Lessons from Charlie Kirk’s life

This transcript was generated from the episode’s YouTube captions and lightly edited for readability: filler words and the mid-show announcements have been removed. It may still contain transcription errors.

Hello friends. I’m sure you’re just like me. You know exactly where you were when you got the news last week that Charlie Kirk had been murdered. And we’re going to talk about that on this show today. Welcome to The Case for Life program. We’re delighted to have you. We’re going to talk about a hero of the faith today, Charlie Kirk, and what we should think of in the fallout from his death. How we should approach this as biblically grounded Christians and in ways that will help us not only process our own thoughts and feelings, but maybe help some of our fellow believers work through it as well.

I’m going to be honest with you. I can’t imagine a time in my life where I was more troubled by the death of someone I really didn’t know. I did not know Charlie Kirk. I’m told that he and I had met early in his career, but I don’t remember it. He’s not somebody that was close to me in terms of a friend that I see regularly. But I think like you, his death, I mean, it rattled me. It still rattles me.

And I think there are reasons for the visceral reaction that we’re having. One of them is that we’re looking at a guy who integrated gospel and cultural engagement better than anyone. I don’t know anybody who went out there and was faithful to proclaim the gospel as well as speak truthfully on cultural and political issues. This guy was the total package. You may remember a couple of shows ago we interacted with one of the videos he had posted about a student exchange he had had on abortion.

And Charlie just did a masterful job as we pointed out on that show. So you look at a guy like that, you go, he’s what I want Christians to be. And so when you see him cut down in the prime of his life, it’s troubling. And of course, then there’s the whole emotional side of it. Here’s a young father who leaves behind a grieving widow, and he’s got two small kids that are going to be raised without their dad. And that just I mean, it impacts us.

Impacts us. It’s a gut punch. There’s no way around it. And we also look at this guy and we think, is this going to be the end of a movement that has been started? Make no mistake about it. Charlie Kirk delivered the presidential election to Donald Trump in 2024. He was on college campuses starting up Turning Point USA groups. He got thousands upon thousands of new voters into the stream that voted conservative as opposed to left. He converted a lot of people.

And I think there’s a lot of fear on our side that uhoh, we’ve lost our champion. Now what? Well, we’re going to kind of unpack all that in today’s edition. Welcome. Glad you’re here. And I want to remind you if you haven’t visited our sites, please do so. And I want to remind you that our principal sponsor is here today and that is the life training institute. We can help you with speakers. We can help you with pro-life content to educate people and we want to be available to do that.

So be sure to visit the site and take a look around if that is something we can help you with. All right. What I’d like to do today is just talk about three big questions that that come to mind as you think about what happened to Charlie Kirk. But before I do that, I want to put to bed something that’s out there that involves a very dear friend of mine, and that is Christian apologist Frank Turk. There’s been a conspiracy theory out there that is just disgusting.

And it goes like this. You watch the video of Charlie being shot and you see a guy in a white cap who happens to be my friend Frank Turk standing there and the conspiracy go theory goes like this. Notice that guy touching his cap and touching his chest. He’s giving hand signs to the shooter about when to pull the trigger. This is complete nonsense. And I’m just disgusted that there’s some people on our side propagating this nonsense. Frank was a mentor to Charlie.

In fact, Frank was a father figure to Charlie who mentored him in apologetics, who coached him as an understudy and loved him like a son. And I want to encourage all of you watching today to do something. Go to Frank’s podcast at crossexamine.org and watch what Frank has to say about being right there. Now, I want you to imagine for a moment that someone you love like a son gets murdered a mere few feet from you and then that people have the audacity to suggest that somehow you were in on it.

This is just terrible stuff and I wish it weren’t out there, but I feel the need to say on behalf of my friend, trust me, my good buddy Frank Turk had nothing to do with the murder of Charlie Kirk. Nothing at all. I think we also need to be careful of something else that troubles me, and that is this. There are people on the left who have said some very bad things about Charlie Kirk. Yesterday, there was an ABC journalist that that underplayed what happened by talking about how touching the conversation was between the shooter and his trans lover.

And I agree, it was a terrible sound bite. It was a bad moment for that journalist and what he said was completely out of line, especially in light of the murder of an innocent man. But today, that same journalist published an apology, and I’m watching conservatives jump all over this guy and attribute to him the worst possible motives. I think we all need to take a step back, take a deep breath, and maybe we need to accept people apologizing, even when they do it imperfectly, and not attribute to them the worst possible motives.

We do not lose our responsibility to be Christlike just because one of our heroes got killed. We still have a duty to respond biblically and we need to do that. I think we’re to extend forgiveness to people who make mistakes commenting on Charlie Kirk. I also am concerned about another thing I see happening and that is conservatives rushing to demand that people be fired for saying things that are negative or derogatory about Charlie Kirk. Now, I’m not speaking here about people who incite violence with their speech.

