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John Vervaeke and the meaning crisis.

Rod Dreher's Substack

Fr. Tom Miller

July 11, 2025

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John Vervaeke & The Meaning Crisis

What I'm Learning From Engaging The Thought Of The Cognitive Scientist

Rod Dreher

Jul 11

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John Vervaeke

I’m in Germany at a conference. On the plane here, I started reading a terrific book, Awakening From The Meaning Crisis, by John Vervaeke and Christopher Mastropietro. I’ve been wanting for a long time to get into Vervaeke (pron. “ver-VAY-kee”), a University of Toronto cognitive scientist who is part of Jordan Peterson World, but I just don’t have time to listen to podcasts, which is how he presents most of his public work.

If you do, here’s a treasure trove: a link to video presentations of Vervaeke’s lectures on the Meaning Crisis. The book I bought seems to be a distillation of the first twenty-five episodes (a second volume is coming). Vervaeke is not a Christian, by the way. He is interested in Buddhism, not as a religion, it seems, but as an approach to cognition. His work is filled with useful insights — so much so that I don’t think I’ll be able to wait for the final book, presenting his Meaning Crisis lectures in written form (the form in which I best learn). Looks like I have my next thing to listen to on my daily walks. Here’s what I’m getting from the book so far:

The Meaning Crisis, in Vervaeke’s view, amounts to this:

… the decentering of human life from its cosmic significance, a decline in our sense of purpose, and a sensation of having lost the soul that gave earlier human societies their adaptiveness and vitality. It seems we are left with a feeling of having lost our place in the world along with a sense of who we are and what we ought to do with ourselves.

People today — those without dead souls — are grasping for meaning, trying to find their way out of the dark wood of despair.

There is a pattern to all of these efforts, a certain hunger in the human spirit, a depth of need that has not been fully understood. When we begin to recognize this need as a feature of our spiritual condition, we can begin to piece together a unifying account for why all of this is happening. Each of these movements is responding to a crisis of meaning, a disorienting sense that we have forgotten some essential dimension to reality and lost our relationship to what is good, true, and beautiful. This crisis has deprived us of something essential at the center of our lives. It has been described in many ways by many thoughtful people across time, but we might think of it quite simply as a famine of the spirit, an existential illness that has taken shape in the human brain, body, culture, and soul.

Vervaeke describes the search for meaning as the search for wisdom:

Wisdom is ultimately about how to generate and enhance this meaning. Wisdom is about realizing. This means that cultivating wisdom generates realization in both senses of the word: becoming aware and making real. Wisdom is about realizing meaning in life in a profound way.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting for me. My next book is (broadly) going to be about pilgrimage as a journey for meaning — specifically, a journey to recover God, and, in the narrative I plan, a way of seeing our civilizational inheritance as a material bearer and mediator of meaning and divinity. (Note: not divinity itself — that would be idol-worship — but as a mediator of God’s presence.) Vervaeke:

It may sound high-minded and mystical, but self-transcendence is an essential need for human beings. It performs core functions for our cognition. For instance, deep connections exist between meaning, wisdom and altered states of consciousness (ASC). Throughout our history, human beings have consistently sought ways to alter the quality of our conscious experience by manipulating our physiology and behavior.

Prayer, then — and not just petitions to God, but deeper, more mystical ways of prayer, like the Jesus Prayer in the Orthodox tradition. And pilgrimage: those 20,000 young people walking for sixty miles across the plains of Beauce to Chartres this past June were “praying with their bodies” — seeking to know the Lord through participation in Him.

Vervaeke says a true mystical experience is transformative. After you’ve had one — and you accept it as real — you know you can’t be the same person.

These are awakening experiences, wherein people return from the mystical experience feeling it was somehow more real than reality. They feel a compelling need to change their world and themselves to fit that new reality.
… When people use this word “meaning,” it is a metaphor. They mean that the way life becomes significant is somehow analogous to the way a sentence has semantic meaning. The pieces fit together in some way that impacts our cognition and connects us to the real world.

He goes on:

When words become a sentence, we no longer see the words, but see through them. They become transparent and give us access to participate in reality, allowing us a chance to grasp it, to have contact with it. We have to unpack this metaphor. Why do we use it, and what does it reveal when we talk about the meaning of our lives? How is it that some of the most meaningful experiences people have are precisely the ones that are completely ineffable to them, that they cannot put into words?

For Christians, the material manifestations of the experience of Christ — liturgies, prayers, hymns, church buildings, pilgrimages, and so forth — are metaphors, of a sort. A “metaphor” is an analogy, a kind of bridge. It comes from the Greek word meaning “transference.” The culture we create from our common experience of God serves as a bridge that allows us to have access, however imperfectly, to the “real world” of the divine. It is what allows transcendence — again, imperfectly — to be immanent. Vervaeke says that “metaphor is a way of reaching into the world so it seems to reach back.”

For the cognitive scientist Vervaeke, culture is necessary for knowing:

Your cognition is very participatory; you partake in large, distributed networks of cognition. Before the internet networked computers together, culture networked brains together to provide some of our most powerful problem-solving abilities. This is how human beings responded to an impossible predicament. They formed a social network. These networks were managed with a form of pattern-oriented activity that became so fundamental to human culture that its influence pervades nearly all of our behavior. We call it ritual.
Ritual is guiding your interaction without you noticing. It is the groundwater beneath these cultural forms. If you dig into your own behavior, social or otherwise, you will find it. Even when our interactions seem empty, they continue to convey—and convey us through—these patterns of meaning. In the minutest of gestures, in the smallest of small talk, ancient rituals are at work.
… Ritual trains your ability to regulate your emotion and to undertake a process called decentering: adopting a non-egoic perspective by redirecting your attention to something real outside of you.

It all began in the distant past, with shamans as the bridge between the transcendent and the immanent.

The shamanic integration of flow with altered states of consciousness (ASC), the insight and refinement of intuition, the capacity for metaphorical thought—all of these expanded human cognition by making it much more creative, capable of reading patterns and generating connections between different scales and categories of the world. This allowed our ancestors to gather the world together and unite different parts of experience to create working models of reality as well as the structures that seemed to exist beneath us, around us, and within us. These symbolic unities, or mythologies, gave us a new kind of agency in the world and an idea of who we were within it. This was the beginning of what we would later call a worldview.

You can see where he’s going with this — and where I, the Christian writer with a newfound, post-Chartres interest in the power of Christian culture, am going with this.

“Myth,” as Vervaeke uses it, is not something untrue, but rather a story, a metaphor that allows us to grasp transcendent realities, and order our lives according to those truths. Tolkien famously told C.S. Lewis that Christianity is “the myth that is true.” I believe that, certainly — but the point to take is that myths themselves, even if not true in the most literal sense, are crucial to human cognition and the forming of culture. Without building a sacred canopy (the term is Peter Berger’s) over ourselves and our societies, a canopy woven from myth, we are lost.

