What do you do |with the anger? A great rage has begun to erupt amongst those who admired, loved and supported Charlie Kirk. And rage notoriously gets in the way of trying to think clearly.

There is a natural human instinct for revenge. This is partly out of fear – “let’s stop them now before they kill more of us” and also justice: “if they are going to take our lives then they forfeit their own.”

Both are natural and normal instinctive responses. At the same time commentators are reaching out afresh to the War Studies academics who have been warning anyone who would listen that all the requisite factors are in place for civil war to break out on the west.

This would be bad and complex enough, if there were just two antagonised parties confronting each other, but there are three.

Kirk was one of those advancing the analysis that one of the strategies that lay behind cultural Marxism was that Islam and migration were being used to destroy ‘the West’, the largely white democracies that were created by Christendom.

Leaving aside Islam for the moment, let us return to the two ideologies in conflict with each other, which are often described politically as being the Left v the Right.

Perhaps one of consequences or effects that flow from Charlie Kirk’s death is that we should no longer confine ourselves to that political binary framework. It has become more than unhelpful, it has become partly untrue. And this is because the political struggle is no longer essentially about the rights of the Left’s collective ideology against the Right’s defence of the rights of individuals, but has revealed itself, or become that of good against evil.

Usually “we are the good guys and you are the evil ones” is a rhetorical claim for moral superiority by one side against another, but after Charlie Kirk’s death, a watershed has been reached, and it is no longer a matter of rhetoric; and this may be why.

It is a truism to say that almost all people claim that what they are doing is good. There is universal recognition of the existence of good and evil, but people disagree as to what constitutes good and evil. But since the struggle between good and evil is considered to be part of the supreme struggle for and between human beings, the stakes are considered very high indeed.

In fact, they are so high, that the struggle can quite easily slip over into violence, and the killing of those who are deemed to be or host evil can become justified, both by fear and the lure of achieving moral purity.

There is, of course, a different way of understanding the human struggle between polarities; and that is between truth and untruth- truth and error- truth and deceit.

This dichotomy is also considered to be vitally important, but there is a sense with those who believe in truth, that the truth will triumph over error- untruth and deceit, given enough time, courage and exposure. The deceivers are overcome not so much by violence as by having the truth told in as many ways and as clearly as it can.

And that was Charlie Kirk’s great gift. In fact, it proved to be astonishingly effective in his mouth and mind.

Given this description, it begins to become evident that in a conflict where good and evil are seen to be pitched against each other, there is more likely to be recourse to violence, justified by the malignant threat of evil, than in the struggle between right and wrong.

(It’s not that right v wrong, which can very easily become ‘might-is-right’ v ‘weak-is-wrong’ does not resort to violence. Quite clearly it does. But more usually when set in a collectivist context. The most obvious example would be the collectivist example of German National Socialism in the 1930’s and 40’s.)

But at the level of public debate the Left are more likely to call their opponents evil, while the Right are describing theirs as wrong or mistaken.

A consequence of this is that the Left are paradoxically more prone to resort to violence in their struggle against what they perceive to be the immoral right.

Charlie Kirk warned that the Left were reaching for the weapon of violence to suppress ideas they found threatening in a way that made an intensification of political violence more immanent.

The broadcaster and commentator Jonathan Sacerdoti wrote in the Spectator,

“For years, Kirk warned that it had become dangerous to speak openly if one held conservative views. Many dismissed that claim as theatrical. Now, it looks like prophecy. His books, his speeches, his podcast appearances, all returned to the same theme: that expressing dissenting views in public life, especially on campuses, came with mounting costs. Not just reputational or professional costs, but personal ones. Threats. Ostracism. Hostility. He argued that universities had become places of ideological conformity and subtle coercion. He said that tolerance had been redefined as submission. Now, the country must reckon with whether he was right.”

In America during the eruption of the culture wars, it has indeed been the ideologs from the Left who break out into both public violence and both call for and implement assassination.

And this is what requires us to change our language about the present cultural conflict.

It is less a struggle between Left and Right than it is between good and evil. The intensifying of outbreak of violence on the Left, and now culminating in Kirk’s assassination may turn out to have been a last straw. It appears to have had the effect in convincing the Right that they are no longer dealing with truth versus error, but they also are drawn into the fight between good versus evil. And when or if that point is reached, they too may be willing to engage in retributory violence.

