Current Events – Family Council

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.”

Outsourcing Discernment in An Age of Mass Information: Guest Column

Oct 14, 2024John StonestreetCurrent EventsCurrent Events, News

Elon Musk recently found himself fighting the government of Brazil after his X social media platform was briefly banned there. Ironically, the censorship was marketed as a defense of democracy, i.e. the government “graciously” stepping in to save the people and the voting process from harmful disinformation.

Of course, claims of disinformation is a common tactic often employed by the powerful to silence critics. Once limits are placed on what can be written and spoken, many other liberties are at risk. Indeed, there are real dangers of an unchecked flood of information, too. In the introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman described this tension by comparing Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984:

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

In the end, the explosion of information everywhere, all the time, has made us believe everything and nothing at all.

And our reputation precedes us. There’s been understandable concern about Russian interference in the last few U.S. Elections, but their strategy reveals as much about us as it does them. Imagine a group of operatives from Moscow planning and scheming how to dismantle America, and finally one of them announces, “I’ve got it! Memes! We’ll use memes to interfere with their democracy.”

Of course, it’s far more serious and strategic than that. In fact, it’s even more troubling how the interference from our international enemies resembles so closely the behavior of social media giants like Facebook and legacy media outlets. Shutting down conversations they don’t like and highlighting narratives they do is not the free exchange of information.

Over 30 years ago in First Things, C. John Sommerville wrote an article entitled “Why the News Makes Us Dumb.” His answer was that the very idea of “news,” as the name suggests, prioritizes novelty. To stay in business, the media “have to make each day’s report seem important, and you do this primarily by reducing the importance of its context.”

If we read philosophy, history, science, theology—regularly—we would be able to make much better sense of the day’s events. But we don’t. We’re too busy to manage anything but the News.

Sommerville wrote this before the internet was much of a thing and social media even existed. At the time, he was complaining about archaic things called “newspapers,” but his concerns proved prophetic. If people were “too busy to manage” one daily news reading back then, how can we possibly make sense of news firing at us all the time and from every direction now? The answer is, we don’t. In fact, many don’t even try. We prefer our “news” pre-digested and delivered to our feeds. In other words, we have outsourced the hard work of discernment to others.

Two-thirds of Americans get at least some of their news from social media, especially Facebook. Nearly three-quarters of X users rely on that platform for news. When Americans say they rely on “multiple sources,” they typically mean multiple social media sites, not a combination of traditional media and social media sites, or sources from multiple perspectives.

If Americans weren’t regularly reading “philosophy, history, science, theology” in 1991, it’s even worse today. In 1990, 16% of Americans hadn’t read a single book in the previous year. In 2015, it was 27%. Last year, it was 65%. Most of what was read isn’t helpful anyway. According to USA Today, between 1993 and 2013, the best seller lists were dominated by self-help and young-adult fiction. Today, people are mostly just reading their phones.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman presciently warned of a “vast descent into triviality.” Christians, because they believe that Christ is the truth and the Word, should always prioritize discernment, but especially in the information age. Otherwise, we risk being tools in somebody else’s arsenal.

The Attempted Assassination of a President: Guest Column

Jul 17, 2024John StonestreetCurrent EventsCurrent Events, Trump

Saturday marked the end of the longest span between domestic assassination attempts of U.S. presidents and presidential candidates since President Lincoln was killed at Ford’s Theatre in 1865. President Garfield was killed in 1881; Mckinley in 1901. Attempts were made at Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, and Truman in 1950. President JFK was killed in 1963 and candidate RFK in 1968. Candidate George Wallace was shot and survived in 1972, and two attempts were made at President Ford in 1975. The most recent domestic assassination attempt prior to Saturday was over forty years ago, when Ronald Reagan was shot and survived, and afterward quipped to his wife Nancy, “Honey, I forgot to duck.”

While the frequency of this violent history may be surprising, it does not diminish the horrific and evil nature of Saturday’s shooting nor the tremendous loss experienced by the family of Corey Comperatore. According to the New York Times, Comperatore died when he “threw himself over his family members to shield them.”