The Axial Age (from the 8th to the 3rd centuries, BC) was a period of profound shift in human consciousness, across many different civilizations. It was the period of the Greek philosophers, the Hebrew prophets, and the advent in the Far East of Buddha, Confucius, Lao-tzu, and Zarathustra. This caused what Vervaeke calls the “great disembedding,” in which humanity became conscious of itself as somehow separate from the cosmos. He became aware of a transcendent world beyond this one.

In the great disembedding, one world became two. The everyday world was that of the untrained mind, a world beset by self-deception, self-destruction, illusion, violence, and chaos. To live in this world was to be out of touch with reality. The real world lay behind this world of illusion. This was how the trained mind, the wise mind, saw the world.
In the two-worlds mythology, wisdom is not the acquisition of power or prosperity. It is the emancipation from a lesser reality. The axial hero did not want to conquer the everyday world. He wanted to be transformed out of it.
In the two-worlds mythology, meaning was not just about connectedness as it was in the continuous cosmos but specifically connectedness to the real world. This also changed the idea of the self. In the continuous cosmos, you were defined largely by how you fit into the world. In the two-worlds mythology, you were defined more by self-transcendence, how you transformed and grew as a person.

The two-worlds Mythology is a mythological form of thinking that allows us to articulate and train the psychotechnologies of the Axial Revolution, the projects of self-transcendence and wisdom. It took the meaning-making of the shaman and refined it into a more precise way of cultivating human cognition. However, this mythology is failing us now. The scientific worldview, with its materialist and physicalist metaphysics, is gradually eroding the Axial project.
This is one of the great problems of the Meaning Crisis. Since the shaman, human beings have depended on mythology for meaning-making. It has become inseparable from humanness itself. The Axial worldview still holds up our idea of the sovereign person, the individual who has agency, freedom, and responsibility. However, a mythology must be livable in order to perform its function.

The scientific-materialist worldview makes it impossible for the Axial Age way of thinking — obviously, Christianity is part of this — to be sustained. This, says Vervaeke, is why we are having a Meaning Crisis: being human, as we have understood it for over 2,000 years, requires living by myths that connect us to a world of transcendence that we intuit is really there. The Axial Age way of thinking is deeply embedded in our psyches. But the modern way of thinking denies flat-out that there is anything transcending this world.

In 2015, the formerly Christian writer Damon Linker wrote a powerful essay challenging the complacent optimism of the New Atheists, saying that Nietzsche understood better than them the terror implied by the death of God. Linker wrote:

If atheism is true, it is far from being good news. Learning that we're alone in the universe, that no one hears or answers our prayers, that humanity is entirely the product of random events, that we have no more intrinsic dignity than non-human and even non-animate clumps of matter, that we face certain annihilation in death, that our sufferings are ultimately pointless, that our lives and loves do not at all matter in a larger sense, that those who commit horrific evils and elude human punishment get away with their crimes scot free — all of this (and much more) is utterly tragic.

Back to Vervaeke:

The meaning of a mythology is like an atmosphere, and it gives oxygen to our idea of humanness. This atmospheric property of meaning—symbolized by the shaman’s soulfight—refers to human “spirit,” the idea that something about human beings is not confined to body and world but also extends beyond it.
When this symbolic reality begins to decline, it is like the thinning or pollution of that atmosphere. Our meaning-making is asphyxiated, and we are barred from accessing the spirit of soulflight. Human beings become homeless in the universe, as though the soil from which we have grown meaning, and grown ourselves, is no longer fertile.
As Nietzsche famously observed, if we live only for the next world, and the next world is taken from us, precious little is left for the project of meaning, and the consequences are nihilism and profound self-destruction⁠. We do not want to lose all that we gained through the great disembedding, but how do we live with this legacy when we can no longer inhabit its worldview? To begin answering this question, we must gain a fuller understanding of what this world bequeathed us.

(My next book is going to take up in part that highlighted line.)

Vervaeke continues:

To retrace the steps of the Axial Revolution, I will begin in ancient Israel. It is difficult for many modern people to fathom the scope of influence of the Bible—not just for practicing Jews and Christians but for all who grew up and live in the West. Biblical illiteracy has been steadily rising in tandem with our secularization, and this a thwarting problem for our culture—not because people should be Christians or Jews but because failure to grasp the grammar of the Bible is also the failure to grasp the grammar of your own cognition.
You may well profess to be an atheist and disbelieve the doctrines of these traditions. However, this kind of belief—in other words, the propositional belief—is irrelevant in this context. I am not referring to what you profess but how you think and behave. Defining belief only by creed and proposition is analogous to defining the democratic sensibility by whether or not you cast a ballot on voting day; you still participate, however unconsciously, in the ethics, rituals and institutions that structure this form of society.
… The mythology of the Judeo-Christian heritage, for instance, has become an invisible architecture for our thinking, a meaning we live in, furnish, and refurnish over time. One of the psychotechnological inventions that undergirds this architecture appears so obvious that we do not stop to consider its novelty: the understanding of time as a cosmic narrative, as a story. All cultures tell stories, and we will unpack the cognitive science of story in later chapters.
Yet the Continuous Cosmos [of the pre-Axial Age] was not a story. It was a cycle. The story has a beginning, a crucial turning point that forces a crisis and leads the protagonist to act, and a resolution. There is a direction to a story. There is a purpose to it.

Yes. I believe it was MacIntyre who said that we cannot know what to do until we understand what story in which we are a part. The scientific-materialist worldview denies that there is a story at all. Here, according to Vervaeke, is the breakthrough that came to us through Hebraic monotheism:

As with most historical transitions, the cross-fade from continuous cosmos to Axial mythology was gradual rather than immediate. You can detect many aspects of a Bronze Age god in the Old Testament, but He becomes more Axial as He becomes the force of progress, the idea that history, when directed to its proper course, is moving closer to its purpose, gathering together across time, perfecting and refining, becoming more real.
This gathering is happening on a cosmic scale but also on an individual scale, and God becomes the correspondence between these scales, whose revelations collapse together— like the character and the world of a narrative—when the narrative reaches a pivotal turning point. The turning point of the story is called kairos.
In common parlance, kairos refers to a critical or opportune moment, an opening in time that allows us to see, access or intervene in something that was once invisible or obscure. In the two-worlds mythology, kairos is a revelation of the real world from within the mirage.
Kairos requires a shamanic synonymy of knowing and participating. This synonymy is captured in the idea of Da’ath, an ancient term for knowing, used in the Bible to refer to sexual intercourse (e.g., Adam knew his wife Eve). Modern Westerners may find this confusing; we do not often use sex as a metaphor for knowledge. Yet many cultures do.

Moses receiving the Law on Sinai was a kairos moment. For Christians, the Incarnation was the kairos moment of all kairos moments.

The sexual metaphor is a rich one, and we should not shrink from it out of prudery. When one has sex — or, I should say, unites with someone one loves, as distinct from merely mating like animals — one opens a bridge in the most intimate way possible with another soul. One ceases to be oneself, but unites with another, knows the other through unsurpassably intimate participation in the other, and is changed by it. One might even produce new life from it.

