The Charlie Kirk Effect Is Real

It's been a few days, but I'll be honest, it is still a sharp and terrible grief. When I heard Charlie Kirk had been shot, I hopped over to X. I wanted to see what had happened. I thought it would be a Ronald Reagan-type flub, or a Butler PA close call, but instead, I watched him slump over and die.

The horror of what happened continues to reverberate throughout America and the world, and there's a sense, as many have now said, that the Rubicon has been crossed. Something has been shattered that can never be replaced. Everyone has been confronted with a very stark, very important choice. I didn't know Charlie Kirk, never met that guy before in my life, and I didn't know Charlie Kirk. Something else that I've never done before in my life is believe in God. I'm going to wear this suit to church.

I'm going to go to church. We went to church today. It was the first time in 20 years we are raising three boys that will one day be men. And we want those boys to be as strong in their convictions as Charlie Kirk was. Today, I went to church looking for God. I went to church to surrender myself to Him fully. I have seen thousands of comments on social media this morning, just like this one on TikTok, that cements to me Charlie's greatest legacy.

It's from a young man named Thomas. I don't go to church, but Sunday, I will sit in Charlie's place. Please join me. I will shake the pastor's hand and say, Charlie Kirk brought me here, and that truly is what this revival is going to look like and how Charlie's legacy will be cemented in this next generation. I call heaven and earth today to witness against you. I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live.

We all face that choice sooner or later. Charlie gave one answer, his killer gave another, and in Charlie's martyrdom, his witness to life, he asked the same question of us. Do you ever feel like your money is working against your values instead of for them? That is no way to build a future for your children and grandchildren.

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Visit Taylor for Gone in the link below for a no-obligation consultation. On September 10th in Utah, Tyler Robinson chose raw power, violence, vengeance without mercy, silence, and death. But it wasn't senseless, as some people are saying. The assassination was the logical conclusion of a culture that says words are violence and labels half of its citizens enemies of democracy.

He lived through the same Gen Z world as Charlie. Online extremes, smartphones, COVID lockdowns, the closure of churches, government cover-ups, endless talk of fascists and threats to democracy. Americans have been deliberately divided and radicalized. The perfect storm of rhetoric, loss of faith, isolation, and psychological trauma. Robinson wasn't an outlier on the left, or in his generation. Young people who lived through these traumas All are saying the same thing. Disturbingly, 34% of college students feel that it is sometimes permissible to respond to campus speech with violence.

As Bishop Barron wrote in the days following Charlie's death, that point of view makes sense if and only if one has given up completely on a shared matrix of meaning. If argument is pointless, bombs and bullets become inevitable. Robinson chose bullets, not for himself, but for Charlie. One man pulled the trigger, but thousands cheered. Americans scrolled through their feeds that day, and the next, and the next, and saw their neighbors, co-workers, teachers, and even doctors celebrating a young father's assassination in cold blood.

This is the fruit of years marinating in a Reddit discord trash post life, divorced from physical reality, and plunged in spiritual darkness. You need conservatives to be afraid of getting killed when they go to events so that they look to their leadership to turn down the temperature. The issue is, right now, they don't feel like there's any fear.

Like, I don't know, I don't know, it's like memes. It's just memes to everybody, I guess. I don't know, bro. Kill them! Kill those motherfuckers! Murder those motherfuckers in the street! Let the streets, let the streets soak in their red capitalist bloods, dude. There is no argument or debate in this world. It demands the silencing of all dissenters, because in this world, words are violence, the vilification and dehumanization of its opponents, and the total absence of mercy. A media diet of rage painted the target, and Robinson pulled that trigger.

And Charlie Kirk, his only weapon words, his only refuge, God, died before 2,000 students and the entire world. And in this world, death is the answer. Death is what Charlie had coming to him. But death is not the final word, and nihilism is a false religion.

And in Charlie's martyrdom, we see that there is another way to live. We see that life and hope may yet triumph, precisely because Charlie died the way he did. Hear me out. Like Robinson, Charlie was a college dropout. He lived through the same cultural and political upheavals of the 21st century. Robinson chose death for another. Charlie chose life for everyone, and the way he chose is narrow, because the path of life recognizes that for us to flourish, we need structures. We need order of both nature and grace, because after all...

What is the root of politics? The proper ordering of society to the common good. Charlie realized it wasn't about the next ballot initiative or winning a Senate race. At the heart of it was each person's ultimate good, and we saw this in how he spoke with his interlocutors on college campuses.

What Charlie also found, especially as I watched him grow up in politics, find his beloved Erika, and have children, was that reason wasn't enough. Politics without religion devolves into power struggles. Justice without mercy leads to despair, because who among us hasn't messed up at some point? The good life, the central truth of the good life that Charlie found, is that faith and politics are not at odds. They are allies.

