‘Never Forget’ Is Easy. Remembering Well Is Hard

This September is filled with calls to collectively remember. It was one year ago, on Sept. 10, that conservative activist and Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk was killed at Utah Valley University. September 11, of course, marks 25 years since the attack on the World Trade Center towers in New York City.

Amid these invitations to remember, I have wondered what it means, in this place and moment, to remember rightly. There is no doubt we remember these events. Yet, our memories differ. As the Catholic theologian Jean-Luc Marion writes, “Once things have happened, there remain only words.”

Marion points to a gap between events and memorials—between things that have happened and the words that remain after. We cannot recover the event itself by placing ourselves back in time. We can only speak of the past. But the way each of us speaks differs, and therefore the event itself appears to change from across the insurmountable gap between past and present.

Think, for example, of how we speak of Charlie Kirk. Almost immediately following Kirk’s killing, it seemed like every media outlet rushed to cover the event. Explicitly partisan outlets either cast him as a hero or a villain. Conservative Christian spaces glossed over his hateful rhetoric and chose instead to point to him as an exemplar, especially for young men. Progressive Christian spaces turned to Christ’s instruction to love your enemy and seek reconciliation. Contained in all these articles are linguistic gestures: Was he murdered or assassinated? Is he a victim of gun violence or a martyr for the First Amendment? During his life, was he a faithful Christian witness or a nationalist agitator? Should Kirk be remembered as a pillar of the American Right or a podcaster who profited off an economy of division?

Marion’s observation on the formative importance of words also illuminates why, in the wake of 9/11, the federal government heavily policed public speech, using the Patriot Act and the newly formed Department of Homeland Security to tamp down on protest. Fast forward to 2025, and posting critical comments about Kirk’s legacy after his death became a fireable offense. High-profile journalists and pundits were suspended or fired for comments made about Kirk, and thousands of ordinary social media users had their jobs threatened as their Kirk-related posts were screenshotted and sent to employers (per Vice President JD Vance’s instructions). According to Reuters reporting, over 600 people lost their jobs. Fortunately, many who were wrongly terminated have been reinstated to their positions over the past year.

This policing of memory reminds me of something a wise professor taught me years ago: We cannot remember what we have been taught to forget. We live in a moment that Harvard social epidemiologist Nancy Krieger calls “a digital book burning.” This is a moment when forgetfulness, ignorance, and erasure are celebrated. The current administration bans books, dictates what can be taught in museums and classrooms, appoints conspiracists and fools to the highest levels of governmental office, and actively renarrates the story of America to give themselves the glory. We live in and under a nation that trades history for national hagiography and flirts with the unrestrained powers of authoritarianism and fascism. We are taught to forget.

We live in and under a nation that trades history for national hagiography and flirts with the unrestrained powers of authoritarianism and fascism. We are taught to forget.

This forgetfulness is part of a larger imperial project of renarration, which is an attempt to homogenize our collective memory. Often, this renarration comes in the form of a linguistic trick observed by the Palestinian author Mourid Barghouti: To blur the truth, simply start a story with “secondly.” “Start your story with ‘Secondly,’” Barghouti writes, “and the world will be turned upside-down. Start your story with ‘Secondly,’ and the arrows of the Red Indians are the original criminals and the guns of the white men are entirely the victim.” Writing for the Pacific Citizen in 2024, Kenji Kuramitsu explains that when we start our story with secondly, “the arrows of the Native Americans alchemize into the first volleys of unnecessary warfare, the uprisings of enslaved persons become avoidably excessive, and Gandhi is transfigured into the cruel tormentor of the gentle Raj.”

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Following Kuramitu’s adaptation of Barghouti, we can continue: Start the story with ”secondly,” and Charlie Kirk becomes a martyr for the First Amendment. Start the story with “secondly,” and the innocent, God-fearing America was attacked on 9/11 by heathens for simply loving freedom.

If Marion is right in his belief that all that remains after an event like 9/11 or Kirk’s killing is our words, then to begin narrating the past with “secondly” creates a false beginning. Memory gives way to mythology. Forgetting has the final word.

To be sure, as time passes, our memory naturally fades. There are gaps in our recollection. This is where the renarration of “secondly” thrives. When we are taught to forget America’s disruptive military presence across the Middle East, 9/11 becomes a story of Islamic terror that both condones present Islamophobia and positions Islam as incompatible with “American values.” This is the very message that Kirk preached time and time again. Still, we are taught to forget Kirk’s hostile, bigoted, fear-mongering rhetoric and, instead, we are told to applaud him. According to New York Times journalist Ezra Klein, Kirk was a role model for “practicing politics the right way.” Start with secondly, and our politics will begin looking like Kirk’s; start with secondly, and the way that Kirk practiced politics becomes admirable.

This renarration, which ignores the temporal gap between event and word, requires what philosopher James K.A. Smith diagnoses as a “spiritual dyschronometria”—an inability to keep time and a lack of awareness of what time it is. To employ the linguistic trick of “secondly” is to presume a divine perspective that exists above and beyond the constraints of being, time, and reality. In other words, to reconstruct history in this way is to assume a perspective outside and beyond our creaturely existence. Such narrators treat the past as an object of their own making to be shaped and molded as they see fit. Rather than locating themselves as creatures in a place—a “there”—those who seek to renarrate the past claim they are doing so from a position of “nowhere,” unbound by the limits of finitude. Take, for example, Hunter DeRensis’ hagiography of Charlie Kirk, wherein he likens Kirk and TPUSA to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement. DeRensis constructs a history of his own making through renarration, deradicalizing King and molding him into a Kirk-shaped figure. Such narrators deceive themselves. They cannot remember rightly.

What, then, does it mean to remember in a world filled with so many different memories? We might take our cue from the only One able to transcend the insurmountable gap between past and present.

In Luke 22, Christ calls his followers to remember him. To demonstrate for us how we ought to do this, he lifts a loaf of bread from the table and raises a cup filled with wine. To take and eat as Christ taught us is to take up a discipline of memory and remembering that is practiced in thought, word, and deed. It is, as the poet Christian Wiman puts it, “a tenuous, tenacious discipline of memory and hope.”

In our partaking of this meal, Marion identifies a “eucharistic hermeneutic.” Moving across the temporal gap between “then” and “now” is Christ, who transcends the chasm of time, re-presenting the past as we participate in the Lord’s table in the present where we hold his body and blood. When we participate in the Eucharist, we encounter the living Christ, not the Christ that is convenient or the one who has been created and remade to suit our desires. We partake in the Christ who encounters us in this world and calls us beyond ourselves.

This, to be sure, is a singular memorial. But it generates in us a discipline of speaking and remembering rightly. It is a memory that refuses forgetfulness and rejects the renarration of “secondly.” To remember rightly requires that we develop a paschal memory that speaks about the past to a God who intimately knows what has been, what is, and what will be.

As we are called to remember and commemorate, we must remain steadfast to a God who calls us to remember truthfully, not conveniently. We must place our located, contingent, and time-bound memory before a God who is the fullness of time.