But for Christians, every effort must be made to avoid violence.

Although the temptation at this point will be to see violence as justified by self-defence. As one remark on X had it “I’m tired of seeing the bullets all flying in one direction….”

Is there no other form of self-defence than to return the bullets?

It is always better, if one is not on the Left, to change someone’s mind than to take their life. In fact, that almost seems to be a defining difference between Left and Right.

The American politician Nick De Freitas gave vent to the frustration so many felt

We are not “one people” anymore, are we?

“The truth is we haven’t been for some time now, and there is really no point in pretending anymore, if there ever was.

We are two very different peoples. We may occupy the same piece of geography, but that is where the similarities seem to abruptly end.

I convinced myself for a long time that whenever the left called me a racist, a bigot, a sexist, a fascist, a “threat to democracy” for even the most innocent of disagreements, that it was simply hyperbolic rhetoric done for effect.

And now the “effect” is a widow and two orphaned children, because the left couldn’t bear the thought of a peaceful man debating them and winning.

I don’t think they realize it yet, but murdering Charlie is going to be remembered as the day where we finally woke up to what this fight really is.

It’s not a civil dispute among fellow countrymen. It’s a war between diametrically opposed worldviews which cannot peacefully coexist with one another. One side will win, and one side will lose.

My Christian faith requires me to love my enemies and pray for those who curse me. It does not require me to stand idly by in the midst of savagery and barbarism…quite the opposite.

So, every time I feel tired, every time I feel discouraged or overwhelmed, I am going to watch the video of a good man being murdered in Utah…I will force myself to watch it…and then I will return to the work of destroying the evil ideology responsible for that and so much more.”

Can the struggle between diametrically opposed world views be contained in the arena of political and philosophical debate?

Charlie Kirk himself, in the days just before his assassination, emphasised how the conflict of ideas had to find political form. Without a link between ideology and politics, the ideological values would have no traction.

“If we want things to change, it’s 100% necessary to politicize the senseless murder of Iryna Zarutska because it was politics that allowed a savage monster with 14 priors to be free on the streets to kill her.”

If we are to make the changes by argument rather than by force, we need to expose the truth about the difference and end result of the different ideologies.

Brendan O’Neill suggested that the horrific implications of the Left’s grievance culture had been laid bare for all to see.

“It is possible we have just witnessed the savagery of grievance culture, the apocalyptic endpoint of the neo-medieval belief that ‘words hurt’. After all, if speech is violence – as so much of the wet left says it is – wouldn’t that make violence a legitimate response to speech? We are potentially seeing the dire consequences of re-educating an entire generation to fear disagreement, to cherish their own self-esteem above all else, even liberty. It seems to me that a young man might just have paid the highest price for this lethal ideology.

This is America’s Charlie Hebdo moment. Violence wielded against ideas, a man punished for his ‘blasphemies’, gunfire cutting down discussion. And so, we should say of Charlie Kirk what we said of Charlie Hebdo: Je suis Charlie.”

Our best response to avoid being thrust more deeply into civil violence that may teeter into civil war is to continue the example that Charlie Kirk left us. After all, we can see that ‘they’ killed him because he was becoming so effective at changing the minds of the brainwashed young.

Indeed, it may be that the assassination was justified in the eyes of those who planned and paid for it, precisely because as well as silencing Charlie Kirk, it might end the talking for good and tip society into the destabilising violence that ‘they’ seek.

Who is the ‘they’? That may be the 64K dollar question. And how does Islam fit in may be a second question with a complex answer.

But for now, the challenge we are presented with is how we move on from this assassination without being drawn into further violence.

The answer for Christians will or should be the same solution that Charlie Kirk so effectively employed let us use our best minds and most persuasive mouths to continue to tell the truth about the illusions, false promises and distorting sub-human dystopias the left have brainwashed our culture with.

It was partly the fragility of ideological coherence mixed with such appallingly obvious damaging outcomes that gave Charlie Kirk the moral strength and superiority that allowed him to challenge the Left in the public square, by taking the truth to the enemy, and instead of killing them take revenge in a different way, by killing the ideology and changing their minds with a challenge they found as difficult as they found their lack of success mystifying. The challenge was ‘Prove me wrong.”