The Modern Death of Socrates
The Heritage Foundation recently unveiled a banner featuring Charlie and Erika Kirk alongside a list of Charlie’s characteristic exhortations: Get married. Have children. Build a legacy. Pass down your values. Pursue the eternal. Seek true joy. The final two injunctions unmistakably echo the Westminster Shorter Catechism’s famous first answer: Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. True and lasting joy, as the Catechism insists, comes only from knowing the truth about what is eternal—for only God, the Maker of heaven and earth, has existed from all eternity.
I have argued elsewhere that Charlie Kirk is an American Socrates, and his insistence on pursuing the eternal and seeking true joy only strengthens the comparison. Like the Athenian gadfly, he ventured into the intellectual hives where the self-anointed wise men of our day preside, asking whether they possess knowledge or merely imagine they do. And like Socrates, he attracted students in droves—students eager both to see him unmask the pretensions of the learned and to challenge him themselves. Nothing delights a student more than discovering his professors are not as wise as they pretend. Nothing dismays a professor more than discovering her students have discovered this. As in Athens long ago, the students loved it. The professors hated it. And, just as in Athens, rather than thank the man who exposed their ignorance, they plotted to silence him—and rejoiced when the silencing succeeded.
Consider the charges against Socrates. He was accused, first, of corrupting the youth—by the subversive act of teaching them to question their betters—and, second, of introducing atheism or teaching other gods than the city recognizes. In his defense, Socrates showed both accusations to be absurd. He was, he explained, obeying the Oracle at Delphi, that Athenian institution where a drunken priestess of Apollo, sitting in the darkness of a cave, would utter cryptic riddles for the Greeks to puzzle over. To Socrates, the oracle declared, “Socrates is the wisest of men.” He therefore made it his mission to test the pronouncement, to see if he could find someone wiser than himself. This quest, he explained, was the very opposite of corrupting the youth: if the Athenians were truly wise, they could answer their students’ questions, instruct them in wisdom, and render the gadfly of Athens harmless.
You can see that Charlie Kirk mirrored this as well. The university professors accused him of “corrupting the youth” by leading them to follow gods other than those sanctioned by the university. The deities of the modern academy are familiar: Alfred Kinsey, Judith Butler, John Money, Michel Foucault, and, ultimately, Marx and Rousseau. These were the prophets of the new orthodoxy, and their philosophies were taught as unquestionable truth with very practical political applications. Charlie Kirk did the unthinkable: he questioned them—and, worse, taught students to do the same. For this, the professors hated him. Like their Athenian predecessors, they could not refute him; they could only resent being exposed as living the unexamined life.
But Charlie also resembles Socrates in charging his students to pursue what is eternal. Any serious philosophical inquiry must begin there: What is eternal, lasting, permanent, real? That which is eternal has no beginning as well as no end. Something might be immortal or everlasting—having a beginning but no end—but the eternal transcends even that. All philosophy begins with the question: What is eternal, and how do you know? Without answering it, we have no foundation on which to build a life. We will not know which virtues to cultivate because we will not know our destination or what truly endures. We will be unable to give meaning to life because we will not know where we came from or what we are.
Although we ourselves are not eternal—we had a beginning even if we shall have no end—we can nevertheless be connected to what is eternal through knowledge. Knowledge differs from opinion precisely in this: opinions shift like shadows when challenged, but genuine knowledge endures because it is true. When you have knowledge and not merely opinion masquerading as knowledge, you possess something that cannot be taken from you. You can answer every challenge because you have understanding. Knowledge is certain. To know what is eternal is the highest good; it alone leads to true and lasting joy.
Here is where Charlie and Socrates part company. This is why Charlie is an American Socrates and not merely another Socrates. As an American Socrates, Charlie knows that eternal life is to know God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent. Socrates, by contrast, did not live up to his own standard. In Plato, there are several “Socrateses.” There is Socrates the skeptic, insisting, “I know nothing—but neither do you.” And there is Socrates the metaphysician, repeating Egyptian and Babylonian myths about the eternity of matter, the preexistence of the soul, reincarnation, the idea that material existence is punishment, and that the soul must escape the body to be absorbed into “the One.” All these claims are demonstrably false and belong among those “arguments raised against the knowledge of God” that Christians are commanded to demolish (2 Cor. 10:5).
