By Michael Pakaluk
It’s due to a kind of compulsion that this week I write about Charlie Kirk. I can’t stop seeing in my mind, over and over, the images. It’s a radiant day, one of those summer days we live for. It’s glorious to be alive. He is smiling and relaxed, wearing a loose white t-shirt with a single word: “Freedom”. Sitting on a stool under a tent, he good-naturedly answers questions from students gathered on the campus lawn. He has just answered a question with another, lowers the microphone to his lap, smiles, waits for the response. So relaxed. So kind. And suddenly he is knocked off his stool by an evidently mortal wound to the neck, caused by a high-powered rifle.
Why have I been obsessed with these images? I think because, differences aside, Charlie was doing what good teachers hope to do. We like outdoor classes, exposing, challenging students, gaining their attention, debating to find the truth together.
If that’s the case, I was shot with Charlie Kirk. And my children, and many of my students, have thought that they too were hit. They see that what they were trying to do was annihilated.
I disagree with Peggy Noonan, who wrote that in a society with a sense of class those images wouldn’t even be shown: the Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination was censored for years, after all, to hide the carnage of the bullet. But as Cardinal Müller has pointed out, Charlie Kirk died as a witness, as a martyr. I like to think that I would have been present in the stadium, with other Christians, to witness St. Polycarp. It was good, not bad, to be at the foot of the Cross and see the effects of the torture. Sometimes it’s good to be shocked.
What my children and students were trying to do was annihilated in more than one way. Charlie Kirk was hardworking. He was an entrepreneur. He married young and after that worked even harder. He and his wife generously welcomed children. He studied diligently and wanted to know what was true, not what people said. He read the Bible and prayed every morning, and advised others to do the same. He loved his country. He believed that the United States is the greatest country that has ever existed, and that we are tremendously blessed to have been born and live here, which entails responsibilities. He did everything he did out of love for Christ. That was what drove him. And he seemed to be on the path toward full communion with the Catholic Church.
Therefore, all of us who have similar aspirations were hit with Charlie Kirk.
Why did they hate him? Was it because he was “controversial”? But mere intellectual divergence doesn’t generate hate by itself. I didn’t listen to his podcasts or follow him, but he said things like the risks of allowing gun ownership in a society are preferable to the risks of banning them altogether. (That seems right to me.) Also, that affirmative action was calculated to lead to discrimination, not to remedy it. (Very plausible, and the intention is good.) That women should consider having children in their 20s and putting their professional career on hold for later. (Many women say the same.) I disagree with what I later learned he held about immigration and housing. But, again, disagreement alone leads to discussion (“let’s talk”) or contempt (“you’re an idiot”), but not to hate.
Hate, certainly, can come from envy. Who is this tall, athletic, and handsome man, without a college degree, who married Miss Arizona and is much more successful, much richer and influential, much more followed and admired than I am? He was happy with an evident kindness. Many men in history have been hated just for this reason. Read the Bible to see that we Christians must expect it.
But I think they mainly hated him because he rejected the “deal” of our popular culture about what love is. For us, love consists in finding a way to affirm any preference that someone has, and not saying anything that implies that another person was wrong, was straying, or (above all) doing something that offended God. Doing so is making others feel “unsafe” and possibly incurring “hate speech”.
But Charlie Kirk clearly held that if another is wrong, is straying, or is doing something that offends God—so that person would be upset and even might hate you—if you were called to say something that would expose it, you should say it anyway, and certainly not deny it. Because it is the truth.
We should affirm one another only with what we are willing to affirm as true in the presence of God.
Charlie Kirk called such commitment “courage”. He often said that courage is the easiest virtue, because all it requires is to say “yes”: yes, I will affirm as true to others only what I am willing to affirm as true in the presence of God.
If one returns to Solzhenitsyn’s famous commencement address at Harvard, one will see—if one doesn’t remember—that he diagnosed, as the main failure of the West, the lack of ordinary courage: “A decline in courage may be the most striking thing that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage.”
Whatever his flaws, Charlie Kirk did not have that failing.
Solzhenitsyn went on to say: “There are still many brave individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.” Charlie Kirk’s life, in the end, proved Solzhenitsyn wrong. And Charlie’s death is now called a “hinge point”, a turning point, truly a change of course.
Signs of the times. We are supposed to look for them, as Catholics. It’s what we do: we see the good in something that is not our own, separate the good from the bad, and then appropriate it. So, how are we doing it with Charlie Kirk and his movement?
About the author:
Michael Pakaluk, Aristotelian scholar and Ordinarius of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, is Professor of Political Economy at the Busch School of Business at The Catholic University of America. He lives in Hyattsville, MD, with his wife Catherine, also a professor at the Busch School, and their children. His collection of essays, The Shock of Holiness, will be published on August 25 by Ignatius Press. His book on Christian friendship, The Company We Keep, will be published this fall by Scepter Press. Both are available for preorder. He contributed to Natural Law: Five Views, published by Zondervan last May, and his most recent book on the Gospel came out with Regnery Gateway in March, Be Good Bankers: The Economic Interpretation of Matthew’s Gospel.