When the Christian scripture calls Christ the Bridegroom and the Church the Bride, this is the way of knowing implied by that metaphor.

Vervaeke:

The identity relationship between knowing and participating is a fundamental Axial idea, and it is central to understanding the religious nature of the ancients and their symbolic way of experiencing the world. “Knowing” is not the apprehension of facts, seen dispassionately from the outside. It is nothing you could acquire from a distance. You know something by assuming its identity, by becoming it. Your becoming it somehow changes it, reveals it, makes it real.
When you are making love with someone, you are participating in them, identifying with them, empathizing and resonating with them. You are changing them as they are changing you, and this process of change rises—forgive me the pun—to a climax, after a turning point and before the resolution. You may begin to see why, in so many religious traditions, sexuality is a perennial symbol for our sacred union with reality. Da’ath describes our participatory knowing in the course of its unfolding.
This idea of knowing is critical for our project because it changes the way we interpret religious ideas of faith and belief. In ancient Israel, faith did not mean having incredible beliefs without evidence. That is a recent, very modern idea. Faith was Da’ath. It described this symbolic relationship you had with the world and with your existence. It was your sense of living in this reciprocal realization.

Do you see the Chartres pilgrimage with different eyes now? Do you see all the various manifestations of Christian culture, beginning with the early Church, and extending through history to our own time, in a different way? You should. The idea that faith is about nothing more than assenting to propositions is a modern one, and one that leads to disenchantment.

In the Orthodox Christian faith, “sin” is understood not as the breaking of the moral law, in a legal sense, but rather more as “missing the mark” — of living in disharmony with what is Really Real. Vervaeke thinks something similar:

This kind of language returns us to the idea of sin, but our biblical illiteracy inhibits us; we are tempted to understand sin as doing something immoral, committing a particular act of transgression. This is much more a symptom than a definition. Sin is better understood as being in a distorted relationship with reality. It is the misdirection of love and attention.
Recall the archery analogy that sources the term’s meaning; you cannot shoot for where your eye tells you to look. If you do, you will miss the bull’s-eye. The true arrow is guided by Da’ath, the kind of knowing that conforms the attention of the archer with the proper target. The archer and her target seem to share the same body, the same identity. Their craft is a movement toward connectedness and participation. When she lands the target, it becomes real to her. She stakes herself in its reality. She is binding herself to the world and the world to herself. One way of understanding sin is as the failure to effect that binding.

In 2022, when I visited the medieval Orthodox monasteries in northern Romania, I noticed at the base of one of the painted churches images of kings. The monk guiding me told me that those are the pre-Christian Greek philosophers who opened the way, conceptually, for Christ.

Vervaeke writes about them at length, saying at one point, “If you were to put Western Civilization on two feet, one foot would be the Bible, and the other would be the works of Plato.” Here’s an excerpt.

Pythagoras’s cosmos anticipated the relationship between beauty, order, and realness that would become essential to the Greek philosophical tradition. When people report awakening experiences, they often rediscover these Pythagorean affinities. They suddenly perceive the world as a cosmos, and their perception of order and coherence is suffused with beauty.
The notion of cosmos created a powerful model for how we understood meaning and wisdom—what a self was, how it perceived and grew, how we fit into the universe, and how we made contact with reality. It draws a striking contrast with the modern worldview.

A cosmos is not the same thing as a universe. A cosmos is a universe suffused with order, pattern, and meaning — with logos. I didn’t fully understand the meaning of the opening of the Gospel of John (“"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us."). What does it mean to say that God was the word, and that Jesus of Nazareth was the incarnate Word? Finally someone explained to me that translating the Greek word “logos,” which John used, as “word” is limiting. Yes, “logos” means “word,” but it means far more than that. It means “reason.” It means “ordering principle.” To call God the Logos means that one of His properties is that He is the ordering principle of all of reality. To call Jesus the Logos is to say that the ordering principle of all reality manifested as a man.

Back to Vervaeke’s discussion of Plato:

Notice the role of participatory knowing in the “virtuous circle” above. Contact with reality is dependent on my self-transformation. I am not a passive observer forming true beliefs. I am implicated in my observations. The appearance of the world is a consequence of my framing, and I have to change myself to see the world more clearly. When I do, the world itself seems to change, and it places a demand on me to change myself. As I transform, the world discloses more of itself. This is the dynamic of participatory knowing. It is a reciprocal opening between me and my environment. I am not just changing my mind or knowing with my mind. I am knowing with my whole self, my whole identity, and all the machinery of my cognition.
The related quests for reality, inner harmony, self-knowledge, and transformation are explored deeply in Plato’s Republic. The quest is dramatized in the Myth of the Cave, perhaps the most famous passage in the history of Western philosophy.

I’m running out of the allotted space in this newsletter, so I won’t retell the Myth of the Cave, which most of you no doubt know — but if not, or if you need a refresher, follow the link. More Vervaeke:

Remember: these myths remain popular because they are not stories from the past. They are dramatic recreations of the perennial patterns we face as human beings, like the disharmony we experience in the parts of our psyche, the problem of being trapped in illusion and being out of touch with reality.
In this vision, reason and spirituality are not opposed. They are inseparably bound together. Plato paired the Socratic project (ordering the psyche to overcome self-deception) with the Pythagorean one (the soulflight of self-transcendence and transformation of consciousness). From this marriage, he discovered a way to depict this radical transformation. His depiction is so entrancing that it became a constant refrain throughout the West.

This is why the truest Christianity is a journey towards what we Orthodox call theosis, or unity with God, in which we achieve perfect harmony with Him, while remaining ourselves. Dante writes about this process in the Paradiso. He invented a word, transumanar, to describe the process — but he very much does not mean what Silicon Valley means by transhuman. He means that we become most fully human by becoming transhuman — that is, gradually changed and perfected by radical, ongoing communion with the Holy Spirit.

Vervaeke on logos:

As I mentioned in previous chapters, this word is among the most translated—and mistranslated—words in all of philosophy. It has to do with the order and arrangement of these real patterns, the concentering formula that fits everything together, integrates it with mind, and makes it intelligible to our comprehension. The research shows that our grasp of logos is intuitive, but not something we can define or express. We know it by conforming to it, by becoming like it, by matching the pattern of our cognition to the pattern of its disclosure, and entering into that reciprocal realization with it.

You see here why in the Christian view, conforming to the Logos — Christ — requires creating patterns of meaning through which the Logos is disclosed. We have to build a Christian culture so that our lifelong journey, both individually and collectively, to theosis can be effected. Rieff said that in the Christian era, Christians knew generally how to live because the answer to “What am I to do?” was “Do as the Saviour did.” We created all the structures and artefacts of Christian culture in an effort to order the material world to Christlikeness, and to create for ourselves immanent patterns of cognition that help us flesh-and-blood humans to do as St. Paul commanded: to put on the mind of Christ.

