Tuesday, September 23, 2025
Good evening.
It goes without saying that writers who digest the news, attempt to make sense of it, and conduct that task conscientiously, inevitably ask themselves: “Did I get it right?”
Are my words too harsh? Is my perspective too skewed? Am I dispensing more heat than light and therefore contributing to the obvious problem we have in America with civil disagreement?
I asked myself those very questions before filing my last report on September 3.
In it, I commented at great length on the abominable Catholic school shooting in Minneapolis, but more to the point, on the societal evils lurking among us (knowing full well that by labeling acts or people “evil,” there are many countrymen who’ll never concur with my perspectives).
In retrospect, my words then—a mere 20 days ago, but what seems like an eternity now—were far too timid when set against today’s new reality of vastly changed circumstances. Sadly, it’s become crystal clear that I understated the gravity of our cultural sickness by several magnitudes.
In the aftermath of the shocking assassination of conservative icon and now Christian martyr Charlie Kirk in Utah on September 10, no words are sufficient.
It is also now abundantly clear from the mountain of prosecutorial evidence which has been compiled and filed by Utah and federal authorities that Kirk’s alleged murderer, Tyler Robinson, 22, killed him because he refused to back down in openly speaking his mind to college students.
Kirk made it his life’s mission to challenge those students to rethink their largely unchallenged pro-abortion, pro-gay and pro-trans beliefs, which he asserted were morally wrong, un-Christian and un-American.
That was his field of evangelism. And whether he was loathed or loved, no one who heard or saw him could possibly deny his persuasiveness in successfully articulating that message. Indeed, Kirk may have been the most effective youth evangelist in many, many generations, perhaps ever.
“I visit college campuses so you don’t have to,” he said smiling during a timely and lengthy conversation with Christian pastor and podcaster Doug Wilson back in April (which I’ll highlight later in this report).
The organization Kirk founded 13 years ago when he was just 18, Turning Point USA, brought a distinctly conservative, Christian message to campuses nationwide where it had rarely been heard before. Where seldom is heard a discouraging word about Hamas terrorism or male athletes playing female sports.
He invited college students of any political persuasion to spar with him under a plastic tent at his “Prove Me Wrong” events. The hostility he encountered in doing this would have fazed men less courageous, as the collection below of video clips from his campus appearances clearly show.
Perhaps the “sickest aspect” of his assassination, Wall Street Journal columnist Kim Strassel wrote, was what “motivated his many debates and catapulted him to fame’’—talking as a means to end political violence—is the very thing that ended his life.
It was a cold-blooded, brutal, calculated murder, for which prosecutors are seeking the death penalty—in Utah, by firing squad potentially, and with some irony. Robinson may eventually meet the same end that he allegedly delivered to Kirk with a single shot to the neck, from his grandfather’s rifle.
Shocking in its cruelty, the assassination is the most grotesque display of political violence we’ve witnessed in this country since the turbulent 1960s.
Kirk built a formidable grassroots political machine, claiming more than 250,000 student members with 3,500 college chapters at schools ranging from small private Christian colleges to large public universities and Ivy League schools.
His impact is largely credited with helping his friend and political ally Donald Trump win the White House by nearly evening the proportion of 18-to-29 age voters who cast ballots for him in 2024. Four years earlier, when Democrat Joe Biden defeated President Trump, Democrats captured nearly two thirds of the vote in that age demographic.
As horrific as the murder was, worse still perhaps is the ease with which many fellow Americans justified or even savored it. That is its own kind of horror, for it reveals something far deeper going on in the country Kirk revered, and gave his life for. Something that is ipso facto evil, in my estimation.
Immediately on September 10, after I’d seen the news bulletins describing Kirk’s grotesque shooting and while first responders still desperately sought to save his life, I prayed for his survival.
When Pastor Nate Devlin stopped by a few minutes later, it was clear from the first word either of us spoke that this event would be a turning point from which there was no turning back. Then Nate, reading the bulletin on his phone, uttered the fateful words I’d feared: “He’s dead.”
