Last Week, I Watched a Father Get Shot in the Neck
On the horrifying assassination of Charlie Kirk.
I have recently been convinced that nostalgia is really just a trick. We all long for the simpler, more innocent times of our youth, because we very obviously weren’t as divided back then. In the 90s, we had Wrestlemania, Ninja Turtles, and Jurassic Park. We didn’t have heated political arguments with our friends and we didn’t worry about things like political assassinations.
But nostalgia is a trick.
Charlie Kirk’s daughter is three years old. His son just celebrated his first birthday back in May. His wife, Erika, has had to put them to bed by herself for six nights. They are living life through a tragedy, dark and deep, and I am praying for them every day. I have found myself compelled to pray for them more and more, because I cannot imagine their pain.
When I saw the video of Kirk getting shot, I was shocked by how un-shocked I was. Thanks to Twitter’s X’s automatic video feature, coupled with the destruction of Gaza, I have seen lots of videos of real people dying over the past few years. There is a major difference between graphic, real-life violence and graphic movie violence. When you see the former, your body knows it and your stomach begins to move. Something that was far more natural for the vast majority of human history suddenly feels wholly unnatural when you see it for real.
It took a minute for Kirk’s death to sink in. In the moments after I began to think about how violent things are getting in America. From Trump’s attempted assassination last year, to the assassination of Minnesota’s Speaker of the House back in June, to the murder of a judge’s son only a few years ago, things feel like they’re getting worse. And that’s before you even mention January 6th.
I don’t remember it being like this when I growing up. But nostalgia is a trick.
In the 90s, we had (at the time) the biggest domestic terrorist attack in American history, with the Oklahoma City bombing. 168 people died. The 80s weren’t really any better: In 1985, police in Philadelphia dropped a bomb on some row houses and destroyed 61 homes. Neo-Nazis assassinated a Jewish radio host. And, of course, there was an assassination attempt on the president. Nostalgia is a trick.
Addressing a problem means recognizing it exists: America is a violent place.
Kirk’s murder is now part of a long history of American violence, and despite our lengthy catalog, it feels very different. Maybe it’s because video of his assassination is so readily available online; maybe it’s because he is a young father of two children; or maybe it’s because we are just hyper-aware of politics now, which seems to be everywhere.
When Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered by a Donald Trump supporter this summer, I didn’t weep for them the way I wept for Kirk. A death as public as Kirk’s simply makes our brokenness impossible to ignore. The pain of a father losing his life was compounded by the reactions from some of the online Left, who openly celebrated.1 Those things are hard to read and process, but it shouldn’t be a surprise because it is thoroughly who we are.
The Internet has connected us to each other but it has added a layer of distance. My enemy online is different from my enemy in real life, and my words mean less because my enemy online is an avatar and some words, not a person.
When Paul Pelosi was placed in the ICU in 2022, the Right openly celebrated and mocked him. One of Donald Trump’s first acts in Office was to pardon the rioters on January 6th. When asked about Speaker Hortman’s death and if he was going to call Tim Walz - the governor of Minnesota - Trump said, "Why would I call him? I could call and say, 'Hi, how you doing?' Uh, the guy doesn't have a clue. He's a mess. I could be nice and call, but why waste time?"
It was wholly unsurprising to me that Kirk’s murder was celebrated on the Left, because celebrating death is what we do. We are far beyond restoring whatever social fabric I felt existed in the 1990s and are accelerating past each other in the race to, “Who can be more indifferent to suffering?” This indifference has, again, always been a part of who we are as a country. Nostalgia is a trick.
J.F.K.’s assassination was celebrated by some on the Right. Richard Ely said:
Kennedy died a tyrant's death. He encouraged integration, which has the support of communism. He was a tyrant.
Malcolm X also famously said that Kennedy’s assassination was America’s “chickens” coming home to roost. Indifference to death is wholly American.
Political violence is so dangerous because it - coupled with our Extremely Online culture - multiplies that indifference and rewards it. Caring less about someone who differs from you politically is now a contest. Having empathy for someone has now become “toxic.”
I think one of the best practices for a Christian (and everyone else, if I’m being honest) is to read the book of John in one sitting. We tend to cite/memorize/post passages we like, but even when we put them in the most well-thought out context, we are not reading them the way the author intended. The book of John is a letter and, more importantly, a story. In it, the author does a remarkable job of creating a sense of dread. Jesus is doing miracles, but there is worry behind them. He continually warns about what is coming, even if it is subtle. When Jesus is turned over to the Romans for His execution, you understand the purpose of the dread. It is a dark moment and it feels like defeat.
When you read the ending of John in isolation, it feels like a victory. But in one sitting, the victory feels incomplete. You truly get the sense that God’s reconciliation of all things to Himself will not be instant, nor will it be spontaneous. It will take time, and at times it will feel lost. But the dread has faded and the victory is lingering underneath.
My faith in Christ gives me that hope. I am mortified by what happened last week and what is to come, but America is Babylon. It is a violent place. It is a wonderful place. It is not my home.
Kirk and I shared a faith, but I did not see a whole lot of Christ in his Christianity. In fact, many of the words he used in public indicate that his faith was more nominal than sincere. People in secular society struggle with this, but there is a fundamental Christian principle that says you cannot proclaim Christ with your mouth but deny Him with your actions.
When Paul Pelosi was attacked, Kirk offered to pay his attacker’s bail. Kirk repeatedly downplayed January 6th and called it, “Entrapment Day.” He denied the results of the 2020 Election and - in his own way - contributed to the violence on that day, the overwhelming majority of it against police officers.
