Good morning, I greet you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is a day we felt we needed some conversation, wanted to come together as a community, and think some things through. So, I’m going to read a text of Scripture, then pray, and then we’ll turn to conversation, from Romans chapter 12. “Bless those who persecute you. Bless, and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep, live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be conceited, repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to what is honorable in the sight of all, if possible, insofar as it depends on you. Live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”
These are words we need to hear this morning, even as there is within us a righteous call, demand, hunger for justice and righteousness to prevail. We are here in the light of a tremendous tragedy, which is, for a wife and children, a horrifying loss, a life-changing event. There’s a sobriety to our conversation today, but let’s be very thankful we have this conversation in full confidence in Christ. Jesus saves. So, let’s pray.
Our Father, we come before you in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, to declare the full power of the gospel in Christ’s name. Father, in light of recent events, we are struck again by the fact that if there is no gospel, there is no hope. But in Christ, there is eternal hope, secure hope, and a hope not merely for our eternal life given to us by your grace, full acquittal of sin, but there is also the promise of full justice, perfect righteousness, a day that is coming where your righteousness and judgment will be so perfect that every eye will be dry, and every tear will be wiped away. Father, we ask your blessing on this conversation because we know that day is coming, but we are not there yet. In these days, we want to be faithful. We pray this in the name of Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
This has been a remarkable season in American life. As I wrote in the piece at World Opinions this morning, and as I discussed on The Briefing today, generations are shaped by events, tragedies, happenings that simply become a part of our lives in such a way that there’s a before and an after. It takes, in some cases, some time to figure out what all these things mean, but there’s also an immediacy. The immediacy that came after the assassination of Charlie Kirk yesterday is one of those moments where, as the day went on, it seemed to me the right thing to do is to gather together for some conversation. Charlie Kirk was an amazing young man, 31 years old when he was shot yesterday. He had been in public debate, conversation, and political life in the United States for 10 years, co-founding Turning Point USA at age 18.
His life, biography, his mode of operation meant that he was a political activist, a public speaker, a public leader, an organizer. He was a provocateur. It was the very love for that kind of debate that set him in Utah yesterday on a college campus, under a tent, with the charge, Prove me wrong. It was public debate that he was engaged in when his life was taken. There is an inescapable human dimension to this story, and as Christians, that’s what strikes us first. His widow, Erika, two precious, extremely young children, a mother left without a father, a wife without a husband, and now children without a father. So, we as Christians have to think of our concentric circles, getting back to what’s most precious, and that’s where we have to say the greatest loss is found, and it’s an unspeakable tragedy.
But then, working outward from that, there are millions of young people who have been, I think, activated, inspired, educated, mobilized by Charlie Kirk. That was the passion of his heart. There is a sense of a movement, even a fellowship of sorts, that comes in such a movement. Especially given his ability to mobilize and inspire so many young men, there’s kind of a brotherhood that is involved. There is grief all around, and there’s more than that because we’re not just talking about someone who dropped dead of a sudden heart attack. We’re talking about an act of violence that took his life. There’s a lot here for us to consider.
This is an unusual event for us, in that we just said there was a chapel service planned, but we need to use this opportunity to have this kind of heart-to-heart conversation as Christians. I am joined here by Dr. Denny Burk, Dr. Dustin Bruce, and Dr. Andrew Walker. Honestly, we’ve been in conversation, we’re in conversation a lot anyway, but yesterday was an unusual level of conversation, and I want to be honest, an unusual level of immediate concern for those whom we love, care for, and live with joyfully on this campus. To put it bluntly, I think Charlie Kirk had a lot of influence, a continuing influence, an inspiring influence on an awful lot of the students at Boyce College, in particular, and specifically the young men of the college. So, let’s talk this thing through a bit in a way that will honor God, and help us to think this through. Andrew, the news came yesterday, what was your first thought?
