Writing Thursday morning at his Substack, our friend, conservative talk radio host, and 2025 MRC Bulldog Award winner Erick Erickson laid out the stakes of the evil before us following Wednesday’s assassination of Charlie Kirk, the media’s role in our body politic, and calling Christians to remember the commission to be God’s light in a broken world.
He opened by noting haunting words Kirk offered last week:
“You have to try to point them towards ultimate purposes and towards getting back to the church, getting back to faith, getting married, having children...I'm trying to paint a picture of virtue of lifting people up, not just staying angry,” Charlie Kirk said last week. Now he is dead, assassinated on a college campus.
“Events change things,” he added, citing other headlines in the day-plus leading up to Kirk’s killing and the same moniker sadly applied to those murdered on 9/11.
Noting he didn’t “always agree or see eye to eye” with Kirk, Erickson praised him for the “pattern I recognize from my own life, as he got older, got married, and had kids, he matured and became less brash and more contemplative,” “calling people to the church than to politics,” and urging young people to get married and have children.
He then pivoted to the media, specifically ripping MSNBC “as an assassination fan fiction network” with their “commentary rang[ing] from Kirk bringing this on himself to suggesting perhaps the bullet came from a Kirk fan celebrating,” he said.
More broadly, he noted the double standard even despite assassination attempts on Trump, the Scalise shooting, and the attempted hit on the Family Research Council: “[W]hen someone on the left acts out violently, the progressive American press, Democrats, the cultural elite, and Hollywood always find an excuse to say it was not them.”
Erickson later concluded with that call for Christians to embrace God’s teachings: “To my Christian friends, loving your neighbor is not easy. Neither is doing to others what you’d have them do to you when they do not reciprocate. But these are the things the people of God must do. When those who'd divide us call us to hate, the people of God can be the light by showing His love.”
In an X post Thursday morning, he elaborated and called out “professing Christians” for “pronouncing ‘you don’t hate them enough’” in referenced to the left. He conceded that’s true for some on the left, but reminded Christ followers that our faith “conquered the world by being the opposite of worldly hate and I don't think now is a good time to give that up.”
He continued:
People on the left often tell us we cannot love the sinner without also loving their sin. Now, some in the church are claiming we need to hate both the sin and the sinner...Being a light in an increasingly dark world and drawing others to us will be more effective than reciprocating...The world says to seek retribution. Faith says to let Christ take care of retribution. You love God and your neighbor. This problem we face is bigger than you. It is not bigger than God. So be wary of those who call you away from our better angels. It is what this evil wants.
He doubled down an hour later, declaring “what is good is engaging in debate” plus “[f]ighting for the law, order, and justice” because “fighting the same way the left fights is not how you beat the left.”