Creation itself bears witness that it had a beginning, that our souls had a beginning, and that both owe their existence to the Creator. The world, as the work of God, declares the glory of God. We were made as a unity of body and soul, and though death tears them apart, there will be a resurrection when body and soul will be reunited to live forever. Our highest good is to know God as He has revealed Himself in all His works. Yet because of our sin, we cannot be restored to fellowship with God through philosophy, intellectual striving, or any imagined “journey of the soul.” We must be redeemed and regenerated. The Greeks, like Socrates, could have known all of that from general revelation, and yet they did not. They knew of Moses and the Temple in Jerusalem, but ignored them in favor of Egypt and Babylon.
This makes Charlie more like Christian in Vanity Fair than like Socrates. Readers will recall that Christian and Faithful were charged with the same offenses the modern professoriate hurled at Charlie. During the trial, Envy declared,
“I myself heard him once affirm that Christianity and the customs of our town of Vanity were diametrically opposite, and could not be reconciled. By saying this, my lord, he at once condemns both all our laudable doings—and us in the doing of them.”
Christian and Faithful knew what Charlie knew: Christianity is not compatible with the reigning philosophy of the city.
Then Superstition rose to speak:
“He said that our religion was worthless, and could by no means please God—and therefore we worship in vain, are yet in our sins, and shall finally be damned!”
Today, the religion of the modern university is not that of the medieval cathedral but the DEI-LGBTQ orthodoxy. The professors who preach it to their students offer them a gospel of grievance, a creed of chaos—a joyless and depressing setting into which the joy of Christ shines like lightning across the night sky. The students see the light, and they want to follow it.
Pickthank added his testimony:
“He has railed against our noble prince Beelzebub.”
Indeed. For at the heart of the moral philosophy of the LGBTQ movement is the law of Lucifer: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. The radicals admire Lucifer as the archetypal rebel—the one who overthrows every objective standard, mocks Scripture, and bids mankind to crown itself as god.
Finally, Judge Hategood instructed the jury to uphold Pharaoh’s law:
“For Pharaoh’s law was made upon a supposition, to prevent mischief—no crime being yet apparent. Yet here is an obvious crime.”
Pharaoh’s law cannot stand for a Faithful and a Christian to come into Vanity Fair and question its religion and its gods. Whereupon Mr. Blindman, the foreman, shouted,
“I see clearly that this man is a heretic!”
And thus the verdict was sealed before the defense was heard.
How strikingly similar all this is to our universities today. They, too, rely on Pharaoh’s law to silence any questioning as “hate speech.” They, too, position themselves as protecting the students from dangerous ideas.
I have spent my career among them, watching professors who boast of “wanting to make a difference” teach their students to doubt the Bible, to deny general revelation, to treat feelings—especially empathy—as the final authority in morality, and to embrace the basest sexual ideologies imaginable. When I challenge these dogmas in my own classes, students who begin by pushing back eventually find relief in the discovery that there are real answers—that we can, in fact, know what is eternal and what is good by using reason to form sound arguments. Other professors, alarmed at this intrusion into their intellectual monopoly, work feverishly to undermine me and reclaim control over their students’ minds. It is the scene of a colossal spiritual battle, fought in the heart of the University of Vanity Fair. They use insults, and I use the Logos.
Into this arena, Charlie Kirk strode boldly with nothing but a “Prove Me Wrong” sign and a social-media camera. Students who disagreed with him loved the chance to debate him; many even made videos about why he was wrong. But it was all voluntary. Unlike the required DEI courses, no one compelled them to come debate and make their own videos. They came in droves because the debate was real, the stakes were real, and the man was unafraid. It was the first time in their university education where they were taught, by Charlie’s example, about the importance of debate and learning to think in terms of sound arguments in pursuit of true conclusions.