I’m not speaking here of people who influence children. For example, there have been examples of grade school teachers teaching kindergarteners to hate Charlie Kirk. Okay, that violates school policy and those schools are right to move to fire these teachers. I agree with that completely. But should we as conservatives be leading the charge to get people fired for what they say? And my concern is this. While there are certainly exceptions to what I’m talking about, and I certainly understand the tension there of wanting to see people, you know, dealt with who spew hate, I understand that.

But if you lose free speech in a culture like ours, the pro-life cause, the Christian cause is dead on arrival. Why? Because we need free speech to get our ideas out there. And sure as the day is long, there will be another leftist president like Joe Biden, like Barack Obama who will come along and if he has the numbers in the Congress and maybe the support of the courts, they will come and they will try to restrict us on what we say.

They will define what we’re saying is hate speech and we’re going to have to fight a battle on free speech. But it looks kind of bad when we’re the ones out there railing against cancel culture. But then when we have the power, we want to turn around and dish out cancelling speech to our enemies. I think we need to be careful about that. I’m not saying nobody should ever be fired for what they say. I am saying let’s be careful. And when I see people on social media, for example, that are saying, “Hey, I want you to send me the names of anybody who says anything bad about Charlie Kirk, and we’ll go to work getting them fired.

We’ll organize a protest about where they work and we’ll get them canned for what they said. Is that really what we want to lead with? I would I think we need to be a little more thoughtful and careful there. Okay. Now, what about the big questions we need to look at here with Charlie Kirk? Here’s big question number one, and all of us have struggled with this, and it’s really the problem of evil. Why did God allow this to happen to one of our champions?

And of course, I can’t give you the answer why God allowed it. I can tell you this. Number one, the logical problem of evil, the idea that if evil exists, God can’t exist, is not one that needs to silence the Christian. And I’ve seen some of our critics on the left bring this up. Oh, if your God really exists, why did he allow your guy to be killed? Why didn’t God stop that evil? And what you need to know is this.

The fact that God allows evil does not prove God does not exist. And let me explain why. In order to object to the problem of evil, you have to assume that evil is an objectively true feature of our universe. You have to assume it exists out there somewhere. All right. But if evil exists, what else exists? Objective good of which evil is a departure or deprivation of that objective good. But if objective good exists, it has to come from someplace. As Frank Turk has pointed out, as Charlie Kirk even pointed out, if objective moral rules exist from which evil is a departure, there must also be an objective rule giver.

You can’t get objective moral rules without a transcendent objective moral lawgiver. So therefore, we’re pointed right back to who? Obviously, God. For evil to exist, there has to be someone in whose character objective right and wrong are grounded. So when people say to me, well, where was your God? Obviously, he doesn’t exist because he even allowed your guy to be taken out. That is not an objection against God’s existence. Because the objection only works if you assume that objective morals exist.

But if objective morals exist from which evil is a departure, then you also have to assume there’s an objective moral lawgiver. Otherwise, morals are just mere preferences. So that is not going to defeat the argument for God’s existence. What I think is going on in the main here is more of a pastoral problem for us as Christians. We look at this and go, how do we explain to our kids, to others that God would allow this evil? And if God is sovereign, yes, he allowed this.

Let’s not sugarcoat this. And what I like to do in these situations is something that I hope will help you. And here’s what I like to do. When I don’t understand something theologically, I reason from what I know to what I don’t know. Here’s what I know. This is the same world where God raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead. And if this is the same world where God raised Jesus from the dead, I can trust him in things I don’t understand.

And I don’t understand why God took out Charlie. I don’t know what God’s reasons were. But I can trust that he had morally sufficient reasons for allowing this evil. Can’t explain it. But I can say if I can trust God in that he raised Jesus from the dead, the central tenant of Christianity, I can trust him in those things I do not understand. And one day in heaven, yes, we’ll get the answers. Right now, I don’t have it. But a second pastoral point for us to consider is this.

A lot of us are saying, “Why doesn’t God just get rid of all evil?” I want to be careful here because if God got rid of all evil at 12:01 tonight, where would you and I be at that moment? If at midnight tonight, God gets rid of all evil, where are we at 12:01, as my friend Greg Kokal asks. Well, we would be in deep dudu. Why? Because when God gets rid of all evil, as CS Lewis pointed out, he’s going to do a complete job of it.

He’s going to wipe it all out, including my evil. It’s easy for me to look at God and say, “Why didn’t you stop that evil, but be angry when I face the consequences for my evil?” So, I don’t want to I don’t want to impugn God here and question his motives. Here’s the basic thing, and I read this today in scripture, and it kind of helped me grapple with this a little bit. Think about Lamentations 3, which today I chose to read in the Old King James because I like the way the language is there.

