I have posted hundreds of reflections on this site since the beginning in 2016. I have never spoken through the lens of politics. I have only endeavored to speak the truth as I see it.

These past few days have been very hard for me as they’ve been for many tens of millions of others, both in America and around the world.

They killed someone who is a better man than I.

Yes, I use “they” even though it was a single person who carried out a vile and evil act. But that assassin did so because he was influenced by thousands of voices who compare people like Charlie or Trump to Hitler.

It’s a classic philosophical challenge: “If you were transported back in time to the 1920s and came across Adolph Hitler, after he wrote Mein Kampf but before he gained his total control of Germany and proceeded to kill millions of people, would you shoot him?”

This is the voice that is being taught in our schools and universities and then reverberates throughout mainstream and social media. The result is the attempt to galvanize a mass armada of young people to see conservative opposition as evil and it therefore becomes their duty to engage in violence of some form.

Be it silencing their voices on college campuses or, even, threatening and assaulting them on those campuses and out in public. 

It is insane.

Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump (as flawed an individual he might be … and I know many self-proclaimed conservatives that cringe at some of the things he has done), he is not Hitler.

Nor is and was Charlie Kirk. People who say this are plain stupid and ignorant. They have no way to think independently … to examine history and the many forces that have shaped it.

Their stated goal is to tear down the values that have shaped western civilization and brought prosperity to billions. Values like freedom of speech (please read about what is happening in the UK). Values like stable families are the bedrock of successful communities. Values that see everyone as individuals with inalienable rights that come from God. Values that protect religious liberties and freedom to worship in whatever faith you choose. Values that elevate the practice of reasoned debate, unencumbered by fear.

Values that are enshrined in the United States Constitution, the best foundation of laws and society ever fashioned. 

Yes, these values do not guarantee perfection. After all, we are humans and are driven by internal voices to act in ways antithetical to these core values. Yes, the history of the last five hundred years of the evolution of western civilization has been marked with serious flaws and internecine strife and wars. But it was never the fact that it was Christians who slaughtered hundreds of millions.

It was the atheists and nihilists like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the like. If God is not real, then anything is possible and their idea of good is the mass eradication of large swaths of humanity.

Christians just don’t think this way.

It was Christians who ended slavery, a practice ubiquitous around the globe. Slavery was the norm in pre-Christian empires, and in the centuries that followed … in Africa and in the tribes of American Indians, throughout the Middle East … and it still prospers today in the absence of Christian influence. It remains big business, even in the United States, as vulnerable women are routinely “trafficked” in the sex trades.

We are in the clash of civilizations and ideals. And Charlie lived his life at the epicenter.

Charlie was and is a better man than I.

Which brings me to this.

I have watched and listened to thousands of speeches since my “awakening” to the world of politics in my early teens and since then. Some of them have been great. Some historical whose words still ring in our memory.

But I have never … I repeat never … heard a speech as the one that Erika Kirk gave yesterday.

I have only to surmise that she was propped up by God and given the strength and wisdom to speak to the world.

I have said that I have been called to be bold, especially in ways I could not have imagined since I was “awoken” again twenty years ago by hearing the audible voice of God.

Since then, I understand fully that I am an eternal being who is called to be part of a vast family seeking to do his will … something I sadly fail at much more that I wish. Charlie’s and Erika’s clarion call is for me to seek God’s strength to love and speak the truth is an antidote to the grief and anger I have … to a little voice that wants me to surrender into the darkness and lose hope for humanity.

Our battle is not political. It is spiritual as I’ve previously said. We are asked to choose a side in this spiritual battle.

Such is the legacy of Charlie’s life and Erika’s future. 

If you have not yet seen her speech, please do so. You can find it everywhere.

Lord, give us strength. Help us as we seek to move forward. Not out of vengeance but out of truth. To follow the Incarnate, the One who is our pathway to the light.

Amen.