This aligns with Vervaeke here:

Plato provided us with the paradigm-changing insight that a connection exists between our conformity to reality and the necessity of self-transformation. As we track patterns in the world, we can reflectively internalize these patterns to better understand and harmonize ourselves. The inward transformation allows us to refine our grasp on reality, to awaken from illusion, and draw ourselves closer to what is most real.

That is as far as I got in the Vervaeke book yesterday. It is incredibly helpful to me as a plot out my next book (again, I will tell you all about it once I have a publisher’s agreement). But I think you can see where I’m going with it. Going to that Chartres pilgrimage really changed me. I hope I can publish this book inspired by it. You know, sometimes people ask me how I get ideas for my books. The honest answer is I just wait for them, and they appear. Well, this one appeared in a big way at Chartres, through the young people who walked that walk, and, of course, through the glorious cathedral itself. The second time in my life!

If you like all the stuff in today’s newsletter, please come to the Midwestuary Conference in Chicago on August 22-24! Vervaeke will be there, as will Jonathan Pageau (his frequent online conversation partner), Paul VanderKlay, and my fine self.

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Justice - everyone has to face their choices, good & bad. If you believe in a Divine Judge who knows all, no one skates free. Everyone must face their story and how they wrote it by their actions.

Mercy - One can find forgiveness of sins, make restitution for their crimes. In this life, or the next. No one is a prisoner to their past, but no one gets to ignore it either. Mercy is meant to lift us above our past, pull us back on the path, reset the world we live in even if our acts have shrunk that world by our choices. Some may only fine mercy by a life in prison because their acts make them unworthy of living among us. While not a fan of the death penalty, finality of life often opens the door to reflection. The mask comes off when you are going to die, are you a harden & hateful soul, or can you in your final moments have contrition for your acts? In my world, mercy is only going to be received when I am willing to provide it. Mercy flows through me, or it bypasses me. My choice.

Forgiveness - It does not ever mean that the wrong someone has committed against us is acceptable. Forgiveness is not asking us to close our eyes and pretend everything is ok. Forgiveness is the ability to see beyond the wound, to emancipate oneself from the memory that has become our mental prison, to let justice be in the hands of another when we cannot obtain it for ourselves. Forgiveness is a choice - we can decide to offer it or withhold it. few things are worse than letting someone who injured us live rent-free in our heads for a life, imprisoning us in an inescapable memory when we have the keys of our freedom in our own possession.

Contrition – You are sorry for your offense and take accountability for it and are willing to live with the consequences of it and the possible need to make amends for it. Contrition belongs to the perpetrator of the act, and the victim may freely tell them to the go to Hell if they please. Your sorrow for your acts does not depend upon their recognition or reception of your repentance.

Reconciliation - It takes two, and it is not always achievable. When forgiveness and contrition are experienced, there is the possibility of reconciliation. You can't be reconciled with someone with someone who fails to take account of their own actions. In a more perfect world, reconciliation is always the goal. You can't be reconciled with a person who is a slave to addiction, especially if that addiction is behavioral altering. The addiction will always come first until they leave it behind. If someone says they are sorry and they alter their acts, reconciliation is possible. But contrition without change is empty. Few things can heal our hearts more than real reconciliation, but it is something not entirely in our control, as all the best things in life are, others have to meet us on the path of their reconciliation and work through the mess and injury however great or small it might be.

Healing - Be it victim or perpetrator - there is healing. If you have a healthy mind & heart, you choose the acts that define you. You choose the emotional weight to give to those acts and how they roam about in your thoughts and feelings. No victim need be a prisoner to the worst crime committed against them. *Victimhood is the surest path to an unhappy life.* Perhaps for some it is inescapable because they have developed a mental illness that will ever prevent they from rising above the pain. But if you are not mentally ill, defining your life as a victim may be one of your worst choices. Healing for the perpetrator can only come when they face their acts and do what they can to make amends.

Well, that is a lot. If you read it all, you probably need another cup of coffee. As always comments are welcome, even if you disagree with me on some of the points. It is after all just my ramblings about it. I hope you have a great day my friend, fellow pilgrim and one willing to lead me some minutes to read this. Peace.

*2025 Addendum for the Coffee Talk Crew

I couldn’t agree with Fred more than recklessly inviting evil into your life is stupid. Nothing could be more stupid than knowing beforehand that someone is going to do evil and you welcome it pretending that it somehow won’t take place. I can agree that that type of naive wishful thinking is profoundly stupid. Europe is doing that with Islamists and the Center & Right of American culture & politics does that too often with the LEFT. There is no such thing as pre-forgiveness. If you come to commit evil, I pray you are stopped. If it takes you leaving life to protect those I love, I vote you go home to God first rather than my loved ones. I am not happy about not having a choice but violence, but violent men/women have to be stopped with violence, not nice words or hopeful prayers. Pray for their souls, stop their actions. Contain their evil. Predatory evil needs to be identified and ended.

I don’t think Charlie Kirk’s wife is stupid for forgiving the murderer of her husband. She still wants him to face justice and punishment for his crimes, but she is not going to live in the wound created in her life by his vile act. She did not have to forgive; she could have chosen to wait on it or never offer it to the murderer. She made a choice, and one that happened early on because she is serious (not perfect) about her faith. I admire hr for her seriouness, I don't think I could arrive at forgiveness that quickly.

At the core of Christian Discipleship is the dynamic of forgiveness – contrition and reconciliation. Disciples are aware of how much they have been forgiven by God. Disciples know that if they want to seek God’s mercy, they must offer it to others. I don’t think it has to be an immediate thing, massive wounds of hatred, violence and evil take equally massive amounts of time, grace and healing to mend. The wounded will know their scars forever, how they chose to think about them is a choice.

Most Christians, and all Disciples should know that forgiveness is essential if they pay any attention to the Our Father. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” I can’t imagine praying those words and not trying to live by them. Again, I don’t think it means forgiveness has to be immediate, thoughtless and a given, but it should be something or somewhere I hope to arrive in life. I should want to forgive eventually even if the pain of the offense at the moment is too fresh, deep and crushing.

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Fr. Tom Miller@Padre

September 15, 2025

From VDH - The Blade of Perseus

Was the Current Madness Birthed in the University?

Was the Current Madness Birthed in the University?

September 15, 2025

Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness

America is currently sick.

The young conservative organizer and media personality Charlie Kirk was just murdered in a political assassination by a 22-year-old ‘anti-fascist’ and trans advocate, Tyler Robinson. As planned, he eliminated the most astute and successful political activist in a generation. Indeed, Kirk may well have ensured that Donald Trump won the 2024 election by not just increasing his youth vote by 6 percent since 2020 but, more importantly, by margins in the swing states of 15-24 percent, ensuring Trump’s victory.

No sooner was he killed than thousands on left-wing social media erupted in celebration—among them scores of teachers and professors. Their venom was eerily reminiscent of their earlier canonization of left-wing murderer Luigi Mangione. Recall, Mangione was the spoiled nepo baby who lethally ambushed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Thereby, he became an icon to the Left as a social justice warrior fighting the evil capitalist system, which had so enriched himself and his own family.