My first thought was along the same lines as what you just shared. Gratuitous violence is always a shock to the conscience, and the particularly vivid video that we are seeing is beyond comprehension in its graphicness. Attention then turns to a wife and children that are now without a spouse, without a father present. That’s horrible, those are occasions to weep with those who weep. We can’t use other language than tragedy and grief in these types of situations. Then, when we zero out about the significance, what I call the crater of impact of someone like Charlie Kirk, I think he is arguably, maybe the most significant conservative leader who was not in elected office, probably since William F. Buckley. I would actually argue that Charlie Kirk’s significance transcends even the significance of someone like William F. Buckley.
William F. Buckley founded National Review Magazine, the founder of the modern conservative movement. He was kind of an elite speaking to elites. What did Charlie Kirk do so effectively? He was able to transmit conservative ideas, and praise the Lord, Christian ideas, into a vernacular for the youth. I was reflecting on this with some friends, we just recorded a podcast a little bit ago, and one of the things we said was, Charlie Kirk made conservatism relatable, palatable, and cool for youth culture. It’s always been the adage that when you’re young, you’re rebellious, you’re progressive, you’re trying to break free from the constraints that have formed you, and you want to pursue rebellion for rebellion’s sake. Conservatives in American history have done a good job of having a populist message in the form of Fox News and talk radio, but conservatism has never broken through to youth culture until Charlie Kirk came along.
That’s just not quite true, okay, you are so young, I want to say the conservative movement, as we know it, would not have happened without William F. Buckley Jr. and others in the creation of Young Americans for Freedom, which we need to remember mobilized more conservative young people on many college campuses than the hippies who were protesting. Many of them ended up in public office. The point is, I don’t think any movement has a future that does not mobilize youth. I think in his generation, Charlie was unique, and frankly, at a time when no one thought this was going to happen, he was incredibly powerful.
Yeah, I would argue that he mobilized youth in a disproportionate way from Young Americans for Freedom, which is predominantly a collegiate-led project. Then you look at the transmission and the immersion of the ideas, millions and millions of followers on Instagram, TikTok, and on X. I’ve never seen youth culture be open to conservatism, and now, given my vantage point is limited as a 40-year-old, but that says something about the magnitude of someone like Charlie Kirk on American culture.
I think the issues are very different in the 21st century than they were in the 1960s. I think the polarization in the culture is something that no one actually even saw coming in the 1960s, that was horrible division, violence on the streets over a particular set of issues that I think is far smaller, less fundamental than what we’re dealing with. I’m agreeing with you, I think someone like Charlie, for instance, in taking on the LGBTQ issues and all the rest, was just far more effective than anyone prior to him in terms of activating young people to understand what’s at stake. So, I’m agreeing with you, I’m just saying, I think his unique power, I mean, he had social media people before didn’t have it. So, it’s not fair to say they didn’t use it, they didn’t have it. This is a different thing, and he was a master at understanding how to seize it all and use it towards his ends.
Even Young Americans for Freedom and Buckley conservatism always had Christian accents built into it, but I would argue that there’s no one who has been as explicit about their Christian faith as someone like Charlie Kirk, especially bringing that down to a youth culture, and happily seeing great progress and transformation in his own understanding of how he integrates his faith in his politics. He began, early on in his career, more or less very libertarian on a lot of social conservative issues. Over time, as age and experience tend to do, it matures, you begin to see the world in new ways. He gets married, has a family, he becomes a stalwart social conservative. He begins challenging LGBT ideology, he begins actively engaging in debates on campus. I think that’s a wonderful testament to a man who, I never met Charlie Kirk myself, I have several friends who knew him at varying degrees, but all of them testified to a very deep and abiding faith.
Yeah, when I first met him, I wrote about this in the World piece. When I first met him, it was in his libertarian phase, kind of Ayn Rand, very hard. I didn’t put this in the article, but I’ll tell it to you now, it was kind of a presentation of a young party conservatism, kind of a rally. He didn’t have a lot of interest in Christian conservatives, we were backstage speaking at the same conference, and I’ll just say he was not really interested in Christian conservatives, to the contrary, he wanted to create distance. So, I was surprised and very pleased by the turn. As you just said, Andrew, this is organic in the providence of God, getting married, having children, growing a little older, all of a sudden you understand that conservatism can’t be built as a house on stilts in the air, it’s got to rest on something. I also know so many people who knew him very closely who say this was a very authentic Christianity, a very authentic embrace of Christian truth and Christian morality that undergirded his social conservatism. Denny, you’ve watched him for a long time, what were you thinking when the news came?
