“You are blessed when they insult you and persecute you and falsely say every kind of evil against you because of me. Be glad and rejoice, because your reward is great in heaven. For that is how they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” (Matthew 5:11-12 CSB – Read the chapter)

Most days are mundane. That’s not to say they are boring, but they don’t stand out as particularly notable. They won’t likely be remembered for long. But every now and then, something happens that is going to be remembered; something happens that will define a whole generation. And while we don’t always recognize these moments as they happen, other times there’s really no doubt. Yesterday we crossed the 24th anniversary of 9/11. That was a generation-defining moment if there ever was one. The day before that our nation experienced another moment that will likely come to define this generation when a young man was murdered—assassinated, really—in cold blood. Let’s reflect for just a few minutes in Charlie Kirk.

Before yesterday, I knew who Charlie Kirk was. I had heard his name in various contexts for several years. And while I didn’t know a whole lot about him, I knew enough to recognize him as one of those polarizing figures that people either loved or hated once they knew him. But I have never watched a single one of his videos. I’ve never read anything he’s written. I’ve never listened to anything he said. He just wasn’t someone who featured very prominently in any of the news sources I frequent.

With the news of first his being shot, and then of his passing, however, I discovered that I was in reasonably small company. Admittedly, I wasn’t Kirk’s primary audience. His aim was much younger than me. Kirk was the face of a youth movement. For a dozen years, Kirk has been traveling around the country visiting college campuses and making thoughtful, reasoned arguments for conservatism and the Christian faith. And the evidence would suggest he had not been merely successful in his aims, but phenomenally so.

For pretty much all of last century—and probably most of human history before that—young people grew up reasonably conservative and sharing the faith of their parents. Yes, of course, there have been exceptions to that, but norms are norms for a reason. Getting married and having kids tends to result in people becoming more conservative at least culturally if not politically as well. Kids tend to take on the political and cultural opinions of their parents. Thus, most kids grow up fairly conservative. And, if their parents hold to some kind of religious tradition, kids grow up with that as well.

And then they go off into the world.

Once they leave behind the environment of their birth and discover there are new and different ways to see the world, this discovery combined with a natural adolescent spirit of rebelliousness, leads them to become entirely more liberal or progressive or less religious or perhaps a combination of all of the above. This transition often happens to the shock and horror and utter befuddlement of their parents which for many kids only serves to sweeten the deal a bit. In short, going off to college and turning liberal has been a rite of passage for many, many young people.

Until Charlie Kirk.

As a bright, conservative young man, Kirk apparently grew tired of the liberal values of his college campus, and the bad arguments many of his peers were using to defend them. He knew what he believed politically and culturally, and was able to offer an eloquent, reasonable defense of his positions. He was also remarkably persuasive when debating other people. So, after only a year of college, Kirk quit school and started an organization called Turning Point USA. Turning Point’s goal was to create chapters on college campuses all over the nation that sought out and raised up young conservatives—and especially men—who could advance and defend conservative ideas and values on their campuses.

Kirk himself began traveling from one college to another, visiting chapter after chapter, and engaging ideological opponents in open forum debates. He invited people to make arguments for the liberal and progress worldview that was dominant on their campus, and challenged them, pointing out the flaws and holes in their arguments, and demonstrating with reason and rhetoric why conservative ideas and values were superior.

Now, many have tried to do this kind of thing before, and many have failed. They’ve failed for a variety of reasons. They were too old to really connect with the students. They weren’t very good debaters. They were too combative and belittling in their approach. Kirk had none of those problems. He was a peer to the people he was reasoning with. He was exceptionally intelligent. He was unfailingly kind and generous with opponents who were dismissive and belittling toward him. Growing up as a member of Generation Z, he was a digital native, and made incredibly effective use of social media. While not necessarily deeply rooted in a commitment to the Christian faith early on, he nonetheless lived out the command of 1 Peter 3:16: “Yet do this with gentleness and reverence, keeping a clear conscience, so that when you are accused, those who disparage your good conduct in Christ will be put to shame.”

And in a fairly short order, Kirk’s message and approach began to take root. He began to win more and more supporters—and again, especially young men—to his position. Suddenly, a centuries-old tradition began to shift. Young people were going off to college and for the first time encountering conservative ideas and values presented in a winsome, compelling, and intellectually robust manner. Young men who had been told for years that they were the problem, that they were worthless, that they needed to become less masculine in order to avoid being a threat to society, and so on and so forth, found someone who boldly told them they mattered. Kirk called them to rise up and be real men who worked hard and contributed to their world in positive, impactful ways. And they began flocking to it like moths to a flame.

