Charlie Kirk Shows the West the Way Home

Charlie Kirk’s assassination was an apocalypse for America, an “unveiling” in which every conservative suddenly realized—by watching on social media and elsewhere the reaction of many liberals—that their country had many left-wing people in it who would be thrilled for them to be murdered for their conservative beliefs. This was America at its worst.

But the Charlie Kirk memorial service on Sunday—you can watch the entire nine-hour thing here—was another apocalypse. We saw 100,000 people, including the most senior members of the United States government, openly praising God and heroic virtue. I’m an American, and am accustomed to hearing politicians talk about God. But not like that. Never like that.

The Secretary of State of the United States, Marco Rubio, spent six minutes praising the murdered Kirk’s impact on politics. But then, summarizing the deepest meaning of Kirk’s life, the foreign minister of the most powerful nation on earth spent the last minute of his speech presenting the Gospel with more directness and clarity than many clerics.

Go ahead, watch it. Not a false note in the thing. Marco Rubio, a faithful Catholic, found in Charlie’s martyrdom the courage to speak the truth about Jesus Christ. You don’t hear that kind of thing from the Quai d’Orsay.

The stadium event was totally Evangelical in its style, as was Charlie’s way of worship—and indeed, is now the mainstream of American Christianity. Yet some of the most powerful rhetoric came from Stephen Miller, a Jew who serves as Deputy White House Chief of Staff. Miller delivered a blistering attack on “the forces of wickedness and evil.” Miller’s words ought to ring loudly across the European Union:

To those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness, you are jealousy, you are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity. You thought you could kill Charlie Kirk? You have made him immortal.

Miller said that Kirk’s murder has awakened a “dragon” within the hearts of those now determined “to save this civilization, to save the West, to save this Republic.”

“What will you leave behind? Nothing. Nothing. To our enemies, you have nothing to give, you have nothing to offer, you have nothing to share but bitterness,” he raged. 

“We built the world that we inhabit now, generation by generation, and we will defend this world. We will defend goodness, we will defend light, we will defend virtue. You cannot terrify us, you cannot frighten us, you cannot threaten us, because we are on the side of goodness, we are on the side of God.”

It always makes me wince to hear a politician say that he and his followers are on God’s side. To this temptation, I can’t quote Solzhenitsyn often enough: the line between good and evil runs down the middle of every human heart.

And yet, Miller makes an important point. Western civilization really was built by men—sometimes great sinners—confident that the God of the Bible, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the God of St. Peter and St. Paul, was the guarantor of Truth. 

Europe should know this better than America. Look around you at the great civilization your Christian forefathers raised. You are letting it fall into ruin. What has the European Union, whose constitution was written deliberately to cast God out of the European narrative, built? 

Nothing that will last, except perhaps having delivered the nations of Europe to the offspring of Europe’s historic enemy, Islam. European elites are presiding over the funeral of a once-great civilization that is dying, because it no longer believes in God or in itself. 

Could it be that a cheerful young American without a formal college education is the Joan of Arc that Europe needs now in her hour of despair? Stranger things have happened. I saw the spirit of Charlie Kirk alive in the 20,000 young European Catholics, mostly French, who walked the pilgrim’s path to Chartres this past June. French TV networks broadcast the Kirk memorial from Arizona. Those speeches might have been in English, but they were also talking to France, and to all of Europe.

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, is a Hindu, so naturally she could not join in the Jesus-worship. But she said something important for all of us: “Free speech is the foundation of our democratic republic. We must protect it at all cost, because without it, we will be lost. Charlie knew this. He lived it.”

Do the people in Keir Starmer’s government, arresting British people for praying silently, believe this? Do the bureaucrats of Brussels, authors of the Digital Services Act? No, they don’t. And they are going to lose democracy because of this lack of faith.

The Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a man who had a problem with alcohol, but who converted to Christianity, spoke with the fire of a pastor. “This is not a political war, this is not even a culture war,” he said. “This is a spiritual war.”

Who can doubt it, after what we have seen in the days since Charlie’s assassination? The young man charged with killing him grew up in a solidly conservative, religiously observant Mormon family. Yet he fell down the cracks of the Internet into hell.

Vice President J.D. Vance, a Catholic convert and close friend of Charlie’s, told the crowd that he has believed in Jesus for some years, but it wasn’t until Charlie’s murder that he felt bold enough to say publicly what was concealed in his heart. 

“Most of all Charlie brought the truth that Jesus Christ was the King of Kings, and all truth flows from this first and most important one,” he said. 

And then there was this from Vance, whom many believe will be the next President of the United States:

It is better to face a gunman than to live your life afraid to speak the truth. It is better to be persecuted for your faith than to deny the kingship of Christ. It is better to die a young man in this world than to sell your soul for an easy life with no purpose, no risk, no love, and no truth.”

That is a call to heroism. That is the answer to the meaning crisis. That is the summons to personal repentance, and to fight to save what remains of Christian civilization. If you will not bend the knee to Christ the King, then you had better prepare to pay your respects to the Caliph.

