After Prayer – Reaction

Thursday, September 11, 2025

Save for the very dark and insane corners of the internet (and briefly MSNBC) the assassination of Charlie Kirk has been universally condemned.  Even the late night hosts lacked anything snarky to say.  There is no news to report, as the manhunt for the shooter continues.  The reporting chaos is beginning to settle and the real journalism is finally taking hold.  The calm and quiet that should have happened yesterday seems to finally be here.  Reasonable reaction to the event has begun to see the light of day.

Far and away, the best reaction piece I have seen is from Matt Continetti:

To the ghouls celebrating online, Kirk and his supporters represented something else entirely: fascism, Nazism, Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale. How does one succumb to such delusion? Whatever the mix of ideology, grievance, envy, contempt, or pure nihilism, the hatred is spreading. Every year brings forth downwardly mobile graduates with debt, no prospects, a sense of entitlement, and mounds of resentment. Combine radical individualism with a culture without restraint, and you have the social equivalent of a Molotov cocktail.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal last weekend, author Cynthia Ozick said, “This is a good country. It’s a great country. And now, it’s disintegrating.” That is why Kirk’s death feels like a watershed. It is the most stunning evidence we have to date that America is becoming two nations, divided not only by politics but by culture, lifestyle, psychology, and epistemology. Weak institutions, corrupted data, rampant distrust, political enmity, and an apparent inability to control criminality and the dangerously mentally ill tear us apart like a centrifugal force.

Two paragraphs that quite neatly, and accurately, diagnose the problem.  But Continetti’s path back is but partial:

Is there a way back? I used to think that inspired statecraft could reverse the downward slide. I now believe that only a collective effort can do so. A renewed commitment to law enforcement and constitutionalism. A communal pledge to promote free speech and tolerance for opposing views. A decision to decentralize power and allow states and localities to decide matters for themselves. A reckoning with the antisocial costs of smartphones and social media. A revival of color blindness and American patriotism. Kirk’s own life pointed to the true sources of happiness and human flourishing: family, faith, vocation, and national pride.

All those things Continetti calls for were once a part of the fabric of this nation.  He is correct in saying this will require all of us, not just good leadership, but what has changed us such that we abandoned these things?  Why did we quit cherishing them?  Look at the list of ills he presented in the diagnosis, “grievance, envy, contempt, or pure nihilism, the hatred.”  Now compare it with something the Apostle Paul wrote to the fledgling church in Galatia two thousand years ago:

Now the works of the flesh are evident, which are: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like; of which I tell you beforehand, just as I also told you in time past, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law.

Paul’s “works of the flesh” list bears a remarkable resemblance to Continetti’s description of the college campus, does it not?  The problems we are dealing with here are not problems of institutions or politics, but problems of the human soul.  Any community commitment to the ideals Continetti proposes must be preceded by a cleansing of the heart of each member of the community, lest the pledge he desires be empty and meaningless.

How do we react to something like this?  The universal regret and condemnation is a good start, but on the whole inadequate.  They must be followed with self-examination and confession.  The time has come for each of us, individually, to clean house in our hearts and souls.

CLOSING NOTE: Today is a horrific anniversary.  Many thought after those events that the nation would turn around from the self-destructive path it was on – and it did – for a while.  But not long in the grand scheme of things, not long at all, lest we would not be talking about a political assassination today.  Charlie Kirk would have been about 8 years old when those events occurred.  The end of his short life, at 31, is testament to just how short lived and ultimately ineffective that turn around was.  Turn arounds don’t happen because of events and sentiments – they happen because God works in and changes the hearts of people.  We have to be open to that working.