Such utter moral bankruptcy was on display as well by the social media praise of Palestinian activist Elias Rodriguez (“Free Palestine”), after he brutally murdered a young Jewish couple at the Jewish museum in Washington, D.C. Rodriguez supposedly showed the world how to deal with Zionists—reifying the hateful rhetoric that pervades the modern campus.

Was that ghoulishness confined to such anonymous left-wing nuts and fringe trolls?

Not really.

MSNBC’s guest “analyst,” Matthew Dowd, casually raised an asinine suggestion that the lethal shot came from a Kirk supporter firing off a round. And then, in Pavlovian fashion, he blamed the assassination of Kirk—on Kirk himself—for being an unapologetic “divisive” activist.

Dowd, who was subsequently fired by an embarrassed MSNBC president, only took his cue from anchorwoman, the untouchable Katy Tur, who first editorialized Kirk as a “divisive” figure. By her logic, would that mean that, say, a Bernie Sanders or Zohran Mamdani would also be divisive? What does Joe Biden, by Tur’s logic, deserve after labeling half the country as “semi-fascists” or reducing them to “garbage,” “chumps,” and “dregs”—or boasting he’d like to take Trump behind the gym and beat him up?

Does Tur mean that anyone deemed “divisive” then should naturally expect what befell Charlie Kirk?

Yet, in truth, Charlie Kirk was an upbeat, happy warrior not unlike William F. Buckley in his youth, willing to politely debate political opponents without anger and bias.

The multimillionaire socialist Rep. Ilhan Omar, who once claimed that the Trump “dictatorship” was worse than what she had fled from in her native Somalia, claimed the slain Kirk mourners were “full of sh-t” in a long, incoherent rant. Such creepy examples could be easily multiplied, such as the accustomed lunacy of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She now claimed that those who block gun control legislation could not blame others for inciting the violence: i.e., Charlie Kirk should have expected to reap what he sowed.

A dense AOC seems clueless that not even her fellow leftists seriously advocate confiscating bolt-action .30-06 hunting rifles of the sort that the assassin used to kill Kirk. Perhaps it might be wiser not to try to hunt down and round up 500 million guns in America, but rather to enforce existing unenforced gun laws that prohibit felons, the mentally ill, and domestic terrorists (“anti-fascists”) from possessing them.

Just prior to the murder of Charlie Kirk, a video had been issued of a 23-year-old Ukrainian immigrant, Iryna Zarutska, brutally murdered on public transit in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her throat was slashed by one Decarlos Brown, an African-American, 14-time felon, recently and prematurely released from custody.

The horror followed the now familiar left-wing script. The left-wing mayor, Vi Lyles, immediately tried to stop the release of the transit video, lest it cause anyone or anything to be blamed. Then she followed with the usual DEI boilerplate that excuses evil: do not judge the homeless, arresting people solves nothing, and the murder was merely “tragic,” as if there is no culpability, just bad luck or fate.

As expected, most of the media suffocated the murder story. After all, it upset the dominant racial narrative that must remain unquestioned. We have been told for decades that systemically racist Americans prey on victimized blacks, and thus, Ibram X. Kendi-style antiracism—de facto stigmatizing and demonizing whites—is needed to stop racism.

The left knows that black males, age 15-40, commit well over 50 percent of the most violent crimes in America, while comprising about 3 percent of the population. They know it and privately navigate accordingly, but few speak of it, and none seem to have answers to it. So the topic remains taboo.

Any “tragedy” that highlights that fact—such as the murder of Ms. Zarutska or the recent brutal strangling of Auburn retired professor Julie Schnuelle by a young black man with a felony record who was released back into the public—must be suppressed. So too we rarely hear of the recent murder of the elderly Queens couple by the alleged career felon and released criminal Jamel McGriff. He robbed them, he tied them up, he murdered them, and then he torched their home. And on and on the crime continues, the narrative continues, and we dare not say a word.

In our post-Daniel Penny world, three young black people, sitting just feet away from Zarutska, witnessed Decarlos Brown slit her throat—and did nothing. Perhaps they were afraid, we were told. Perhaps, we were advised, no first aid could have staunched such horrific wounds. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps…

Nonetheless, when Zarutska was staring out at eternity in her death throes, bewildered that someone or something had just ended her life, none of the three lifted a finger to help her—or even console her in her final moments. Instead, the killer, blood dripping from his person, calmly walked off the train unmolested. And even then, in his absence, there was no effort of any of the nearby witnesses to tend to the dying Zarutska. Instead, they sidestepped her and left her behind on the train as she lay gasping her last breaths.

The killer, Decarlos Brown? He can be heard on the video mumbling twice, “I got that white girl.” Yet we were told either that the video was doctored, or too unclear, or irrelevant. If accurate, it demolished the media elite’s insistence that Decarlos Brown had not a racial thought in his mind.

Instead, we were to listen to media analyst Van Jones pontificate that the late Charlie Kirk should have been ashamed for connecting Decarlos Brown to racist hatred. Perhaps Van Jones should reconsider. He should review the entire narrative of how Zarutska found herself a target of a killer. Brown was a 14-time felon. He was out on cashless bail. The magistrate Teresa Stokes, who freed him, had no law degree. Such a “judge” had never taken, much less passed, a bar exam.

She owned an out-of-state alternative treatment center and was involved in another local one. In a prior sane world, magistrates had law degrees. They had been certified as competent by the bar exams. They followed conflict-of-interest protocols that prohibited them from even indirectly profiting from their judicial decisions.

But again, that narrative too is passé, given the power of diversity, equity, and inclusion to exempt norms and protocols for the supposed greater collective good.

From where does all this hatred, violence, and moral vacuity arise? Why did the shooter inscribe his bullets with “anti-fascist” messaging, cruel taunts, and trans jargon?

Is the hatred caused by the media, who talk about toxic “whiteness” nonstop? Is it the collateral damage from the racial obsessions of a Jasmine Crockett, Joy Reid, and septuagenarian Al Sharpton, now ending his racialist career where he started it?

Or is the promulgator the Democratic Party and the Left, out of power, impotent, and angry that their superior intelligence and morality are not properly appreciated by 51 percent of the people? Who put a photoshopped Trump on a New Republic cover as Hitler?

If a General Milley (“now I realize he’s a total fascist”) or a General Kelly (“certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure”) calls a current or ex-president a fascist, and presidential candidate Kamala Harris agrees (“a president…who admires dictators and is a fascist”), then does an unhinged 22-year-old “anti-fascist” college student feel the popular culture might approve of his own efforts in dealing with “fascist” Trump supporters?

Milley, Kelly, Harris, and the rest can call anyone a fascist but without ever defining the term. Did Trump suspend immigration law to let in 12 million illegals? Did he invite into the DOJ or White House the prosecutors Nathan Wade, Jack Smith, and the revolving door Michael Colangelo to coordinate lawfare against an ex-president?

Is Trump ignoring the improper usurpation of executive power by left-wing lower-court judges or instead appealing their decisions through lawful channels?