Until, that is, one murderer decided no one would debate Charlie Kirk again. We have all seen the screenshots of professors and teachers rejoicing at his death. It felt like a modern reprise of Vanity Fair:
“Then Mr. Implacable exclaimed, ‘I would not be reconciled to him for all the world! Therefore, let us immediately charge him to be deserving of death!’
And so they did. Faithful was condemned at once. He was taken from the court back to his cage—and from there, to the most cruel death that could be invented. They scourged him; they buffeted him; they lanced his flesh with knives; they stoned him with stones; they pierced him with their swords. Last of all, they burned him to ashes at the stake. Thus Faithful came to his end.”
When I first heard that Charlie had been shot, I refused to watch the video. I thought it was only a distant, grainy recording. Later, I was told there were up-close high-definition videos, filmed from multiple angles, that captured everything—the bloody details. Charlie was murdered before the very students who had come to debate him, to challenge him, to enjoy the freedom of ideas that he brought into the modern university. A murderer decided that no one should have the right to debate Charlie Kirk anymore. And the reasons he gave could be heard in many university classrooms. ASU’s own Barrett Honors College successfully censored Charlie Kirk in 2023 from speaking at their college because they said he uses “hate speech.”
We are told Charlie died instantly and did not suffer, unlike Faithful above. But his murder is the first in our country where a Christian has been martyred in full view of the public—filmed in high definition and spread across social media for all to see. We have not yet begun to see the effects of this on the youth who watched those videos. And we saw that professors rejoiced on social media.
The celebrations of the demoniac professors only prove how much good Charlie was doing. And the good he accomplished far surpassed that of Socrates. For while Socrates taught the youth to question their teachers, to discover whether they were truly wise or merely pretending, Charlie went further: he taught them to look to Christ for redemption and to have their deepest questions about Christianity answered.
In this, he was—most likely without realizing it—following the counsel of Richard Baxter. In his essay on sharing the Gospel with the unlearned, Baxter urges us to begin with the simple but profound truth that only God is eternal.
“You must know,” Baxter wrote, “that there has been but one God from everlasting, One who Himself had no beginning and can have no end, One who has not a body like ours but has a most pure and spiritual being. This God knows all things and can do all things. He has all goodness and blessedness in Himself.”
Pursue the eternal. The works of God in creation and providence clearly reveal his eternal power and divine nature. There is no greater joy than to know God. And to understand the depth of our sin and rebellion, we must contrast it with the clarity of God’s revelation. The University of Vanity Fair is all about obscuring and obstructing that revelation.
Few people are more “unlearned” today than the students of our universities. At the University of Vanity Fair, they are taught to believe men are women and good is evil. They are trained by the example of their professors to be smug and self-righteous, to virtue-signal while repeating empty leftist platitudes. They believe that we must help the “oppressed” while teaching that being poor forces you to do drugs, be promiscuous, and commit crime, thus stripping the poor of any human dignity or agency. Their teachers are easily exposed as living the unexamined life. They love what is evil and teach their students to do the same.
Until Charlie Kirk arrived, these professors had one reliable defense: if questioned, they silenced their critics with cries of “racist,” “patriarchal,” “white,” or “heteronormative.” That tactic no longer works. Charlie Kirk showed the nation, and the world, that the emperor of DEI has no clothes. And once stripped of those rhetorical fig leaves, the professors who kept America’s students in ignorance stand exposed as frauds. Do not be corrupted by their vain and worldly philosophy (Col 2:8).
Charlie Kirk is an American Socrates. He told American university students to pursue what is eternal and to seek true joy. Socrates told the Athenians that by killing him, they would only ensure another generation would rise up to question them more forcefully and demand wisdom. So also to the students of American universities: follow the example of your Socrates, Charlie Kirk. Expose the folly of your professors. And as their ignorance is revealed, they will sit alone in their empty classrooms, abandoned by students who now pursue wisdom elsewhere.
“Now I saw that behind the multitude, there was a chariot with horses waiting for Faithful, who, as soon as his adversaries had murdered him—was taken up into it. He was immediately carried up through the clouds, with the sound of the trumpet, to the nearest way to the Celestial Gate.”
