What We Do
Charlie Kirk. Born in 1993 outside of Chicago, Illinois. Married in 2021. Two children. Founder of a political and religious advocacy group. Toured college campuses debating political opponents in an open forum. Hosted a podcast. Judging by those now celebrating his death, to include elected officials and political appointees, one would expect his biography to read more like this: “participant at the Wannsee Conference, officer of the Schutzstaffel, architect of the Final Solution on the Question of the Jewish Problem, and facilitator of extermination camps.”
I wanted to give deliberation its due by waiting a week to write on this. To let cooler heads prevail, but why should I write in this forum at all? What is the relevance of this event for a school? It is cowardice not to acknowledge how it pertains directly to what we do. We teach people how to think, but as importantly, how to listen to one another, and often, how to disagree with one another. We teach young people, but also adults indirectly, how to find their way through their thoughts and emotions—and how to change their opinions when warranted.
What Kirk did, he managed to do without vulgarity, without imposing himself on anyone, and by concluding even tense debates with “God loves you.” He did that thing most necessary for the preservation of a civil society: he disagreed agreeably. On an ideological level, he embodied G.K. Chesterton’s line about the true soldier: “A real soldier does not fight because he has something that he hates in front of him. He fights because he has something that he loves behind his back.” It is better to be for a thing than against it, and what we are for requires speech to express.
The gravity of this event, however, lies not simply in its attempt to curtail freedom of speech. It spotlighted a dysfunctional society wherein emotivism is permitted to stand in place of rationalism, violence in place of dialogue, and one in which words are too frequently detached from consequences.
Some have said, in less polite terms, that Kirk was an extremist who deserved an extreme end. What is it that made him extreme? Was he extreme because he was a Christian? America is a Christian nation, and even those who profess no Christian faith, or faith of any kind, are the beneficiaries of a Christian culture and history. Fifty-four of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence were Christians (the other two were Deists), thirty-eight of the thirty-nine signers of the Constitution were Christians (all but Franklin, who regarded himself as a Deist), and around 70% of the current American population, with that number growing by about one percent per year among young males. This majority does not claim a right to impose their faith on the minority, but their cultural influence has inarguably formed America’s cultural and ethical norms. People can reference a “separation of church and state” without pointing to Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, but Jefferson’s point pertained principally not to a freedom from religion, but a freedom of conscience. It is a short letter, but this is the relevant passage: “…religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church and State.” Kirk was either killed for exercising his freedom of conscience or his freedom of speech, and that assassination is now hypocritically celebrated by those claiming to be doing the same. It is a curious way of sustaining a free society.
The government’s role in this event would be irrelevant were it not for the fact that many of those celebrating are politicians, would-be politicians, schoolboard members, teachers, medical professionals, and civil servants, some of whom are operating at high and in consequential positions within state and federal justice departments. Is it sensible that we should allow our civil servants to foster a no-holds-barred system for resolving political disputes knowing that one side’s excesses will inevitably be mirrored by the other?
If only for a moment, let’s assess Jesus Christ as though he were a secular philosopher. What is it that makes his message so threatening? Do we believe that a population that tries to love not only one another, but one’s enemies, is less likely to be a healthy society? Do we not believe that there is a higher law than man’s? We could treat this as provocative, but Plato and Sophocles, who preceded Christ, said the same. Are they too to be banished from the state’s list of permitted philosophers? Are we opposed to cultivating an inner moral character that prizes humility, mercy, and peacemaking like Aurelius or most of the Stoics? Do we believe, even if only culturally, in forgiveness as the way of breaking cycles of retribution and resentment? Do we believe in servant leadership? Do we believe in compassion for the vulnerable, the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized? The government through its affirmative action programs seems to. The motto of the U.S. Special Forces is de oppresso liber. In the interests of fairness, reciprocity, and sympathy, do we not teach young children the golden rule of “Do to others what you would have them do to you”? (Matthew 7:12) In our government and in our culture, we do not appear to have so much of an issue with the message as we do the faith.