The summit of an extraordinary day of speeches was the address delivered by Charlie’s widow Erika. As she approached the podium, with music playing, Erika Kirk could be seen praying. Then she looked heavenward, and said to her martyred husband, “I love you.”

Erika is a Catholic; her husband was Evangelical. But their marriage modeled how Catholics and Protestants can work closely for the glory of God and the advance of the Gospel. 

Drawing an implicit contrast with the aftermath of 2020’s George Floyd killing, Erika said, “We didn’t see violence. We didn’t see rioting. We didn’t see revolution. Instead, we saw what my husband always prayed he would see in this country: we saw revival.”

She meant that there were reports coming from all over that Americans were returning to reading their Bibles. Americans returned to their churches—or went to church for the first time ever. All because of Charlie’s witness. Evangelicals don’t believe in saints the way Catholics do, but if they find inspiration in Charlie Kirk’s life and death, then they are on the way to understanding why Catholics (and Orthodox) revere the saints.

And then came one of the greatest moments in American history. Erika Kirk said that Charlie wanted to save young men like the one who took his life. Weeping, and struggling to speak, the widow Kir said: “That man … that young man … I forgive him.”

She sobbed, but in that moment, you could see a burden released. There is a straight line from Jesus on the Cross asking God to forgive his own murderers, and Erika Kirk, nearly two thousand years later, forgiving the lost Tyler Robinson, who stole her husband and her children’s father.

“I forgive him because it is what Christ did, and it is what Charlie would do,” she went on. “The answer to hate is not hate. The answer from the Gospel is always love. Love for our enemies, and love for those who persecute us.”

Then came Donald Trump to end the long day with a typically rambling speech that deflated the mood. The only memorable thing he said was to joke about how unlike Charlie, he hates his enemies. It was a standard cringe moment from Trump, but in a way, it showed how he too needs Jesus. He too needs repentance.

It is also the case that that same morally compromised man, Trump, is responsible for appointing all those men and women of his cabinet who spoke with such power about God, truth, and heroic virtue. What can I tell you? History is complicated. God, they say, writes straight with crooked lines.

I am in America now, and don’t know how all this is being reported in Europe. I saw on X that German state TV broadcast a lady official from the Lutheran church calling Charlie a “right-wing radical racist.” A columnist for the left-wing Scottish newspaper The National likened the Charlie movement to a creation from the Joseph Goebbels playbook. 

I expect a lot of European media and political commentary about Charlie’s memorial service will be like that. It cannot be said often enough: Europeans, your media lie to you. They lie all the time. Think of what Matt Goodwin, the tireless English campaigner to save his country from mass migration, tweeted while watching Charlie’s memorial service:

Why was the aftermath of George Floyd’s death not like this? The English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton once said the instinctive impulse of the Left is to negate, dismantle, destroy, while the instinctive impulse of the Right is to conserve, preserve, and build. Days like today bring that difference home.

Watching the camera pan yesterday that stadium crowd in Arizona—old and young, white, black, and brown, my fellow Americans—I could not forget that there are many Americans (and Europeans too) who would be happy to see us all murdered, as Charlie was, for the things we believe in. We have seen this evil revealed in these past few days. Once you see it, you can’t un-see it. And we shouldn’t. This is not just a political war, but a spiritual war.

It is one we must all be prepared to fight. Many of the leaders we in Europe have—in government, in media, in churches and elsewhere—are prepared to negotiate the surrender of the West. They are satisfied to manage its decline, so long as it declines in a proper secular, progressive way.

It doesn’t have to be this way, you know. Charlie Kirk never went to college. He built a powerful student movement based on his passion and conviction. And one of the strongest convictions he held was that you can just do things. 

Last Saturday, I told a group of conservatives in an East Coast gathering about the hope and passion I observed in the 20,000 Chartres pilgrimage of young Catholics. I told them that Europe is in serious trouble as a civilization, and the churches are flat on their backs. Most French bishops don’t support that pilgrimage—but the kids did it anyway, for love of Jesus, and out of passion to reconnect with their civilizational roots.

Sometimes, you can just do things. If Europe is going to be saved, that generation will be the one to do it. And who knows? Maybe the life and death and witness of a happy-go-lucky young American Evangelical will be their greatest ally. My guess is that Charlie Kirk knew little about the glories of European Christendom, but he knew the most important thing: that our civilization was built on the worship and teachings of Jesus Christ, a Jew of Nazareth. 

That’s enough. The question is, do we have the courage to turn away from this culture of death that European and American elites tried to build without God? We are all today like François, the protagonist of Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel Submission, having seen an extraordinary manifestation of Christian holiness, and left with a choice: spiritual life or spiritual death. 

François, a coward who preferred the easy way, chose badly. How will it be with us? If we can’t un-see the existence of those who wish people like us to be murdered for political advantage, we also can’t un-see and un-hear the testimonies of Charlie’s friends and family on Sunday. As Joseph said in the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 50:20), in forgiving the brothers who sold him into slavery, “What you meant for evil, God meant for good.”

This might be our last chance. Let’s seize the day.