I heard about this yesterday, I was coming out of hermeneutics class, and a student, I don’t know if you’re in here, but he caught me in the parking lot and said, Have you heard the news? I said, No, I’ve been teaching, what happened? He said, Well, Charlie Kirk’s been shot, he’s in the hospital. I just want to say to that student, thank you for telling me that, I didn’t know what had happened until minutes later. I probably should have stood there and talked to you for a moment, because I found out what happened, saw everything in gruesome detail right after that, and realized how traumatized probably that student was. When I think about Charlie Kirk, two things come to mind. Number one, there are all kinds of people online with a microphone in their hand on college campuses interviewing people and being provocateurs. To me, what stood out about him was when he would share about Christ, he would talk to lost people.
He would talk to people who did not know Christ, who were leftists, who were there opposing him on all kinds of ideological grounds, and he would just talk to them about Jesus. He would preach the gospel, and if they had a problem with some aspect of the faith, he would talk about that aspect of the faith. He was a popular apologist. So, that’s what stuck out to me, he was very explicit about that, as Andrew said, and so that was profound.
Then, also, as people have testified, you can even see it in some of his videos from over the years, of his humanity. One event, there’s a video out there of a young woman coming up at one of his events, he would just debate anybody who walked up,
He wanted people who disagreed with him to be in the front of the line.
That’s exactly right. But anyway, he had a young woman walk up, and I don’t think she was there to disagree with him, but she talked about her abortion, she had had an abortion, and she told her story of coming to a realization that this was a baby, and this was my baby. Charlie’s response to that was, he just wept, he just cried, right there, he responded like you would think a compassionate Christian might respond. So, to me, the provocateur, the conservatism, all of that is so significant for our culture, and it accounts for his influence, but what struck me was his explicit Christian testimony that came on the other side of some kind of conversion, I don’t know the whole story to that, but that was profound.
That became evident, and as I say, my first exposure to him backstage, I didn’t see that coming, so I’m just giving thanks to God, first of all, because that changed Charlie Kirk’s message, and I think it changed his personality and his character. I could see that in some concrete ways, but it certainly makes this conversation very different because we are not without hope. We understand that because Charlie Kirk had come to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, his sins have been forgiven, and his destiny is secured. That makes this a different conversation.
Dustin, you’re the dean at Boyce College, so many Boyce College students know Charlie Kirk online especially, a rather constant communication partner. What was your first thought and concern for Boyce College students?
Yeah, we talked about how good he was with social media, reaching the masses through new forms of technology, and kind of ironically, I didn’t just receive a message that he had been shot, but I received a video of the actual shooting. When I was first alerted to this, it was through a text message that included a video of the shooting, and so I watched that and then immediately thought, Oh, should I have watched that? As I’ve talked to students, a number of students have just shared that same concern over, alright, we live in an age where we don’t just hear about things, but we have a vision of them that’s presented to us, particularly through social media. How should we think about exposing our conscience to such things?
Let me ask a question. Did you choose to expose your conscience to such things?
So, you knew what it was before you watched it?
I knew that it was, I could see the link that it was a video, and I assumed it was him getting shot. Yeah, I think two-thirds of my class this morning had watched it, and of course now, it became not just you see it once, but it’s being played over and over. This is one concern I have, we see so many more things than we used to as a people, and I have concerns over what that does to us, and I don’t know that I have a great answer over that question right now.
Given the fact that Charlie had such influence, and given the fact that he had the power of creating, communicating, and immediacy, a lot of people felt like they had a relationship with him. He took on a public role, but the way that works is that people in public roles move into our hearts in a certain sense, sometimes we invite them in, and thus they become a part of us. We are Christians, we’re talking as Christians today, we believe profoundly in the fact that right and wrong are not compliments, right and wrong are not matters of taste, good and evil are objectively real. There is anger in this, the Scripture says, “Be angry, but sin not.” That’s a tough thing to think through, but at least a part of it, it seems to me, is that a Christian with a Christian conscience and a Christian heart can only respond to evil with anger, but that anger has to be a Christian anger, that anger’s not inactivity, and it’s not less anger than the world will have, is perhaps an even deeper anger because we understand this is an affront to the one true and living God. This was the premeditated destruction of an image-bearer of God. So, how do we be angry and sin not?
