“I want to be remembered for courage for my faith. That would be the most important thing. The most important thing is my faith.” – Charlie Kirk
Perhaps it seems a little strange for an Australian Anglican Minister to want to write about an American Christian and conservative activist. And yet a week after being woken up to my wife saying “Charlie Kirk has been shot” to watching the horrific video on X, and in light of what’s happened since then I think it worth reflecting on this giant of the faith.
I can’t quite remember when we stumbled across Kirk. No doubt it was connected to our own struggle against our local State Government school and our failed fight with our supposedly conservative State Government to help us stop the sexualisation and politicisation of our kids in school. The identity politics of the left and the deep harm it’s doing to a generation of young people and the failure of anybody in Australian politics to realise the problem and stand up to it causes one to look further afield. And so somewhere in the midst of all that, we found Charlie Kirk. Not only was he a great debater, but it was clear he understood what we had experienced here in Tasmania. That the institutions of our society are totally and completely captured by an ideology that will destroy us – anti-Christian left wing identity politics. But more than that, Charlie was clear that more important than politics, was making sure people heard the good news about Jesus. He was politically passionate, but far far more passionate about Jesus. He seemed like a good man to follow.
As an aside, somewhere along the way Kirk, or the person running Kirk’s X (formerly Twitter) account followed me so I like to think I at least helped him think through an issue once in return for all the ways he helped us.
Without qualification, Kirk’s death is a tragedy. He was a young husband and father. I’ve watched a few too many videos in the past week of his little daughter running up to him, hugging him, sitting on his knee and playing with him. There was one particular video where he’s in a toy shop with her and she basically forces him to buy her the toy she wants. As a girl Dad, it’s so easy to put oneself right there and it’s so obvious the pain his children will carry for the rest of their lives, not to mention his loving wife Erika. Our comfort in the midst of the sadness is that Kirk, an imperfect sinner like us all, loved the Lord Jesus. He was welcomed into his Father’s house and is now with Him in glory. Our prayer for his beautiful young family is that God’s peace and love is real and present in a powerful way for them at this time. The gospel is so so powerful in our world’s darkest times.
As we were processing Kirk’s murder last Thursday morning (Australian time), what I wasn’t expecting to have to process was the sick and vile response to it. Even though I’ve battled against school Principals who think I deserve to have my rights ignored because I’m a white Christian male. Even though I’ve been defeated by a Government Education Department that thinks being inclusive means excluding me. Even though I’ve experienced first hand the vile anti-Christian hatred, and hatred for those who express their belief that men can’t become women… I was naively unprepared to see people celebrate and excuse the execution of a man at a University campus sharing ideas.
And the response was vile and rampant. I’d never heard of Hannah Ferguson prior to last week. Ferguson rightly got called out for her outrageous post a few hours after Kirk was shot. According to her Kirk is “a viral sensation for meeting intellect with pure hate”. She then spent a whole slide misquoting and misrepresenting him followed with the words “extremist is not an understatement”. She then had an entire slide about his words about supporting the American Constitution’s 2nd Amendment (the right to bear arms) which again are ripped from their context. On and on she went until she arrived at what she knows for sure:
- she’s glad Charlie Kirk will no longer spread his extremist messaging (aka she’s glad he’s dead),
- she believes he empowered the violence that ended his life (his assassination is his fault),
- he caused more harm than good,
- violence is sometimes necessary, and
- though this act of violence isn’t an act of progress she understands lots of her progressive buddies will disagree with her and think this was all good (and she’s not condemning them for that).
Well she rightly coped a bit of flack and a week later claimed she was just “inviting nuance to the party”. Last time I checked murder being wrong didn’t need a lot of nuance. Let alone murdering someone for ‘wrong’ opinions. I could go on with other examples of the shocking response to Kirk’s death, things like the ludicrous decision of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s to platform Hasan Piker (who’s called for violence and justified it like Ferguson) and tried to present him as the voice of reason, but you’d be here all day if I kept going.