At that moment, Charles James Kirk belonged to the angels (as Secretary of War Edwin Stanton famously said upon the death from an assassin’s bullet of Abraham Lincoln).
Similarly, Kirk’s death seems like the end of one time, and start of another. It is a hinge or inflection point in our collective history, I’d assert, as jarring to me personally as 9/11 or JFK’s assassination in 1963, which I still recall vividly as a scared 8-year-old in second grade.
Only this time, it seems to signify, at first glance, something far worse.
I say that because for both 9/11 and JFK, there was a universal sensibility and consensus among Americans about how to process each event.
Americans were not cheering when President John Kennedy was shot on that awful November Friday in Dallas, Texas. Far from it. This video of CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, announcing live to the dumbstruck nation the news of President Kennedy’s death on-the-air, serves as testimony of how moved the famously stoic Cronkite was that day, as he choked back tears.
Nor were Americans cheering when airliners became missiles and felled the World Trade Centers in lower Manhattan. In the newsroom I then occupied at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, people were openly weeping—and cheering in Arab countries.
But this time the cheering is coming from Americans! The haters of Charlie Kirk and what he stood for have cheered his death with such ferocity, in fact, and in such huge numbers, it is hard to make sense of.
“I would have killed him myself.” That’s what one person said at a vigil in Seattle for Kirk the night he died, according to this report in the Free Press, “The students celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder.”
In the hours after Kirk’s assassination, young people flooded the internet with hateful rhetoric justifying an innocent man’s death.
As I observed this ghoulish, demonic hate while preparing this report, I was reminded of the Isaiah passage (57:20-21) from which Pastor Nate preached this past Sunday.
“But the wicked are like the tossing sea; for it cannot be quiet, and its waters toss up mire and dirt. There is no peace,” says my God, “for the wicked.”
As the wicked celebrate the death of Kirk—appearing to have lost their minds as well as the slightest shred of human decency—the principle of free but civil speech we once took for granted in this country seems to have also been thrown overboard in the tossing waves.
Has political hatred on social media become our new Roman Colosseum?
Matthew Continetti, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, captured the moment well in a column he wrote for the Free Press titled, “Who will stop America’s slide into the abyss?”
“The assassination of Charlie Kirk is shocking on every level,” Continetti began.
“He was shot in public, in front of a large crowd, and on video. The 31-year-old husband and father of two was not an elected official, but the most successful conservative activist in a generation. The attack didn’t just deprive a family of its center. It struck at the ties that hold a free society together: open assembly, civil debate, viewpoint diversity. Like every terrorist act, the shooting was meant to instill fear—in this case, fear of speaking out, of exposure, of making a difference.”
Continetti adds: “It is the most stunning evidence we have to date that America is becoming two nations, divided not only by politics but by culture, lifestyle, psychology, and epistemology.”
By epistemology, he means knowledge and belief. Religious belief or more accurately, the lack thereof. And even more accurately, the disdain and antipathy people of non-belief apparently hold toward those who outwardly express Christian belief, and hew to a Christian worldview.
For that reason, Pastor Nate correctly called the event in this post the day after the murder, “the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk.” He was one of the first commentators to use that phrase.
“Charlie Kirk is the first Christian martyr in America in my lifetime, perhaps in 60 years,” Pastor Nate wrote. “If any further evidence was needed to prove that American culture is currently in the throes of Negative World, then I’d suggest yesterday’s events settle the debate, from the assassination itself, to the cold mockery by leftists on social media.”
Even observers who don’t profess Christian faith attach ominous significance to Kirk’s murder. One such person is a high-school buddy of mine with whom I recently reestablished a connection after a half century.
A resident of Maine, Jim confided in an email to me last week: “When I see friends and relatives posting things that basically say he had it coming, I worry about the future of our country.”