A former fire chief, Comperatore was also, according to his daughter,

[T]he best dad a girl could ever ask for. My sister and I never needed for anything. You call, he would answer. … [H]e could talk and make friends with anyone, which he was doing all day (at the rally) and loved every minute of it. He was a man of God, loved Jesus fiercely, and also looked after our church and our members as family.

Questions abound about this attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, from the motivations of the shooter to the seemingly unfathomable reality that the 20-year-old was able to reach an elevated position with direct line-of-sight only 130 yards or so from the President. There’s also the many “what might have been” questions, about the President personally and about the nation, questions that have only shudder-inducing speculative answers. And there are the worldview questions that arise in historic moments like this, about the reality of God and the role of divine providence in national and international affairs; and about the human condition, especially the frailty of life and the moral significance of our actions.

As Dr. Al Mohler helpfully articulated in The Briefing, “[L]ife and death can come down to the matter of seconds and to a matter of a millimeter.” The former president seems to also recognize that his survival was due to that level of precision, acknowledging to the New York Post, “I’m not supposed to be here. … By luck or by God, many people are saying it’s by God I’m still here.”

That it is by God and not luck, Christians know for sure (and it seems, so does the President). At the same time, this clear teaching of Scripture, that God oversees the affairs of men particularly in raising up and casting down those in power, is not easy to understand. Why would God spare the President’s life but not Mr. Comperatore? By all indications, Mr. Trump turned his head to a chart on a screen and was somehow saved. Mr. Comperatore made the decision to throw himself between his family and an assassin, and it cost him his life. How does that make any sense?

“Here,” Mohler continued, “Christians understand we have nowhere to go but the Doctrine of Providence. … It is essential to our Christian understanding of the world.” God’s providence extends to every moment of human history, not just the seemingly exceptional ones. The world is never outside of His control, even when the outcome is not as we hoped. Put differently, the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 was providential for both England and Spain. The fog that enabled the Dunkirk rescue was providential for the British, the Germans, and the entire world.

And yet, just as essential to the Christian understanding of the world is the moral capacity of human beings and the meaningfulness of human actions. A Hindu leader once noted to theologian and missionary Lesslie Newbigin,

I find in your Bible a unique interpretation of universal history, the history of the whole of creation and the history of the human race. And therefore, a unique interpretation of the human person as a responsible actor in history. That is unique. There is nothing else in the whole religious literature of the world to put alongside it.

There is no conflict between God’s sovereignty and man’s moral responsibility. In fact, the alternatives would be far worse. If no sovereign God exists, then life and all that happens is random and meaningless, except for some preferred interpretation we choose to impose on it. If all is predetermined, either by “nature” or by some heartless deity, we have no cause to expect better behavior of ourselves or others. The meaningfulness of our actions and the constant presence and oversight of our loving Creator may be difficult to reconcile, but it is a far better scenario.

Thus we can say, both truthfully and meaningfully, that God graciously spared the former president, that the shooter’s actions were evil and heinous, and that Mr. Comperatore was heroic to protect his family. We can also, truthfully and meaningfully, judge the words and the actions of ourselves, our leaders, and our press in response to this tragedy. We can act so that, by God’s grace, this kind of thing will not become normal. We can pray that, having lived through this attempt on his life, President Trump is brought to a place of gratitude to God and a sense of responsibility, rather than to a sense of entitlement. At the same time, we should pray that God’s grace and mercy covers the Comperatore family and that He will use His church to do so.

We should know also that our moral actions matter as well, as citizens and voters who follow Christ. How God’s people respond to this telling and troubling political moment will either point this world to Christ or not. So, here’s a prayer for us all:

O Lord, we beseech thee mercifully to receive the prayers of thy people who call upon thee, and grant that they may both perceive and know what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to fulfill the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

If you’re a fan of Breakpoint, leave a review on your favorite podcast app. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.