As many of you are no doubt aware, last week, on Wednesday, September 10, conservative influencer Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at a public event at Utah Valley University. The alleged shooter has since been apprehended and is in custody.
Kirk is not unique in falling victim to murder; there are some fifty people every day, in the United States alone, who lose their life to a deliberate and malicious person, even apart from considering the horror of abortion. Why, then, do we react so strongly, to this particular person, and these particular circumstances?
To be frank, I have never followed Kirk very closely. I found some (but not all) of his religious and political views unreasonable or even disturbing, and I did not personally care for his manner of engagement. To be fair to him, those few commentators that I have listened to paying tribute to Kirk, have described him as a kind, warm, and compassionate man, a good husband and a loving father.
Given that Kirk was not a Catholic, nor do I believe that he held to a political platform that we ought to subscribe to without qualification, why would I describe his murder as not only a tragedy (which it inarguably was) but even a national tragedy? Why do respond to it on a national level? Why do we suspect that it may have national consequences?
It cannot be simply because, perhaps, he is someone we have occasionally seen in the media – a face that we recognize. It is rather because – although we do not yet know the motive of his killer – we all intuitively (and reasonably) suspect that Kirk was killed for his ideas: and not for his false ideas, but for those that are true. His murder, then, has deeper implications. It has left a wife widowed and two small children fatherless, an unspeakable injury. But in a deeper sense his murder also represents an attack on the truth, a common good, to which we are all entitled. Truth is a transcendental property of being, it is at the very core of the nature of reality itself, and it is the privilege of rational creatures to be able to discern it, discover it, and, to some degree, even comprehend it. Its value is so inestimably high, that it is worth even dying for; likewise, a life lived without truth, would not be a life worth living. When truth is attacked, we are all besieged. Distress and anger are the reasonable and just response.
It is important that anger be well directed, however. There has been no end of ugly compilations of foolish people celebrating the death of Kirk. These people are useful idiots, held in contempt by the truly powerful in our world, who delight in division and prejudice insofar as it makes us blind to their rapacious bids for ever more power and renders us easy to control. Do not lose yourself in an impotent rage against fools; their masters will only laugh at both you and them from their position behind the curtain. And the demons, reigning over all of them, laugh hardest of all. We have to recall our ultimate battle in this life: For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places. Therefore take unto you the armour of God, that you may be able to resist in the evil day, and to stand in all things perfect. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of justice, and your feet shod with the preparation of the Gospel of peace (Eph 6:12-15).