While there’s good reason to worry, one aspect of this story that I’ve found greatly encouraging in the avalanche of darkness since Kirk’s murder is the unexpected sources who’ve been the most outspoken against those celebrating his death.
A case in point is this commentary (now censored by YouTube but still preserved in part on X) in which Stephen A. Smith, the popular host on the ESPN sports network, strongly condemned those celebrating his death.
Explaining why he was devoting the first 16 minutes of his Sirius XM Radio broadcast to the Kirk murder, Mr. Smith said: “I’m a black man born in America. I know what problems that exist in this country. But I also know there’s far more good people than bad people in this country regardless of who you are, what your ethnic background is …”
“At some point in time, … [we] can’t just give lip service when such a vile act takes place … and then within 24 hours we move on with our lives like nothing happened. SOMETHING DID HAPPEN!”
“I don’t care what his political beliefs were! I don’t care what he felt!” Lowering his tone and volume, Stephen A. then says: “I care about the fact that a man was gunned down … at the age of 31. That his wife is a widow. That his children are fatherless because his ideas and his beliefs differed from somebody else, apparently.
“And then I’m going online and I’m seeing people celebrating it! SHAME! SHAME ON YOU!”
While I support every citizen’s right to speak his or her mind, even offensively, that doesn’t mean odious comments are morally defensible. Or that communicating them publicly will not carry possible negative consequences in the world adults occupy.
I stand with Stephen A. Whoever celebrated the death of Charlie Kirk, shame on you.
For the balance of this report, I’ll explore three interrelated questions:
- Who was Charlie Kirk?
- Why was he killed?
- What does it mean for us who remain?
Charlie Kirk embodied the American dream he so gloriously and vigorously defended.
As he explains in the interview above, he grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. “In fifth grade I made the most important decision of my life, I made Jesus Christ the chairman of the board of my life. … And every decision from there was always instructed by my faith.”
Kirk was the proverbial all-American kid (if we still have such standards in society at large). Devoted Christian, Eagle Scout, quarterback of his high-school football team.
In his senior year, when his application was rejected to the only school he wanted to attend, the United States Military Academy at West Point, “I convinced my parents to let me take a gap year. It’s been 13 gap years” since that time, founding and running Turning Point USA.
Soon thereafter, his considerable skills as a connector and fundraiser were evident. He grew from an eager, naïve teenage politico with bold dreams to the leader of a growing national movement, for which he gathered donations in the hundreds of millions of dollars from eager and wealthy supporters.
But money wasn’t what motivated Charlie Kirk. Championing the cause is what motivated him, as President Trump noted in his tribute to Kirk Sunday evening.
Along the way, Kirk became a confidant of President Trump starting in his first presidential campaign in 2016. They were two relative political neophytes, each helping the other and, in the process, building a close friendship which deepened further when he helped Trump win an improbable reelection to a second term in 2024.
“Charlie Kirk was without a doubt among the most influential figures in the most important election in the history of our country. … He was a missionary with a noble spirit. He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them,” President Trump said memorializing Kirk.
Freedom, particularly religious freedom, was the greatest legacy Charlie Kirk stood for.
“Perhaps it should be no surprise [that] Charlie, who spent his life speaking with the critics of these traditions, ultimately became convinced that we needed not just a political realignment, but also a spiritual reawakening,” President Trump said.
“We want religion brought back to America. We want to bring God back into our beautiful USA like never before. We want God back. Charlie would have been so pleased to hear his friends and colleagues today giving testimony and giving glory to God.”
“How did Turning Point start?” Pastor Doug Wilson asks in the earlier video.
“Really it started first diagnosing a problem. So, as a senior in high school leading into my first year at Turning Point USA, I saw that young people were going very much in a liberal direction … so dramatically that there wasn’t a counter opinion or counterpoint ever presented. And I had this crazy idea that conservatism can be spread and communicated in a much more appealing way …
“I would go to campuses in 2013, 14, 15, with no money, no connections, no idea of what I was doing, no film crew, with literally just a card table arguing with kids. We’d find one conservative and we’d start a Turning Point group from that. It was pure grassroots. …
“I’m an entrepreneur. And thanks to the Lord’s blessing and His providence and His grace, we started to see it grow, and we started to gain some traction.”
