John Stonestreet – Page 4

The Assassination of Charlie Kirk: Guest Column

Sep 19, 2025John StonestreetCulture, In MemoriamCurrent Events

*Above: Charlie Kirk speaks in Fayetteville, Arkansas. (File Photo: 2022)*

Unsurprisingly, on September 11, 2001, I wept. I also wept, unexpectedly, on September 11, 2011. Perhaps it was delayed grief, but mostly, it was a delayed realization. Sitting that Sunday morning with my young daughters, only 6, 4, and 2 at the time, it struck me how different their world was from the one I wanted for them.

The same sense struck this week, on September 10. The assassination of Charlie Kirk seems to mark a new era, a world no one wants but may very well be here. Calling the murder a “tragedy for all of us,” U.K. comedian and commentator Konstantin Kisin wrote:

I hope I’m wrong. But tonight feels like some sort of invisible line has been crossed that we didn’t even know was there. … [T]o murder a young father simply for doing debates and mobilising young people to vote for a party that represents half of America? This is something else.

Charlie’s death is a tragedy for his wife, his children and his family. I don’t pray often. I am praying for them tonight. But I fear his murder will be a tragedy for all of us in ways we will only understand as time unfolds.

I hope I’m wrong. I fear I’m not.

Kisin is not wrong about lines being crossed, though the Christian must not fear. We must, however, squarely face the sober realities of this moment.

Kirk’s murder followed another this week, in Charlotte, of a young woman from Ukraine riding a public train. Iryna Zarutska was stabbed by a man who should have been in prison or at least institutionalized, and she was then left to die by people too engrossed in their screens to notice or too jaded to care. Together, these atrocities reveal realities about our culture and how it has shaped those within it that many will find unthinkable. But we had better think about it anyway.

Zarutska’s killer is a terrible example of the mental and social brokenness that permeates modern life. The bystanders who did not come to her defense or to her aid are, like the social media commenters and media personalities who callously commented on Kirk’s assassination, examples of the rabid and pervasive dehumanization that infects the Western world.

In a recent Breakpoint commentary, released prior to the atrocities of this week, Abdu Murray argued that this “post-truth world that elevates feelings and preferences above facts and truth has collapsed the distinction between a person’s ideas and their identity. And so, the social erasure of cancel culture has calcified into something darker.” That something darker, he argued, is “assassination culture.” He continued, “Unmoored from that objective standard for human value, we have made gods of ourselves and therefore justify eradicating any who dare to have other gods before us.”

This is precisely what Os Guinness warned of in the new film Truth Rising, that the West is squandering a unique heritage. A civilization built upon the ideal of human dignity, with a mixed and troubled history of working out that ideal, has now replaced it with something else. But racialized, sexualized, and politicized conceptions of human dignity only produce victims.

George Orwell is often credited as saying, “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Charlie Kirk was a committed truth teller, with a remarkable gift for exposing and answering deceit. And yet, as he did this, he treated the deceived with the dignity they had as image bearers of their Creator, recognizing that they too were victims of their own bad ideas.

There is a cost to telling the truth. Our Lord has told us to count this cost. If Kisin is indeed correct, that cost is higher than we have imagined. This is indeed a civilizational moment. It is to this moment that we have been called as His people. As His people, we know that this moment is not some fatalistic inevitability, nor does it determine or define the Story of which we are part.

In a video circulating on social media, Charlie is asked why he went on campuses to talk with and try to persuade those who disagree with him. Charlie responded, “Because when people stop talking, that’s when violence happens.” It was a prophetic moment, but Kirk also demonstrated that we need not accept that. He showed that the conversation can be had; that it must be had. He showed that the truth still wins hearts and minds, and that lies can be opposed. And that it can all be done with a big smile.

It takes courage to tell the truth and to, as Paul wrote, “regard no one from a worldly point of view.” As Murray wrote, only the “ancient biblical truth about what it means to be human can heal our contemporary malady.”

It can be healed. This is not wishful thinking. This is the hope Christ secured for us all. As the banner on the Turning Point USA website proclaims, Charlie Kirk has been “received into the merciful arms of our loving Savior, who suffered and died for Charlie.”

Guest Column: Where Do Human Rights Come from, Senator?

Sep 10, 2025John StonestreetCurrent EventsLiberty

Last week, democratic Senator Tim Kaine made this bold statement during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing:

The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government but come from the Creator—that’s what the Iranian government believes. It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities. And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So, the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.

It’s one thing when a progressive media figure says something like this. For example, back in 2024, Politico’s Heidi Przybyla warned that believing human rights “don’t come from Congress, they don’t come from the Supreme Court, they come from God,” makes one a Christian nationalist! Even so, it’s another thing altogether when a sitting U.S. Senator and former vice-presidential candidate claims that this fundamental Christian belief is indistinguishable from Islamic fundamentalists.

Kaine’s comments were quickly condemned by fellow Senators and religious commentators for, among other things, rejecting the words of the Declaration of Independence. The Senator also failed to realize that his own belief, that rights come from government, is what every communist, fascist, and totalitarian regime in history believed. Still, the first part of the Senator’s claim is not fully wrong.

The Mullahs in Iran, like all committed Muslims, believe that human rights come from God. So do Christians. But that is where the similarities end. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has lived in cultures rooted in both Islamic and Christian notions of human rights, says in the new film Truth Rising, “You don’t have to imagine how life would be under Islam. … All you have to do is go to any of these places that Western Civilization has barely touched, and the education you’ll get is much better than Harvard.”

In fact, though Muslims and Christians agree that our rights come from God, they hold widely diverging views about what those rights are, how those rights should be understood, and how the government should recognize and enforce human rights. That’s because Muslims and Christians hold fundamentally different and conflicting ideas about who God is and who humans are.