The Bible says that the anger of man does not achieve the righteousness of God, and the reason that is the case is it’s entirely bound up with what we’re angry at. If you want to have a righteous anger, you have to be angry at the same things God is angry at. In other words, the focus has to be, your affections have to be aligned with God, with his reality, and with his nature. The anger of man doesn’t achieve the righteousness of God because we have anger misdirected all over the place, we get angry at the wrong things.
But it’s not always the wrong things, right?
No, it’s not always the wrong things, but we get angry at the wrong things, we take personal offense, and then we don’t get angry at the things that we should be angry at. This is something to be angry at, this was an overt evil, it was wrong, we shouldn’t reconcile ourselves to it.
So, who are we angry at, Denny? Who is anger directed in this case, towards a moral agent? Who is the moral agent to whom we respond righteously with anger?
Yeah, so right now, I’m being circumspect because there’s a lot we just don’t know yet. We do know somebody shot Charlie Kirk, we know that somebody shot Charlie Kirk while he was speaking, and we could probably assume that they wanted to stop him from speaking, that’s what we know. Was this a lone shooter, was this a conspiracy, I don’t know where to direct that anger.
The reason I’m asking the question, I think you do actually. You know to direct the anger first and foremost to the killer.
You don’t know who that is yet, but that’s properly the first and most concentrated place the anger is addressed.
One of the dangers is that we have a lot of righteous anger, realistic, truthful anger, but because part of the frustration is we don’t have a suspect, we don’t have a video, the danger is that’s going to be misapplied.
The problem is, we live right now in an ecosystem of what seems to be proliferating episodes of political violence, the trend is upward right now, not downward, which means there’s something in the ecosystem going on in secular society that we have to confront as a society. I don’t think secular society has the moral reserves in the bank to confront these crises, it’s going to require a Christian confrontation with the lies that are circulating in the culture around us. One thing that I’m thinking about in the context of how to channel your anger, you should be angry over this. A young wife and young children no longer have a spouse or a father, that is grievous. What we choose to do with that can say a lot about us and reveals what’s inside of us.
My concern right now is that if we have a conservatism without Christ, it can descend into kind of red-pilled radicalism, where you embrace a no-holds-barred strategy towards political engagement yourself. I understand that temptation, that’s not the Christian outlook when it comes to our mode of political responsibility. I think if you’re going to channel your anger properly, channel your anger properly by doing the things that reflect what Charlie Kirk would have you do, channel your political agency to vote for the right people who will instill the right values into office. Open your Bible, if you’re married, love your spouse, if you have children, love your children. That is a far more important way, an outlet to channel your anger than just venting online to people. As we learn more about the exact causes of this, there potentially could be some justification for some ideological anger at what’s going on in society around us.
The response, some of the response, I mean, horrifying statements, stupid, celebratory statements made by the Governor of Illinois and a commentator on MSNBC, I just, to be honest, I don’t live and work with people who would ever have responded that way in any other context, I don’t understand that.
There are layers there, incidentally, we were studying Ephesians 6 last night in Bible study, at Wednesday night Church, principalities, powers, spiritual realities to contend with. Our society is not prone to immediately go to the spiritual, but we as Christians ought to go to the spiritual. When you see headlines at publications like Jezebel Magazine, talking about on September 8th, they published a headline that said, “We paid witches to curse Charlie Kirk” that’s a headline, you can go look online right now. Don’t look at me and tell me there are not spiritual forces at play in the sociopolitical conversations that we’re having as a society. I’m not here to say Charlie Kirk was right about every single thing he ever said or did, but if you align yourself with truth, there will always be forces seeking to counteract the truth. We have to have a level of discernment to understand that this is not just a political reality, it’s also a spiritual reality.
