Charlie Kirk’s assassin symbolized a subculture of rebellion found in recent shooters: full of dark, video-gaming, and Satanic themes. Indeed, like the biblical Cain, the assassin took his rage against the moral law to the point of killing one who embodied the ideal of that law.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk is forcing the nation to stop and reflect upon who we are.
It took the shock of a cold-blooded, premeditated murder witnessed by thousands at a campus event and watched by countless millions on social media to get people’s attention.
Thus, the spectacular nature of this killing forces us to look for its deeper meaning.
It’s Not About Charlie Kirk
Many people have tried to reduce the debate to the person of Charlie Kirk and his positions. He was indeed an inspiring conservative leader, not without controversy. However, his murder was something bigger.
It was not about Charlie Kirk. It was about what he represented. It was also not only about the murder suspect, Tyler Robinson, but what he, too, represented.
We saw a dramatic clash of symbols and models. The two figures represented the sides of a conflict now writ large in a polarized America. We must now choose which way we want to go.
Liberals hate to divide things into two opposing sides, dismissing it as an oversimplification. Nothing, they claim categorically, is so black and white. However, by definition, any polarized nation must have two sides. This division reflects the tragic reality confirmed by the events in Utah.
Charles Kirk and Tyler Robinson as Man-Symbols
Like it or not, Charlie Kirk was a man-symbol. That is to say, he represented much more than the positions he held or the person he was. Symbols transcend shortcomings or personal idiosyncrasies. As a symbol, he proposed an ideal for America.
Charlie Kirk was your archetypal all-American boy. He was good-natured, clean-cut, polite, frank, and manly. His behavior was governed by a profound respect for a moral law and a strong faith in God. He symbolized what might be called the “Ten Commandments American,” an ideal that holds that everyone should try to live under the mantle of God’s law, motivated by love for our Creator.
On the other hand, Tyler Robinson was also a man-symbol that transcended his person and opinions. As someone reported to have been living in a relationship with a man “transitioning” to a woman, he would be the first to admit that he represented an opposing archetype, one with no regard for God’s moral law. His ideal was a regime of absolute license, with no limits for anyone, except for those Americans who proclaim the existence of God, His higher law and humanity’s need for limits.
He symbolized a subculture of rebellion found in recent shooters: full of dark, video-gaming, and Satanic themes. Indeed, like the biblical Cain, Tyler took his rage against the moral law to the point of killing one who embodied the ideal of that law. For Cain, it was his brother Abel. For Tyler, it was Charlie Kirk.
The Role of Symbols
Thus, we are engaged in a clash of symbols, good and evil. These symbols are important because they point to ideals toward which people tend. They propose models to be imitated. They make invisible ideals instantly visible, thus moving souls to action and serving as the foundation for models of society.
The radical shock of the Charlie Kirk assassination forces us to consider which symbol should represent America if we are to survive as a nation. It forces us to ask an even more serious question: Are we still one nation?
A Nation as a Source of Unity
Indeed, symbols help generate models for society. In Charlie Kirk’s case, this model was the Christian nation.
A nation has unity. A nation is born when a people coalesces into a clearly distinctive whole. Through a forging process that often involves suffering, the nation forms a cultural, social, economic, and political unity in which the goal is not the individual good of each member but the common good of all.
Saint Augustine once defined a people as “a gathered multitude of rational beings united by agreeing to share the things they love.” The nation gives rise to the State, which orders the common good. Rules like the Ten Commandments and moral customs serve as guardrails that ensure order and freedom. We become capable of sustaining this model when motivated by a love of God that unites us.
Although far from perfect, there was a time when America was a Christian nation and enjoyed this unity. This model of a Ten Commandments America is undoubtedly what motivated Charlie Kirk.
A Meeting Place of Individual Wills
There is another model of organizing society, contrary to Saint Augustine’s model of loving ideals together. It celebrates disunity and maximum individualism as the most complete expression of freedom and self-realization.
This model forms not a nation but a collection of individuals gathered solely for the pursuit of their own interests. It resembles a co-op, a stockholding company in which each investor disregards the other and is concerned only with his self-interest and profits. Each personal interest, no matter how bizarre, is equal to any other.
In this model, society is reduced to what philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre called “nothing but a meeting place for individual wills, each with its own set of attitudes and preferences and who understand that world solely as an arena for the achievement of their own satisfaction, who interpret reality as a series of opportunities for their enjoyment.”
Today, this model reaches the point of obsession. Cooperation is a mere tool for survival. The New York Times quotes presidential biographer Jon Meacham as saying he hoped the Kirk murder would not lead to revenge but “remind us that we have to be able to live with people whose opinions we despise without resorting to violence.”
This anomalous state of things cannot be our goal. We no longer have the guardrails or moral laws that kept order in Saint Augustine’s notion of a people.
What we have instead is the maddened impetus of enslaving passions. Thus, mixing people who despise each other’s opinions is a recipe for violence. Moreover, a state of things where co-existing hatreds are celebrated is not a description of a society but an insane asylum, where the norm is violence that overseers and social workers must constantly suppress.
The Liberal Compromise
For a long time, liberalism tried to navigate between the remnants of Christian society found in Saint Augustine’s model and modernity, which unleashed unbridled license in the name of freedom. Liberalism turned moral values into personal opinions and banished God from the public square. It hoped to appease the forces of chaos with a gradual descent into nihilism.
Charlie Kirk’s death proved to America that this appeasement has not worked. We have reached the extreme point of our liberalism where the rage of unbridled passion calls for the suppression of ordered liberty, moral law and Faith. There is no going back.
We must choose between two symbols and their respective social models. Will America seek a condition where we celebrate hating each other’s loves? Or will she be a nation where people look beyond self-interest and celebrate the things they love together?
How we resolve this conflict in the soul of America will determine if the nation is now at a turning point or a breaking point.
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The featured image, uploaded by Gage Skidmore, is “Charlie Kirk speaking with attendees at the 2025 Student Action Summit at the Tampa Convention Center in Tampa, Florida.” This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.