Here’s what it says in Lamentations 3. The prophet says, “It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed.” Let that sink in a moment. It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed because what you and I deserve, if you want to go and campaign on justice and you want to say I demand justice, what I deserve is nothing but the wrath of God. That’s it. I have nothing to commend myself to God. When I stand before the Lord, it isn’t going to matter a hill of beans that I was out doing pro-life work because my good deeds will never atone for my bad deeds which are numerous and legion according to the scripture.

There is none righteous, know not one. So if we’re going to say, hey, we demand justice, we should pursue justice as Christians, but thank God he has not gotten rid of all evil at this point. That his patience is there, that his mercies are new every morning. Because what you and I deserve is not what we’re getting. We’re getting the Lord’s mercy. His hand is stayed that we might repent and turn to him in saving faith. And I would encourage us to think on that, not just a strict demand for justice.

Because if all we get is justice, we’re in a world of hurt. We are going to face something far worse than Charlie Kirk faced when he got killed. We’re going to face the wrath of an eternal God who we have offended infinitely. There is no measure to the amount of evil we have done to our creator who created us who is the sovereign lord of this universe. So I am thankful the gospel says that Jesus stood in my place condemned so that I don’t get what I deserve.

And the reason I don’t get what I deserve is because he stood in my place condemned bearing the wrath of God for all the wrong I’ve done and continue to do. Let’s be honest about that. So think pastorally here that number one we can reason from what we know to what we don’t know. What we know is this is the same world God raised Jesus from the dead. And we can reason from what I just quoted from Lamentations that it is of the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed.

Thank God his mercies are there. But there’s another big question we need to look at and that is question number two. Can we unify as a nation after this? And my answer is no. And I’ll tell you why. The woke world view and the biblical worldview cannot coexist because they are diametrically opposed to each other. The woke worldview has an entirely different ontology, meaning a foundational belief of what ultimate reality is. It has an entirely different epistemology, that is the question of how we know things.

It has an entirely different ethical system and an entirely different anthropology, meaning what does it mean to be human than the biblical worldview does. For example, take epistemology, how we know things. On the work on the woke worldview, truth is not determined by objective evidence or by lining up with reality. In fact, on the woke worldview, what matters is not what’s true objectively. In fact, to even appeal to objective truth is considered oppressive. What matters is what is known as standpoint epistemology.

Meaning that truth is determined by the standpoint of the oppressed individual. And on that worldview, right and wrong, our ethics are not determined with an appeal to an objective moral standard the way the biblical worldview teaches us. Rather, right and wrong are determined by looking through the lens of the alleged oppressed group. So if you’re a white person and you get murdered like Charlie Kirk was, there is no real wrong done there because he’s part of the oppressor class. Now, it doesn’t matter on the woke worldview if Charlie Kirk was the kindest person in the world to blacks and other minorities.

And by the way, it’s nonsense to say he was racist. No, he was not. I challenged people to produce in context quotes where you can show he was a racist. He was not. He certainly challenged the woke worldview, but that doesn’t make him a racist. But on the woke worldview, you are not judged by how you act toward people of a different skin color. You’re judged by what class you’re in. And if you’re in the class of an oppressor, which is a white person would be like Charlie according to the woke worldview, you really can’t be wronged because those who are oppressed can never be wrong in what they do.

So therefore, if you get killed or murdered or sanctioned or censored or otherwise mistreated, you’re really just getting what is right because you are part of that oppressor class. Well, the biblical worldview absolutely denies that. As you know, on the woke world view, you can never change. Once an oppressor, always the oppressor. On the biblical worldview, such were some of you. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6, some of us once were sexually immoral. Some of us once were people who hated others and were murderous in our thought and intent and actions perhaps.

But Paul then concludes with these wonderful words, “And such were some of you.” Or as Paul says in Colossians chapter 1 verse 13, when you become a believer, you are transferred out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom or domain of God’s beloved son. You’re not what you used to be. The work worldview allows no hope of redemption where the biblical worldview does. So there’s an alignment problem there where these two worldviews are never going to coexist peacefully. They’re going to be at war with each other at the idea level.

So when we talk about unity, what I mean by unity is this shared worldview principles that we have an in-house debate about on how to best live them out. But what do you do when you have two worldviews that don’t agree on the first principles on what we ought to be, what knowledge is, what ethics happens to be, what it means to be human. Well, in that kind of worldview clash, you’re not going to get unity. But that does not mean we are absolved of our duty to love our neighbor.

