The End of All of Our Exploring: Charlie Kirk and the Call for Unity

On September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk was assassinated on a Utah university campus. After handing out hats, answering questions, and inviting debate, a single shot rang out, extinguishing the leading voice of his generation. This murder has prompted a tsunami of questions. 

Relevant questions include whether (a) the West is doomed to experience a gloomy future by parasitic ideas that have become so infectious they have killed common sense and a commonplace understanding of the truth, and (b) does the West face an irresolvable spiritual crisis on the road to civilizational collapse? Amid an impending sense of calamity, grief, recrimination, and retrospective assessments of political violence, such questions remind us of three significant developments. 

First, we should note that we live in an era torn apart by rising controversies featuring a flight from the truth and the embrace of absolute certainty by the nation’s elites. Consistent with this move, “[i]t is usually futile to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance. Self-proclaimed moral supremacy and the pursuit of utopia grounded in secular principles herald the swift ascent of ethical and psychological panic and invite unresolvable conflict.

Conflict has become increasingly predictable since the nation has succumbed to rule by elites, who are primarily educated at exclusive academic institutions. This can be seen in the current composition of America’s Supreme Court, which has become more elitist than anyone thought.

As a consequence of rule by elites, there is a greater distance between our leaders and the populace, both economically and politically. Often, our leaders have become captives of strange doctrines and ideas that are designed to separate us from both the truth and our fellow citizens. 

For example, Richard Cloward and Frances Piven, two influential sociologists, engineered the Cloward–Piven strategy in 1966 to unleash "militant anti-poverty groups" to facilitate a "political crisis" to radically reshape the nation in the image of elite revolutionaries. Similarly, James Lindsay, an anti-communist scholar, observes that virtually all our kids go to Marxist schools. This is not news to Western Christians, as ideologues in power both in classrooms and newsrooms manipulate our collective and historical memory to capture the future. 

As a consequence of such efforts, the lives of both our children and the poor are diminished while the wealth and power of elites have been enhanced. In the process of such moves, Rod Dreher observes that modernity denies that there are any transcendent stories, structures, habits, or beliefs to which individuals must submit. Charlie Kirk engaged in debate and public speaking to combat such moves.

Second, we should recall that America has previously experienced vicious cycles of violence. Frequently, violence has taken the form of mass shootings at churches and schools. But Charlie’s death was different. It was unmistakably political. He spoke with courage against the nation’s elites.

For many observers, Charlie Kirk’s death prompted sorrow, reflection, and a sense of tragedy. For others, his assassination was a source of joy consistent with the fact that a YouGov survey shows that liberal respondents were more likely to say that political violence is justified.

That said, as Utah Governor Cox acknowledged, Kirk’s death was more than a personal tragedy. “It is an attack on the American experiment … an attack on our ideals.” This particular attack was focused on silencing an individual committed to America’s devotion to freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion. Kirk’s death took place in a nation that has consistently proclaimed that our rights come from God.

Prompted by the belief that our rights and sense of justice come from God and provoked by four instances of violence, Christians should demand action. The events include the recent massacre of elementary children in Minneapolis, Minnesota while attending a church service, the weekly murders of young people in Chicago, the murder of Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Charlie Kirk’s murder. Such events must provoke the West to relearn what is important: namely “that the role of the law is not to redeem the wicked, but deliver justice to the victims and restore order disrupted by crime.”

Third, whether the YouGov survey and Governor Cox are correct or not, Americans should appreciate the American Spectator’s quite different take on Charlie Kirk assassination. Echoing Apostle Paul’s extraordinary claim that Christians wrestle not against flesh and blood, this secular magazine observes:  

The bullet that killed Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University did not only strike down a man. It announced something deeper, something darker — the arrival of open spiritual warfare in America. For years, the signs were there: classrooms colonized by ideology, churches emptied by apathy, communities corroded by contempt. But Kirk’s assassination and the celebrations that followed crushed the last illusions. The age of debate has ended. The age of spiritual battle has begun.

Accordingly, America faces an age of demonically inspired warfare. How the nation and how each one of us responds to this battle will determine the nation’s fate and influence the fate of our children. To be sure, Americans are already awakening to this battle that will not end in our lifetime. Statistics show that millions of people re-engaging with church attendance exploding, mass attendance rising and by reading their Bibles in response to fact that Charlie Kirk’s life was taken in an instant.

Against this backdrop of spiritual war, we should remember T. S. Elliot’s courageous words. In Little Gidding, Eliot wrote:

We shall not cease from exploration, 

And the end of all our exploring 

Will be to arrive where we started 

And know the place for the first time.

Rich with religious and spiritual themes, this poem is filled with biblical references and allusions to Christian theology. Most importantly, Elliot concludes that after all of our exploring, all of our struggles, both the beginning and the end of our exploration points in the direction of anthropologist Renė Girard’s cataclysmically important book, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. 

Girard’s book echoes the words of Jesus. Scripture observes that Jesus said, “I saw Satan Fall like lightning.” Filled with imagery that creates a sense of transcendence, T. S. Elliot and René Girard invite all of us to contemplate the mysteries of God and the words of Jesus.

On this view, all Christians have been called to unify, to seek justice, and join in a spiritual battle, knowing that Charlie Kirk’s courageous witness and his assassination combine to call us into a struggle that demands every breath we take. That is the beginning and the end of all of our exploration. Charlie Kirk’s life and death are a testament to the Elliot’s perceptive intuition, Girard’s book, and the words of Jesus Christ.