“For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”

Psalms 30:5

I didn’t know Charlie Kirk. I had never interacted with him or seen him in real life. Although I was familiar with his content, I was not an avid consumer. And yet, his death has affected my family as if that of a close friend. It seems to me that this feeling is widespread and that this cannot fail to tell us something about how Charlie Kirk lived and how he should be remembered.

After spending several days flitting primarily between anger, sadness, and confusion, able to concentrate on little else as the aftermath of his assassination unfolded, at one point, this grief dissipated almost entirely, replaced by an unmistakable sense of hope. Having shared this with a handful of friends who I knew had been experiencing events similarly, I have come to believe this sequence of reactions has been widespread too.

Action

“For the kingdom of God is not in word but in power.”

1 Corinthians 4:20

Charlie Kirk offered hope. He was a political figure and his death was undoubtedly a political assassination. But his argument went beyond politics. Rather, it preceded politics. Kirk unflinchingly told his audience, whomever they might be, go to church, get married, have kids, and debate the issues of the day in good faith and good humor. Mainstream conservative political talking points aside, this was his true message. It was not novel and it was not complex. It was simple and normal and good. He was counselling hope – not aimlessly as a goal but purposefully as a method.

Attention has unavoidably been drawn to the lattermost component of “debate” in light of the tragic irony of the circumstances of his death; an obvious reading being that those couldn’t beat him in argument killed him instead. In a newly viral clip from just months before his death, Kirk explains to a questioner that, “when people stop talking, that’s when you get violence.”

But what are we to talk about, and why? We risk a hollow reading of Charlie Kirk’s message and a gross misrepresentation of what ought to be his legacy by supposing it counsels sitting around and thinking, finding goodness in coming ever closer to intellectual clarity. Truth only matters if we act on it. There is no real hope in whataboutism or bothsidesism. There is hope in action, or at least in the possibility of action – the rejuvenated understanding that we can act.

Truth can guide action, but it cannot motivate it. Hence, we must focus too on the former components – go to church, get married, have kids – as they comprise a sermon for the health of the body politic in which debate is to take place. Kirk steadfastly believed – and often recited – the words of John Adams, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Which is to say, of sorts, that a protocol of political economy this seriously incorporating the ideal of debate must surely be practised by a community strongly aligned on the rationale for doing so in the first place. It is to enable the public discovery of the best means of coherently enacting the good, not to discover the good or the community itself out of nothing but talk. Debating in good faith requires a people of good faith.

A community that prizes talking so highly and offers it pluralistically as an avenue of political participation perhaps risks violence as a failure mode, given many political ends are naturally exclusive of one another. But a community that elevates this failure to its priority is not a community at all. It is a cancer consuming its host.

Demons

“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”

Matthew 7:15

It is foolish to continue pretending that “leftism” is still in the building. Dangerous, even. Labor rights, welfare, environmental damage, corporate corruption, and imperialist foreign policy are nowhere to be seen. You need to realize what time it is, because the communists have set the clocks. These demons will dance on your grave and laugh at your widow and children. “Everything that exists deserves to perish,” says Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, incidentally thought to be Karl Marx’s favorite line in literature. How the Democratic Party is to deal with this reality, festering for decades but to which millions upon millions are suddenly wide awake, or if it is simply to collapse, is for others to say, and will surely be said at length in the coming weeks, months, and years. Let us observe that over half favor political assassinations, and leave the rest to the imagination …

On a more personal level, many of these people will soon reckon with Kirk’s content in context, a feat Kirk seemingly could achieve only in death. Maybe they will see him treating gay and trans people with more kindness and respect than they ever have or than any fellow communist ever has: not as means but as ends: not as props but as people. Maybe they will see past “debate” and into the goodness of Charlie Kirk’s being. We can only hope that his transparent superiority in conduct can provide a final off-ramp to those not fully possessed.

As for those who cannot be saved – who have been orchestrators and beneficiaries rather than Lenin’s useful idiots – they and their networks must be mercilessly destroyed within the bounds of the law. The swifter and more resolutely the better, on the proper understanding that this is and can only be the least violent path forward. RICO cases must be brought against each and every Antifa and DSA cell known to law enforcement, extended to their financial backers, their backers’ backers, and their backers’ backers’ boards. The entire NGO-ocracy of communist agitation must be treated as the criminal enterprise it is and dismantled root and branch. Any and all communist indoctrination must be grounds for revocation of university and college charitable status and the seizing of endowments. Departments must be canned wholesale with plans presented publicly to prevent their return, and individuals investigated on the basis of operation within the wider criminal network. Anybody adjacent to the crackdown yet not quite rising to perceived criminal guilt should nonetheless be permanently ostracized from civilized society. Expression of these ideas should be toxic for the entire rest of the lives of those involved.