He wasn’t merely disliked, he was hated. There’s a sense in which, in the world as we know it, there are people who will give themselves to hate, they will marinate themselves in hate, and that’s going to come out in some kind of destructive force. As you say, we’ve seen far too much of this, including two assassination attempts against, who was then former President Trump, and is now again President Trump. You look at that context and you say, okay, that didn’t happen for decades in American life, now it’s coming with a horrifying repetition that there’s something toxic in our culture.
Yeah, as I’ve watched some of the responses to this increased political violence, there is a tendency to want to throw off the rule of law in order to seek justice, which will undercut justice in the long run, right. We can’t respond in that way, and you’re the supreme historian here, so you understand that, can fill in the gaps here, but oftentimes when violence has been perpetuated from the left, and the right decides to throw off all the restraints of the rule of law, things can descend into pretty dark days. I do see some of that out there being put forward, that’s a bit concerning, we need to let justice play out according to the system, and we should be adamant that it does, but we should not want to do away with it.
That’s well said, and I want to kind of challenge us, especially perhaps the young men in here, because I was seeing this online, this impersonal, They, they are going to pay for this, or the phrase, You don’t hate them enough, thrown out on social media, this idea that we’re ready to take up arms, we’re ready to go do a fight of some sort. The question is, who’s that aimed towards, how are you going to actively, productively channel that?
That’s a very good point, I just interrupt you to say, that is the toxicity that happens generation by generation, it’s a them, it’s a they, that we project without taking responsibility. There is a they, there is a them, and they are working what we believe to be evil plans, they propose horrifying policies, we believe that many of them are in direct rebellion against the Word of God. But it’s very dangerous, and you put your finger on it, just to say, They’re going to pay for this, that undefined they is, I think in biblical terms, very dangerous.
The only category of people that can pay for it, the they, are politicians, they’re the people you actually have the direct agency to determine whether or not they’re going to be in office or not.
The first person, if you pay for it, is the perpetrator of this crime, who should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Yeah, we just don’t have the control, of the they out there in culture, academia, in entertainment, I don’t have the power to snap my fingers and change things, if I could, I would, which means, apart from me having my utopia, we’ll call it Andrew-topia, as I’ve said in other classes before, you’re going to have to work this out through the political process. You can’t just immediately get what you want, you can try to work that out violently, which is only going to return with further violence, which means you’re back working within the system of the American process itself.
Let’s stay there for just a moment, because the rule of law often stinks. It is often extremely frustrating because it seems not to deliver justice, perhaps as speedily, as clearly as we would hope, but the rule of law is all we’ve got because it’s the rule of law, or it’s the mob. The mob is not going to help us here, and conservative Christians are the people who have to go to the front lines of understanding, we’re not a mob. A mob, as the 20th century demonstrated, is a thing that takes on a mind and a spirit of its own, unaccountable to the rule of law. The rule of law can be very frustrating, but it is the only way, and by the way, it’s built into the Old Testament and God’s revelation to Israel. What they are given is a rule of law, it is honored by the Apostle Paul in the New Testament in explicit terms, it is the emperor who bears the sword, and not in vain.
So, I think it’s a good word for us all, it’s very tempting in a moment of urgency and anger to even emotionally join a mob, but we’re called to a brotherhood of Christians, to a fellowship of believers accountable to all these things. Our demand for justice is not less than theirs, it’s actually greater than theirs, but we also know that the ultimate satisfaction of full justice can’t be delivered by a mob, it also can’t be delivered by the rule of law. It can be delivered to the fullest sense possible on earth by the rule of law, but the final judgment on these things is going to be made by the one truly perfect judge.
Well, and remember, :Be angry and do not sin.” We serve a Savior that says, “Love your enemies.” We serve a Savior who, when he was reviled, he did not revile in return. You’ve got to remember, as a believer, that political violence is not a part of your tool chest. You can choose political violence, or you can follow Jesus, but you can’t do both. So, you’re going to hear a lot of people on both sides pretend like political violence is an option here, or this is the right way to respond to this, I’ve seen people talking this way, people who aren’t behind anonymous accounts saying these kinds of things, and I’m saying, That’s not Christianity.
