Why Charlie Kirk’s murder feels so personal

I didn’t know him. But I know why he matters.

Two months ago, I was invited to speak at a summer barbecue hosted by a county Republican Party. Just a low-key gathering — a few speeches, some pulled pork and paper fans. But a few days before the event, it was abruptly canceled.

I still have the voicemail the organizer left me. “We received some information from our security advisor today that really, we should not do this,” she said, clear nervousness in her voice.

At the time, I brushed it off. Stuff like that can sound dramatic in the moment. Looking back, though, the warning feels prophetic.

The targeted political assassination of Charlie Kirk last week hit so many of us like a gut punch.

I never met Charlie, though several of my friends did. But I admired him. He had courage I often lack, and conviction I wish I could summon more boldly. He was clear about what he believed, lived for Christ and for his family, and stood in the public square when lesser men would cower. And he was killed for it.

That’s not supposed to happen in America, a nation built on free expression and debate. Not for simply speaking out loud beliefs that, until recently, were considered common sense.

This is a perilous time, for the United States and for North Carolina.

Why this is so personal

I wrote a column in the Observer last week about how outrage is the only acceptable response to the murder of Iryna Zarutska, who was stabbed to death on the Charlotte light rail in August. In it, I wrote:

“In Zarutska, I don’t see a stranger. I see my wife in that seat. She was on that train at that hour a week earlier. I see my kids in that seat. My oldest may soon ride that same line to UNC Charlotte.”

With Charlie’s murder, it’s hard not to see ourselves. Especially for people in and around conservative politics.

The people celebrating his death are disgusting ghouls, of course. But so many others — including people I love — felt the need to condemn the murder while denouncing Kirk’s views as abhorrent in the same breath.

To do so, they cherry-pick, misrepresent and twist a small handful of Charlie’s tens of millions of words uttered on the public stage. The implication is obvious, that he had it coming.

If I had Charlie’s courage, I’d say a lot of the same things: that God is sovereign, that marriage and family are beautiful, that abortion is wrong, that men and women are different. That’s what made it so personal.

What would these folks say if it were I who took a bullet to the neck?

Tribalism

In that context, it is natural to retreat into tribalism. That was my first instinct, too.

Just as close-up videos of Charlie’s assassination were deluging social media, the newspaper I contribute to published two columns from staff members cynically mocking Republicans for making Iryna’s death a political issue. My stomach turned again.

I called my editor and told him I didn’t think I could be associated with the publication anymore. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they celebrated his death,” I told him, or something to that effect.

Within a few hours, I realized this was unfair and counterproductive. But it’s where our country finds itself right now, and it’s a precarious place to be. We’ve trained ourselves to respond to tragedy by taking sides.

There’s a Saturday Night Live skit from a few months ago where two black news anchors and two white news anchors take turns reading crime reports, keeping score and cheering when the suspects turn out to be members of the opposite race.

SNL has surely gone downhill over the past few years, but in this case they nailed it. We do the same in the political arena. Immediately after Charlie’s murder, fingers began flying in both directions — with liberals and conservatives trying to tally up which “side” had the most blood on its hands.

This, too, is unfair and counterproductive. But it’s what happens when politics becomes your god. People stop being people. Everything becomes points on a scoreboard. And once you’ve dehumanized your opponent, violence starts to feel a little more permissible.

Spiritual war

This is not a kumbaya message. There is a spiritual war for the soul of our state and nation going on, and we do have to choose sides.

It’s just that the sides are not Republican and Democrat, or left and right. They are civilization versus anarchy. They are truth vs. falsehood. Yes, they are good vs. evil.

“For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” Ephesians 6:12

When we turn politics into a religion, we forget who we are. And worse — we forget who we belong to. That’s what makes this moment so dangerous. We’ve replaced moral courage with moral confusion. We’ve traded the Ten Commandments for ten thousand tribal hashtags.

The real problem we’re facing isn’t that people disagree about politics. It’s that too many of us have made politics the core of our identity, the thing that defines who we are, who we hate, and what we think makes someone human. But politics cannot bear that weight. It was never meant to.

In a press conference last week, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox asked, "Is this the end of a dark chapter in our history, or the beginning of a darker chapter?"

Right now, I’m not feeling optimistic. But I know what the answer has to include.

We need a shared belief that:

• America is fundamentally good, not irredeemably evil.

• Patriotism is a virtue, not a vice.

• Faith is vital to public life, not something to be driven underground.

• We have a duty to serve others, not just ourselves.

• There is such a thing as objective truth, and it’s worth defending.

If we can’t agree on those things, we’re not a society anymore. We’re just tribes at war.

What comes next

I am not interested in litigating every over-the-line statement that political leaders on the Republican and Democratic side have made over the last decade that have brought us to this point. We can’t descend into tone policing and whataboutism.

Former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg said something last week I agree with:

“Right now, the categories that matter in responding to this killing aren’t left and right or MAGA and Democrats. I think the only category that really matters here is helping or hurting.”

That’s exactly it.

Are we helping this country heal and move forward — or are we dividing it further? Are we living like politics is our highest calling — or are we putting faith and family back in their rightful place?

We cannot keep labeling people we disagree with as fascists or Nazis. And we cannot call entire political parties “domestic extremist organizations” just because we don’t like their policies. That language isn’t just reckless — it’s dehumanizing. And once you’ve stripped someone of their humanity, almost anything starts to feel justified.

Charlie Kirk understood this. He knew the real danger wasn’t disagreement. It was disengagement. The real enemy wasn’t the other side — it was the loss of shared reality, of moral vision, of the ability to talk with one another at all.

“When people stop talking, that's when you get violence,” Charlie once said. “That's when civil war happens, because you start to think the other side is so evil and they lose their humanity.”

That’s the warning. And it’s also the invitation. Let’s talk. Let’s listen. Let’s lead. Before it’s too late.