Political Violence Has No Place in America
Last Saturday, Charlie James Kirk posted on X, “Jesus defeated death so you can live.” He is now with the Lord, as he was murdered by a cowardly assassin on Wednesday while answering questions from students at Utah Valley University.
Kirk was a father to two small children and a husband to his wife, Erika. He was a patriot and masterminded a highly successful GOTV campaign that helped propel Donald Trump to victory in the 2024 election. Kirk was a political wunderkind, founding Turning Point USA at the ripe age of 18, just a day after he graduated from high school. He turned TPUSA into a powerhouse that rivals The Heritage Foundation and other major conservative organizations in funding, reach, and influence. TPUSA has become a dominant player in high schools and on college campuses, where Kirk patiently engaged in conversation and debate with left-leaning students on a variety of topics that ranged from guns to gay marriage.
Testimony after testimony has been streaming in from all corners of the Right since Kirk’s passing. He’s being praised for his kindness, generosity, indefatigable work ethic, and talent at communicating ideas to audiences. As Jonathan Keeperman noted in a moving tribute, “[Kirk], perhaps more than any figure aside from Trump, paved the way for the right to reshape itself and take on the cause of the American people. He did it with intelligence and sincerity and his own subtle touch of mischievous humor.”
Vice President JD Vance posted a heartfelt remembrance, mentioning that Kirk first reached out with an encouraging message after Vance’s appearance on Tucker Carlson’s primetime show back in 2017. Eventually, they become close friends and political compadres. “When others were right, he learned from them,” Vance reflected. “When he was right—as he usually was—he was generous. With Charlie, the attitude was never, ‘I told you so.’ But: ‘welcome.’”
Some, like Jeremy Carl, even saw in Kirk the makings of a future president.
As Kirk himself would have pointed out, far more important than his political success or high-profile friendships was his faith in Jesus Christ.
Connected with the Calvary Chapel Association of churches, Kirk talked about Jesus in public on numerous occasions. His eternal hope was rooted in the conviction of Jesus’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension. As he explained to an atheist in a clip that went viral, “Jesus Christ saved my life.” This means that Christians should “not grieve as others do who have no hope,” as St. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians. “For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep.”
Kirk started TPUSA Faith, which was established to unite Christians around the key doctrines of the faith and target woke teachings coming from some pulpits in America. And he spoke about how America was founded as a Christian nation, making arguments that were more grounded in history than the vast swarms of smarmy academics who looked down their noses at Kirk with disgust.
Unfortunately, some on the Left have gone far beyond merely being rude. Contrary to what you may have been led to believe by the media and the thick web of obtuse moral misdirection being spun by Big Eva, Kirk is the latest victim of their ongoing crusade to stop their enemies by any means necessary.
When polling shows that 55% of those who identify themselves as center-left think that President Trump’s murder would be somewhat justified, there is a cancer that’s metastasized and threatens the very foundations of our nation. When the media, Hollywood, corporations, and our public institutions pump out a constant stream of open hatred for more than half of the country, it’s not all that surprising that someone decided to act on those views.
Yet evangelicals are often hamstrung in how they should respond to this blatant evil, being constantly fed a diet of shameless moral equivalencies. By indirect means and subtle framing, they’re frequently led to believe that what’s going on right in front of their eyes is not reality—a long-running psychological campaign that’s now being steamrolled by events from which Christians can no longer turn away.
Righteous anger is not a moral failing but a proper response to great evil; passivity, tone policing, getting lost in nuance, and displaying an above-it-all attitude are not. Citing a homily of St. John Chrysostom, Thomas Aquinas wrote, “He who is not angry, whereas he has cause to be, sins. For unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices; it fosters negligence, and it incites not only the wicked but even the good to do wrong.”
Anger, after all, is the right emotion to have when seeing what more and more of those on the Left have become. As the news of Kirk’s murder began being reported, leftists on Reddit and Bluesky—the latter, we are supposed to believe, is where all the “moral” people went who left Elon Musk’s X—ranged the gamut from making tasteless jokes about Kirk to openly celebrating his murder and salivating over who should be next. Politicians like Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker blamed Kirk’s assassination on…Donald Trump. On MSNBC, disgraced political commentator Matthew Dowd openly wondered whether Kirk himself had it coming since he said so many things that violated leftist pieties (thankfully, Dowd’s contract with the network has since been ended).
For some, the political turning point was seeing Brett Kavanaugh’s character be impugned by an orchestrated campaign to prevent him from serving on the Supreme Court. For some, it was the government’s response to COVID. For others, it was seeing cities and neighborhoods burn down in the summer of 2020.
But for many in Generation Z, it will be seeing the murder of Charlie Kirk, a man who debated and argued with students about politics for a living. It will be seeing the vile reactions from outlets like The New Republic, which labeled Kirk a “MAGA troll” in a headline after he was shot. It will be hearing congressional Democrats shout “No!!” when Rep. Lauren Boebert asked for a moment of prayer during a House session on Wednesday. (To their credit, the New York Yankees held a tribute to Kirk before the team’s game that night against the Detroit Tigers.) It will be seeing Big Eva outlets wag their fingers at Christians, rushing to make sure no one notices the galactic-sized gulf between the Left and Right.
The time for equivocation is over. Political violence in America is being normalized, aided, and abetted by a growing number of people on the Left, and they must be held to account. Places like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League that targeted Kirk, labeling him a fascist and a white nationalist, need to be called out by Republican lawmakers and shamed for constantly dehumanizing their political opponents. The constellation of leftist activist networks that regularly cause violence and mayhem in our cities and towns needs the full weight of the law thrown at them. Fomenting and carrying out political violence should have no place in American life.
God rightly gave the power to our civil rulers to punish those who commit heinous acts like murder. May God pour out his perfect vengeance on the murderers of Kirk and Iryna Zarutska, the Ukrainian refugee who was recently stabbed to death on a Charlotte light rail train. And may those murderers repent before the state carries out its duties, because absent that, they’ll feel the full wrath of God for all eternity. As the Psalmist wrote, “As fire consumes the forest, as the flame sets the mountains ablaze, so may you pursue them with your tempest and terrify them with your hurricane!”
Going forward, the key political question of our time is how to channel the righteous indignation that an increasingly large number of Americans—and more and more citizens who were apolitical at the beginning of the week—are feeling right now toward productive ends. The Left has been able to get away with an enormous amount, from its demonic obsession with the shooter Luigi Mangione to President Barack Obama—the man who learned at the feet of Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn—lecturing us from a supposed place of high moral principle.
We must stand together and say: “No longer.”
Crime—especially repeat offenders—needs to be met with severe punishment, and the myriad networks on the Left that carry out violent acts in public need to be dismantled, piece by piece. Those who make even the slightest attempt to justify violence, chaos, and mayhem in our churches, neighborhoods, public spaces, schools, and college campuses should be stripped of their political power and shouldn’t be listened to ever again. Evangelical institutions that are still intent on gaslighting Christians need to be shunned and shamed into changing their ways or face the possibility of closing their doors forever.
In this time of calamity and grief, we must ask the Triune God to “grant us help in this our time of need,” in the words of the Book of Common Prayer. We should ask Him to accept “the prayers we offer…for our nation, granting virtue unto its citizens and wisdom unto those in authority, that, through obedience to thy will, justice and truth may be more firmly established among us, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
Pray for our nation, pray for our civil rulers, and pray for the Kirk family.
