Oft Evil Will Shall Evil Mar
Charlie Kirk's Assassination and a New Great Awakening
The title to this essay is a line from Tolkien. But I'm also reminded of two distinct lines from Star Wars, paired:
If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
I dunno, I can imagine an awful lot.
Charlie Kirk was a powerful force. He went from campus to campus and he talked to people. Generally when he was debating, he would put his microphone down, to reassure his partner that he wasn’t going to talk over them. He was respectful, and he was highly effective. He played a major role in winning over Gen Z to the conservative side. That’s why he was killed — murdered. He was murdered not because he was “hateful,” or “extreme,” but because he was effective.
But now, even dead, he’s beating them, worse than he ever did when he was alive.
For all the fear of “Christian Nationalism,” a shallow, largely fictitious bogeyman for years, the murder of Charlie Kirk has effectively called it into being as a force.
(Ron Coleman, by the way, is an observant Jew.)
Trump couldn’t, and wouldn’t, have called Christian Nationalism into being himself. (Though, to be honest, it’s currently in a form FDR or Truman would have been comfortable with, if not Obama.) But Charlie Kirk’s murderer did. Christianity has historically advanced martyr by martyr. The way to kill Christianity is to ignore it. But the left can’t do that, of all things.
For one thing, leftism has the instinct to extirpate all potential rival power centers. And at a more fundamental level, since leftism was (to invoke Tolkien again) created in mockery of Christianity, as the Orcs were created in mockery of the Elves, there’s a fundamental hatred there that can’t be tamped down for long.
That hatred isn’t really returned by its objects. But if you get people’s attention, well, you may not like what comes next.
Why are they afraid? Erica Kirk today offered forgiveness.
Her full eulogy is here. On the other hand:
Forgiveness doesn’t mean avoidance of responsibility, or of consequences in this world.
But the real — and most hated — consequence won’t be FBI raids, and RICO prosecutions against the leftist groups that organize and finance terror, though those are likely to happen. It will likely be in another Great Awakening. There have already been signs of a religious revival among the young, both here and even in Europe. My University of Tennessee colleague Rosalind Hackett has been predicting for some time that the big religious force of the 21st Century is going to be militant Christianity, not militant Islam.
Tyler Robinson played a major part in helping to move that prediction closer to reality. I hope he reflects on that, in whatever time he has left.
Those on the left - and Democrats in particular - take “forgiveness” to mean “you got away with [whatever was forgiven] and will suffer no [significant] consequences…go and sin some more”. That’s not how it works in Christianity…there can be no forgiveness without (at least) acceptance that one has sinned, preferably with true repentance. Vengeance is mine saith the Lord…the Christian in forgiving gives up individual vengeance and places it in the hands of God…Justice - which serves the purposes of consequences for the law-breaker and the protection of law-abiding society from the law-breaker - belongs to the state. Every individual Christian’s forgiveness of Charlie Kirk’s killer does not shield him from the legal consequences of his heinous crime.
As always a great and well thought out piece. I would like to add my two cents. First the American Christian tradition is different from the European one in that the replacement theory of Christians replacing Jews is not mainstream. I feel very comfortable with my Christian fellow Americans and never felt otherwise as an American of the Jewish faith. Secondly the Islamic tradition is one of conquest. They attempted to conquer Europe, first through the Iberian Peninsula and then through Eastern Europe by way of Hungry only to be stopped at the gates of Vienna. Today the third attempt is underway via immigration and population growth. Will an awakened Europe rise to this challenge. Only the future will tell but I have grater faith in America than I’ve had for a longtime that an unapologetic Christian faith may yet save the West.