How Great the Chasm That Lay Between Us

Where to begin? The murder of Charlie Kirk feels different. It feels like a true inflection point, a milestone of American cultural history after which things may not be the same. As someone online pointed out, the assassination attempt on Donald Trump last summer was shocking, but both his survival and America’s relative familiarity with that sort of thing helped soothe the country’s nerves. Charlie Kirk was not an elected official, but a private citizen. He was a commentator and media personality. Because of that, this killing feels wider in symbolism. Tonight, a lot of Americans feel like someone died on their behalf. And there’s some truth in that.

Kirk was extremely popular, especially with the kind of college audience he died in front of. His gifts were as plainly apparent as his views. For Kirk to die on a college campus is an irony both painful and beautiful. Perhaps more than any other conservative in the world, Kirk sought to mainstream traditional views on politics, family, and religion through debate. This is, I think, a key reason for his popularity. In a time of great political conformity on campuses and the workplaces of emerging adults, Kirk embraced being the minority report, and he made disagreement look both plausible and enjoyable.

I did not always like what I heard Charlie Kirk say. I’ve been consistently critical of Donald Trump and the nationalist conservative movement behind him. But those disagreements are hard to hold in view given where things have gotten. I told a family member today that Kirk’s death feels dark to me in a way that few things have. The injustice, the carnage, the naked terrorism against free speech—all of these things leave me with a cold dread for the state of our country in general, and the state of my own family and community in particular. In this moment, I see myself in Charlie Kirk, not because our views were identical, but because I too sense the spiritual and social evil that Kirk gave his life trying to identify. And reader, I have to confess, I don’t think this kind of evil exists equally on both sides.

The failures of American liberalism have gone far beyond the theoretical. Progressivism’s contradictions permeate the country’s education, media, and mental health infrastructure so completely as to be unavoidable. When Kirk was shot, he was reportedly talking about rates of gun violence among transgendered Americans. This seems like a spicy topic, only because the psychological disorder of gender dysphoria has, like so many mental health problems, become an uassailable identity instead of a treatable ailment. The complete and utter failure of the American left to define man and woman has not just created moral chaos. It has abandoned mentally sick Americans, many of them teens, to the caverns of their illness.

Indeed, the world shaped by late modern liberalism seems to be a factory for churning out broken people. While I might have disagreed with Charlie Kirk about just how tightly one should tether Christianity with Republican politics, I did not disagree with him that human flourishing requires believing certain things about ourselves and our universe that the Democratic Party does not want people to believe. Kirk was relentlessly, explicitly, and doggedly Christian, in the same way that the worldview he opposed was relentlessly, explicitly, and doggedly secular.

He got this right, and I often got it wrong. Kirk knew something that many conservatives, including myself, have struggled to remember: That alienating people is often both the cost of telling the truth and the first step to winning them over. I have often gone out of my way to say that you don’t have to be a conservative to be a Christian. I think that’s still true, but probably not in the way I meant. There are orientations toward the world—toward nature, toward societies, toward mothers and fathers, toward marriage and children and work and death—that either reject or accept reality. American progressivism, baptized into the religion of the Sexual Revolution and identity politics, rejects reality. It sanctifies the self, and builds little fortresses for unmoored desires.

Including the desire to eliminate those who disagree.

In the coming days many will write and speak of the brokenness of American political culture. They will, rightly, mourn our violence, our polarization, the loss of cross-ideological friendship, and the curated information islands of the social media age. Yes and amen. But some of this could be misleading. It could imply that what’s ailing us is meanness. It could imply that what we really need is to rediscover civility and tolerance. This is not correct. The truth is that it’s precisely the embarrassment over spirituality and unwillingness to submit to transcendent truths that has turned our civic life so gangrenous. What keeps people from shooting the necks of people they dislike? A commitment to individualism, free speech, or pluralism? No. In the end, it is only the fear of God that preserves the center. In losing God, we are burying ourselves.

The world that Charlie Kirk and his youngest listeners inherited is a world which has masturbated itself numb to God. It is a world where lonely, disaffected, angry, adrift young men peel away from lonely, materialistic, selfish young women. It is a world where the violent walk free lest judges or asylums “stigmatize” them. It is a world where not even the grisly public murder of a husband and father can be grieved without some kind of disclaimer. Ours is a brutally inhumane time. And the only way out of it begins by looking at the ruling ideas and institutions of this inhumane time, and rejecting them in favor of something better.

There is a timeline in which the next few weeks and years are a time of deep renewal. President Trump and the ruling powers on the right have a historic opportunity right now to lead a shocked and disgusted nation toward something like healing. They have an opportunity to reintroduce to the republic the language of humanity created in the image of God, male and female, endowed by that God with the inalienable right to life. Christians likewise have an opportunity to learn from Charlie Kirk: Not all his politics, but all his boldness, all his willingness to engage, all his energy to speak of things eternal to a culture unwilling to listen.

In the hours since Charlie Kirk’s death I’ve been thinking of a phrase from a song we sing at my local church. The song is “Living Hope” by Phil Wickham. The first stanza describes fallen humanity:

How great the chasm that lay between us
How high the mountain I could not climb
In desperation, I turned to heaven
And spoke Your name into the night

“How great the chasm that lay between us.” The chasm between the world of truth and the world of ideology. The chasm between Americans. But most of all, the chasm between we human beings, and the Savior whose wisdom formed the world, without whom we have no hope. If there was ever a time to speak that name into the night, it’s now.