The Devil has overplayed his hand

Making sense of the murder of Charlie Kirk

Several years ago, I was paid $50 to participate, with 7 or 8 other people, in a three-hour focus group looking at fundraising advertisements for a famous animal welfare organization. Whenever anyone offers to pay me $50 to pontificate on stuff I know nothing about, I am an enthusiastic participant. We looked at different advertising campaigns and at the end of the evening they brought out the campaign that they were most interested in promoting; global warming (it wasn’t yet climate change) is upsetting weather patterns and animals are dying. The pictures were gratuitously graphic, the messaging was emotive and devoid of facts, and I immediately wrote off the potential ad campaign as puerile and slightly moronic. But I wondered how much spin to take off my response – even then global warming was a tortured topic for a conversation. I didn’t want a heated argument. I just wanted to collect my fifty bucks and leave.

The first person to respond came in with a howitzer and blistered the paint in the room with a response that matched my view. When it came my turn to offer a view, it was sufficient to say,

“Yes, I pretty much agree with everyone else.”

The last guy to speak started by giving us a summary of his resume as a musician, table waiter and artist. He then stunned me with the words,

“I have never met anyone who doesn’t believe that the world is being destroyed by global warming. I disagree with everyone else here tonite but that is not the point. The point is I have never met people with your views. That doesn’t seem right.”

He wasn’t angry. He was just incredulous that his range of friendships was so limited. And I immediately took stock of the range of my friendships.

Abraham Lincoln lived during a particularly violent and politically strained period of US history. His life was taken from him by John Wilkes Booth, a gifted young actor with strong Southern sympathies who locked himself in an echo chamber. He was absolutely convinced that the route out of Southern disgrace was to assassinate the focus of all the disappointments in his life. When he shot Lincoln and broke his leg jumping from the presidential box, he called out “Sic Semper Tyrannis” to the shocked theatre crowd and escaped into Virginia. He was stunned when newspapers wrote of him like he was a criminal. He knew that he had made a big mistake when Virginia farmers wanted nothing to do with him. It is reported that his last words were “Useless… useless” as he looked at his hands, paralyzed by a bullet. Perhaps he finally recognized the futility of thinking that murder is a solution to anything. We will never know the enormous cost of Booth’s arrogance. Perhaps, as I believe, Mr. Lincoln’s model of Reconstruction would have been so effective that the corrosive Jim Crow laws would not have found purchase, exiling black Americans to another century of horror.

Whatever birthdays that are left to me will never be the same because this year’s birthday featured another arrogant killer who took the life of Charlie Kirk. I certainly did not know Mr. Kirk, but I became aware of him and his fledgling organization early in the first Trump presidency. To say that he was an impressive young man is not to put too fine a point on things. Almost from the beginning I was convinced that he was the future of the Republican Party and certainly was a future president. His grasp of history and the Bible was beyond anything I had seen before, and his poise and rhetorical skills were rare in a professional speaker much less a callow youth. He only got better in the intervening years, and I can’t think of a time when I thought,

“I don’t agree with his view on this topic.”

He was either on my wavelength, or he converted me to his side of the argument. It is too much to say that Charlie Kirk was another Abraham Lincoln, but it is agonizingly easy to say that we will never know the enormous cost of his killer’s arrogance.

I am not an American but hearing of Mr. Kirk’s assassination put me in a profound funk. Why him? Who would do such a thing? What is going on in the US? Does this portend worse to come? And then, of course, what of his poor wife and kids? And then I prayed for his family and friends and for a country that appeared to be tearing itself apart.

I was very angry at the killer. And then I was very angry at those who thought it a clever idea to stomp on his grave with stupid social media posts. And when that phase passed – mercifully short – I took the view of Franklin Graham who said that,

“The Devil has overreached.”

And that is where I am now. They killed the wrong guy because now there will be thousands of Charlie Kirks. People being loud and proud in declaring their faith in a God who loves rather than an ideology that hates. People making declarations of their faith in Jesus Christ. Maybe even people who smile more, speak more politely and empathize more with those who suffer from the neuroses of our age and who might just need someone to finally hear them. Maybe we will start to work towards a culture that doesn’t abandon vast hordes of people to tent cities and drug addictions, but will house, feed and treat them.

When Charlie Kirk’s murderer was caught it was reported that he had confessed to his father and that his father had turned him in to the police. I felt for the dad and wondered how impossible that would be and how difficult his subsequent grieving for his son would be. And then I thought of Charlie Kirk’s dad and how impossible the past few days have been for him and how difficult the subsequent grieving for his son will be. Yes, the injury to Charlie Kirk’s dad is profoundly deeper but he, at least, has the solace of mourning a son in whom he can be very proud. Not the killer’s dad. He must mourn a son who attracts only contempt.

Over the years, I have thought about the artist in our focus group and his surprise at having such a limited range of friends. I have spent years of my life pondering the US Civil War and wondering how John Wilkes Booth came to have such a fevered mind. The irony is that Charlie Kirk likely had more experience and better answers for my questions than anyone alive today. He waded into university campuses for the specific purpose of destroying ideological echo chambers because he knew that all of us need to deliberately listen to “new songs” from time to time. The Bible says that iron sharpens iron but there can be no sharpening if there is no contact and hence no debate.

Was the murder of Charlie Kirk a celestial “oopsie” or does God have a purpose in this? To Christians, the question answers itself. Of course, God has a purpose, and one day we may understand that purpose. I think it will hinge on the notion that the Devil has overplayed his hand. The life, love and message of Charlie Kirk will explode over the coming months in ways unimaginable to us today. Will political discourse become less angry and distempered? Will shame reattach itself to vulgar language? Only time will tell.

But there are signs that the fever dream is beginning to break. Mr. Kirk’s widow has publicly committed her life and the resources of their formidable organization to doubling down on her husband’s message which I encapsulate as Deut. 30:19,

This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the LORD is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

She and the Turning Point organization will continue to call everyone to choose life for the sake of the children Mr. Kirk exalted people to have. This is a call to participate in the ultimate creative purposes of God - to impose order on chaos through individual choices. Perhaps Charlie Kirk’s death is removing the logjam to that message.

The internet is filling up with short videos of left-leaning people (mostly young) who are horrified by the nihilistic reaction of vocal fellow travelers who find pleasure in the murder of Charlie Kirk. These “formerly of the left” people are publicly expressing their horror and are removing themselves from the ranks of the Democrat Party in the tens of thousands (someone is counting). That is immensely encouraging for moral and not political reasons.

On January 1, 404, a young Christian monk named Telemachus had had enough and jumped into the local colosseum to stop the gladiatorial games. The angry crowd stoned him for such effrontery. The writers don’t say this, but I think that, at the end of the fighting, the crowd silently left their seats pondering what had just happened. In hearing about this event, the Emperor Honorius banned all gladiatorial games. The Devil had overplayed his hand. The bravery of Telemachus cost him his life, but we know the enormous blessings of his sacrifice. And so it will be with Charlie Kirk. His sacrifice will result in enormous blessing. This may be small consolation to his family but all of my birthdays from now on will include prayers of thanks for the life of Charlie Kirk.

RIP.