In every generation, there are historic moments that are never forgotten. And when you look at generation by generation in the United States, of course this goes back even to the Battle of Bunker Hill. You can go down the list. Then of course, at one point it was remember the Alamo, at another point it was remember Pearl Harbor. Then in the 1960s when I was a boy, it was multiple assassinations. First of John F. Kennedy, the President of the United States, and then Martin Luther King Jr. and then Robert F. Kennedy, the President’s brother, the very night he won the California Democratic primary.
Of course, when these things happen, the immediate question is, what does this mean? What kind of country are we? What does this say about who we are? How does this fit into our American identity? What does this say about American culture? And of course, today is September the 11th, reminding us that today, this very day is the 24th anniversary of the attacks by Al-Qaeda, the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington DC. More about that in just a moment. But the point I want to make now is that the generation of those living at the time, and in particular those who were young at the time, it is a searing memory they will never get over, certainly never forget, it becomes a formative experience. And then yesterday in Utah, another generational-shaping event. An event that raises basic questions about American culture and who we are.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk, conservative, activist, organizer, spokesman, debater. He was on an American college campus, in this case, the campus of Utah Valley University. And he was doing what he loved to do and what he did so well, he was debating with students, he was openly engaging with students. He was sitting under a tent that said, “Prove me wrong.” And he was the kind of convictional conservative who had an enormous gift and a lot of courage to go out before a very interesting crowd, a massive crowd of college students, and basically to take all comers. And as he often said, he wanted to give preference to those who disagreed with him. That’s a form of engagement that is all too rare in our society. And frankly, it’s a form of conservative confidence that was sadly lacking, especially when it came to young adults for a long time in the United States.
Charlie Kirk formed Turning Point USA. He co-founded it when he was 18 years old. And when he was assassinated yesterday, he was only 31 years old. He had a very short life, but he had a massive impact. But let’s remind ourselves of where we were yesterday when the news came that Charlie Kirk had been shot, and then all too suddenly the word came that he indeed had been murdered. And that’s the right word. A part of conservative conviction, a part of our biblical worldview is that we must call things what they are. And so when we’re looking at this savage attack, a shot by someone who is evidently able to use a weapon with a skill of a sniper from a distance estimated by law enforcement of something like 200 yards and perhaps more, you had one shot that became a fatal shot into the neck of Charlie Kirk, right in front of that huge crowd of college students, right on video.
And of course, it is just one of those moments. Almost immediately there was the recognition that this must assuredly be a fatal shot. And thus the shock began to set in the entire nation, and then the word came confirming his death. And then the reminder of the fact that this was a very young man with a young wife and two very young children. The wife now a widow, the children now fatherless.
Of course, this context is political. It’s a lot more than political, but it’s never less than political. And no one would’ve understood that better than Charlie Kirk. He waded into political waters. He did so as a convictional conservative. And there’s an interesting point to be made here because Charlie Kirk, as an 18-year-old, basically held already to most of the political principles that he held the day he was killed. In other words, there’s a continuity there. Now, there is discontinuity I’ll speak about in just a moment, and it’s a blessed discontinuity. But the continuity is there, and it’s one I recognize because it also marks my own life and my perception of myself. I began as a very young, conservative political activist working in political campaigns, including the campaign of Ronald Reagan in 1976. I understand what it is as a very young man to be filled with political convictions and political passions that are about more than politics, but not less than politics.
Charlie Kirk had an amazing intuition about politics. He also had an amazing organizational ability, and as I say, he was a convictional conservative. Now, he redefined conservative in some sense, part of it because of the fact he was so young and he brought a certain disequilibrium to the political equation as a matter of strategy. And of course, no one understood that better than Donald J. Trump, President of the United States then and now. And President Trump as a candidate in 2024 entrusted enormous responsibility to Charlie Kirk and to his army of young activists, even in terms of some of the grassroots work for which they were, in one sense, unprepared. He had confidence in them, and as we now know, they delivered.
Now, as I say, Charlie Kirk developed his core conservative convictions very early. But I just want to remind you that there are basically two and only two variants of conservatism. And this is something we’ll discuss in greater detail on another more appropriate day. But the two, and I would argue, only two real variants of conservative thought are a secular conservatism and a Christian conservatism, or I’ll say a theistic conservatism that would include those who understand that for instance, our rights are given to us by God. That the conservative principles come out of the existence of God and his revelation to us. It’s the secular conservatism that is the only real conservative alternative, and in one sense, you’re talking about conservative Christianity or Christian conservatism versus something like Nietzsche. It is the right or the conservatism of power.
And an interesting aspect of all this is that when I met Charlie Kirk years ago, and we were backstage at a conservative conference at which both of us were speaking. At that time, Charlie Kirk, as a very young conservative, was really not a Christian conservative in terms of his identity. As a matter of fact, he saw Christian conservatives as something of a limiting force of that other conservatives would have to overcome. He didn’t identify with Christianity personally. And quite honestly, he spoke of, if not denying a conservative Christian influence in political conservatism, at least he wanted to limit it. And he saw that as a limiting factor in terms of conservative victory. And honestly, he wasn’t too impressed with a conservative Christian leader. I think that the Christian part was the drawback.
But the Charlie Kirk, who emerged in just a few years was a Charlie Kirk who openly identified with Christianity and personally identified with his own personal Christian faith. As a self-identified Christian he began to understand that Christianity is actually the truth claim that is the very basis of the American constitutional order. And he began to see Christian virtues, Christian convictions as central to any kind of viable conservatism. And then it was also demonstrated in his personal life by the fact that he married a beautiful wife, Erika, and together they had two young children. And I will tell you, and this is just deeply biblical, and you know it, nothing makes a man more mature, and this is right out of creation order in God’s plan and Genesis, than becoming a husband and a father. And thus, this expands the tragedy of what happened yesterday, but it also helps to explain the trajectory of Charlie Kirk’s life.
Now, I think there are a lot of people who would look at Charlie Kirk and say, well, he was a professional provocateur. And of course he was that, he enjoyed that. But he was more than a provocateur, he wasn’t a poser. That is to say he wasn’t conveniently conservative. He was pretty much conservative, come high water or low water, and when it was popular or unpopular. But he was a provocateur. And frankly, he played a different role than many of us would play. But it was a very effective role and it was particularly effective in reaching young people, high school and college students, young adults in particular. And he had a certain genius for reaching conservative young men. And I want to make very clear, that is a really important gift. And he deployed that. And you see this in the fact that in the immediate aftermath of the news of the shooting there on that university campus in Utah, you had a flood of young men who all of a sudden swarmed around the story. Charlie Kirk was something of a hero to them.
Certainly if not a hero, he was a crucial influencer when it came to their understanding of reality, politics and their personal responsibility. The role of a provocateur is sometimes an awkward one. And if you are a provocateur, you will have enemies. And of course I will argue that any man or woman of conviction will eventually have enemies. But it is simply one of those days that will now go down in American tragedy, that it was an assassin who took out Charlie Kirk yesterday with that one round of ammunition. And there’s so many questions. There’s so many questions about this. There is an absolute demand for justice that comes out of this, and that demand for justice is right and it’s righteous. But then as I argue in an article published this morning at World Opinions, the blood of Abel cries out as the Lord said to Cain, it cries out from the ground. And that is true whenever violence like this is brought against a human being made in God’s image. And of course there will be political controversy swirling around this and there will be investigations.
And yesterday it turns out that at least two men were arrested as potential suspects identified legally as persons of interest. But it is not at this point clear. There are more questions than there are answers when it comes to this assassination.