So why did this event resonate so palpably? One person, referencing Normal Rockwell’s painting “Freedom of Speech,” commented that, “they killed this man.” It’s an interesting observation. The point being that the assassin and his admirers did not just kill Charlie Kirk the man, but an idea central to our conception of ourselves as Americans. Rockwell’s painting, which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post on February 20, 1943, alongside a short parable by Booth Tarkington had taken inspiration from a townhall meeting in Vermont that Rockwell was present for in which a lone citizen stood and spoke against the prudence of financing a school. In Tarkington’s parable, an unnamed character says, “Speech is the expression of thought and will. Therefore, freedom of speech means freedom of the people. If you prevent them from expressing their will in speech, you have them enchained, an absolute monarchy. Of course, nowadays he who chains the people is called a dictator.” The reader learns at the end of the piece that this is a fictious meeting between a young Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. What stands in place of dictatorship in our contemporary moment is terrorism, the purpose of which is to inspire fear to prevent or make dangerous the expression of certain thoughts in order to produce a preferred political outcome.
The grotesqueness and corrosiveness of those advocating for this violence and what they contend is the righteousness of the further violence they wish to see is appalling. This sentiment is espoused, and future perpetrators encouraged, by people either in charge or attempting to gain control of our children’s education, members of the military who have sworn to defend us, politicians who have thrown off any semblance of objectivity, university professors who have utterly betrayed the notion of academic disinterestedness, medical professionals who cannot seriously be regarded as carrying out their Hippocratic Oath, and alleged professionals within our justice system who can never again be taken seriously—at least no more seriously than if they were Robespierre who claimed that, “…Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.” This sort of thing represents the end of civil society. Our children deserve better than this farce. Ridgeview is committed to doing its part to ready more sensible citizens.
During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) broadcast not only hateful and incendiary messages, but went beyond this to help coordinate the “génocidaires.” When the killing finally concluded, the United Nations oversaw the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and the owners and “journalists” who worked for RTLM were prosecuted and convicted for genocide, incitement to genocide, and crimes against humanity. Words, at least in some cases, have consequences.
What we should have intense distrust for is anyone who claims that we have a right to assassinate our political opponents in front of their families. It is, frankly, beneath us to have to even say this, and yet our politicians, civil servants, justice officials, teachers, and medical professionals are among the advocates now requiring that we do so. Their conduct is abhorrent. In contrast, consider the tone of a prior century’s religious disputes; namely, those involving Voltaire. He debated Rousseau’s naturalistic Deism, defended theism against Helvétius when he advocated atheism and materialism, satirized the Jesuits, wrote against intolerance and religious persecution, carried on a forty-year correspondence with Frederick the Great about enlightened absolutism and deistic-theistic views, softened Diderot’s militant atheism, and ridiculed Leibniz. In the 247 years since Voltaire’s death, no evidence has emerged that he solicited the assassination of any of his ideological or theological opponents, nor that he celebrated their deaths. More likely, Voltaire changed Frederick the Great, and Frederick the Great changed Voltaire. This is what honest dialogue does.
The eighteenth century is different from the twenty-first. They say it is more enlightened. Improved by science, technology, and greater access to “education.” And, it is said that politics is downstream from culture, but the culture that has produced this demonic and ghoulish behavior has spilled out of its cesspools and leeched into our schools and colleges poisoning our youth. If our society asserts that youth is entitled to privileged protections, both for their safety and their welfare, should any of us, regardless of our political persuasion, trust the champions of Charlie Kirk’s murder with Charlie Kirk’s daughter? If not with her, what of our own children under these people’s sway and tutelage when we hold opinions contrary to theirs?
What do we do? What can be done? We are only one school. We are, however, in favor of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. The pursuit of these things is an arduous and life-long pursuit. It is sometimes hard to know the truth. Mostly, we only get an approximation or a shade of it. Unless we are apathetic, we know arguments will ensue. If we are in it for Truth, and accept that we shall never have a perfect iteration of it, we need not resort to violence to press our claims. Our objective is persuasion through dialogue. If we care for Beauty, we must acknowledge its opposite. It is less necessary that we should work against ugliness, than that we work for Beauty. We must be intelligent and sensitive enough to comprehend the difference. Finally, we must regard this life as worthwhile enough that Goodness is preferable to evil. It is why man recognizes a gulf between what he is and what he generally feels he ought to become. If he is heroic, he struggles his whole life to close that gap. To become something closer to the idealized version of himself. The pursuit of this is painful and hard, but if he values Goodness, he cannot succumb to the world. In this sense, to succumb means to allow himself to be made by the world rather than by himself or a divinity higher than himself.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk was a momentous event because it was intended to be, but it is possible that it will have ramifications no one who championed it may have imagined. For Ridgeview’s part, I hope that its effect is a greater and clearer commitment to our noble project. I hope that we live better, and model better, the lives that remain possible for the handful of young men and women we have the privilege of serving.
D. Anderson
Headmaster
