Here are edited excerpts of a conversation between Russell Moore and Mike Cosper on CT’s The Bulletin podcast.
Mike Cosper: Look, his murder has really bothered me. If you’re a dad—I don’t care how you feel about Charlie Kirk—look back on the days of your life, the days of your marriage, when your kids were little. There’s something so beautiful in those years, and they not only robbed that from him; they robbed that from his kids. They robbed that from those kids’ grandparents, from his wife. I’m gutted by this regardless of how I feel about Kirk’s politics. This is gutting.
Looking at Kirk’s videos that his most ardent fans liked the most—the ones that have the most views, the most likes—it’s not necessarily the “Charlie Kirk Destroys Progressive” or “Charlie Kirk Destroys Trans Activist” or anything like that. A lot of those videos are Charlie responding to people and preaching the gospel. He articulates a very straightforward and compelling understanding of the gospel.
Another video I watched was one where a college student comes to him and says, “One of my parents is very liberal. One of my parents is very MAGA. I don’t find myself agreeing with either one of them. How am I supposed to navigate this?” He basically says, “Love your parents. Show up. Stop talking about politics. Don’t let politics drive a wedge between you and your parents.”
I found that admirable when I immersed myself in it. I could delineate plenty of differences in political rhetoric and ideology between myself and Kirk. I just don’t feel this is the day for that. It’s worthy to celebrate the ways where we were arguing for the same things and advocating for the same things, whether it was the importance of marriage, the importance of gender, the importance of the gospel.
I’m emotionally moved by this because, on the left and right, Kirk’s death is already being leveraged for political ends in ways that are incredibly gross.
Russell Moore: What makes that all the more striking are places where there’s an exception to that. Last night I was watching a couple of very young, very progressive mirror images of Charlie Kirk—Dean Withers and Parkergetajob. These people are doing similar things to what Kirk was doing. Both had debated Charlie Kirk quite a bit, and both were openly weeping in a way that was genuine.
What I heard in that was what we’ve been talking about here. This is a human being, and there is a sense of shock and outrage at what could happen to a human being’s life. And fear for the country when you have a situation that seems to be unraveling and people start to see murder as a response to political rhetoric.
That entire world is built on “Here’s a video of me humiliating someone”: Fill in the blank, so-and-so gets “owned.” It’s easy to start to see people as YouTube avatars.
Both of these young guys were shaken by the fact that this isn’t a game: There’s a human being here. Even as angry and upset as I am, it was a little glimmer of hope that people can see sometimes what really matters and what doesn’t.
Mike Cosper: One thing I genuinely respected and admired about Kirk—and on lots of things he and I differed—was his willingness to sit across the table on a small scale, on a large scale, on camera, in real life and everything else. He was willing to engage people who thought his ideas were retrograde and evil.
There’s this wonderful clip of an encounter where he shows up at a college campus and puts up a sign that says something like “Tell me where I’m wrong” or “Debate me.” The mother of a student comes to the table and basically says, “What are you doing? What is this?”
He explains, “Look, I do this for a couple of reasons. One is that I think there’s a lot of people who think like I do, and they’re afraid to share their ideas because they get shouted down when they do. I also do this because if we can’t maintain the capacity to talk to one another, the only alternative is civil war and violence. And so I think it’s an important exercise for us and for civility to just show up and say, ‘Let’s have a conversation. Let’s build a relationship.’”
Kirk did that as imperfectly as any human being would do in terms of showing civility to the people he debated, but it was a value he articulated and aspired to. More often than not, he’s showing respect to the people he’s arguing with.
Russell Moore: One thing that fuels political violence is the sense that—once and for all—“I’m definitively going to deal with my opponents.” Then they’re gone, and we move on. That is not only immoral and satanic but an insane and irrational way of thinking.
We have to pay attention to what Jesus said to Peter: Those who live by the sword will die by the sword. What he means by that is that these cycles of revenge just continue to feed off of each other unless the revenge cycle is broken.
What ends up happening is not only the harming of whoever one’s enemies are but the harming of oneself, because it’s the deadening of a soul to the point of thinking, The way I’m going to respond is murder. That is itself a kind of self-harm.
We must have a sense of the value and dignity of human life apart and beyond from somebody’s gifts and somebody’s set of beliefs—and that there is a different way to be from retaliation and revenge: the Sermon on the Mount. Those ways of shaping our consciences are going to be necessary.
Mike Cosper: Modernity, especially since the French Revolution, has had this idea that violence was somehow going to purge society of its evils and heal it, that it would come out the other side because we killed all the right people.
Whether the purges in the French Revolution or the Bolsheviks, the starvation of the kulaks, or the Nazis’ attempt to eradicate Jews from Europe, there was this belief that efforts would bring us much closer to utopia.
Obviously this is a sin. Every human being is made in the image of God, and every murder is asin against the image of God. But the other reality that history should show us in all this is that all those attempts at violence, all those violent revolutions, resulted in more violence.
Russell Moore: Usually we’re talking into our own ecosystems. We’re trying to get the cheers of whoever we’re already with, rather than thinking we could persuade someone. A few figures tried to persuade. Charlie Kirk was one of them.
The Bulletin closing: Our hearts are heavy today for the family of Charlie Kirk. We mourn his death. We grieve for his wife, Erika, and their two precious little children. It is our prayer here that this deep loss will become a catalyst for new and lasting change in our country’s political life for the common good.
Listen to the full episode, which released Friday, September 12.
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