What you’re saying is so important in the New Testament, the taking of violence in your own hands is an antitype, ultimately, in Judas.
Exactly, well, I mean, Paul says in Romans 12, “Vengeance is mine,” right, he’s talking about the Lord, don’t take your own revenge because the Lord says, Vengeance is mine, and then right after that, he says, There’s no authority that exists except from God, and the government doesn’t bear the sword for nothing, but he’s a minister of wrath. In other words, a part of leaving vengeance to the Lord is trusting God-ordained authorities to handle these things, that you don’t take it into your own hands and commit some act of political violence, you don’t do it. Trusting the Lord means trusting the authorities insofar as they are acting justly to do this. It’s fundamental Christianity 101, I’m very concerned of political violence appearing on both sides, and people getting so angry that they would respond in a way that’s fundamentally contrary to Christ. I just would exhort everyone listening to this to not go that way, you can either do that, or you can follow Christ, you can’t have it both ways.
Don’t let your heart go that way, you can’t do both. Don’t let your heart go that way. Don’t begin to take pleasure in the thought, that’s the first thing. Dustin, give a pastoral word here.
I think there are biblical virtues that are eminently relatable to political virtues, so the call to be self-controlled in Galatians 5, that cashes out in being sober-minded and letting your reasonableness be known among all, as the Apostle Paul talks about. I know right now there’s perhaps a swelling sense of resentment, we want to lash out, we want to get them, they are the enemy. I would say, don’t let your heart sit and stew on those realities, it’s not going to end up in a good spot, but in the interim, pursue sober-mindedness, pursue reasonableness, not just acting out with outbursts online just because everyone else is in the moment.
Yeah, I think a few concerns that I’ve been thinking through, one, there is a way that certain elements of society have been responding that completely dehumanize Charlie Kirk and his family, to only see him as a political agent, and therefore there can be rejoicing in his death. That’s hard to respond to, it’s easier in some ways for me to be angry in a righteous way at the killer because that act is so clear. When you see people responding and rejoicing in his death because they’ve just politicized him, that’s, for me, a little bit harder to be angry and do not sin. I would say that we have to just come back to remembering that we don’t see people in such terms as if they’re only a political agent, but that we see people as people, even when we may have deep disagreements and concerns over them. So, we have to reject that dehumanizing that others might be doing in our engagement with them.
Yeah, you’re absolutely right, but let’s acknowledge that there’s a proper hatred that this calls out. It’s a hatred, for example, of the killing of unborn babies in the womb, it’s an anger of the subversion of marriage, it’s an anger towards the proliferation of perversion, it’s an anger towards the tearing down, we believe, of civilization, it is a disrespect towards what any sane society respects. It is horrifying realities, and I think it’s hard for us to hold these two things in tandem, but we are called to be angry against such things. You can’t read the Scripture and not know that God hates evil, and in one sense, we have to respond to these evils as believers in the full measure of anger that is their due.
But we can’t give ourselves to anger, it’s a tough thing. I want to be honest, without righteous anger, people aren’t going to vote the right way, without righteous anger at the right things, they’re not going to sacrifice in order to try to bring change in society and its policies and laws. So, this is the hard thing for us, isn’t it? We want people to be angry, righteously, and I mean, we are not in the sixties, which was a time of tumult, we’re in a time in which the basic humanity of fellow human beings is at stake here, when good and evil in the political polarization of this country, blue and red, are increasingly living in separate moral worlds. So, I am angry about that, and it needs to be channeled into an appropriate anger that leads to something that has consequences, but we can’t give ourselves to anger as a mode of life.
There’s a new book by Yuval Levin, and in the very beginning of the book, he talks about how can our Constitution work? He says, well, the Constitution only really works when you live in a society where primordial issues of moral foundation aren’t debated. So, he says, the Constitution can work when the people can debate tax policy and entitlement policy, he says, the Constitution isn’t going to work as well, or it may not work at all, if we’re a society that is questioning basic moral principles of right and wrong, good and evil, male and female, the dignity of the human person. I read this, and I thought, okay, why am I going to read the rest of this book? Because we live in that society right now. I wish we lived in a society where we were just debating tax policy, but we aren’t.