Kirk recruited and encouraged many young women to campaign for conservative causes. He also served as a significant middleman working behind the scenes with the Trump administration.
Among the luminaries who counted him as an influential confidant and close friend were Vice President J.D. Vance, who escorted Kirk’s casket from Utah to Arizona on Air Force Two; Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who says Kirk was the “primary architect” of his political alliance with Trump; and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
Among women, there’s Riley Gaines, a former college swimmer who campaigns against transgender men competing in female sports; conservative U.S. House member from Florida Anna Paulina Luna; and Alex Clark, one of Turning Point’s biggest stars through her “Culture Apothecary” health podcast.
The public outpouring of grief from them and many others since Kirk’s death—and moving testimonies of what he meant to them—attests to the remarkable life Kirk lived in just 31 years.
But it was his skill as a debater and persuader on college campuses that established Charlie Kirk’s true calling as a contemporary evangelist. Kirk was a self-described “autodidact,” self-taught and widely read on biblical, classical and constitutional subjects.
He didn’t talk down to people. And when he talked, to young people especially, they listened. He knew how to communicate with them.
Ironically, he talked so as to end political violence. If you observe his videos talking to students—and I have, dozens of them—you quickly see why Kirk was so effective. He didn’t mince words or soften his views to pacify his audience. No matter how furious or provocative the questioner, he didn’t respond with anger or duck questions.
“He debated people’s positions—not their integrity. He talked to ensure we keep talking,” Kim Strassel writes in her WSJ Potomac Watch column.
In a land of political midgets, Kirk stood out as a giant.
“It’s notable,” she continues, “that few if any of our elected representatives—the institutional embodiment of civic society—engage in anything resembling the outreach of Kirk. Washington politics is rarely anymore about ideas, education, persuasion or constructive disagreement. It’s a partisan blood sport, players vying for pole position in the race for nasty put-downs and righteous anger—in moments staged for viral sensation.”
That political world has seen violence steadily escalate in recent years. The rioting at the U.S. Capitol Building in January 2021. Two attempts on Donald Trump’s life. One attempt on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s life. Attempted killings of U.S. House members Steve Scalise and Gabby Giffords. The slaying in Minnesota of a state legislator and her husband. The murder of two staffers of the Israel Embassy in downtown Washington. And the arson attacks against the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion and the New Mexico Republican Party headquarters.
Through it all, Charlie Kirk knew he was a likely target. Yet he persisted in conveying his message.
Why? Because Christ had called him to deliver that message. His regular prayer before speaking was: “God, use me for your will.”
He believed down to his socks (as I like to say) in the right to free speech, no matter the topic or how uncomfortable the conversation.
When adversaries asked, “Why are you here on our campus?” Kirk spoke to a truth so deeply American it could never be silenced.
In one of his more famous clips, he said:
“First of all, that question should not even have to be asked, but when people stop talking, really bad stuff starts. When marriages stop talking, divorce happens, when civilizations stop talking civil war ensues. When you stop having a human connection with someone you disagree with, it becomes a lot easier to want to commit violence against that group. What we as a culture have to get back to is being able to have reasonable disagreement where violence is not an option.”
Sadly, though, it was an option for the 22-year-old alleged to have murdered him.
In the video immediately below, Ohio politician Vivek Ramaswamy discusses the last conversation he had with his friend, Charlie Kirk, just two weeks before he was murdered:
“The love of this country was in his bones. It was in his soul. That’s my message to his misguided killer tonight. You may have killed his body, but you’ll never kill his soul. In fact, you have singlehandedly made his legacy immortal in the United States of America.”
“If you are going to walk with Jesus, you are going to be opposed … In our days, to be a true Christian is really to become a scandal.”
