Charlie Kirk was a student of mine.
I did not know him well since we only spent a short time together in a seminar I taught on Saint Augustine’s City of God. But I had a chance to hear from and teach a young man who was, in my estimation, a good-hearted, genuinely truth-seeking individual. His assassination is an inflection point in modern American history because of the choice it sets before us.
When an assassin shoots a speaker on campus, he has arrogated to himself the right to decide who shall and shall not be allowed to talk. The shooter thus implicitly claimed that he was absolutely in the right, and ultimately that he is infallible. But the American constitutional order assumes that no mere human is infallible in matters of political viewpoint and opinion. To forego persuasion for assassination is therefore an attack upon the American idea itself. Hence the assassin struck a blow against one of the few remaining unifying principles of our polity, which was traditionally held to be sacred. The assassination therefore radically calls into question our very constitutional identity and raises a most fundamental question: Who are we?
The Constitution’s Preamble refers to the American body politic as “We the People.” When John Jay wrote to New Yorkers to advocate ratification of the Constitution, he explained what he took American unity to consist in:
I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.
This was something of a rhetorical exaggeration. For example, as David Hackett Fischer argued, the American people were forged from at least five distinct “folkways,” including the Puritans, Cavaliers, Quakers, and Scots-Irish, as well as the Barbadian slave culture that was imported by English planters from the Caribbean to the American Deep South. While Americans were predominantly Protestant and English-speaking lovers of common law liberty, they were not universally or unhypocritically so.
Is it any surprise that in this milieu a radical online subculture of unmarried, non-church-attending, sexually rebellious, and disaffected youth has metastasized?
Still, as with any Founding mythmaking, there are core truths to Jay’s claim. Three stand out: American civic theology, habits and manners, and political philosophy.
The Declaration of Independence expressed the common American mind in its affirmation of the civic theology of providential and moralistic monotheism. There is one God who created all things, who is the author of the natural moral law and endower of natural rights, who is the just judge of the world, and who is the ultimate executor of that law. This God was the God of liberty, because he endows his creation with free will, the capacity to imitate him in creating and ordering, which Americans believed was exemplified in republicanism. While this God was not necessarily identical with the God of Abraham or the Holy Trinity or the rational God of the deists, such a God was affirmable and affirmed in a kind of overlapping consensus that valued robust individual and communal religious liberty.
This overlapping consensus drew its vibrancy from the church or churches who shepherded the masses according to their respective doctrinal traditions. While some scholars have suggested that the Founding generation was unchurched, there are good reasons to doubt that and affirm that something like 75 percent of the population was likely churched.
Central to American habits and manners was the American family and its familistic culture. Annual divorce rates in the 1790s were very low, and the chances of one’s marriage ending in divorce was less than 5 percent—a number that was pretty stable for the next century. Over 90 percent of people got married, and birthrates were high. Meanwhile, Americans’ commonly held political philosophy, the love of ordered liberty, was encapsulated in the Declaration, the Constitution, and the various state constitutions. This was what united the various demographic strands into one people.
These three traditionally unifying features of the American people—its civic theology, familistic and churched culture, and love of ordered liberty—have been decaying at an accelerated rate. The rise of the “nones” (28 percent of adults), the decline of weekly church attendance (26 percent of households raising children attend church weekly), alarming divorce rates (40 percent of marriages end in divorce), the decline of marriage (less than half of households are headed by married couples), and cratering birthrates have been well documented. All of this has dovetailed with the decline in social capital over the past several decades, since healthy families and churches are constitutive of the robust friendships that make up a thriving civil society.
The human heart’s deeply religious appetite for love, community, meaning, etc., when not satiated in the traditional Western institutions of civil society, will inevitably seek fulfillment elsewhere. Therefore, is it any surprise that in this milieu a radical online subculture of unmarried, non-church-attending, sexually rebellious, and disaffected youth has metastasized? Or that Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, was dating a trans-identifying person, had a “furry” fixation, and was apparently ensconced in radically leftist LGBT online spaces, which appear to have had foreknowledge of the assassination plot?
Transgender ideology strikes at the core of all three traditionally unifying features of the American people. It denies that God created man male and female, who, while equal in dignity and rights, have essentially distinct roles and responsibilities that are divinely ordained. It holds in disdain the traditional institution of marriage as shackling and eschews any church community that holds to traditional biblical teachings about sex and marriage. Those teachings imply that, while persons with gender dysphoria have dignity and deserve respect and proper health care, no individual can actually become the opposite sex or any number of fanciful, potentially infinite “gender identities.” The proposition “Trans people exist,” is meaningless unless it means that “persons with gender identity disorder and/or gender dysphoria exist.” But the trans ideologist retorts that such a claim amounts to “erasure,” to the denial of trans “existence.” From this perspective, there can be no peaceful conversations about transgenderism—so there can be no love of free and orderly debate of rival viewpoints. Such an existential threat to trans “existence” lays the premise for a violent reply that too many trans-indoctrinated individuals have been willing to undertake.
Will Kirk’s assassination jolt Americans to wake up and remember the principles that once united them? From John Winthrop’s sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” to Alexander Hamilton’s opening Federalist paper to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, it has been part of the American DNA to link its constitutional identity as a people in crucial moments in our history not only to its own happiness but that of the world. These leaders and many others in our history have understood that the eyes of the world have ever been on the American experiment and wondered whether government of the people, by the people, and for the people can long endure. Kirk’s murder forces us to consider our choices once again. Either we will recover those things that could unite us again. Or we will deserve to go down as a byword for the ages.