Then something else began to change. Kirk himself got married. He started having kids of his own. And he recognized that the conservative cultural and political ideas and values he was promoting only made sense and were only truly supported by a single worldview position: Christianity. He grew more serious about his own faith and started incorporating his faith into his presentations. He started proclaiming and sharing the Gospel and defending the faith. He demonstrated why the Christian worldview was superior—intellectually, morally, culturally, and so on—to all the other available options.

As he began to do this more and more, his political and cultural opponents, driven by a worldview that vigorously rejected the faith he now so eloquently presented and defended, began to hate him all the more. The more firmly he began to stand on Christ and Christ alone, the more his opponents attacked him. And Kirk just kept fighting his happy battle. He demonstrated well the final beatitude Jesus revealed in the Sermon on the Mount. “You are blessed when they insult you and persecute you and falsely say every kind of evil against you because of me. Be glad and rejoice, because your reward is great in heaven. For that is how they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

And would you believe it, his growing base of followers began to shift in this direction as well.

Over the past several months I have written on here more than once about the growing trend of young people turning to Christianity in the West. This movement has been especially pronounced in Britain and the U.S. A generation who grew up in a mostly secular world is now rebelling against the worldview of their parents by turning to the Christian faith instead of away from it like their parents did. They are turning especially to conservative, historically orthodox expressions of the faith at that. I think an entirely reasonable and compelling argument can be made that Kirk helped to ignite this movement.

And now he has been assassinated. At the time of this writing, the killer is still on the loose. I suspect that won’t last too much longer. We don’t know the motivations of the murderer yet, but from all appearances, this was a political assassination. Someone hated Kirk’s ideas and message enough that he felt justified in leaving Kirk’s wife a widow and his two children to grow up without ever really knowing their father. This was an evil, cowardly act that deserves to face justice to the fullest extent of the law.

In the meantime, the anger and hurt over what has happened to a man who genuinely inspired so many is raw. Yet over and over, as I have heard his closest friends and supporters reacting to the news, the consistent call has been for a response that is consistent with Kirk’s own message and approach. He was unfailingly kind and generous with his ideological opponents. When they were ugly to him, he was gracious in return. He didn’t attack people, but only arguments. Was he perfect in this? Surely not, but a reputation exists for a reason. He was a happy warrior. The proper response to his murder will be to continue being happy warriors in his absence. Anything else will only demonstrate that everything he stood for and defended was a lie.

The political left in this nation right now has a violence problem. Yes, there is violence that has come from the political right. But the vast and growing majority of politically-motivated violence in our country is coming from the political left. And rather than recognizing the horror of this growing trend, and speaking out tirelessly to oppose and thwart its advance, more and more voices are speaking out in support of its perpetrators, offering excuses and rationalizations rather than just condemnations. Just consider the lionization of the young man who murdered the healthcare company CEO a few months ago.

This spirit of political anarchy is poisonous to a society. But the right response cannot and must not be to meet it with equal force. Anarchy met with anarchy only generates more anarchy. At the same time, anarchy met with totalitarian impulses won’t solve the problem either. That path is poisonous to our fragile union as well.

The right response here is and must be a return to the values and virtues that served as the foundation for our nation in the first place—a passionate commitment to ordered liberty and the rule of law; a tenacious hold on the Christian worldview and its virtues which is the only world that has ever led to a lasting, peaceful freedom; a firm stance upon the absolute value of every human life; and so on and so forth. These are the weapons that will see this war of ideas won in a way that will lead to a sustainable freedom in the future.

More than this, we must respond to this advance of moral evil with the ethics of the kingdom of God. We must be salt and light. We must love our neighbor in our heart rather than hating him. We must pursue purity in our thinking and doing. We must insist on faithfulness in our relationships. We must be committed to the truth. We must go above and beyond what is merely expected to love extravagantly when we get the chance. We must love our enemies with the love of Christ.

These things will see the transformation that Kirk had only begun to inspire continue to grab hold of more hearts and minds, bringing restoration and redemption to our brokenness. These things will honor the legacy he laid in only 31 short years of life. These things will prove right all of his effort and arguments. These things will make certain that his death won’t be in vain. Let us commit to carry this torch into the next generation so that together we can enjoy the fruits of such righteous labors.