by ProfDave, ©2025
(Oct. 14, 2025) — Well I remember the shock of November 22, 1963, the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Assassinations just didn’t happen in America – at least in living memory. Kennedy was an attractive and eloquent young man from a wealthy political family who rose rapidly to the presidency and led us through the Cuban missile crisis a few months earlier, but his death made him almost everybody’s hero. You could say that he was a martyr for progressivism, or the Cold War, or Roman Catholic presidency? Instead of silencing him, it silenced his enemies. The motives of his assassin are still unclear. But then he was followed by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 – even more directly martyrs for their ideals.
What has happened to the USA? Seemingly, in my day even a madman could not conceive of indiscriminately slaughtering the innocent, much less shooting up schools and churches. Now it happens every week and we expect riots and multiple murders daily. Something has happened to our moral boundaries.
In the early third century, church father Tertullian famously wrote, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” The young man who shot Charlie Kirk never read church history. Two assassination attempts arguably guaranteed Trump’s second election and the woke left should fervently wish that Kirk had never been shot. Before that day, I was not familiar with Kirk or with Turning Point USA – except glimpses of a few debates shown by other conservative sources. His blood put him and his causes on the front page.
Secondly, I watched his widow speak with my mouth open. Charlie’s death unmasked an even more powerful voice – his warrior wife! Then there was the presidential scale, football-stadium funeral, a veritable evangelical revival, putting Kirk’s values on international display. Note how Trump’s attempt to coopt the enthusiasm was overshadowed by Erika Kirk. Overall, we can hardly comprehend how Kirk’s following was galvanized. Will history record the assassination of Charlie Kirk as a “Turning Point” of 21st century USA? Millions of mouths have been opened and millions of others are horrified.
Martyr for what? Charlie’s blood the seed of what? Kirk stood for a lot of things – most of them controversial – and I do not profess to know or agree with all of them. The most important, perhaps, is the example of civil discourse. He walked in and put up a card table representing reason where angels feared to tread – on university campuses. Woke students and professors railed at him, he listened, and answered politely with wit and logic, “You hate me because I’m right.” And, more often than not, he was. They could not answer him. Is that why someone had to shoot him? Too long the culture wars have been dominated by hatred and violence. Will Charlie’s death bring more reason and less rage to the debates? Can public policy be based on facts rather than emotions?
Whether Charlie Kirk earned the “Martyr’s Crown” is beyond earthly jurisdiction, but the award I’m sure Charlie and those closest to him most desired. And Erika’s forgiveness solidifies her claim to genuine Christianity. No one but the real thing could do that so soon after her loss. In recovery circles we know that only in forgiveness can we find peace and freedom from our perpetrators, but it can take decades. Only in the Crucified can we find such power.
We have heard a great deal about Jesus Christ in the last two weeks – unprecedented in this century. Suddenly, ‘Jesus’ has become politically correct – almost! Whether you or I would agree with every detail of Kirk’s brand of Fundamentalism, our mouths are open to use the sacred Name and to sing the sacred songs in public – more than in decades. Minds are open to see the symmetry of the Gospel, “faith once delivered to the saints.” Young people are going back to church – and finding it home. The traditional values of faith, family, and freedom are getting a second look – at least in moderate circles. They work.
Apart from vignettes in Breakpoint and other faith, family and freedom sites, I have little familiarity with the thought and work of Kirk and Turning Point USA. Broadly speaking, Kirk appeared to be a casualty of the culture wars – a martyr for a particular constellation of moral values and precepts – “faith, family and freedom,” the religious right calls it. It is tempting to say that the enemies of that constellation could not answer with reason, so someone used bullets.
The ‘war’ in the culture wars has been mounting for decades. We can debate the details of how ‘Christian’ the ‘Founding Fathers’ were, but the consensus of religious freedom, until recently, has been inviolable. Behind it stood the powerful notion that Christianity was a voluntary conviction that should not, could not, be coerced by the state. Hence, all faiths have found a relative haven in ‘Christian America’ until recently. Compare the treatment of minority faiths in non-Western cultures. Behind the voluntarism, of course, is the sacred value of each human being, made in the image of God according to Judeo-Christian dogma – at the foundation of Western Civilization. No, it wasn’t automatic, but won in the crucible of a century and a half of religious wars.
“Faith, Family and Freedom?” is, of course, a shibboleth of cultural conservatism. ‘Faith’ stands for the monotheism and associated moral values Europe adopted from the Middle East at the end of the Roman Empire, with or without religious devotion and practice – generally based on Judeo-Christian scriptures. In addition to religious freedom, religion is to be allowed a respected place at the table in public life, the 10 Commandments are assumed to be the foundation of law, and it is the duty of the state to sharply restrict vice and hatred.
‘Family’ assumes the superiority of lifetime monogamy, the sacredness of marriage, of children, and of the transmission of family values from parent to child.
‘Freedom’ means “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (well-being) in the USA, at least. None of these things may be taken away without due process. On the other hand, my freedom should not trespass your life, liberty or well- being.
Most cultural conservatives add some sort of patriotism to the list. It being the duty of the state to protect “faith, family and freedom” against “enemies domestic and foreign,” civic and national loyalty are appropriate, to one degree or another.
Herein lies a tangle of problems. We do not all agree on ‘American’ values, much less the policies of the current administration – national, state, or local. ‘Liberty’ certainly includes dissent, but insurrection? Assassination? Liberty, and with it democracy, vanishes when reason is replaced by emotion, debate by rage, and demonstration by riot.
Bullets are not due process. As we saw last year, they do not win elections, either. The blood of the martyrs just might. In any case, the challenge is for our progressive friends to come up with more constructive arguments, and better ‘faith, family, and freedom’ than those espoused in the West for the last two millennia. Just tearing down the old could very well drown us in anarchy (or police state), impoverished, lonely, and miserable. Look at history.