‘A picture of virtue’: Charlie Kirk’s noble aim

“A man is not primarily a witness against something,” Whitaker Chambers wrote. “That is only incidental to the fact that he is a witness for something.”

Chambers wrote this in the foreword to his memoirs, which doubled as a letter to his children. Chambers’ memoirs, titled Witness, centered on his stand against Communism. But he hoped that he was pointing toward the good by taking on that evil.

Charlie Kirk, shortly before he was assassinated, laid out a similar sentiment to a reporter writing a profile of him at Deseret News.

“My job every single day is actively trying to stop a revolution,” Kirk said.

In service of this, Kirk spent much of his time knocking down bad ideas — arguing against socialism, against DEI, against gender ideology, against the worst sorts of feminism.

But pulling up the weeds is never enough. It’s only the precursor to planting a lush garden. You can’t battle evil simply by knocking down bad ideas. Also, it’s pointless to rail against the bad things if you’re not going to offer something positive.

Kirk addressed exactly this in the interview: “This is where you have to try to point them towards ultimate purposes and towards getting back to the church, getting back to faith, getting married, having children.”

“That is the type of conservatism that I represent,” he said, “and I’m trying to trying to paint a picture of virtue of lifting people up, not just staying angry.”

In the political fray, most of what we do is negative. That’s because it’s the political fray. Politics will never be what matters most. If it is our job to point people towards the good, that good won’t be electing the right guys, or even passing the right legislation. These things matter, but they are always subordinate goods.

What matters most is outside the political. It’s personal. What matters most is loving your neighbor as yourself. It’s falling in love, getting married, and laying down your life for another person. It’s starting a family, and loving your children more than you love your own life.

No politician is going to give you what matters most. Some will get in the way. No law is going to give us the good life. If we, who wade into the political fray and the culture wars, are to do righteous work, we need to call out what we believe to be evil, but in the service of painting a picture of the good life.

Father Richard John Neuhaus once had an audience with about 20 conservative journalists, and he worried about the negativity in political journalism. Neuhaus said to try not to simply tear down people and ideas but to lift them up, too.

Among conservative influencers, Owning the Libs” has been a pastime. Kirk did his share of that. But especially after he got married and became a dad, he tried to point toward the positive.

Kirk was dedicated to promoting debate, bringing conflicting views face-to-face. Half of the country might have disagreed with him about the proper role of government, the proper regulation of guns, and the proper foreign policy. The evils he was fighting were things some people thought were good.

But the good he was advancing, what he was a witness for, was not partisan. It was family, marriage, and love.

CHARLIE KIRK’S HONORABLE LEGACY OF CIVIL DISCOURSE

This isn’t uncontroversial, of course, that’s why it needs to be argued for, forcefully and passionately. That’s one reason losing Kirk will make us poorer.