Ferguson’s disgusting take, and the ABC’s platforming of Piker, are bad enough, but they are the respectable Australian version of a much more vile and widespread response to Kirk’s assassination. Already traumatised by the video of Kirk being shot, our feeds then filled up with video after video of people being happy he’s dead, glorifying in his murder, and rejoicing in evil. Having just spent a week on a conference learning about how the Western church has lost sight of the spiritual battle we’re in, and how it fails to account for the demonic work in our life, and with a sermon to preach last weekend on 1 Timothy 4, the spiritual aspect of the horrific response to Kirk’s death seemed palpable. 1 Timothy 4 opens with these words,
“The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron.”
– NIV2011
This all made it hard not to see Satan at work as these sick people rejoiced in Kirk’s death. And of course the spiritual aspect of all this mustn’t be discounted. For though much of the talk is of Kirk as a political operator, for those of us who’ve watched him, and as we’ve listened to his own words, we know that he was first and foremost concerned with changing lives through sharing the gospel. And he did this a lot. In fact some are saying he was this generations most significant evangelist since Billy Graham (in the USA).
It’s this evil response, sometimes wrapped in respectability (oh he was in favour of the right to bare arms so he deserved to die, oh he was trans-phobic so he deserved to die, oh he was a bigot so he deserved to die) that has impacted me more perhaps than his death. Yes I enjoyed listening to him debate. Yes he followed me on X. But I didn’t know him and I’d never met him. But what suddenly became apparent as the masks fell off and people rejoiced in his death is just how many people want me and my family dead too.
For, like Kirk, I too believe that Jesus is the only way by which someone can be saved. I too believe that abortion is murder. I believe that men can’t be women. That marriage is between a man and a woman. That children have a right to their biological mother and father. Like Charlie Kirk I don’t hate people who disagree with me about these things, Christ calls us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. But he also calls us to speak the truth in love. Having watched hours and hours of what Charlie Kirk did I am confident he spoke the truth in love as well as any sinner could. Being a sinner myself I’m confident I’m doing my best, with God’s help to speak the truth in love too. And yet if many in our western world have decided Kirk deserves to die for his views, if they’ve decided his children deserve to be robbed of their father, and that his wife deserves to mourn the love of her life, then I too in their view deserve to be murdered, and my children deserve unimaginable trauma, and so too does my wife deserve grief.
Over the course of the last week, my wife and I have pointed this out to a few of our acquaintances (I would’ve used the words friends 8 days ago). “Hey buddy, you do realise I agree with Charlie Kirk about this or that thing and to be justifying his death over it feels like an attack on me”. Horrifyingly one acquaintance essentially agreed my wife and I were hateful and harmful like Kirk but didn’t want to talk to us in person about it. Sadly for us, it’s more than one story of real loss of relationship in the wake of the loss of Charlie Kirk.
I shouldn’t be as surprised as I am. My battle with the school and the Government and the lack of sympathy I got from many people ought to have prepared me. Yes I had people tell me to chill out, not to worry so much when things were happening with the school, yet the shocking realisation of this past week is that if I was shot in the neck on my church’s livestream in front of my children some of my so called friends, and a fair few others would say, ‘oh well he did kinda care too much about trans issues’ and ‘he was a little bit too forthright in his opinions’, he didn’t deserve it but we need to bring some nuance.
That is nothing but pure evil.
And evil is what we’ve seen an endless stream off since last Thursday morning (Australian time) when that evil man pulled the trigger and thousands upon thousands rejoiced.
As Tucker Carlson said at one of Kirk’s TPUSA events, “The people doing evil do not win in the end — they are destroyed by the evil that flows through them.” Evil never wins in the end.
And as Charlie would want let me finish with Jesus who in the face of the evilest act ever perpetrated on this earth, when the only innocent man ever to live was hung on that Roman cross for us his response was love, “Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.’ ”
Evil like we’ve seen this past week, from the murder itself to the rejoicing of many requires a response. As Kirk would want, our response should be informed by our Christian faith which tells us not to repay evil with evil. Instead we need to pray and work hard to defeat the evil that permeates our western world with good. We must do it by boldly speaking the truth in love as Charlie Kirk has inspired us to do. And we must remember to hold fast to the gospel and earnestly pray that everyone who has rejoiced in evil this past week finds forgiveness through repentance and faith in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Source: Chris Bowditch Substack