So, then what do we do with that? It means that we are sober-minded and honest, understanding that ideas are not neutral, and ideas are not equal. I’m not here to baptize conservatism, even though I am a conservative, but I am here to tell you, there are metaphysical principles built into the progressive worldview that are completely at odds with biblical Christianity. That’s not a partisan comment, that’s a biblical statement,
And increasingly that’s obvious.
Its obvious but then, that’s going to have a response necessary from us, and the response is to say, Well, I hate progressives, that’s one option, or it’s to say, I really hate progressivism, as a set of ideas, and I want to seek to liberate people from their captivity to progressivism without hating progressives.
I think that’s profoundly right, and I think that’s what we try to emulate, demonstrate. I think Charlie Kirk was a provocateur, but when you watch what he did with human beings, it was amazingly respectful. I think that’s a danger for conservative Christians. I think we have to watch the way we speak, speak more like we should speak to someone face to face, and less like someone who’s just throwing intellectual hand grenades at a crowd.
That explains a lot of his effectiveness as a communicator. One of the phrases I’m seeing thrown around in the aftermath of his assassination is, he was a happy warrior. Would that be described of all of us in this room, someone who can contend for the realm of ideas with conviction, with principle, with grit, but can do it in a way that retains the possibility of persuasiveness. We no longer live in a society where we’re trying to persuade people, we just entrench back into our own tribes. Charlie Kirk was actually trying to persuade people, and what happened in the span of his career, one of the narratives out of the 2024 election was the swing of Gen Z towards the right, which means people are actually open to persuasion still if they’re confronted with the right type of communicator. So, I think trying to emulate what he practiced is very important for us as believers.
I was challenged this morning when I saw someone writing back to me in response, and it was that I had basically overblown this, the insinuation is this is only Charlie Kirk, I’d used the word assassination. Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, used the word assassination, I kind of lean into it, but I think it may, in this generation, need to be defined. An assassination is a murder intended to send a public message, and that goes back to classical history. It arose in an unbelievable, unprecedented series of political assassinations in the 19th century, and then in the 20th century, so many tragic assassinations. An assassination is an attempt to murder someone in order to send a political message.
Well, we’re going to have to figure out, we can make some inferences that I think are very likely to be true, but this returns us to the fact we need police, the FBI, and others to do their work. I’m praying, among other things, for an airtight case, for a sense of public recognition that justice has been achieved, and I think those on the left who pray better be praying the same thing, because it would be a tragedy if 10 years from now, we’re still speaking of it at the level of mystery we are right now in terms of who did it, why, where’s the accountability?
I’m going to say, today is September 11th, 2025, 24 years ago today was Tuesday here in this chapel, right, the anniversary of the attacks on 9/11. One thing that stuck out to me from that time was the sense of national unity that happened in the wake of that calamity. I remember there was one scene where the president, George W. Bush, at the time, went to address a joint session of Congress, and either going up or coming down from the lectern, he saw the opposition leader in the Senate, Tom Daschle, and they hugged on the floor right there in front of a joint session of Congress. There was a sense of, We are bitter ideological opponents, but man, we’re in this together.
The thing that concerns me right now is, I don’t know what could produce that kind of response amongst partisans right now, I don’t know that that kind of feeling or sense of common civic purpose is what it used to be. But I think that gives us a particular calling as Christians, we are bearing witness to another kingdom, and that kingdom is invading right here where we’re living. We need to be able to bear witness to that, we love enemies, and the ideologies that we hate, that we know people hold around us, we don’t hate them, we love them, and we love them for the sake of Christ, we want to see them saved, we want to see them converted, we want to see them brought into the kingdom. We can’t live our lives just in this constant outrage of the other, but we have to—
Because we really do want their ideas to be defeated, we want their proposals to be voted down,
We want them to be converted, yes. I want more people like Charlie Kirk, who, when you first met him, was not a believer, and it was evident, and then he became one, and it was evident, and the way that man manifested in his life, that’s what we should want for everybody. If we can’t do that, there’s nobody else on the planet that’s going to do it.