Those words—prophetic for the purposes of our consideration of Charlie Kirk—were spoken nearly three centuries ago by the most famous evangelist of that time or perhaps any other era, George Whitefield (pronounced WHIT-field).
Whitefield was the Billy Graham of the 18th century—or more to the point, several Billy Grahams rolled up in one man of unbounded energy, religious fervor, and incredible charisma and gifts from God.
Though English by birth, Whitefield crossed in the Atlantic 13 times traveling to the American colonies. He spent most of his final three decades—from 1738 until 1770—as an itinerant evangelist crisscrossing early America on horseback (he disliked the bumpiness of riding in a coach).
In his lifetime, he is estimated to have delivered a staggering 18,000 sermons, and another 12,000 other talks as a missionary throughout the English-speaking world. But most of his time was spent preaching to Americans, wherever he might find them.
Besides his gift for oratory—his friend, the noted Yankee skeptic Benjamin Franklin said hearing him preach was like listening to “an excellent piece of music”—Whitefield talked to everyone, in stark contrast to the accepted convention among the Anglican clerisy of that time.
Miners, prisoners, women, orphans, the commonest commoner as well as dukes and earls—all were in need of Christ to atone for their sins. Thus was born the evangelical message “you must be born again.” While presenting the Gospel in this fashion may seem uncontroversial in our modern age, this proposition was a fairly revolutionary one at that time.
“By the time he died in 1770,” writes Eric Metaxas in his book If You Can Keep It, “an inconceivable 80% of the population of the American colonies had heard him preach at least once.”
Audiences then were so enraptured by Whitefield’s mellifluous voice and fluid preaching style that he is widely credited as having triggered the religious revival which preceded the American Revolution known as the Great Awakening. This was a development of national and even world consequence not just for Christian revival but as a predicate for American independence itself, Metaxas argues in the book.
We’ll return to Whitefield at the conclusion of this report. But for now, his quotation above brings important context to our second subject:
Why was Charlie Kirk killed?
If you believe some of the deranged reports that have emanated from the modern scandal that we collectively call the “news media,” what motivated the shooter was unclear.
CNN’s national security analyst said of the suspected killer: “There is no dominant political ideology. Instead it’s a stew of irony, violence, gaming fetish, and Discord,” Discord being a communication platform largely used by members of the gaming community.
ABC’s Matt Gutman described the beauty of the text messages that the suspect, Tyler Robinson, was sending to his lover.
Gutman said the messages were:
. . . very touching, in a way, that I think many of us didn’t expect—a very intimate portrait into this relationship between the suspect’s roommate and the suspect himself, with him repeatedly calling his roommate, who is transitioning, calling him ‘my love.’ And ‘I want to protect you, my love.’ So, it was this duality of someone who the attorney said not only jeopardized the life of Charlie Kirk and the crowd, but was doing it in front of children, which is one of the aggravating circumstances of this case. And then, on the other hand, he was, you know, speaking so lovingly about his partner.
Other news reports more to the left of CNN and ABC—if that is possible—had more outlandish theories as to Robinson’s motives.
MSNBC initially blamed Kirk’s murder on (who else?) … Kirk.
Shortly after he was shot, MSNBC contributor Matthew Dowd said: “I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.” And: “You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place.”
Words are violence, of course, according to the twisted logic of the far Left. And as violence, they justify actual violence in return.
Dowd then climbed further down his insanity hole when he said: “We don’t know if this was a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration, we have no idea.”
Later, facing outrage for its coverage, MSNBC apologized for Dowd’s comments and sacked him.
Shortly thereafter, another left-wing outlet, the Daily Beast, said MAGA was the reason Kirk had been murdered. Here’s the incredible headline below:
Meanwhile, Atlantic writer Jemele Hill asserted that “Charlie Kirk was likely the victim of a white supremacist gang hit” (no, I am not making this up).
