From Grief to Grit: A Christian Roadmap After Kirk’s Assassination 

I have received more questions about “What can I do?” in the past two days than I have since the contested presidential election in 2020. Multiple friends have called to ask what the next steps are in light of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Let me get right to the point. There are three things.

1. Pursue Virtue

Your first assignment as a Christian man is to pursue a life of faithfulness to your Creator, the Lord Jesus Christ. This is not only what God calls you to, but it is also the example set by Charlie Kirk, who in recent years made sharing the gospel and defending the Christian faith a central part of his public platform. He wanted to be remembered for his faith before anything else. 

If you have not repented of your sins and put your trust in Jesus Christ, now is the time. If you are not living for Christ in your daily life, now is the time. Discipline yourself to live a life that threatens the kingdom of darkness at every level. If you are not actively using the fundamental weapons God gives to every believer—prayer, scripture meditation, and active obedience in your work, church, and family life—it is time to secure that foundation first. 

In case it was not already obvious, sin, the world, and the Devil are waiting to devour you and those you love in countless ways, from the content you consume online to the DEI policies that actively threaten the physical lives of your children, like we recently saw in Charlotte. Your baseline spiritual, mental, and physical health rests on your virtue. The cardinal virtues are bravery, wisdom, courage, and self-control. 

Do not be like the men who talk about wanting to do something good in the world—as long as it is big and important—but never showed the discipline in their personal lives to prove themselves capable of being faithful in little. You will have moments in your life when taking a public stand is necessary, but you must first learn to take a stand in private to be ready for those moments.

2. Pray Imprecatorily

The imprecatory Psalms are often ignored in modern evangelical circles because of their harshness. My friend, Pastor Sean McGowan, has written a short book called Psalms that Curse, attempting to recover the practice of praying these passages as they were meant to be prayed. McGowan says that “enemy love and imprecations are not completely incompatible.” Jesus himself used imprecatory language against Jerusalem in Luke 19:44, when he proclaimed God’s judgment: Israel’s enemies would “tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you.” 

Another pastor, Tim Bushong, put to music a rendition of Psalm 110 that we do at my church from time to time. The last verse goes:

The kings who fight against my Lord 

Shall taste His wrath and meet His sword

Upon their corpses He will look 

Then drink to vengeance from a brook.

Praying these Psalms—whether in private devotions or public worship—helps recenter a Christian on the role God plays in punishing evil. In Romans 12, Paul reminds his listeners that the government bears the sword to administer God’s justice. He writes, “Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘VENGEANCE IS MINE, I WILL REPAY,’ says the Lord.” 

Ultimately, even those who seem to get away with evil in this life will face a righteous Judge. We can take comfort in the fact that all will be made well, with an eternal perspective that seeks justice on this earth and remembers that justice will ultimately come, no matter what.

3. Seek Righteous Influence 

Most of the men asking my opinion are not in a position to directly influence public policy or to have participated in the manhunt for Tyler Robinson. For those who are in those positions, they should be a “good soldier,” as Paul says in 2 Timothy, and wield the sword righteously. 

There are plenty of authoritative roles upstream from the actual use of force. Pastors have a responsibility to communicate what God’s Word says about the ethics of force to those in their congregations who serve in political or law enforcement roles. There are also those in academia, think tanks, the media, and similar institutions who help shape public opinion. Their responsibility is to reinforce righteousness. 

For most people, whose political influence is largely limited to their social media and voting, they have already done a great deal of good by electing Donald Trump over Kamala Harris, not to mention the local and state victories they may have helped secure. Not every crime is stoppable. In the case of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, there were security weaknesses that were exploited. It may not be within Donald Trump’s jurisdiction to clamp down on private events at state universities, but it is within the role of the general government to punish treason and insurrection. 

Many are only now waking up to the fact that college professors and influential voices on the Left often harbor treasonous sentiments. The government can take steps to clamp down on that. 

If you are someone reading this who wants to do something tangible to defend your country, it is time to get the training and experience needed to pursue vocations that will place you in positions where you can wield the sword righteously.

Conclusion

I believe that much of the angst in the country today, including the calls for and predictions about a coming civil war, has built up over years of polarization. We have reached a point where half the country is largely unable to find the common ground necessary to even have a conversation with the other half. We are diametrically opposed at nearly every point, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel. The conditions and instability among the Zoomer generation suggest that more violence is on the horizon. 

Splinter groups on the right have begun to advocate unconventional approaches to restoring law and order, many of which involve ceding more authority to the center. The thinking is that if problems such as immigration and transgenderism cannot be resolved in short order, then drastic and even violent solutions are necessary to secure a future for our children. 

In such an environment, it is incumbent on Christian men to possess the inner virtue to know the dictates of wisdom and to bravely use force when it is called for. We ought to be the stabilizing element in society, the people others turn to when chaos ensues, the calm and steady hand that guides others, because we ourselves are being guided by God. 

Many great warriors, men such as George Washington and George Patton, would have gone largely unnoticed except for the fact that they lived in times when their mettle was called upon. It was then that the years of discipline, of leading men, and of cultivating courage truly counted. 

May we be as they were.