Special editorial:

For Charlie Kirk, the event at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10 began like so many others. In front of a crowd of about 3000, the Turning Point USA founder and president engaged in spirited debate, fielding questions from all quarters, taking on all comers. Kirk’s responses were typical: Drawing on conservative values and, even more, on his sincere and ardent Christian beliefs, he replied to a range of interlocuters with grace, aplomb, and wisdom. But the event had hardly even begun before a single assassin’s bullet brought a vibrant young life to a sudden end.

For several reasons, it is important to mourn the murder of Charlie Kirk; he was much more than a right-of-centre American political activist. In a profession famous for the compromises of conscience it requires, and the corrosive effect it has on those who rise to positions of influence and power, Kirk was an exception to the rule. Moreover, his organization, Turning Point USA, addressed two absolutely essential problems in contemporary culture. First—and most obviously—this group engaged the young, and did so at the very place where their indoctrination occurs: on universities campuses. This, as it happens, is also the site of their immiseration. In addition to being deprived of a genuine education, American college students, at the outset of their adult lives, are saddled with crippling debt, putting the prospect of a family formation out of reach, and leaving young men, in particular, prone to compulsive coping mechanisms. Thus, as Kirk once distilled the message he brings to such young men: “stop watching porn, stop smoking weed, stop drinking endlessly,” go “back to church…And do what the church tells you to do. Find a woman, marry her, provide, have more kids than you can afford.”

The unambiguous and unapologetically religious character of this exhortation brings into view the second problem that Kirk addressed directly. Taking the principle that “politics is downstream from culture” a step further, Kirk saw that politics was not merely a second-order consequence but a third-order one. Put differently, culture itself, for Kirk, was downstream of cult, of religious practice and belief. Like Fr. Richard John Neuhaus did a generation before him, Kirk saw that religion, as Neuhaus once put it, is “at the heart of culture,” and made his intervention accordingly. Thus, Kirk’s political engagement was continuous with his religious commitment, and he was unapologetic and untiring in his work to return his country to Christian values. A champion of pro-family positions, he always drew on the ultimate wellspring from which those positions came by means of his witness to His Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

As one of the most visible and committed pro-lifers of his generation, his tragic, public, and grizzly assassination would be reason enough to mark his passing. But sadly, his death is also a vivid emblem of a truly dire moment in public discourse in the West. For Kirk was silenced not by the force of a compelling argument but by the violence which was the very antithesis of the vigorous public debate in which he was engaged when he died. Debate, after all, is the great alternative to violence. If, as the Prussian military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz famously said, “war is the continuation of politics by other means,” politics can, by the same token, be the place where such escalation is preempted. The continuation of politics in the realm of violence is not inevitable, and passionate debate—and its expression in representative democracy—should be the genuine substitute, in a civilized society, for violence.

Kirk’s murder is, therefore, sadly emblematic, a symbol of a society regressing from speech into violence. And nothing, in recent years, has accelerated this slide as quickly as the pernicious and pervasive ideology that conflates speech with violence. This worldview informs the horrendous reactions which have followed Kirk’s murder. Outlets of news and opinion that present themselves as being sane and sober have noted, as if by way of explanation for his assassination, that Kirk was a “divisive” figure; others have drawn the connection much more directly: as one cable commentator put it: “hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.” Kirk’s message, in other words, was the wind and the bullet that severed his neck just steps away from his wife and two young children; it was the whirlwind which he reaped.

When Christ found Himself in the midst of a violent crowd, primed to execute the woman caught in adultery, His response to it demarcated, with absolute clarity, the threshold between peace and violence: “He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone” (Jn 8:7). This is the very boundary that the speech-as-violence ideology fatally blurs. While the phrase itself is not equivalent to shouting “fire!” in a crowded theatre, it applies the paradigm of this limit-case to political discourse and, in doing so, it compromises the preconditions for debate. For it precisely because speech is not violence that our civilization has not devolved into spasmodic outbreaks of brutality, with the leading figures of opposing parties being assassinated like so many rival mob bosses in grim cycles of reprisal without end.

That Kirk, an avid and passionate advocate of debate, should have been killed in the very act of dialogue does not augur well for the future. Indeed, the grotesque glee with which Kirk’s murder has been greeted by some—including one person at the event itself, who cheered with joy even as others ducked for cover—illustrates that our culture is not only losing its commitment to rational discourse, but abandoning its reverence for the sacred character of life itself.

The pro-life movement has a unique ability to counter both of these deleterious trends. Abortionists, after all, are actively engaged in actual violence which they inflict on the most vulnerable. And yet, our movement only ever advances by means of persuasion and conversion. We have always known that our culture must collectively decide to eschew prenatal infanticide, and that is must choose to give up the unseemly charade that unborn life isn’t human life. Violence cannot achieve this end, because violence is precisely what we seek to stop. Through our longstanding civic and political engagement, we have encouraged our fellow citizens to turn their back on acts which violate the sanctity of life. And this very engagement in the political process is a tacit endorsement of the civil dialogue on which it depends.

The Greek word witness is “martyr,” and Charlie Kirk was just such a witness: to the sanctity of unborn life, to the necessity of changing hearts and minds through reasoned arguments, and, most of all, to Jesus Christ. He was faithful to St Peter’s exhortation, to be always ready “to give an answer … for the hope that is in you” (1 Pet 3:15). Indeed, he gave his life in the process of giving such answers. We should honor his memory by advocating for the unborn and by engaging in public, courageous witness to the sanctity of life—and the “Author of Life” (Acts 3:15).