Oft Evil Will Shall Evil Mar
Charlie Kirk’s Assassination and a New Great Awakening

The title to this essay is a line from Tolkien. But I’m also reminded of two distinct lines from Star Wars, paired:

If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

I dunno, I can imagine an awful lot.

Charlie Kirk was a powerful force. He went from campus to campus and he talked to people. Generally when he was debating, he would put his microphone down, to reassure his partner that he wasn’t going to talk over them. He was respectful, and he was highly effective. He played a major role in winning over Gen Z to the conservative side. That’s why he was killed — murdered. He was murdered not because he was “hateful,” or “extreme,” but because he was effective.

But now, even dead, he’s beating them, worse than he ever did when he was alive.

For all the fear of “Christian Nationalism,” a shallow, largely fictitious bogeyman for years, the murder of Charlie Kirk has effectively called it into being as a force.

(Ron Coleman, by the way, is an observant Jew.)

Trump couldn’t, and wouldn’t, have called Christian Nationalism into being himself. (Though, to be honest, it’s currently in a form FDR or Truman would have been comfortable with, if not Obama.) But Charlie Kirk’s murderer did. Christianity has historically advanced martyr by martyr. The way to kill Christianity is to ignore it. But the left can’t do that, of all things.

For one thing, leftism has the instinct to extirpate all potential rival power centers. And at a more fundamental level, since leftism was (to invoke Tolkien again) created in mockery of Christianity, as the Orcs were created in mockery of the Elves, there’s a fundamental hatred there that can’t be tamped down for long.

That hatred isn’t really returned by its objects. But if you get people’s attention, well, you may not like what comes next.

Why are they afraid? Erica Kirk today offered forgiveness.

Her full eulogy is here. On the other hand:

Forgiveness doesn’t mean avoidance of responsibility, or of consequences in this world.

But the real — and most hated — consequence won’t be FBI raids, and RICO prosecutions against the leftist groups that organize and finance terror, though those are likely to happen. It will likely be in another Great Awakening. There have already been signs of a religious revival among the young, both here and even in Europe. My University of Tennessee colleague Rosalind Hackett has been predicting for some time that the big religious force of the 21st Century is going to be militant Christianity, not militant Islam.

Tyler Robinson played a major part in helping to move that prediction closer to reality. I hope he reflects on that, in whatever time he has left.