Charlie Kirk was shot and killed during a Turning Point USA event at Utah Valley University yesterday. A political assassination by any honest description. Whatever your thought of Charlie’s arguments, this was a heinous murder in front of his family. Officials described a single round fired from a nearby building; Utah’s governor called it a political assassination, and reporting tells us that the manhunt is ongoing.
I’ll be honest, I was sick over this. I don’t know if it’s because he has a young family like I do, or because it was so public and graphic. Maybe it was all of that at once. But whatever the reason, it tore me up. I admired his courage, his willingness to speak hard truth, his unapologetic faith, and his effectiveness as a leader. He mobilized a generation of young conservatives to get off the sidelines and into the arena. That combination of gifts, is so incredibly rare.
The reason I am writing today, though, is what I saw online in the aftermath.
No, this is not about the absolutely ghoulish cheering that came from some popular progressive influencers and other dark corners of the internet. That is awful and I don’t care to waste my time condemning them. If you don’t already hate that, I can’t help.
Instead, I feel compelled to address a different group. I’ll call it the collective middle (center left and right, mostly Christian, some social justice warriors, some never Trumpers). My newsfeed was full of them yesterday all sharing a similar sentiment:
“Remember guys, we even need to love our enemies.”
They said this not to warn conservatives to love the horrible murderer. But instead to try to encourage those darker corners to have a spirit of generosity toward Charlie who they disagreed with on a host of issues: immigration, trans rights, gun issues, etc.
This thin Christian veneer masks a crude unkindness. It hides a certain animus for Charlie, calling him enemy, while virtue signaling a Christian tone by invoking the words of Christ.
People you disagree with can be your opponent, but they are rarely your enemy.
As citizens, we must reserve the label of enemy for truly evil people. Call your neighbor an “enemy,” and it won’t be long before you’ll start imputing evil intent behind every action, you’ll begin justifying extreme means, and you’ll eventually slam the door to reconciliation and unity. Enemies do not treat disagreements as arguments to be won. They see the person across the aisle as someone to be defeated—at all costs.
Once you’ve fully embraced the war-like enemy language, you can expect the labels of “Stalin,” “Mao,” and “Hitler” to begin flying. But the truth is, if you really believed the person across from you was a genocidal lunatic, you’d feel morally licensed (probably obligated) to meet them with force. These overheated metaphors catch fire and soon you are ablaze in violence. Moral of the story: don’t train your conscience (or your audience) to cross that bridge.
Instead, differentiate clearly:
Opposition are people who cast ballots differently than you, read the Constitution differently than you, or believe different policies will solve our problems. Opponents deserve our best arguments and at times they should see our righteous anger. But they also deserve the dignity of being labeled correctly.
Enemies on the other hand, are those who wage war on innocents and rejoice in the culture of death: the people who fly planes into buildings; the man who slashes a refugee’s throat on a train; or the person who murdered Charlie.
If we cannot tell the difference, what happens?
When we let an opponent descend into a dehumanized caricature (something we should reserve only for the truly heinous) we stop hoping for their redemption and stop working for reconciliation. Sometimes, yes, it becomes necessary to properly name an enemy and protect the innocent. But that shift must be reserved for clear, radical evil.
Charlie Kirk was most certainly not that radically evil person.
If you insist that he was, you are trading away the possibility of reconciliation with an enormous share of your fellow Americans—and if that’s our posture, the future is bleak.
It doesn’t have to be. We can argue hard and still keep space for persuasion and hope for return. We can call opponents what they are and save enemy for those who celebrate terror and make murder a message. And when real enemies do show up (as they sometimes do) we’ll need each other, shoulder to shoulder, to confront them together.
All good. True. Thank you.