Faith, Not Free Speech, Makes Martyrs

The reactions began as soon as the shot rang out at Utah Valley University. Many on the Left cruelly celebrated Charlie Kirk’s death with no thought of his wife and two children. 

On the Right, many were quick to praise him as a martyr for free speech and civil discourse. 

While this praise is well-intentioned, we need to go much further. 

In stark contrast with leftist cancel culture, Charlie’s commitment to open debate about the most consequential issues in our society was courageous and admirable. But to remember him as primarily a champion of civil discourse is to honor the tool while ignoring the temple it was building. 

Charlie wasn’t assassinated because he stood for the free exchange of ideas. He was gunned down for being a courageous Christian conservative, one who was uniquely gifted at articulating views rooted in thousands of years of tradition. 

He called his audiences to faith in Jesus, to the wisdom of Scripture and Western civilization, and to the conservative conviction that there is an objective moral order to which we all must submit, body and soul. There is a God of the Nations to whom man must bend his knee. 

These views are still held by mainstream conservatives across America, but the high priests of progressivism who inhabit most of our elite institutions have deemed them blasphemous. 

The organization where I work, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, educates thousands of college students every year in the principles and virtues that formed our nation and that Charlie championed. Our student leaders and speakers, too, have endured violence and threats for hosting events that challenge progressive orthodoxies on campus. Through my work, I once had the opportunity to spend an hour in discussion with Charlie. 

Yet, beyond that personal encounter, Charlie’s death hit me even closer to home. My wife and I have seen the social media posts from people in our circle, including relatives—the sneers and the golf claps, even the outright celebrations of his death—and we have asked each other the unsettling question: What are these people telling us?

If they think Charlie’s views were hateful, racist, transphobic, and fascist, then they think ours are too. We share much of what he advocated for, alongside millions of our fellow citizens. We’re raising our children to be courageous Christians and conservatives who will embrace most of what he stood for. 

I don’t have the talent or platform of a Charlie Kirk. But when people in our community imply that the world is better without Charlie because of what he preached, or that he got what was coming to him, they are winking at a world better without us as well. Je suis Charlie, indeed. 

Time will heal some of the wounds from this tragedy. In our communities and families, we may once again shake hands and “agree to disagree” when temperatures have come down. But at best, that’s an uneasy truce. It won’t last. 

It won’t last because it comes at too high a cost. We can only keep the peace so long as we refrain from speaking the truth to one another. Yet love demands that we speak the truth.

After all, dialogue isn’t an end in itself. We want to live rightly. And to decide how to live rightly, we need to be able to call a good deed a good deed and a sin a sin. We must be able to speak of ordered loves and disordered loves. We must distinguish truth from falsehood.  

Charlie understood that. At a campus event, when asked about what Jesus stood for, Charlie once told his audience:

Sometimes in the modern Gospel we overemphasize the grace and we underemphasize the truth…. Christ is not just grace-focused. He’s simultaneously truth-focused. …Imagine how much trouble today you would get in if you would go up to somebody and say: stop sinning. Well, you’re being too judgmental. No, no—you’re actually being Christ-like. …Christ loves us too much to have us continue to live in sin…

Civil debate is a good means. But it is not the end. The end is no less than total submission to the truth: obedience to God. 

Free speech and the marketplace of ideas don’t produce martyrs. Faith does. Like all martyrs, Charlie died for his faith in the end. 

Those of us who believe in much the same vision he did should renew our commitment to it and proclaim it louder than ever. In our circle of colleagues, friends, and relations, we should insist not just on the importance of dialogue, debate, and getting along—but on the truth of what we believe in. Love demands it. 

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness.” For most of us, that won’t mean bullets. It will mean subtler persecutions: being quietly blacklisted from certain jobs; being passed over by old friends; or receiving messages implying that the world would be better off without you—messages sent or shared even by people you love. 

Charlie paid the highest price. His death should make us no less confident in the truth but more sober about its cost.