Did he hire a foreign national to undermine his presidential rival with a fake dossier?

Did he round up “51 former intelligence officials” to lie to the American people to warp the election?

Did he pardon his entire criminally minded family and then cover it up by in absentia outsourcing to his aides the pardoning of hundreds of criminals through an autopen? So please define fascism before smearing a president and lowering the bar of the acceptable.

What is the point of the past violent braggadocio of Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, posing with a baseball bat, or huffing that he will take the “fight” against the Trump agenda “to the streets?” Was he merely following on the earlier example of Rep. Maxine Waters, who urged supporters to whip up a crowd and physically confront Trump officials in stores and restaurants?

Why are congresswomen kickboxing and punching the screen as they video their seriousness to assault Trump?

What does now-campaigning California Governor Gavin Newsom mean when he promises, “It’s not about whether we play hardball anymore—it’s about how we play hardball. We are going to fight back, and we’re going to punch this bully in the mouth.” What would a potential third assassin think of that promise?

If the governor of the largest state in the union wants to bloody the face of the President of the United States or physically attack his opponents (“We’re gonna punch these sons of b‑‑‑‑es in the mouth”), then might lesser underlings and sympathizers try to outdo that?

Or, finally, is the culprit for the madness found ultimately in the elite university? Who, after all, mainstreamed the idea of racial re-segregation in dorms and graduation ceremonies and taught America that racial essentialism is part of the new tribal America?

Who ignored court rulings and civil rights legislation in their arrogance to recalibrate admissions by race? Who taught the anti-Jewish assassin Elias Rodriguez his hatred of Israel and his pro-Hamas zealotry, and who influenced Luigi Mangione, an honors graduate, to despise “capitalist” CEOs?

Where did the practice of identifying one’s pronouns at the end of memos start, or demanding that biological males could compete in women’s sports, and demonizing anyone who objected that there were still two, not three, biological sexes?

Where did the critical race theory and critical legal theory that empowered Black Lives Matter, Defund the Police, Cashless Bail, and all the laws that assured the public that thefts less than $950 were not really thefts?

From where did the new anti-Semitism come, and so strangely after the slaughter of October 7—if not from the campus?

Where else in America were young Jews fleeing to a library with the mob pounding on the windows? Where else are Jews roughed up by a thug who is subsequently given an award by their university? Where did demonstrations arise on behalf of those who murdered 1,200 on October 7?

Why, in the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk, are so many teachers, professors, and college-graduate bureaucrats so eager to gloat over and cheer his death? Who taught them that?

Are universities critical to America’s prosperity and security now only in terms of the sciences, math, engineering, and medical schools?

As for the humanities? They scarcely exist at the elite universities as we once knew them. Either de facto or literally, they have been overwhelmed and distorted by endless studies-courses, DEI radicalism, 90 percent leftist faculties, and suppression of free thought and free expression.

Where did the envisioning of violent crime as the fault of a flawed society, the institutionalization of modern racialism, chauvinism, and essentialism, and the empowerment of militant transgenderism that in so many insidious ways has filtered throughout society—if not originally birthed in the university—come from?

Those sins of commission are force-multiplied by those of omission. Hundreds of thousands of students emerge from campuses not just indoctrinated with contempt for the Western tradition and American exceptionalism, and not just often thousands of dollars in debt from inflated tuition, but also poorly educated by the standards that once defined education.

The working classes and high school graduates, supposedly the losers of our society, are not those who are dividing the country. They are not often advocating violence or trying to use any means necessary to overturn the established order. But so often the products of the modern university are doing just that.

Sadly, in all these recent horrors, the ideology behind them—the premise that either birthed or appeased them—was birthed in modern higher education.

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Fr. Tom Miller@Padre

September 15, 2025

Rod Dreher's Diary

The times they are a changing

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The Times, They Are A-Changin'

How Charlie Kirk's Murder -- And Two Other Deaths -- Should Radicalize Us

Rod Dreher

Sep 15

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Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk: one week, two murders, a changed world

Yes, this is going to be another Charlie Kirk post, because I am convinced that a moment of reckoning has suddenly arrived, in many ways.

I woke up Sunday to learn that Tyler Robinson, Kirk’s assassin, was living in romantic partnership with a man, Lance Twiggs, who was transitioning to female, and who was also, it appears, a furry (a weird subculture of people who costume as animals, and often sexualize their costumed selves). (Read Andy Ngo’s excellent online sleuthing.) It could be that Charlie Kirk died so Tyler Robinson could defend the honor of his troon (tranny) lover. Of course we knew already that Robinson was steeped in radical Left/Antifa politics.

Robinson and Twiggs were ex-Mormons raised in conservative families, who were radicalized by going deep online and living there as if it were reality.

Let me offer you this full post by Robert M. Sterling, which he uploaded to Twitter. It’s long, but I think it’s very true. If you’re on X, follow Sterling:

