The Mourning After

I didn’t know what to say at first.

When the news of Charlie Kirk’s assassination hit, it didn’t land like a political headline. It hit like a gut punch. A holy silence filled my heart. One that demanded space before I could respond. Not the silence of fear or avoidance, but a silence that asked for reverence, reflection, and truth.

What do you say when someone is murdered for speaking?

What do you say when freedom of speech, a foundation so core to the identity of this nation, becomes the very reason someone loses their life?

We’re not talking about ideological warfare anymore.

We’re talking about blood on the ground. In front of his family. In broad daylight. For speaking.

And what followed broke me.

There were people online, human beings made in the image of God, cheering. Celebrating. Laughing. Saying things like “He was the nice one. Now you have the rest of us to deal with.” People weaponizing his death for agendas instead of mourning the soul that left this earth. I refuse to call them left or right, liberal or conservative. I stopped caring about what ‘side’ you’re on a long time ago because being pitted against one another is like the gladiators of Rome, the Slaves of Early America, and men vs. women. 

One side is not worse or better, we’re all one in our humanity.

Where was the grief?

Where was the pause?

Where was the human reaction to the loss of a life?

It was as if a light went out.  Not the flicker of a candle in a storm, but the sudden extinguishing of a bare bulb in a quiet room. One moment, it burned with the unmistakable glow of conviction, clarity, and uncomfortable truth. And in the next, darkness.

Not the kind of darkness that blinds you, but the kind that makes you remember what the light looked like. What it stood for. What it illuminated.

When someone dies for speaking,  whether you agreed with the words or not, it's as though that little bulb, the one we always imagine above someone's head in the cartoons when they’ve had a brilliant idea is shattered. Not just turned off. Broken.

The room is left in silence.
And we are left to decide:
Will we pretend there was never light there at all?
Or will we sit in that silence long enough to grieve what we’ve lost, and find the courage to light another one?

The Echoing Chamber and the Trigger

He was 22 years old.

The one who pulled the trigger, who shattered lives, silenced a voice, and changed the trajectory of a nation, was barely old enough to rent a car. His brain wasn’t even fully formed. Science tells us the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for reasoning, impulse control, and long-term planning, doesn’t fully develop until around age 25.

And yet here he stood, a weapon of destruction. Not born evil, but slowly, systematically shaped by echo chambers of hatred and confirmation bias. Fed by algorithmic puppeteers and ideological whisperers who told him: you’re right. You’re brave. You’re doing something important.

What they handed him wasn’t truth.
It was a lie, sharpened into a blade.
And he believed it.
He believed it so deeply that he was willing to kill for it.

He will now carry the unbearable weight of that moment for the rest of his life. No courtroom verdict can share that burden. The machinations of evil that seduced him into action will not serve his sentence. He alone will sit in the wreckage of the life he took and the innocence he lost.

That is the cost of deception.
The cost of indoctrination.
The cost of living in echo chambers where no dissent is allowed, no empathy is offered, and no grace is given.

He was only 22.
He had the potential for redemption.
He could have been reached.
But no one did.

This does not excuse what he did. There is no excuse.

But there is a warning. A clarion call.

When we allow ourselves to see our neighbor only as the enemy,
When we let confirmation bias replace critical thought,
When we mistake our righteous anger as permission to dehumanize,
we become participants in building the world that made this tragedy possible.

Let it never be said of us again.

When Speech Costs a Soul

Let’s talk plainly. Free speech is messy. It means people are allowed to say things you don’t like. It means people can offend you, challenge you, disagree, and yes, even be wrong.

But when someone is killed for words, we are no longer discussing the First Amendment. We are discussing the fall of moral civilization.

There is no such thing as "hate speech" that isn't protected by the First Amendment. You don’t get to carve out exceptions for ideas you dislike. Once we allow that and justify violence based on disagreement, we are no longer a free people. We are captives to the tyranny of subjective offense.

And that is where the Church needs to rise.

Because Christians have known this pain for millennia.

We have brothers and sisters in Christ across the world right now who are being tortured, imprisoned, and murdered for saying the name Jesus. For handing out Bibles. For daring to believe in a God who saves.

