Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
—Robert F. Kennedy, on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Charlie Kirk is dead.
A conservative political activist, evangelical Christian, husband, and father, he cofounded Turning Point USA, for which he was publicly debating when he was shot and killed at Utah Valley University.
He was thirty-one years old.
To be honest, I didn’t listen much to Charlie Kirk. I heard him interviewed, from time to time, on television or on a podcast. Clearly, he was intelligent, passionate, and unafraid to mix it up in the scrum of the public square.
But why did someone kill him?
As Catholics, we believe there is a truth. It is enduring and unimpeachable. But we also believe that each person is free to choose whether to follow that truth. Each of us is a child of God, imbued with an ineradicable dignity and, with it, free will. Free will affords us the liberty to seek and arrive at truth—or to simply walk away. We may choose our ultimate arrival in heaven or our descent into hell. It is God’s greatest gamble.
Our choices are seismic, but they are ours.
When someone shot Charlie Kirk, someone took that choice away. Now, it’s not relevant if Charlie was an arch-conservative or an arch-liberal, a devout Catholic or a hard-bitten atheist. What matters is that someone said, “You can’t hear this . . . because I don’t want you to hear this. I am the arbiter of who you listen to, what you consume, and what you discern because I know better than you.”
This is the dark spirit of ideologically blinkered protestors who prevent events, intimidate crowds, drown out voices, and murder speakers. And they do this because they believe that using their freedom to restrain yours—in whatever way possible, even murder—is good for you.
Ideology is a warped secular religion that leads adherents to murder in the name of a cause.
In his book God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, C. S. Lewis warned,
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. . . . [Those] who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
This murder is an act of brazen totalitarianism. This killing is a move of supreme censorship. In The Gulag Archipelago, a riveting exposé of the hellscape of the Soviet Union’s prison system, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explained,
To do evil a human being must first of all believe what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.
Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.
Ideology is a warped secular religion that leads adherents to murder in the name of a cause. And with a deformed conscience, the ideology’s disciple not only escapes self-condemnation but revels in unabashed self-congratulation. The time-honored notions of spirited debate, free speech, and each individual’s right to decide the path for themselves are deemed irrelevant and obliterated with a haughty shot fired. “They hate their enemy,” a wise friend once said, “more than they love the truth.”
And the endorsement of ideological violence is growing. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) recently publicized a chilling survey of 68,000 college students at 250 different universities, where 34 percent considered violence to stop a campus speech acceptable to some degree. This is at a record high.
What is wrong with us?
Our country was founded upon a Bill of Rights that guaranteed freedom of speech. That means the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts that silenced and persecuted critics of John Adams’ administration would expire in ignominy and defeat Adams in the 1800 election. That means that the free and fiery exchange in the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates would crystallize the explosive issue of slavery, elect Lincoln as president in 1860, and lead to slavery’s abolition (even at the cost of a civil war). That means Susan B. Anthony could publicly speak before her 1872 trial, asking, “Is it a crime for a citizen to vote?” And it means, one hundred years later, that Martin Luther King Jr. could tell a divided nation, “I have a dream.” Freedom of speech is the root of learning and indispensable to the formation of our conscience. It is the bane of dictators and the enemy of groupthink.
“You can’t hear this . . . because I don’t want you to hear this.”
Charlie Kirk didn’t have to die.
If you disagree with him, that is your unimpeachable right. But if you disagree, disagree honestly. Disagree as an adult, not as a raging toddler. Disagree as a fellow citizen, not a craven totalitarian. By all means, give an opposing speech, write a dissenting essay, fund an alternative cause, vote for a crusading candidate, or simply shake your head and walk away. Use logic, not violence. Use organization, not chaos. Use life, not death. Use your brain, not your trigger finger. As Evelyn Beatrice Hall insisted, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Anger and violence are not arguments.
And maybe—just maybe—if you are civil in your disagreement and right in your reasoning, you will have won not perdition but the maturing of your soul.
On the evening of April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy canceled his speech, walked out to the tense streets of Indianapolis, and quietly said,
My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.
So I shall ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, that’s true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love—a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.
Who are we?
What are we becoming?
Pray, my friends, for God’s mercy and act for a better world.
Charlie Kirk and all other victims of political violence, requiescat in pace.