My liberal friends are completely oblivious about how radicalizing the last week has been for tens of millions of normal Americans. Zero clue.
I’m not talking about people who are “online”; I mean regular, everyday Americans. “Normies.” People who scroll through Facebook posts and Instagram reels from the Dutch Bros drive thru line. Political moderates who have water cooler chats about Mahomes touchdowns and Bon Jovi concerts, not Twitter threads or Rachel Maddow monologues.
Millions of them. Tens of millions. They’re logging on, they’re engaging, and they’re furious.
And I’ll be candid: They blame you guys. They blame the left. Regardless of whether you believe it to be justified, they think you’re the bad guys here. And they are reacting accordingly.
I can already hear some of you racing toward the comments to start screeching in moral indignation, so I’m going to be blunt: Shut up and listen to what I’m telling you. Your movement will lose any semblance of relevance if you don’t develop some small measure of self-awareness, and—absent someone force-feeding you bitter medicine—you guys collectively lack the humility to do this on your own.
Here are the facts:
Fact 1. Tens of millions of Americans started the week seeing a 23-year-old blonde woman—a young woman in whom virtually every parent watching pictured their own daughter—stabbed in the neck by a career criminal. These people then found out the murderer had been released from jail 14 times over.
Fact 2. Two days later, tens of millions of Americans watched a video of Charlie Kirk get murdered speaking to college students. Millions of these people knew who Charlie was; millions of them didn’t. Upon seeing the video, however, these normal Americans from across the land and across the political spectrum agreed that he was the victim of a terrible, fundamentally unjustifiable crime, and their hearts broke in sympathy for his family. Good people who had never even heard the name Charlie Kirk before wept.
Fact 3. Immediately after seeing the footage of a peaceful young man get shot in the neck, these same people logged onto Facebook and Instagram (remember, we are talking about regular Americans, not perpetually online Twitter or Bluesky users) and saw some of their local nurses, school teachers, college administrators, and retail workers celebrating this horrific crime. Not just defending it, but cheering it.
These are all facts. You may not like the implications of these facts, and we can certainly debate the underlying causes thereof, but, indisputably, they are nevertheless factual statements.
Here’s what it means for you, the Democrats reading this: These normal, middle-of-the-road, non-political citizens just become politically active. They realized that politics cares about them, even if they don’t particularly care about politics. After watching Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk both bleed out from the neck, they think their lives and the physical safety of their families—the bedrock of human society, the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—depend on political activation, whether they desire it or not.
These people are now sprinting—not jogging, not walking, but racing—to the right. Because they blame you guys for everything that just happened.
When they see footage of Decarlos Brown stabbing a Ukrainian refugee to death, they don’t see just one demon-possessed man. They picture every university administrator, HR bureaucrat, and DEI apparatchik that ever lectured them about systemic racism, the “carceral state,” or the need to release violent crime suspects without bail in the name of social justice. They then think back to conversations they’ve had with their cop friends—their buddy from high school who quit the force after getting tired of being called a racist, their friend at the local YMCA who vents about having to release career criminals because Soros-funded prosecutors aren’t willing to file charges—and they realize everything the left has told them over the last five years has been utter bullshit.
And they blame you. Because, even if you count yourself as a moderate Democrat, your party supported the district attorneys, city council members, and mayors that let fictitious concerns about mental health and racial justice supersede very real concerns for their family’s safety.
When these Americans see blood erupt from the side of Charlie Kirk’s neck, they don’t see just a martyred political activist. They think of every extreme leftist they’ve ever met who (1) calls anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton a fascist and (2) constantly jokes—“jokes”—about punching Nazis and “bashing the fash.” They realize that there really do exist people who wish to see them dead for their moderately conservative political beliefs, their Christian faith, and even the color of their skin. They ask themselves if the violence visited upon Charlie might one day show up on their own doorstep.
And they blame you. Because, even if you’re just a center-of-the-road liberal, you lacked the courage to police your own ranks. You let modern-day Maoist red guards run loose across every facet of society, and what started with social-media struggle sessions has now turned to 30-06 bullet holes. When these Americans log onto social media and see their neighbors justifying, celebrating, glorifying murder, they realize that some who walk among them are soulless ghouls at best, literally demon-possessed at worst.
These people—whether they faithfully attend church every Sunday or only attend with relatives once a year, on Christmas Eve—start talking about things like spiritual warfare. They implicitly understand that no normal human casually celebrates the mortal demise of a peaceful person. And they blame you.
Because, even if you condemned Charlie Kirk’s murder, they probably haven’t seen you condemn those in your own movement who cheered it on. They view you as complicit in allowing heartless fellow travelers to celebrate death, and it repulses them.
For all of these situations, what has your response been? Nothing but bullshit. In response to Iryna Zarutska bleeding out on the floor of a train, you post bullshit statistics about reductions in reported crime, when everyone who’s ever been to a major urban center in the last decade knows that actual crime has skyrocketed, only for victims not to waste their time reporting it to cops that don’t have the manpower to respond and prosecutors that seek to downgrade as many felonies as possible to misdemeanor citations.
In response to a 31-year-old man taking a bullet to the neck in front of his family, you post nothing but bullshit whataboutism.
> “What about January 6th?” (Honest answer: After you let Liz Cheney spend two years operating a star chamber in the House, combined with countless other failed attempts at “lawfare” against Trump, no one cares anymore.)
> “What about Mike Lee making a dumb joke on Twitter about some guy in a mask in Minnesota?” (No one outside of Utah, DC, or Twitter knows who Mike Lee even is.)
> “What about Paul Pelosi?” (That’s not comparable to Charlie Kirk getting shot, and we all know it. And, again, Paul who?)
> “What about regulations on assault rifles?” (That’s not going to get you very far when one of these killers used a knife and the other one used a common hunting rifle.)
In response to teachers, healthcare workers, and thousands of other liberals cheering on Charlie’s murder, it’s nothing but more bullshit and misdirection.
> “It’s not THAT many people celebrating!” (Yes, it is. Everyone has seen it on their Facebook and Instagram feeds.)
> “I thought you guys didn’t support cancel culture.” (We don’t cancel people over their opinions; we’re more than happy to see people lose their jobs—especially their taxpayer-funded jobs—for actively cheering on murder, though. If you can’t see the difference, that’s your own shortcoming.)
All bullshit. Not even smart bullshit, but stale, mid-grade, low-IQ bullshit. Ordinary Americans see right through it, and they don’t like how it smells.
You probably don’t like hearing this. But you need to hear it. Because I’m right, and, as you reflect on this, you know I’m right. The ranks of my political movement gained millions of righteously angry new members this week. We have a mandate to ensure these crimes never happen again, and that’s exactly what we are now going to do. If you want to keep a seat at the table as we do so, you’d better clean house and start policing your own.

A friend back in the US texted me this overnight:

FB blew up in my face. Family and friends celebrating Kirk’s death. The best man at my wedding that I’ve known for 35 years blocked me becuase I called him out for cheering on his death. I deactivated Facebook. I don’t need to see this. It genuinely hurts to know so many people in my life have such bloodthirsty and are so callous.

My friend has a heart condition. This experience caused him chest pain, which he had to medicate to keep it from turning into cardiac arrest. Yep: his heart literally strained to the breaking point from shock and anger at seeing people he cared about to have a relationship with him cheering the slaughter of a man who held the same opinions, pretty much, as he did.

I agree. Prior to last week, the only thing I knew about Charlie Kirk was that he was some kind of successful MAGA influencer. That’s not my world, so I didn’t investigate further. Now I know there was so much more to him than that, but even if all he was was a MAGA influencer, I would feel the same way. If I find that anybody in my life cheered on, or is cheering on, Kirk’s murder, they’re now out of my life. I have nothing in common with people who celebrate political assassination of a man simply for holding and stating opinions contrary to their own.

Killing Osama bin Laden? Fine. He was a terrorist and a mass murderer. But Charlie Kirk was about as average-American as you can get. He used words of persuasion, not weapons. One of the most extraordinary things about him, something that lifted him above average, was that he was willing constantly to engage his opponents in civil debate. This is what made him so popular and influential. At his campus appearances, he made a point of giving people who disagreed with him the privilege of moving to the front of the question line. He welcomed disagreement! In today’s NYT, there’s an account by a conservative college student that shows you the kind of movement Kirk started. This is from Jeb Allen, a conservative at Amherst College, a liberal bastion:

Last spring, I received a death threat in response to an article I wrote. My friends at Turning Point USA encouraged me to request the Amherst administration drop all disciplinary action in exchange for a one-on-one dialogue with the student. That request was granted, and I found our conversation informative.

Today, I believe that among the things the state should do is to ban all gender transition. Close the clinics. Forbid cross-sex hormones, and prosecute doctors who persist. If that is politically untenable, then strictly forbid it to anyone under the age of 30. Outlaw any policies that in any way grant privileges (e.g., bathroom and locker room access) to transgenders. Agreed, the great majority of transgenders are not murderers, and deserve to be treated with ordinary human decency. But we must abnormalize this condition again.

