In the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination and memorial service, I’ve thought a lot about what Americans have endured over the past five or so years.
In January 2021, things looked quite bleak. Joe Biden’s suspicious victory was confirmed, the Jan. 6 protest turned into a disaster for conservatives, and it looked like leftism’s rolling revolution would keep steamrolling all of us.
Christians and conservatives could have easily thrown in the towel and swallowed the black pill. We could have waved the white flag of surrender in the culture war. Instead, we did something I don’t think the left really expected: We fought back.
We fought back hard. And we fought to win, even though it looked like a lost cause. We have lived out that wonderful line from G. K. Chesterton: “The one perfectly divine thing, the one glimpse of God’s paradise given on earth, is to fight a losing battle — and not lose it.” That’s what we’ve done. Everything looked lost, we fought back anyway, and we found that we really can turn our country around. We have experienced what many have called a vibe shift.
We’re only in the beginning stages, and there is much more work to be done. Every victory in the culture war is fragile, so let no man boast. But this is the point: Just when it looked like the culture war was over and the left could declare total victory, the right staged an astounding comeback. This chapter of our nation’s story will make exciting fodder for historians in the future. The right was a heavy underdog but pulled off a huge upset. No one knows what the future holds, but there are countless reasons for optimism right now.
Today’s political right is far from perfect. Every political movement has its flaws and its riffraff. See, for example, David’s band of outlaws who joined his movement in the wilderness in 1 Samuel 22. That’s true of our movement too. But the quality of leadership, the widespread respect for the Bible and the church, and the kind of cultural and political discussions taking place on the right, such as overturning Obergefell and outlawing pornography, are in sharp contrast to the explicit “celebration” of perversion and the total lack of leadership in the Democrat Party.
The differences really could not be more stark. The left has no vision for the country and no love for America and her heritage. They want to drive God and prayer out of public life. Democrats are all about promoting sexual deviance and the coming climate catastrophe, and they endlessly accuse normal, decent people of being racists, bigots, and fascists. The radical left supports things like government-run grocery stores (like that’s never been tried!) and the use of political violence, including mobs, riots, and shootings.
While the left claims to be the side of peace, tolerance, and open-mindedness, this is just one more example of how they invert reality. In truth, they’re prone to violence, hatred, and ideological dogmatism. Democrats represent the party of death (more than 60 million abortions and counting) and darkness of mind (not even knowing what a woman is). The left embraces identity politics and analyzes every relationship through a Marxist lens that always finds a guilty oppressor and an innocent victim. Thus, they pervert justice.
For these reasons and more, many Americans have realized the left simply cannot and must not be trusted with political power ever again. It’s simply too dangerous. The two sides of the political spectrum are further apart than at any time in our nation’s history, including the War Between the States, when at least both sides professed to worship the same God.
But the contrast of right versus left is not the only one worth noting. The right of 2025 is significantly different from the right of previous generations — and this is really the key to the vibe shift. While yesterday’s right settled for participation trophies, today’s right fights back and fights to win.
This is why today’s right is so much more potent than in the past. We are, in many ways, better historically informed, more widely grounded in the Christian faith (as seen in Charlie Kirk’s memorial service), and more willing to actually fight back instead of getting steered and manipulated by the left’s false accusations. And now that Democrats’ name-calling is no longer working, the party’s total lack of substance is being fully exposed. The left is morally and intellectually bankrupt. Meanwhile, the right has a treasure of riches from which to draw. While the left has no real viable leadership, the right has both stars and a deep bench.
Charlie Kirk deserves a lot of credit for the changes taking place, especially among young men. Kirk’s ministry and martyrdom likely cemented a whole generation of men to the right. His role in the 2024 election cannot be overstated, and he is a perfect illustration of how the right has become resilient and savvy.
Most importantly, Kirk presented a fully integrated worldview at just the time when many Big Eva-type leaders were telling us we needed to go silent on political and culture war issues for the sake of evangelism. Kirk took the opposite approach, constantly mixing evangelism and politics, and it paid huge dividends. He connected dots between his faith and his politics in ways many pastors refuse to do. He proved that fighting the culture war and evangelizing the lost go hand in hand, and he used culture war issues to gain a platform for the gospel.
Kirk showed how the Christian faith answers not just the “How do I get my sins forgiven?” question, but all the other major cultural and political questions of our day. He could move seamlessly from talking about Jesus as the only way of salvation to talking about the importance of marriage, the wisdom of the Second Amendment, and the reasons for limited government. In Kirk’s on-campus apologetics, as well as in his personal and political life, everything was integrated under Christ’s lordship.
May God give us more like Charlie Kirk. I trust He will. And if He does, the vibe will keep shifting.