Ask anyone under 30 if they know who Charlie Kirk is, and you’ll usually get an emphatic: “Oh yeah, he’s the TikTok guy!” By contrast, most people over 30 have no idea who he is. On Wednesday 10th September, Charlie Kirk was assassinated by a lone gunman during an event he was running for university students in Utah. He was 31 years old and is survived by his wife and two children.
In this brief reflection, I do not want to wade into the murky waters of American politics. Much of the circumstances and events surrounding Charlie’s assassination are unique to America. Nevertheless, there is something that Charlie’s assassination can say to us in Australia.
At the age of 18, Charlie Kirk started a company called Turning Point USA. His goal was to help young people learn to think critically and to discover objective Truth, a task that was traditionally the domain of the education system. He could see, however, that education had become a business that taught young people what to think, not how to think. His method was simple. He would set up a table at universities and invite anyone and everyone to come and debate him on anything and everything. His slogan was “Prove me wrong”. His snappy and intelligent answers became famous on YouTube and TikTok. By teaching young people to think critically, Charlie motivated many young people to re-engage in ‘conservative’ politics. Above all, he was a proud protestant Christian and he wanted to make a positive contribution to his nation. He normalised traditional Christian values for young people and taught them to advocate for those values in the public square.
Charlie’s secret weapon was the Truth as found in the natural law and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He had supreme confidence that, in a fair fight, the Truth would beat lies every time, and that only the Truth could set you free and make you happy. Tragically, there is a way lies can beat Truth—and that is by silencing Truth through violence. The gunman, and the political and media pundits who have celebrated the gunman’s action, could not beat Charlie’s ideas fairly so they silenced him by violence.
Charlie believed in the contest of ideas. Even more importantly than that, however, he continued to respect you as a person even if he believed your ideas were wrong. He believed that the foundation of a good contest of ideas was mutual respect.
The way we speak to each other matters. It has become all too normal, even here in Australia, to treat those we disagree with as less than human – to dehumanise them. We are quick to reduce people’s entire identity to an easy label or slogan. This is a lazy way of shutting down ideas we don’t like. Give the person a dehumanising label like ‘Hitler’ or ‘Nazi’ and we no longer need to engage with their ideas.
Dehumanising people with our words enables us to justify taking all sorts of actions against them, including violence. Hitler, Stalin and Mao all justified the extermination of millions of people by dehumanising them. Dehumanisation is the last tactic of failed logic and the beginning of totalitarianism. It always leads to violence.
Treating other people as less than human has been tolerated in our society for some time now. Pornography, abortion, euthanasia, IVF, and yes, even contraception treat humans as mere products or objects or tools. The same is true of our obsession with cheap consumer goods. Modern ‘affordability’ is built on slave labour in foreign countries. What’s new is that it’s now becoming normal to add our political or intellectual opponents, even if they are members of our family, to the list of people we dehumanise.
What we really need to come to grips with is the fact that dehumanisation is not the preserve of crazy twentieth-century century dictators. It is the way ALL non-Christian societies function, without exception, because it is the way fallen human nature functions. The tendency to dehumanise each other has roots in every human heart.
Christianity is the ONLY bulwark against dehumanisation. Only Christianity teaches us that God became human out of love for us. Only Jesus teaches us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. Only Christianity teaches us that humans may never be treated as objects to be used. Belief in universal human dignity is the fruit of Christianity alone. The rising tendency to dehumanise people in words and actions is the logical and direct result of the rejection of Christian faith. Like Charlie Kirk, we can remind the world of the distinctive and unique value of faith in Jesus precisely by treating people as people, not objects, even if we disagree with them.