There’s not a lot the government can do about computers and youth, but there is a hell of a lot parents can do. This image, from Tyler Robinson’s mother in 2013, ought to be on the minds of every mother and father in America:

Note this commentary on it:

We need to once again abnormalize letting kids get computers and smartphones. It used to frustrate me to see the Christian school my kids attended forbid students to have phones during school, but parents — conservative Christian parents — permitting it out of school hours. It was like all the good the school tried to do was totally undermined by the kids’ parents.

It has been very heartening to see clips all weekend on X of people saying they are going back to church for the first time in ages, or going for the first time ever, because of this (watch this incredible short clip). Or picking up a Bible. Or leaving the Left. As the WSJ reports, the Charlie phenomenon is going global. You should also know that in the European media, Charlie is being described as a right-wing extremist and freak (strong implication: who had it coming). Here’s a report from German media about how a professional soccer team is coming down on a Christian player, Felix Nmecha, of African background, who is in trouble for posting mild, apolitical support for Kirk. The clip I post is from the translation:

This outraged some fans, and has prompted the team to say they are going to be having a talk with Nmecha. And you wonder why Europe is in so much trouble!

Here’s a fascinating take on the meaning, especially historically, of Charlie Kirk by T. Greer on his excellent Substack, The Scholar’s Stage. Excerpt:

To understand these emotions, you must first understand what the young Republican on campus was feeling at the height of the Great Awokening.
The young Republican felt afraid.
The young man who believed that a transgender woman is not a woman, or that white privilege is not a national crisis, or that Donald Trump should be president, was a young man who lived in fear. He feared what would happen if he expressed his beliefs. He feared humiliation. He feared that his classmates would blackball, bully, or haze him. He feared becoming the subject of a viral wave of hate. He feared having advisors and professors turn on him, damaging his grades or sabotaging his future career. (While I have used “he” here, all of this was even more true for the conservative young woman, who faced even greater social pressures to conform and more vicious tactics when she did not.)
These young conservatives feared because they took the rhetoric of their professors and classmates seriously. They expected to be treated with the same grace, respect, and friendship that the median progressive reserved for the Ku Klux Klan. Time and again they were told that their beliefs were the functional equivalent of a Klansman’s. In this environment, only the most disagreeable or the most courageous were willing to stand up for their beliefs.
It was in this air of fear that Turning Point USA began to rise. For years progressives have looked at Charlie Kirk’s campus events and lampooned him for spending so much time debating 18-year-olds. They missed the point of these events. By walking onto hostile campuses and planting TPUSA chapters, Kirk showed young conservatives that they were not alone. By arguing with anyone willing to stand in line—professor or protester, heckler or hanger-on—Kirk was demonstrating that conservative beliefs could withstand the scrutiny and social pressure of the college environment. Their creed could take the blows and keep its shape. Every clip he uploaded was evidence that a man who openly championed this creed could walk away looking better and wiser than the progressives who attacked him—no matter how many of these attackers there were. Kirk cut against the spirit of the age. He was no anon. He did not hide behind a handle or bury his convictions in the darker corners of Discord. Every time Kirk or his proxies praised Trump or made some inflammatory declaration, they were showing young conservatives that they could not be silenced.
Behind all of this was one overarching message: Do not fear. You have truth behind you. An entire fellowship of young conservatives stands behind you too. Charlie is here today to show you that conservatives like you can stand tall in hostile spaces. You can also do this. You should also do this. They do not own the public square. You do not need to be afraid.
That was the message of the man who was murdered this week.

You know, this is a variation on the message of both Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vaclav Havel. They both said that people who are willing to live not by lies, and willing to suffer for their convictions, will attract more and more people to their cause by their courage, such that eventually a system built on lies will collapse.

Charlie Kirk embodied that. He was willing to suffer the scorn of campus haters for the sake of engaging them in public debate. Indeed, he said many times that the alternative to discussion and debate is violence. He paid for that conviction with his life. I don’t feel comfortable calling him a Christian martyr, because he was not murdered for his faith per se. But he was absolutely a martyr for free speech, like Socrates.

And now we see so very many people who were afraid no longer willing to be silent.

I’m also seeing on X a lot of people complaining that their churches were packed over the weekend, but their pastors said nothing at all about Kirk’s murder. To be fair, I don’t believe clergy are obligated to preach on current events. But this one — my God, it was news around the world, and had so very much to do with faith and courage and the wages of sin! And so many pastors, it appears, blew it. How out of touch with the needs of your flock can you be? I am reminded once again of the Orthodox priest I once met who refused to talk about gender ideology to his congregation, even though parents in it were confused, because he didn’t want to be “political.” Men of God, sack up! People need to know that the church is a place they can go for wisdom and leadership on how to live godly lives in a world that has turned its back on Him. If all you can provide are canned sermons that have little or nothing to do with the actual lives people live, then you are failing.

The American pope had nothing to say about it, aside from expressing condolences to the new US ambassador to the Vatican. Our Catholic reader Anne Heath sent this commentary, written by an angry Catholic, with a broken heart. Excerpt:

And Leo? On the very day of the assassination he tweeted not about Kirk, not about truth, not about martyrdom, but about migrants at Lampedusa. His only mention of Kirk came two days later in a private conversation with the U.S. ambassador, where he warned that “political differences must never be resolved with violence.” A diplomatic platitude, whispered in private, while the nations chanted in the streets.

Leo indicated that his first foreign trip will be to the island of Lampedusa, same as his predecessor’s first foreign trip, to highlight the plight of refugees. If so, then that is a signal that nothing much is going to change in this pontificate. Would that Leo go to Lyon to comfort the family of this wheelchair-bound Chaldean Catholic, who fled his native Iraq to escape ISIS persecution, slaughtered on a livestream by a machete-wielding Islamist for preaching the Gospel:

Say his name: Ashur Sarnaya. He was martyred by the same sort of person Pope Leo is urging Europe to keep letting in, and whose violent presence is driving Europe to the brink of civil war. Such is the pastoral wisdom of so many Christian leaders. Europe, and all the West, ought to be a haven for Christians fleeing Islamist persecution. But the Leos of the world want to keep letting Muslims in. No wonder Christians are losing faith in their institutional leadership — but not, let us hope, in Jesus Christ! (BTW, that same report Anne sent features a report of a German Catholic bishop going on TV to say that the Bible is wrong about homosexuality.)

Yes indeed, Charlie’s assassination has been an apocalypse. We are seeing who people are — and who they are not. We are seeing Good, and we are seeing Evil. We are seeing ourselves too. The words, or lack of words, from religious leaders say nothing to us, or are even counsels of despair. But the blood of Charlie Kirk, the blood of Iryna Zarutska, and the blood of Ashur Sarnaya shouts to us: You must change your life!

Tertullian: “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” Strictly speaking, Sarnaya is the only true Christian martyr of these three. But there is not a Christian alive — indeed, not a person of conscience anywhere — who cannot read these signs, and choose to live in a different way. A better way. A braver way. A holier way. Me too.

Bob Dylan said it well two generations ago:

For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled

The battle outside ragin’

Will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls

For the times, they are a-changin’

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