We are witnessing modern-day martyrs. And yet somehow, we’ve normalized the idea that violence is acceptable in response to words.

God Shows No Favoritism

The Lord brought me to Galatians 5:1 in the days after Charlie’s murder:

“For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”

There is no peace without freedom and there is no justice without truth.

I used to believe I had to earn my place. I bowed to every rule and bore every label, just to be accepted. I let others define me, diminish me, and dictate who I could be. That was slavery, not to Christ, but to shame.

But the cross didn’t invite us into submission to men. It invited us into freedom with God.

And freedom doesn’t come from outrage or revenge.
It doesn’t come from cheering the death of someone we disagree with.

That is bondage. That is a lie.

And it’s the same lie that tells us someone like Charlie Kirk deserved to die because we disagreed with him.

That’s not justice. That’s not moral. That’s not of God.

That is the flesh. That is evil calling itself virtuous.

We are called to peace with God through Jesus Christ. Not through man-made rules. Not through political echo chambers. And certainly not through hatred disguised as righteousness.

The Danger of a Soundbite Soul

The scariest thing in the aftermath of Charlie’s death was how many people had never really listened to him.

They judged him on 8-second TikTok clips, sliced and diced to fit a narrative. They never heard him speak about the importance of family, of strong communities, of loving your neighbor while telling the truth. They never heard his testimony of faith or his call to integrity.

They saw a caricature. And they celebrated a coffin. They used it to say they could sink to their lowest character by calling for justice in the name of violence.

That’s the danger of bigotry. It doesn’t only apply to one side of the aisle. You can hate the haters and still be consumed by hate. You can “stand against fascism” and become a fascist of ideas. You can cheer for a murder and call yourself a justice warrior. You can justify trying to scorch the earth in response to someone else doing that.

But Jesus sees the heart.

And He knows the difference.

We Are Not Opposing Sides. We Are One in Our Humanity

Somewhere along the way, we stopped seeing each other as neighbors, friends, or fellow human beings. Instead, we’ve allowed ourselves to be labeled: left or right, red or blue, this side or that one. It’s as though we’ve forgotten that we all have skin in the game and that we're all trying to move forward with dignity, peace, acceptance, and love.

We were never meant to be pitted against each other like gladiators in Rome, slaves torn apart in early America, or men and women drawn into endless division. When we see our fellow man as the “enemy” rather than someone just like us who is

Hurting        Hoping        Trying

we become easy to manipulate. We become pawns in someone else’s game.

That’s exactly what’s happening when people weaponize Charlie Kirk’s death for their agenda. They’re not mourning the soul that left this earth. They’re not contemplating the weight of such a public and devastating loss of life. They’re using his death like a blunt instrument, either to score points or stir up outrage.

But I stopped caring what side you’re on a long time ago.

Because when we spend more time defending our camp than defending each other’s right to live, to speak, to breathe, we’ve lost the plot. If we can’t look at another human being and grieve for the extinguished light of their life, regardless of whether we agreed with their politics, then we’ve allowed hatred to rot our empathy.

One side isn’t better. One side isn’t worse. We are all one in our humanity.

And we must remember that before we tear ourselves apart beyond repair.

A Call to the Peacemakers

If you’re reading this and you disagreed with Charlie Kirk, it’s okay. That doesn’t make you a bad person.

But take time to ask yourself: Did I celebrate his death? Did I feel a sense of vindication? Did I justify it?

And if so, why?

What does that say about the condition of your soul?

If you’re a believer, let me remind you of this: We are not called to be liked. We are called to be light.

So be the one who stands in the middle and says, “This isn’t right.” Be the one who refuses to dehumanize anyone. Be the one who demands space for sorrow and chooses not to let hatred hijack your conscience.

Bigotry is not a monopoly. Evil doesn't wear one jersey.

And grace, real holy unflinching grace, requires courage.

Jesus spoke freely. And they killed Him too.

So let us not be shocked when the world hates the truth. But let us grieve, deeply and sincerely, when it hates a man so much that it silences him permanently.

Let us grieve. Let us reflect. And then let us speak.

Because if we don’t…who will?