I Rejected Charlie Kirk’s Politics. That’s Why I Grieve His Death

The brazen and reprehensible murder of right-wing religious movement leader Charlie Kirk, a co-founder of Turning Point USA and a key supporter of President Donald Trump, is as tragic as it is telling about the sad state of American politics.

The 31-year-old husband and father of two died after being shot while he conducted a popular debate-style event at Utah Valley University, south of Salt Lake City. Kirk had started answering a question about gun violence in America when a single bullet struck him in the neck. Republican and Democratic spokespersons, including Trump, asked for prayers as medical professionals tried to save Kirk's life, but he succumbed to his wounds shortly after the attack.

I never had contact with Charlie Kirk, but I'm only one degree removed from him because many of my former colleagues knew him personally and supported his efforts. For over 30 years, I helped lead an aggressive protest-oriented anti-abortion movement. My fellow organizers and I intended our movement to be wholly nonviolent. Still, over time, individuals started showing up at our demonstrations eager to pick fights with reproductive rights counterdemonstrators. Before long, they were throwing punches at their ideological opponents. Then, the shootings began. During my time in leadership, four physicians were shot and killed by people from our ranks. It was only after those deadly episodes that some of my colleagues and I woke up to the fact that our increasingly harsh rhetoric contributed to dehumanizing reproductive rights advocates, leading others to believe they could inflict injury and death on them. From then on, I did what I could to reduce incendiary language, but the violence continued.

Before I abandoned the conservatism Kirk so effectively promoted, I shared many of the same platforms he exploited, from the massive student assemblies at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., to the Christian Broadcasting Network's popular television programming. Like Kirk, I was a young star in the Christian conservative universe, but a generation before him. More than a few people have told me, “Charlie Kirk makes me think of you when you were younger.” Maybe that’s one reason I took his death so hard; I literally bent over in grief. But there are other reasons, too.

Listening to news reports in real time, my pastoral impulses immediately went to the young family Kirk leaves behind. No one with a conscience or a drop of compassion could celebrate the life-altering anguish a young widow will experience as she tries to help her toddler daughter understand why the little one will never see her daddy again. Years from now, she will explain to her son, who was born just last year, why he never knew his father. I prayed for them and I prayed for Charlie’s parents, who, I learned, have lost their only child.

Then came my memories: assassinations, bombings, kidnappings, and airplane hijackings that played out on television as I grew up in the 1960s and ’70s. One of my earliest memories is of my family surrounding the black and white television as news broke that a gunman had killed President John F. Kennedy. Then there's the indelible image of my father weeping after Martin Luther King Jr. was slain in Memphis. These events, not to mention the massive politically motivated violence that was the Vietnam War, hang like a pall over my childhood recollections.

Wherever political violence occurs—including recent examples in Utah, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and anywhere else—it is ugly, and it reverberates through whole societies, shocking consciences, instilling fear, giving rise to pervasive pessimism and hopelessness. It is also counterproductive to the ideals that perpetrators ostensibly feel that their ill-advised, misguided actions defend—or even advance. Instead, studies show that assassinations often undermine democracy and social institutions, decrease political participation, correlate with social conflict, contribute to economic decline, and cause harmful psychological impacts across social strata.

Political commentators as different from each other as Rachel Maddow of MSNBC and Katie Pavlich of Fox News have decried the killing of ideological opponents as "anti-American." The robust public exchange of ideas and the First Amendment guarantee of free speech, including using offensive words, contribute to our country's unique freedoms of thought and expression. They strengthen our public life.

Kirk's opinions about others were regularly cruel, dismissive, and exclusionary. Still, he had a constitutional right to express his views and lead his movement—and those who oppose his contemptuous attitudes have an equal right to call out those harmful attitudes and work to defeat the policies and behaviors they produce. But silencing ideological competitors by frightening, brutalizing, or murdering them is contrary to the very foundation of our constitutional republic.

Of course, for Christians, political violence in all its forms is not only unconstitutional, anti-social, and anti-American, but it is also supremely immoral and sinful. Jesus commanded those who seek to follow him to love their enemies, bless those who curse them, and pray for those who abuse them (Luke 6:27-28). Christ did not permit his followers to harm others for any cause. Bullying, menacing, assaulting, and intentional homicide are violations of at least one of the Ten Commandments—against killing—and contradict Jesus' Two Great Commandments to love God, in whose image every person is made, and our neighbors, who, the parable of the Good Samaritan indicates, include people that are the furthest from us socially, culturally, and religiously.

READ MORE: A Field Guide to Christian Nonviolence

It doesn't matter what side of the ideological divide commits a politically motivated murder like that of Charlie Kirk's; it is antithetical to everything Christian. It is demoralizing for anyone who champions human rights, democratic freedoms, political diversity, and general decency. It most certainly flies in the face of virtues Jesus enumerated in his Sermon on the Mount: meekness, the desire to do righteously, mercy, purity of heart, and peacemaking.

Today, I see abortion from a very different angle, and I support a woman's right to make her own conscientious decision about her reproductive health. Notwithstanding my significant and consequential differences with my one-time allies, they have a God-given right to speak, organize, and even legislate as their convictions guide them and the Constitution and the courts allow. My task is to meet that challenge by peacefully persuading a majority of constituents that my position is in the best interests of the whole.

Every religious, cultural, social, and political influencer must unequivocally reject, denounce, and condemn the murder of Charlie Kirk and all political violence, whether expressed in word or deed, whether it comes from our own camp or that of the other. At the same time, we must not let the wicked transgressions of a few discourage us from pursuing good for all. As I write this, Charlie Kirk's assailant is unknown, so we don't know their name, or even their gender, and we most certainly don't know the detailed motivation behind their abominable act, but we do know this person’s actions do not reflect a principled political worldview. Such a killing is neither progressive nor conservative; it is simply anti-human.

As people of good intention, we must not give up working together to advance the irenic, congenial, and mutually respectful, yet firm and determined contest of ideas, policy, and practices with a view toward outcomes that benefit the greatest number of people in the most significant number of ways. We must also admonish anyone tempted to exact revenge that we are not to "be overcome with evil, but to overcome evil with good." (Romans 12:21)

Now is the time to rededicate ourselves to the passionate pursuit of nonviolent social justice fueled by a powerful ethic of love and energized by a generous spirituality that celebrates rather than diminishes humanity. Let's build a safe and accepting future for everyone—and let's do it in honor of all the victims of violence, known and unknown, those who make the headlines and those who don't.

Killing is neither progressive nor conservative; it is simply anti-human.