Because our God is so good, only true religion can hold politics accountable to its true purpose, a flourishing human society. This is not an easy out or a pie-in-the-sky religion. Men and women labor for this vision, and Charlie died for this reality. When he visited the United States in 1995, Pope St. John Paul II ringingly called us as Americans to remember why we have a First Amendment. It's not so we can parade around with our rosaries or pray like Pharisees, Lord, I thank you, I am not like those tax collectors.

It's so that we can humbly roll up our sleeves and do the hard work of governing in service of the common good. John Paul said, faith is always demanding, because faith leads us beyond ourselves. It leads us directly to God.

Faith also imparts a vision of life's purpose and stimulates us to action. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not a private opinion, not a remote spiritual ideal or a mere program for personal growth. It is the power that can transform the world. Robinson chose death, not for himself, but for Charlie. Charlie chose life, not just for himself, but for everyone. What did he constantly tell the college kids he debated on campus? I want you to be happy. I want you to love America, too.

I want you to find God, just like I found him. And we're starting to see the payoff. Yes, we saw footage of people cheering his death and demanding more, but we also saw thousands, millions of other people taking pause.

It's like the silent majority woke up to something they'd forgotten, something sleeping within us all, something woke up in people that we might not even have known was there, as evidenced by the grief and the sorrow we felt for a man we didn't even know.

I'd say that what woke up is the virtue of courage. How do you want to be remembered? I mean, if I die? Everything just goes away. If you could be associated with one thing, how would you want to be remembered?

I want to be remembered for courage, for my faith. That would be the most important thing. The most important thing is my faith in my life. And what is courage? Aristotle describes it as the ability to face fear, particularly in the context of facing physical danger or death for a noble or worthwhile purpose. Courage involves deliberate choice and rational judgment, where a person acts bravely not out of impulse or ignorance, but with full awareness of the risks, aiming for the noble or the good.

That was Charlie. deliberate, rational, willing to face death for a noble purpose, the truth, his faith. Just as politics needs religion, our public life needs a private life of integrity, kindness, and charity standing behind it. And every account of Charlie's personal life testifies that he was a man in full. There was no discord between how he presented himself in front of a camera, on stage in front of thousands. In a business that attracts liars and corrupts good men, Charlie chose to love one woman and father two children.

He tried to be right with God, his family, and his country in that order. That kind of integrity of life is as attractive as it is rare, but we all must have the courage to order our lives rightly if we are to have any hope of reordering our nation toward unity. If you are right with God and your family, then you can be as courageous in public life as Charlie was.

If he died in the public square, you can be bold with what you believe, too. You can bring your beliefs to politics. You can speak your mind. You can face the consequences, and now we know what those are, with courage.

You can also change the world. As John Paul II said, your cross is a participation in Christ's cross, and it is the power that can transform the world. Because Charlie died with a microphone in his hand, a warrior of words, not weapons, that deliberate choice was in a way forced on us all. We are aware of the stakes. We watched them. We clearly face evil in our lives.

We all cried, felt personally impacted. Charlie understood the evil in the world. He had looked the world of Tyler Robinson full in the face, and he deliberately said, I'm going all the way down to reach him. We just woke up to the fact that we can't hide from that evil, which means we have to face it as well. A sobering moment in anyone's life. Even the very last lefty who debated him was sad and level-headed thinking about it. But it wasn't just shock that we felt.

Thousands of young people expressed that they wanted to do something positive, to change, like go to church. Church on Sunday is the right direction. It is the perfect start, but we must keep going. The next step is a full-on revival, when that silent majority in America that lived in fear decides to live publicly and privately for a noble and just cause.

When the people who showed up at church for the first time because of Charlie stay because of Christ, and when we all keep on engaging with people because we genuinely want them to flourish, when we speak the truth like Charlie without fear of being cringed or laughed off or even fired or assassinated.

Charlie didn't cower from evil. He boldly proclaimed the truth of Jesus Christ in the most hostile of environments. He knew the reputational risks. He knew the physical risks. Not recklessly or vindictively, he faced the evil armed with the truth, but never forgot the humanity of his intellectual opponents.

The Charlie Kirk effect is that we can do this too. I can do this too. By his sacrifice, Charlie has become more powerful than even he could have possibly imagined. And the truth is, you can be too. Before I go on a college campus, my prayer is very simple. God, use me for your will. Amen. Because there is a plan above us all. God is sovereign above all. And the capacity and ability of our agency or action is very debatable. So, what is God's plan when I go on a college campus?

I just believe I will only tell truth. I will not compromise. If you liked this episode of The Deep, be sure that you are subscribed on YouTube and hit that notification bell so you do not miss a single episode of this or any other LOOPcast event.