As Ayaan Hirsi Ali also points out in Truth Rising, the God of Islam reveals only his will and demands our submission to it. The true God has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ and offers freedom. The Christian God created humans in His own image. He “determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, [so] that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.” Not only does God want to be known, He made humans in such a way as to know Him. Islam refers to God as love but then reveals him to be vindictive and cruel.

According to Islam, humans have not fallen. According to Christianity, humans are sinful, having inherited a fallen nature from our first parents. If humans are inherently ordered toward sin and evil, then a government run by humans will be prone to abuse its citizens. Thus, it must be ordered toward preserving those rights which God has ordained. In an Islamic society, humans are not seen as bearing God’s image and need only be forced into submission by the state, which is inseparable from the religion.

And so, in practice, Islam looks far more like the totalitarian governments that think of human rights like Senator Kaine does. If humans do not have intrinsic dignity as individuals, individuals must be, at times, sacrificed on the altar of the state or the collective. In just the twentieth century alone, Josef Stalin oversaw the executions of 800,000 perceived political opponents in the Soviet Union, and many put the overall death toll of his policies at 20 million. In China under Mao Zedong, 15 to 45 million people were slaughtered. Cambodia under Pol Pot and Germany must also be put on this same list. Whenever and wherever human rights are attributed to the government, they are trampled. As Chuck Colson often said, “If government thinks they can grant rights, then they can also take them away.”

The very idea that humans have rights that transcend class and sex, tribe and nation, to the very individual, has had a singular source in history. In his book, A Brief History of Thought, the atheist French philosopher Luc Ferry identified that source:

“Christianity was to introduce the notion that humans were equal in dignity, an unprecedented idea at the time and one to which our world owes its entire democratic inheritance.”

The Demand for Death in Canada Grows: Guest Column

Sep 5, 2025John StonestreetEuthanasia and Assisted SuicideAssisted Suicide, Euthanasia, Life, Pro-life, Sanctity of Human Life

According to a recent article in The Atlantic, assisted suicide is now so popular in Canada that doctors cannot keep up with the demand. Appropriately titled Canada is Killing Itself, the article described how Medical Assistance in Dying (or MAiD), passed just 10 years ago, now accounts for about one in 20 deaths in Canada. That number is more than the total number of combined deaths from Alzheimer’s and diabetes, and it surpasses many countries where assisted dying has been legal for far longer. The shortage of “care” is not due to a lack of interest from medical professionals. Doctors are in fact flocking to join what the Atlantic article called “the world’s fastest-growing euthanasia regime.”

For example, Dr. Stefanie Green, a founder of the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers, traded in her decades-long practice as a maternity doctor to end lives. Both kinds of medicine, she told The Atlantic, are “deliveries.” Some doctors have reported euthanizing hundreds of patients and yet, the demand exceeds the supply.

Canada’s Parliament legalized MAiD in 2016, promising increased autonomy and decreased suffering. Instead, the practice has corrupted medicine, threatened conscience rights, pressured the vulnerable, and expanded the culture of death. As the American Medical Association’s official opinion articulates, “Euthanasia is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control, and would pose serious societal risks.” That’s especially true in single-payer health care systems like Canada has. Eventually, the decision of who should live and who should die will be determined by financial realities, justified by arbitrary ideas about “quality of life.”

In fact, whenever and wherever it is legalized, the so-called “right” to die soon becomes a perceived “duty to die.” Though patients are promised “death with dignity” and an end to unnecessary suffering, patients consistently report not wanting to be “a burden” on friends or family. Many are convinced, as law and disability professor Theresia Degener described, “a life with disability is automatically less worth living and that in some cases, death is preferable.” 

Despite what Canadian officials have claimed, there are no effective “safeguards.” A report last year in the New Atlantis noted hundreds of serious violations of regulations in just the Ontario province, and none have been reported to law enforcement. Although Ontario Chief Coroner Dirk Huyer boasted, “Every case is reported. Everybody has scrutiny on all these cases,” physician whistleblowers identified over 400 “issues with compliance.” These range from patients killed who were not capable of consent to communication breakdowns with pharmacists providing the deadly prescriptions. For example, only 61% of physicians notify pharmacists about the purpose of the euthanasia medications prior to dispensation, as required.

Even more troubling are reported cases of providers expediting euthanizing drugs to patients sooner than the legally required 10-day waiting period. In one case, euthanasia provider Dr. Eugenie Tjan administered the wrong drugs. When the patient did not die, the doctor had to administer different drugs to complete the assisted suicide. Huyer failed to report this, eventually admitting this was a “blatant” case of violating Canadian laws: “The family and the deceased person suffered tremendously.”

Also, according to the report, about one quarter of all euthanasia providers in Ontario were notified by the coroner’s office of a compliance issue in 2023 alone. National law states that all reports should lead to criminal investigations, but Huyer failed to report even one. Instead, he determined that all issues in question required only an “informal conversation” with the practitioner. Dr. Tjan, for example, received an email of warning and remains licensed.

To call this a “slippery slope” is an understatement. MAiD began as a practice limited to gravely ill patients at the end of life. The law has already expanded to include people suffering from serious medical conditions but not facing imminent death. MAiD will soon be available to those suffering only from mental illness. Parliament has also recommended granting access to minors.

Assisted suicide is not a medical practice. Rather, it is a practice that corrupts medicine, risks abuse, and erodes public trust. The best-case scenario at this point is that Canada becomes a deterrent for the rest of the world, and that Christians there demonstrate courage in how they live and how they die.