I outline this political project in order to forestall any misunderstanding of what follows as a plea to overlook the political component of Charlie Kirk’s death, to “lower the temperature”, or the like. The temperature must be dialled up to red hot now that the nature of the threat is at long last understood by those it would seek to devour. The demons must be exorcised. The temperature must sweat them out. A political assassination demands political consequences. But only by finding the strength to do what must be done do we earn the luxury of appreciating how far this goes beyond the political. The foremost tenet of communism as it exists today is that “the personal is the political,” which, of course, is to say that everything is political and nothing is personal.

Going to church is political, say the demons. Getting married is political, say the demons. Having kids is political, say the demons. What they mean is that each, in their own way, is a mortal danger to the communist project because good, Christian family men and women are overwhelmingly likely not to become communists. Charlie Kirk didn’t promote “debate” so much as he knew debate would promote goodness. That is why he is dead.

Revival

“Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it.”

Psalms 34:14

The excuse typically given for such visceral hatred of somebody who just wanted to talk is Charlie Kirk’s links to Donald Trump. Trump is Hitler, in case you haven’t heard. And at the political level, Trump and Kirk were clearly allies. But the symbolism of this comparison is highly instructive and belies that the communists cannot conceive of anything beyond the political.

If communism is cancer, then Trump is chemotherapy. Chemotherapy is horrible, but death is worse. When you have cancer, it is crucial that you overcome it, and it is reasonable, if tragic, that this effort will consume your waking life. But a life is not to be lived waiting to get cancer just to beat it. Nor is a cancer survivor to be defined by this experience, but is better understood as being freed. The opposite of cancer is not “not cancer” but anything and everything, opportunity and goodness and action until such a time as a less tragic passing. It is a truth to be meditated on that cancer is evil, but what then? What does this tell us about how to act once cured? Does this alone give us hope? It doesn’t. Having survived, we need something to have survived for.

Of course, they also tried to assassinate Trump. Trump radicalized many with the focused negativity the political moment called for. This is good insofar as it is effective, but its effectiveness will struggle to be anything but reactive and itself political, and the short-sighted and cowardly will only ever be put off by the transient discomfort it causes.

They tried to assassinate Trump, but they failed. They failed because they don’t deserve this martyrdom. They want it. They want the negativity. They want the politics. They want the all-consuming hate and despair they projected into this caricature as a desperate, dying spasm. But they deserve none of this. They deserve Charlie Kirk.

That his unequivocal message of goodness in action has now become eternal represents the complete exhaustion of the communist project. It’s over. They have nothing. They are nothing.

As Jesus teaches in the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 8, Verse 17, “For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad.”

People know this. They feel it. As if by revelation, it is before us and cannot be denied.

Martyr

“Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.”

Revelations 2:10

The word “martyr” has taken on a number of unfortunate associations in modern English. We speak of martyrs for some or other cause as people who suffer or are merely inconvenienced by their advocacy, not necessarily those who are killed. It can also be used sarcastically, as if to diagnose a kind of intellectual or emotional immaturity on the part of such an advocate who does not realize their cause is trivial or of whose advocacy we suspect an ulterior motive. Even if honest and even if killed, usage has still expanded to cover anybody quite simply engaged in an activity of which the killer is thought to disapprove, regardless of what this activity is or how it was being carried out.

The original meaning is quite different from each of these more modern mutations. It derived from the Greek “to witness” and meant to tell the truth, knowing you would be killed for doing so; to not shirk from the threat of murder and to give testimony to the truth regardless.

Charlie Kirk is a martyr. He was killed for truth and his killing cements this truth.

There are certainly political avenues to celebrate his legacy. Lomez wrote a beautiful proposal for the Charlie Kirk National Park. A National Holiday is surely required. There will be statues, murals, and more to follow. The next Independence Day is the Semiquincentennial, and this opportunity should not be passed up.

This is all well and good, but in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 22, Verse 21, Jesus advises us to, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.”

The personal is not the political. Charlie Kirk wanted us to debate the political, having first gone to church, gotten married, and had kids. Not as a matter of policy but as a matter of a goodness and action that only we, as individuals, can choose. Charlie Kirk’s legacy is that while we mourn his death, we celebrate his life by overwhelmingly making this choice. As despair feeds on itself, so too the prospect of hope is reason to hope. As we are counselled in the Book of Proverbs, Chapter 23, Verse 7, “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.”

Church attendance will shortly be through the roof. Where, in living memory, politics has been used only to tear down bonds, they will be recreated, stronger than ever. In two to five years, there will be weddings. In three to ten years, there will be children. This generation will be raised with greater purpose and attention than perhaps any other in the history of the Republic. They will not be given up to demons. They will learn to debate in good faith and in good humor, but they will do so from the precedence of goodness, humility, and action. American civil society will be rejuvenated; unafraid, unconsumed, it will be made great again.

That is to say, they will be born into a world of hope.