We have reached a Turning Point
Charlie Kirk was violently murdered yesterday in Utah while debating with college students about all the major issues of the day, applying God’s truth to the sordid realities of our time with his characteristic courage and enthusiasm. As a mom of three college students, I get to spend a fair amount of time privately talking with my kids and their college friends about the landscape they’re living in and what to do about it, so I know that Charlie Kirk was more than just a political analyst or a grassroots operative. He was a mentor and brother in Christ to many young men and women who had never met him. He was a singular point of clarity and light piercing into the darkest, seemingly impenetrable place—the left-captured university campus.
Earlier this week, my 19-year-old son was working on reciting sections of Teddy Roosevelt’s The Man in the Arena speech for a college class. He told me I had to read the whole thing, not just listen to the sections he was working on, so of course I did my homework. In retrospect, it seems I was reading a speech written 115 years ago with an uncanny likeness to Charles James Kirk. Roosevelt famously said:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
In his short 31-year life, Charlie lived in the arena. He made it his home. He invited others to join him there—doing the work of an evangelist, an apologist, a pastor, and a prophet under the guise of political engagement. He knew that the politics of our day includes all of life; they are not some cordoned off icky-zone that super spiritual Christians should steer clear of, rather, politics are about our most fundamental beliefs regarding reality. And the failure to engage in the political is a failure to engage life as a Christian. During the last decade of societal uncertainty, we have all watched men put to the test—our pastors, business leaders, state and local representatives, and we’ve all been dismayed when men, who should have stood firm, should have resisted, should have taken the hits, should have hit back with the unpopular truth, should have been discerning, instead slunk down and compromised, or worse, joined the wrong team. Perhaps you were one of these men. But Charlie wasn’t.
Roosevelt said, “It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who ‘but for the vile guns would have been a valiant soldier.’” I don’t consider Charlie Kirk to be “of many errors,” but his life was spent with hard fighting, his end was valiant, and we will love to linger long over his memory. He serves as a rebuke to all the cynics, critics, and cowardly men who never find their way into the actual arena, but preface every take with “I didn’t agree with him about this, that, and the other, but…” and “He really could have used some more nuance here…” This is the time for small men to shrink into further smallness, and for great men to rise by utterly ignoring and walking past the critic’s ankle-biting essays on their way to the arena. God give us thousands and thousands of men like Charlie Kirk and protect us from the cowardly men whose gutlessness is writ large in the passive voice of the NY Times.
But the women have a job, too. We must be wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters of valor. We must not grab at the arms of our men, trying to keep them out of the arena. No, we send them out. We put confidence in their hearts. We remind them what they were made for, and we cheer with all our might. We work as hard as we can to make their homes vibrant, happy, and worth fighting for; we feed and nurture their children, we admire their strength, and we put every shred of our trust and hope in the God whose cause we serve. It’s the Lord Jesus who empowers us to never fear anything frightening. Charlie’s wife, Erika, seemed to have mastered this virtue, and we do well to imitate her.
We have reached a turning point. Roosevelt’s words ring prophetically to us:
“The question must not be merely, Is there to be peace or war? The question must be, Is it right to prevail? Are the great laws of righteousness once more to be fulfilled? And the answer from a strong and virile people must be ‘Yes,’ whatever the cost.”
May God give us the resolve to live righteously through his Son, Jesus. May he empower us once more, by his Spirit, to spend ourselves for a worthy cause as our brother who has gone before us did. RIP, Charlie Kirk.