Even if our neighbor is an enemy to what we believe, we still have a duty to be neighborly, to be loving to our enemies. I don’t have a problem saying that the radical left is an enemy of biblical Christianity. It absolutely is. And I know there are people out there that say, “Well, you know, looking at the issue of racism through a woke lens, through a critical race theory lens can help us better understand our duty as Christians.” No. The woke worldview and the biblical worldview are diametrically opposed.

The woke worldview is an alternative worldview, not a helpful worldview for helping us understand our own biblical view. So, make no mistake about it. But we are still called to love our enemies. And that means for example my neighbor who is a few doors down from us who is a diehard Democrat leftist. I still have a duty to love him as a neighbor and seek his good and I will do so with the Lord’s help. But unity is not something we can work for.

And there’s a lot of people out there calling for unity. And I don’t think they have thought this through very well. They haven’t thought through well what do we mean by unity? I think we need to take a close look at that. Now, we’re going to take a break here, and when we come back, I want to move to the next big question, and that is this. Where do we go from here as pro-life Christians? Where do we go from here?

And I’m going to give you four things I think we need to do. So, I’ll see you on the other side of this break.

Welcome back everybody. Where do we go from here? Now, one of the things I loved about Charlie Kirk is that he integrated gospel proclamation with cultural engagement. And a lot of times I’ve heard Christian leaders get in an eitheror false dilemma type environment where they say things like, “Well, if you want to end cultural strife, preach the gospel.” And that’s all they say. And they’re right about that. That is one of the ways we improve the culture. By all means, preach the gospel.

But I rather think a better answer would be let’s do both. Let’s preach the gospel and engage the culture on the idea level. We don’t have to have those ideas be mutually exclusive. So what do we do in light of what’s happened here as Christians and as pro-lifeers? The first thing I want to challenge you to do is to cultivate courage. We need a good dose of it right now. I’ve heard Christians say to me, “Well, I’m glad you’re out there speaking on abortion, but I could never do what you do.” Oh, really?

Let me tell you, I’m going to push back on that. And I want you to ask yourself this question. Are any of the reasons I would give for not speaking on the pro-life issue worth the price of babies lives that might have been might have been saved had I been more courageous? That’s the gut check question right now. And I’m telling you, I’m going to walk my talk here. We’re going to set up where anybody who emails us or me messages us in response to this show that says, “Okay, I’m willing to talk, but I have no idea what to say.” We’re going to send out to you an outline, a detailed outline of what you could say.

There are homeschool groups in your neighborhood that would love to have a speaker come in and talk about a moral issue like this, especially at a time like this. There are church youth groups. People say, “Well, I could never be as courageous as Charlie.” Okay, but could you be courageous enough to talk to your pastor, to your youth pastor, and say, “Hey, our kids need to hear pro-life content, and I’m here as a resource. I’ll help you. I’ll deliver a courageous but gracious pro-life talk that will make the case for life.” We all need to be willing to do that.

We are all apologists now. You can’t just pin it all on Charlie or on a political figure to do the heavy lifting. We need to do it in our communities. Second, be bold in your proclamation of the gospel. This is a moment where people, I think, are open to it. Think about what happened at churches across America this last weekend. Our churches were full. My church was packed out. It was busting at the seams. I don’t think you could have fit more than another 5 to 10 people in that auditorium without having a real population problem.

This is a moment where we need to be willing to proclaim the gospel. Do that. Evangelize people. Tell them that the ultimate answer to our sin problem is a sinless savior that stood in our place condemned. Share that gospel. Thirdly, re-engage politically. I know some Christians think, “Oh, politics is a dirty word.” Let me tell you something. The Christian worldview applies to all of life. And Charlie exemplified this beautifully. He showed what it looks like to take your Christian faith and integrate it across all areas of your life.

Your public appearances, your written materials, your conversations. He did that. That’s a good model for us. And fourthly, I want to encourage you to engage your mind. And here’s what I mean by that. It is time for you to master the moral logic of the pro-life view. We’ve got a course that will help you do that. That in just seven days, you can master the moral logic of the pro-life view and be ready to give an answer for the hope that lies within you on this issue.

One of the things I learned about Charlie from my good buddy Frank Turk, who as I said knew him well, Charlie was always a learner. He would call up apologists and say, “Hey, how can I do better in answering this question? How can I do a better job explaining the problem of evil or explaining the proofs for the resurrection of Jesus? How can I do a better job explaining the pro-life issue?” He was a learner. He mastered his craft and then was able to speak intelligently when God gave him a platform to do it.

We need to be willing to learn. And I encourage you, this is the time for you to hit the books. Maybe you don’t have the time, you think, to read a full treatment like this, although I would encourage you to read the case for life. But even if you don’t have time for a book like that, you do have time for a short course. And I hope you’ll take advantage of that offering that we have available on our websites. Folks, this is a time for courage.

Don’t shrink back from doing good.