His “watchlist” of professors resulted in years of targeted harassment and threats for those working in education. Last year, Kirk told his audience to pray that Trump wins, otherwise “100,000 Haitians” would descend upon America and become their “masters.” And then there is Kirk’s long history of stoking racial flames with his rhetoric. Earlier this summer, Kirk shared this tweet:
One of the reasons that many people speculated that Kirk’s shooter was a “Groyper,” or an Extremely Online Neo-Nazi, is because he was routinely targeted by them for being too cautious with his racist statements. If you look at the replies to Kirk’s tweet, it is a lot of white supremacists essentially saying that Kirk should just say what he means out loud. They understood his message.
So do my black Christian friends. Some of them have reached out to me personally and expressed confusion about the memorializing of Kirk. Charlie said many, many offensive things and there is some evidence (including the tweet above) that he was getting worse.2 You do not get to spend years spouting explicitly anti-immigrant rhetoric and sowing division and then claim Christ. Kirk made his faith a hallmark of his message but he did not provide evidence that Christ had done a true work in his heart. He was, ultimately, a very poor representative of the Kingdom.
Still, he was 31 years old. When I was that age, I said some of the dumbest things in world history. I’m sure many of them were hateful. I take comfort in Paul’s writings which say God begins a good work in us and continues completing it until Christ’s return. A fundamental teaching of Christianity is that once Christ begins that work, the Christian heart moves towards the most vulnerable. Every branch in Christ that bears fruit the Father prunes so that it may bear more fruit. Kirk deserves grace because every pruning looks different and there are times where he showed that pruning was taking place.
I have seen Left-wing Christians say that we should not extend empathy to Kirk because he (somewhat infamously) rejected the idea of empathy, a teaching that is closer to Nietzsche than it is to Christ. The idea that Christians should not extend empathy to someone who has rejected it is anti-Christ. Of course he deserves our empathy, and his wife even more so. She has tragically moved into the “quartet of the vulnerable,”3 historically recognized by Christians as those we must care for:
Widows
Orphans
The poor
Immigrants
If your heart hardens at the thought of praying for a widow, it is time to ask God for more tenderness. It is totally possible - easy, even - to hold all these things in your heart at once: Charlie Kirk sometimes said hateful things, sometimes said kind things, that his killer is a monster,4 that Kirk’s death deserves to be mourned, that the things he said should not be celebrated, and that we should lament for the state of the country.
Real Christianity is hard, especially in our current American culture. The Bible is a book written between 6,000 and 2,000 years ago, to cultures radically different from each other and radically different from our own. It is never going to slot in perfectly to American politics. If you find the God of the Bible aligning with all your policy goals, you are likely worshiping some version of yourself rather than the God contained in those pages.
According to statistics, we are currently in a period of right-wing political violence. Maybe Kirk’s shooting is the beginning of a period of Left-wing political violence; it is impossible to know. I do know this: On the same day Kirk was murdered, a teenager who was radicalized online by Neo-Nazi ideology shot two of his high school classmates here in Colorado. If we move past Kirk’s assassination without having a conversation about the online radicalization of young men, we are doing his family - the families of the victims in Evergreen - a huge disservice.5
But if we are entering an era of Left-wing political violence, it would just be a return to the 1960s and 1970s. You see, nostalgia is a trick. The one benefit we have is that we can look back at our history and see what political violence accomplishes: Nearly always the opposite of its goals. Kirk’s murderer did not make America a safer place for transgender people; he made it infinitely more dangerous.
Democracy is the belief that every election is a competition of ideas, and that competition is conducted peacefully at the ballot box. We do it that way because if we revert to political violence, that competition simply shifts to who has more guns and who has better aim. The ideas cease to matter.
I know America is never going to perfect. I know more violence will inevitably come. This is a wonderful place. This is a violent place. This is not my home. Nostalgia is a trick. But Christ is real.
The reason Charlie Kirk’s fans are so angry is because all of their anger used to be hope. They were hoping - just like I am now - that America was becoming a better place. In a lot of ways it has gotten better, but it will never be home. One day it will be gone.
God is reconciling all things to Himself, but that does not mean the dread has completely stopped. For me, Christ is the only thing that gives hope to combat that dread. And it is at the core of the belief that an act of political violence (or any violence) against Charlie Kirk is an attack against everyone.
When the Apostle Stephen was being stoned to death, the Book of Acts says that instead of calling for help or cursing those who were stoning him, he prayed for them. Not only was Paul (not yet a Christian) present for the stoning of Stephen, he guarded the cloaks of those who murdered him. Paul was not just an observer of one of the earliest Christian martyrdoms; he was a participant.
Instead of rejecting Paul, the rest of the Apostles welcomed his conversion and gave him a position of leadership. It is an insanely radical act of love. The only way we can wade through this dread is to embrace those radical acts of love.
There is no nostalgia in Christianity, because it is not an imagined past. It is the truth and it is the here and now. Kirk and I believed different things, but I do hope to see him again some day when both of our cultural blinders are gone.
“To shame our sins He blushed in blood;
He closed His eyes to show us God;
Let all the world fall down and know
That none but God such love can show”
―Bernard of Clairvaux
This includes someone who apparently was at the event and celebrated after Kirk was shot. There is nothing sicker.
One of the reasons Kirk was at “war” with the Groypers is because he was fighting with them for audience capture, along with Candace Owens. Kirk had started to make increasingly more anti-Semitic statements as of late, and even hinted that October 7th may have been an inside job.
Orphans has always been understood to include the unborn, who Kirk advocated for relentlessly.
Tyler Robinson’s parents also made the difficult decision to hand in their own son. They deserve to be commended and prayed for.
This includes the assassin who tried to murder Trump. He was a registered Republican, but had unclear beliefs and also had a list of targets that included Joe Biden and Anthony Fauci. One thing is clear: He was radicalized online.