I had some sustained time talking with students yesterday, and it struck my heart how wounded and troubled so many students are, and have been. We love the students we have the honor of teaching, being around, and living with. It’s no small thing to just interrupt a schedule like this to have this kind of conversation, but we love our students, and we share this with them in terms of the grief, heartbreak, and let’s be honest, we share the same anger. We’re praying for each other, how rightly to direct these things, but time is running out. The one thing we know we must do is to pray for his widow, Erika, and those two children. So, that’s what we’re going to spend our time doing just as we bring this to a close. I’m not going to ask any one of us to do that, I’m going to ask all of us to do that, just in the span of a minute. I’ll start with you, Andrew, lead us in prayer, I’ll bring it to a close.
Let’s pray. Our Father, we thank you that we can come together as your people to discuss the important things that matter, that are shaping us as a people. Lord, we want to lift up to you right now the family of Charlie Kirk, we pray that you would comfort them, be with them in their mourning, that you would give grace to them, Lord, that there would be hope and peace through this situation in only ways that you can bring to them. We just pray that you would also bless our nation as we work through the fog of polarization and bitterness. Father, may Christ bring peace to us all.
Heavenly Father, your word tells us that in this world we will have trouble, but that we may take heart because Christ has overcome the world. So, Father, we ask that you would enable us to be a people who take heart, that we would not grow weary of doing good, Lord, but that we would even be strengthened by the difficulties that surround us. Father, we do pray for the Kirk family, that you would be a father to the fatherless, Lord. We ask that you would bring people around them who would be of encouragement, comfort, and support, and that your spirit would be with them, that you would bring comfort that only you can. Lord, we thank you for our students, we pray that you would give us all wisdom to process these things and to act and live wisely in light of them.
Oh, Lord, we have heard the report of you and of your work, oh Lord, we do fear. In the midst of the years, revive that work, in the midst of the years, make it known, and in wrath, remember mercy. Father, we pray for mercy for Charlie Kirk’s family and his loved ones. Lord, be to them what has been taken away, let them find you a great refuge and strength. Father, I pray for our nation, we are so broken, it is so evident that we need a deep repentance. We can’t go on ignoring you and thinking that we’re going to beat sin and righteousness and judgment, it’s just not going to happen. Lord, we need your mercy, Lord, would you grant repentance? Let it begin in the house of God, let it go out into our nation, Lord, turn people to yourself. We pray you do it, in Jesus’ name.
Father, I pray this morning, particularly for Erika Kirk, young wife and mother, now a widow, suddenly, savagely, murderously made a widow. Father, I pray that you’ll protect her heart, I know that she is yours by her profession of faith in Christ. Father, I pray that you would surround her with friends, family, love, and fellow believers in church, such that, even as she has now been thrust into the public eye, you will shelter her under your wings. Father, we pray for those two precious children, as a father and a grandfather, I find the words very difficult even to frame. Father, they have been robbed of their father, their father has been stolen from them by violence. Father, not to feel anger in that, I think, would be dishonoring to you.
But Father, I pray that you, as only you can do, would transform that anger into love, protection, faithfulness, and provision. I pray that you’ll surround the Kirk family with those who can give them that immediate, proximate encouragement, protection, and provision. Father, we do understand the stakes are high, we are reminded of that just in the events yesterday and in the events 24 years ago today. We understand the stakes are really high, Father, we feel the urgency of the hour, and we feel the call to do something. Father, I pray that you will, in the hearts of all of us, but in particular in the students in this room, who, if the Lord tarries, will long outlive those of us on the stage, we pray that you will do a work in their hearts to commit them anew to the truth, to justice, in building this community and this nation, and being agents of gospel and grace in this world. May they know how deep and enduring the battle is, and may they be ever confident in the fact that the day of the Lord is coming. Until then, Father, please make us faithful. We pray all this in the sovereign name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Amen. Thanks for coming.
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