Then there was Jimmy Kimmel, an alleged comic, who said the following in all seriousness, for which he was temporarily suspended from his late-night show on ABC: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
The show is scheduled to resume tonight, less than a week after ABC suspended it. That Kimmel outright lied didn’t matter. Mission accomplished! Kimmel will no doubt get the ratings boost he desperately needs.
Despite the reluctance of those on the Left to face facts, Tyler Robinson’s motives for murdering Kirk were made abundantly clear—by Robinson himself.
Prosecutors released a slew of text messages and other evidence last week showing that Robinson targeted Kirk to protect his gay romantic partner and roommate from injury. The partner is transitioning from male to female.
In one text exchange, his roommate (who has cooperated with law authorities) asks Robinson why, incredulously, he’d shot Kirk.
“I had enough of his hatred,” Robinson replied. “Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”
Robinson admitted to his parents too that he was the killer. Each round in the rifle Robinson allegedly used to commit the crime contained etched inscriptions referring to pro-gay and trans-rights slogans. DNA consistent with Robinson’s was found on the rifle trigger, other parts of the rifle, the fired cartridge casing, two of the three unfired cartridges, and a towel.
Robinson complied with his parents’ demand to turn himself in. Prosecutors say Robinson’s mother “explained that over the last year or so, Robinson has become more political and had started to lean more to the left—becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.”
But how did he come to act out on his political leanings?
That’s the mystery. Theories abound.
What’s clear, however, is that young Americans like Robinson justify political violence to a frightening degree. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) conducts annual surveys on the subject of political violence, and its acceptance among various age cohorts.
According to this year’s just released survey, a stunning 34% of college-age students now believe the use of violence to prevent someone from speaking on campus is acceptable.
Illustrating this trend of support for violence is the current circus outside the Manhattan courthouse where another alleged cold-blooded killer, Luigi Mangione, 27, is on trial for second-degree murder.
Mangione, who faces state and federal charges in the December 2024 shooting of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, has spawned a legion of loyal followers who gather daily in support of their folk hero, the oppressed and victimized Luigi. Many of his fans wear Mario Brothers costumes outside the courthouse, after the Luigi character from the once popular video game, the WSJ reports.
Over the past five years, the acceptance of violence to silence “hate speech” among the Gen Z college-age and young-adult cohort has spiked almost 80%, according to the latest FIRE survey. By contrast, just 7% of Baby Boomers think violence is ever justified.
“Several forces have converged to lead us here,” writes Kevin Wallsten, a professor of political science and fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute who has studied the trend. He cites three contributing factors.
First, a youth moral culture guided by an “impossibly expansive definition of ‘harm’ and that elevates emotional safety above all other values.” Second, social media dynamics that amplify outrage and feed the perception that the “other side” is “getting away with it.” And third, a political culture that encourages people to treat their opponents as threats that need to be neutralized rather than fellow citizens to be persuaded.
“We shouldn’t be surprised that the norms against violence have eroded most quickly among those with the lowest level of attachment to older rules of restraint and tolerance,” Wallsten writes.
Lastly, what does the murder of Charlie Kirk mean?
Let’s quickly review the sequence of what happened here. A good man was murdered in cold-blood in broad daylight before 3,000 witnesses, many of whom saw the blood gush from the fatal gunshot wound to his neck.
There is an outpouring of grief among Christians and prayer, but no rioting in the streets nor violence of any kind in response to this hate-filled act. Praise God for that!
Meanwhile, the haters do what haters always do. The seas quake and the waves roar.
The news media throws every possible motive into its news hopper but the obvious truth: that Robinson killed Kirk because of his animus towards the views expressed by a prominent conservative Republican.
“Kirk had it coming to him!” the haters chant.
“What’s all the fuss about?” other haters ask.
“He was a gross [sic], racist, awful person who fueled the fires of division. He didn’t deserve to die,” thank you for that consolation, “but please stop acting like he was some hero,” one first grade teacher in Mt. Lebanon, Jill Calkins, posted to her social media account.
