Charlie Kirk achieved great transformations of consciousness in America and beyond.  He championed  a radically democratized and unbounded Christianity, and through faith and intellect he blew away the smokescreen of the separation of church and state.  With power and clarity, he rebuilt the three-story edifice of American faith, culture, and politics.  His destiny was to awaken Americans to the threat of domestic anti-Christian violence and the harm being inflicted on young people by “trans” obsession.

The polarities of protagonism and antagonism to historic American faith, culture, and politics can illuminate the current American schism.  Protagonistic Americanism believes that freedom originates in God, not man; it promotes unifying, celebratory culture, which explores beauty and truth relevant to all Americans; and it pursues equal justice for all, which serves God-given freedom.

Antagonistic Americanism is the inverse.  It is purely oppositional.  It rejects God-based religion, particularly Christianity; it denigrates America as racist; and it offers only ungrateful grievance and social justice victimologies, which demand unequal treatment under the law.

Charlie Kirk and the assassin represent the extremes of these polarities.  Charlie championed traditional American cultural institutions as methodologies of happiness, the Constitution, and individual freedom and responsibility.  The assassin’s belief is often described as nihilistic, but nihilism doesn’t inscribe hate on bullets.  Antagonistic America has devolved from a critique into a tantrum.  Long-running tantrums often become violent.

Charlie Kirk reached millions of young people because the Christianity he promoted is the most radically democratized religious form in history.  That’s what makes it unbearable to antagonistic America.  Charlie’s civic Christianity offers inclusion without formal membership, welcomes skeptics, requires no rituals, practices, or authoritarian or intercessionary priestcraft.  It does not focus on sin, but does not trade in the cheap commerce of unfounded approval, as does left-wing politicized Christianity.  Charlie’s faith is joined in a twinkling; it takes months or years of indoctrination against nature and common sense to join the hatred that possessed the assassin.  Ironically, it was the First Amendment that protected Christianity from secular power, eventuating a purified spiritual field freed from the motivation of worldly gain.

I attended a public elementary school in New York City.  Every Friday, there was a school-wide assembly.  Each week, the assembly began with a reading from the Bible.  When my fourth-grade teacher had the honor of choosing the verse, she held open colloquy with a student with very good posture named Beverly, whose father was a pastor.  They chose the verse together.  There were Jewish students in the school, and students not raised in any religion, but it did not occur to anyone that this was an unacceptable practice in a public school.  There was no test of religious belief, or lack thereof, implied by this practice.  No federal law respecting an institution of religion compelled this practice.  Reading a few words of Scripture at this assembly represented consensual understanding that the Bible is a book that contains wisdom, and passages selected were inoffensive and respected by the assemblage.  Such understanding enabled America to be one nation melded of the many pluralities.  Charlie Kirk powerfully pushed back against the 20th-century manipulation called separation of church and state to the great benefit of America.  

Tears were pooling on my husband’s cheekbones when he said, “Charlie Kirk was just assassinated.”  A few minutes, later I said, “This is going to turn out to be a trans thing.”  Minutes later, I received a text from a friend decrying the insanity of the world.  We texted the small, cautious pendulum of words that swings between one’s own pain  and the other person’s.  Then I said, “This is going to be another trans murder.”  My friend disagreed: “There have always been trans people.”  I said, “Yes, there have always been people who lived as the opposite sex, but they just wanted to be left alone.  They weren’t driven totally nuts by this insane world.”

Is forgiveness the way forward, or is righteous conflict needed now?  In Sanskrit, the path through forgiveness is bhakti sadhana, and the path through resistance is karma sadhana.  Erika Kirk said, “That young man, I forgive him.”  Donald Trump said, “I hate my enemies.  I cannot tolerate them.”  The indivisible interdependence of the two paths is  highlighted through this question: Could Erika have said, “I forgive him” if the assassin were still at large, lurking outside her home, threatening her children?  Was not her utmost forgiveness conditioned upon brave men with guns who don’t allow  themselves ready tolerance for monstrous crime, and were willing to risk their lives to capture the assassin? 

The media are covering up the trans connection to the assassination.  Soul-dead Jimmy Kimmel blamed it on MAGA, and vile yakkers are blaming the Jews.  Trans ideology is discontinuous with the left-wing parade of victimologies based on a biased view of American history.  It is as if the left ran out of ways to feel superior and denigrate America, so it moved on to an ahistorical, kooky theory that sex identity is a superficial attribute that can be readily changed, and hatred for anyone who doesn’t accept that.  Americans have the general right to dressing, naming, and using mannerisms of the opposite sex, but the assertion that sex identity is a switch that can be flipped is untrue.  And trans ideology is the hill the left has chosen to die on.  

Here are three reasons trans obsessionality can lead to murder.  First, falsehood fanatically believed as quasi-religious doctrine unbalances the mind.  As transgenderists and their supporters face the scientific impossibility of becoming a member of the opposite sex, they blame their frustrations on traditionalists, and not the erroneous assumptions they have accepted.  This frustration engenders violence.  Second, it is easier to mimic superficial characteristics of the opposite sex but impossible to acquire the spiritual gifts of the compassion of womanhood and the courage of manhood.  People simulating the opposite sex may acquire the least helpful traits of each.  The “trans woman” may fall into narcissistic attention-seeking of insecure females while still carrying the violent aggression of weak males.

Lastly, trans ideology is dangerous for a reason that applies to both Charlie Kirk and the assassin.  There is a heroic impulse in the nature of young men.  The collective unconscious of many young men includes a heroic imagination of great deeds, most active in the teen years and lasting into the next decade of life.  In traditional societies, the heroic impulse is fulfilled through military service, sports, or other challenging activities.  Charlie Kirk fulfilled that impulse as a great American thought leader.  But in a world where deepest falsehoods are inflicted upon young people, the heroic impulse can become perverted and lethal.

Harkening back once again to NYC public schools of the 1950s and ’60s, back then, students were indoctrinated to believe in what was called brotherhood.  Continuing Charlie Kirk’s mission, public institutions must rebuild unifying curricula of traditional American faith, culture, and political freedom.  This foundation prepares American adults to follow their own heart and conscience.

Image: Charlie Kirk.  Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.