I can’t say I ever followed Charlie Kirk very closely, may God rest his soul. In light of that fact, I was surprised at how deeply his death shocked me. Apart from the stark personal tragedy of such a high-profile and brazenly reprehensible crime, Kirk’s untimely passing is an unprecedentedly deep cut into the heart of our most cherished cultural values. Even when the President was shot during his re-election campaign, it was easier to draw upon historic points of reference in order to parse through what was nearly a much worse disaster than it was. Presidents have been shot before, so that is a category in which our culture is already unfortunately versed. I cannot recall an instance in our day in which any person occupying such a position of prominence in the political periphery, not a politician or official but merely a spokesman, suffered what Mr. Kirk suffered.

In the haze of the tragedy’s surreality, I was struck by an eerily prophetic gleam in the images of the Utah campus event widely circulated by media outlets. A pavilion emblazoned with Kirk’s slogan, “Prove me wrong,” stands inviting the masses to plant their feet in the arena of ideas, to compete in liberalism’s hallowed tradition of free and civil discourse, and is met with the resounding, sickening reply of clandestine violence. That this horror occurred on a university campus no less, a bastion of those same fundamental liberal propositions as to the sacrality of the uninhibited exchange of ideas and the necessity of that exchange to the pure pursuit of knowledge, exaggerates the wider social implications of this tragedy to an extent that would make a satirist blush — and will, like the satirist, make fools of us all if we blind ourselves to the condition it so brutally exposes.

We would be remiss to imagine that life has only been irrevocably altered for those closest to the impact of this violence, not to say that the Kirk family has not singularly suffered and uniquely require our prayers. But even a tsunami is just a ripple, after all. Mark my words: the death of Charlie Kirk is liberalism’s Rubicon. His passing strikes so deeply because it represents a desecration of the previously inviolable tenets of liberal society. A once invincible boundary has been rendered porous by a single puncture. The rift of relativism has so destabilized the common pursuit of truth, so atomized the once shared metaphysical axioms that made religious and political toleration possible, that the American power to share a civilization in the midst of such asperities has evaporated. 

Prior to the Civil War, the American project of liberalism was haunted by the looming question of slavery and its implications for the founding principle that “all men are created equal.” The founders of our nation erroneously codified by silence a structural forgoing of that discourse, unaware that the disparity in their assumptions could not fit within the framework they had established. That disparity was exacerbated by time and grew so wide it split the country. Now, the deeper rift, metastasizing for the last 250 years, has become manifestly unignorable. 

Americans have tacitly granted since the founding that the question of whether the United States is fundamentally a Protestant republic or a secular republic can, like was imagined of slavery, be confined and managed within the bounds of the propositions on which we do agree. The founders held even more diverse opinions on religion than they did on slavery, but they were largely unified by a more deeply impressed sense of religion’s inherent worth for the coherence and happiness of a society. As that metaphysically unfounded sense has drifted from the beliefs that once made sense of it, and as secularism has taken on an increasingly post-Christian hue, the Christian and secular visions of America have become violently incompatible.

The fact is, no civilization was ever built on or by relativism. A pluralistic society was only ever possible because of the ubiquity of cultural assumptions that included definite meanings of “Creator,” “man,” and “rights.” If truth and meaning are relative, then so is justice, and if justice is relative then society does not and cannot exist. Our culture is faced not only with the grief of yesterday’s lethal flare of uncivility, but with what it signals of our inability to prevent such conflagration. If justice can be so detached from a transcendent conception of truth that words become adequate justification for murder on so grand and hallowed a stage, then the law once enthroned at the birth of America has perhaps been truly deposed.

What I mean is not that yesterday’s murderer at last killed liberalism, but that the vile indifference and palliation of so many Americans in response to what should by all accounts be regarded as the highest sacrilege is indicative of the illness’ intractability. The acute tragedy is that a man, a husband, a father was murdered. The imminent catastrophe is that a symbol of the truth to which our codified freedoms are devoted has been rapaciously destroyed in the discharging of his sacred obligation in the consecrated arena of his righteous occupation, and far more than a healthy number of our populace is unperturbed by the gravity of this development. Anyone who rushes to the defense of this crime is singing the dirge of liberalism.

Those on what is broadly painted as the political “left” ought to be terribly concerned about the cancer of progressivism on their wing of the social order. The symptoms have grown grievous enough to justify a fatal prognosis for our way of life. It is not known with certainty yet what motivated the killer, but it is well documented what motivates those who will defend him. All nations, kingdoms, and empires are mortal like the people that constitute them. I am not a prophet, but, again, I think it would be incredibly foolish at this point to overlook the danger this poison of secularism poses to the very root of our civilization.

I encourage my brothers and sisters in Christ to pray for the soul of Charlie Kirk, pray for his grieving family, and indeed pray for our roiling and aching nation, as this is hardly the only act of violence burdening our collective spirit today. Again, I am no prophet, but my suspicion is that hard times lie ahead. The world of tomorrow will be unrecognizable to us and it will likely become that way through great tribulation. The present order of things is passing away. Let us pray that what replaces it will be better.

The eschaton revealed in the Apocalypse of John is the culmination of a pattern that plays out repeatedly. We cannot know which tribulation is the great and final apex, but by faith we are certain that even that trial more horrid than can be imagined will pass, and that the cycle of Christ and anti-Christ is not infinite. The former will bring victory to all those who are found in him. Tomorrow is not promised for any man or any country. The only sure shelter is under the wing of God’s Son. Do not listen to the faithless world who so openly decries the power of prayer against the encroaching gloom of evil. “The prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects.” Stand firm, hold fast the faith, run the race. “He who endures to the end will be saved.” Time may prove me wrong about America, but of these final things I am sure.

God rest Charlie Kirk, and God save America.

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all men, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life, godly and respectful in every way. This is good, and it is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. — 1 Timothy 2:1-4 (RSV)

Happy is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the LORD his God, — Psalm 146:5 (RSV)

The end of all things is at hand; therefore keep sane and sober for your prayers. Above all hold unfailing your love for one another, since love covers a multitude of sins. — 1 Peter 4:7-8 (RSV)