The School Board did nothing in response—no surprise there, as it is the same School Board that lost a landmark case a year ago over the enforced transgender instruction of first graders in the district. The Autism Caring Center of Pittsburgh removed her from their board.
Other haters throughout the country face consequences.
While the victim of this barbaric, heinous crime was merely engaging in protected free speech, because violence is words, the love tortured assassin gets a pass in much of the news coverage.
Then when sympathizer Jimmy Kimmel has his show suspended for voicing a malicious lie, the New York Times rushed to his defense. It cried “state censorship,” falsely alleging a conspiracy to silence a critic of President Trump. ABC reinstated Kimmel on Monday (though Nexstar and Sinclair, large ABC affiliates, have refused to broadcast him again).
Former President Barack Obama then rushed to the scene. Last week, he weighed in while playing the same “state censorship” card the Times had. This despite the fact that the Biden administration executed actual, irrefutable state censorship throughout the Covid pandemic with its enforcement of lockdown tyranny, including the closure of many churches. More than 100 lawsuits successfully challenged the closures on First Amendment grounds.
That’s where things stand as of now. A few Kirk bashers got punished, but mostly it was business as usual in these dis-United States of America, circa 2025.
Except for one thing. And here’s that one thing. It has to do with the subject we referenced earlier, that of REVIVAL.
More than 100 million people streamed online and watched the memorial service for Charlie Kirk. The event was undoubtedly the most widely broadcast proclamation of the Gospel in the history of the world.
“This is like an old-time revival, isn’t it?” President Trump said, speaking before 73,000 mourners inside State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. He was one of several speakers to use the word “revival.”
Dignitaries from the highest echelons of America and various parts of the world were present. Many witnessed to their belief in Jesus: Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, to name a few of the most prominent speakers. Media personality Tucker Carlson noted that Christian repentance had to begin with himself.
In perhaps the most moving moment in the five-hour event, Kirk’s widow Erika (who has assumed leadership of Turning Point USA) spoke of forgiving the suspected killer, Robinson. Her description of viewing Charlie’s lifeless, mangled body on the coroner’s table was profound. He had a smile on his face, she said.
“Like many, I was stunned by the words of Erika Kirk: Forgive, rather than nurturing revenge. Love, not hate. Love your enemies and those who persecute us,” theologian Peter Leithart writes.
“Pray this isn’t a one-off. Pray those who testified to Jesus speak and live and rule as disciples of Jesus. Pray that President Trump really hears what he heard on Sunday.”
Even before the memorial service, the subject of revival was much on my mind.
I heard similar thoughts from the most unlikely of sources to utter Christian language. That would be Elon Musk, President Trump’s former associate. I have nothing against Mr. Musk, but he is most assuredly not someone I’d cite as my go-to source on the subject of Christian revival.
But the comments Musk made to an interviewer before the memorial service began (with the sound of bagpipes blaring in the background), surely echoed the theme of revival.
“Charlie was someone who believed in dialogue. In open debate. He was a man of ideas. He spoke eloquently. He basically never even raised his voice. He was a man of peace, and now he’s been murdered in cold blood,” Musk said.
“Why was he killed?” the interviewer then asked.
“He was killed because his words made a difference. Because he was showing people the light, and he was killed by the dark.”
And that, in a nutshell, is why Charlie Kirk was killed, and why it matters.
America has seen revivals before as it did in the 18th century with George Whitefield. And it could happen again. All things are possible with God.
That’s it for my second report in September. It’s been a busy month observing the news.
I have written about this subject at such length because it’s pretty clear to me that the murder of Charlie Kirk is a turning point. In what direction, I don’t know. No one does.
But it matters. For the future of our country and our faith, it matters. We’ll find out in the months and perhaps years to come how much it matters.
Meanwhile, I surely hope and pray for revival in this country. May Charlie Kirk’s death be a blessing. May the blood of this heroic Christian martyr produce many seeds. May his passing yield much fruit.
May it be a Turning Point USA in this troubled land.
