Live in Faith and Truth: The Charlie Kirk Legacy

“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude and insult you, and denounce your name as evil on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice and leap for joy on that day! Behold, your reward will be great in heaven.” (Luke 6:22-23).

These are the words Jesus spoke during his Sermon on the Plain. They were also the scheduled reading at last Wednesday’s Catholic Mass—the day that Charlie Kirk was assassinated. The death of Kirk reveals so much about the state of the human condition. It screams of hatred. It calls for sanity. It implores rational dialogue. Most emphatically, it calls for an increase in faith in Jesus Christ.

Kirk spoke for family values, for traditional marriage, and for the dignity of the unborn. His logic on college campuses and vitality of speech got him killed. What Kirk spoke about in his tents across the country and on podcasts and television shows for over a decade was that college students should be willing and able to speak freely, without ramifications for their grades or enrollment. His willingness to fight for the freedom of speech and sane conversations for students ended with his death.

His nonprofit organization, Turning Point USA, has been committed to encouraging college students to speak courageously about logic and truth to their professors since its inception. The need for this encouragement is evident in light of a study that was made public this past August that noted that an incredible 88% of respondents replied “yes” to the question: “Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically?”

Kirk was convinced that speaking openly about the tough issues of marriage, transgenderism, abortion, and religion were critical in order to avoid the Left and Right demonizing one another. He once noted that his role is to go around and speak about important topics in a vocal manner because when we stop doing so, “that is when civil war happens … because we lose sight of the humanity” of those on the opposite side of our views.

What Kirk stood for was definitely political. He was for President Donald Trump, and some argue that his efforts in the states of Arizona and Michigan literally won the election for Trump. However, whether you are a Republican or a Democrat ought to be irrelevant in this case. Kirk was disliked by many because he was unwilling to alter his speech on the truth. He spoke coherently and persuasively regarding the need for open dialogue, rational debate, and vivid faith, as well as for the need for logic in education and policy.

What many forget is that he spoke most often about the need for young Americans to focus on their family over their jobs. He spoke about the chronic nature of absentee fathers, the need for heroic marriages, as well as the beauty of having children and making Christ the center of your life. In viewing his social media pages and hearing the words of a pastor who knew him well, it seems that faith was the most important thing to Kirk.

Charlie admitted: “The most important thing in my life is the Gospel of Jesus Christ and trying to get people back into talking about their faith openly and candidly,” he said. “I’m just stunned at how some people are afraid to share their belief in Jesus Christ and in God, and in the Bible, and the truth of the Bible, and so, that’s why I’m a Christian.”

He was relentless in his clinging to faith. His friends noted that he refused to use his phone on Sundays in order to honor the sabbath and give his entire heart over to quality family time with less distractions from work. He sought to show young people at the universities he spoke that there was more to life than being mediocre, blending into the crowd, and living for oneself.

In a conversation with Deseret News earlier this month, Kirk said: “This is where you have to try to point them (young people) toward ultimate purposes and toward getting back to the church, getting back to faith, getting married, having children. That is the type of conservatism that I represent, and I’m trying to paint a picture of virtue, of lifting people up.”

Despite Kirk’s desire to lift people up, he was destroyed for speaking out against the culture. In faith, we know that Kirk’s life is not truly ended. On Sept. 6, he posted on X: “Jesus defeated death so that you can live.”

May his trust in the goodness of Christ and his work toward bringing others to the truth grant him that eternal life which Jesus won for us as he triumphantly walked out of that empty tomb. For Christians, there is no greater truth than that one—it is worth dying for.

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