialism now: From each faction according to its vulnerability, to each faction according to its ability to confiscate.

George Will. I hope Rod Dreher will take to heart this equivocation before he actually names his forthcoming book “Cultural Socialism” — a title so wrong on so many levels that I don’t know where to start.

5

Former representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas is experiencing a … sudden star turn. It’s easy to see why so many are attracted to him. He’s young (46), charismatic, has a beautiful family and appeals to a cross-section of Americans. But something about him seems manufactured. A leaner, lankier version of two likely role models, Bobby Kennedy and Barack Obama, his practiced performances tend to make one wish for the real McCoys. With unmistakable echoes of Obama’s cadences and Kennedy’s mannerisms, O’Rourke seems to have been created by an artificial intelligence that was informed by polls and demographic projections.

Kathleen Parker

6

“Yes, Moscow Boosts Western Anti-Imperialist Voices. So What?“

As we discussed recently, there will necessarily be inadvertent agreement between Russia and westerners who oppose western interventionism, because Russia, like so many other sovereign nations, opposes western interventionism. If you discover that an American who opposes US warmongering and establishment politics is saying the same things as RT, that doesn’t mean you’ve discovered a shocking conspiracy between western dissidents and the Russian government, it means people who oppose the same things oppose the same things.

…

If you really listen to what the CNNs and Ben Nimmos and Washington Timeses are actually trying to tell you, what they’re saying is that it’s not okay for anyone to oppose any part of the unipolar world order or the establishment which runs it. Never ever, under any circumstances. Don’t work for a media outlet that’s funded by the Russian government even though no mainstream outlets will ever platform you. Don’t even subscribe to an anti-establishment subreddit. Those things are all Russian. Listen to Big Brother instead. Big Brother will protect you from their filthy Russian lies.

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Jonathan Chau

There’s a fair amount of buzz about the death of American Jonathan Chau at the hands of Sentinelese islanders near India. Here’s the New York Times, for instance.

A secularist blogger at Patheos seized the opportunity to mock and vilify Christians, some (perhaps many) of whom are calling Chau a “martyr.” One group even wants the Sentinelese killers prosecuted. (That group is laser-focused on persecution of Christian around the world, so it has an incentive to see every Christian’s violent death as a persecution.)

Here’s my own initial and limited take.

There is no inconsistency between (1) recognizing the illegality and foolhardiness of Chau’s effort and (2) acknowledging him as a martyr because he was trying to preach the Gospel.

But I personally do not call Chau a Christian martyr because he is in almost every way not worthy of emulation:

He was not in communion with the Orthodox Church, but rather with a group multiple schisms removed from it — a group I might even think heretical if I knew more about it than the debased label “Christian.” That he graduated from Oral Roberts University is no reassurance.
He was deliberately violating a reasonable law that was not enacted to prevent evangelization of the Sentinelese. (That’s setting aside any question about what it was intended to do.)
He was, from what I’ve read, totally unprepared actually to evangelize the Sentinelese; he didn’t know their language and he had no training to master languages from scratch. I’m not even sure that he was any kind of commissioned missionary (versus an enthusiastic world traveler).
He was, frankly, grandstanding. Whatever else he was doing, he was doing that. (I might be dissuaded on this point.)
The Sentinelese killed him for his invasion of their island, not for his faith.

In short, I see his letters home as a sort of “hold my beer (and don’t call the Coast Guard) while I go through the motions of declaring Jesus to these folks who won’t understand me and who I can’t understand. And tell Mom I love her.”

God is merciful and loves mankind, so I still can hope for a blessed repose for this foolish and willful young man.

UPDATE 11/29/18: I have just learned that Chau did have some preparation, including linguistic training, vaccinations and quarantine, and was commissioned as a missionary. I need to acknowledge that in light of my third and fourth points and my snarky summary—all based on what I knew or had reason to know at the time I wrote them.

If you want to understand what might motivate a young man to take a very high risk with his life (and his freedom if caught by legal authorities), Ed Stetzer’s “Acts of Faith” item in the Washington Post would be good to read.

UPDATE 2 (reaching this group was a long obsession of Chao, and the missionary agency boot camp was oriented to that, making the mission agency complicit in the illegality).

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Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.