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The date turned over again. September 10. It’s been a year since Charlie Kirk was killed at Utah Valley University.
I’ve sat with this one longer than most. Six versions, give or take, each one trying to get closer to what I actually meant. This morning the coffee was still hot when I decided this was near enough.
Even though I came to his work late. Most people had already made up their minds about Kirk long before I started watching the clips just a bare few months before his death. I came in through the gospel conversations. The reputation I’d heard didn’t fully match what I was seeing.
What stayed with me wasn’t the size of the crowds or the slogans. It was the way he planted himself at a folding table on some campus quad, mic in hand. His own supporters often surrounded him. Sometimes they catcalled the people who disagreed. Kirk would turn and tell them to quiet down. “Let them speak,” he’d say. It echoed Paul on Mars Hill in its own way. Paul walked into Athens, looked around at their statues and altars, and didn’t begin by tearing everything down. He noticed what they were already reaching for and spoke from that place. He reasoned with them. He quoted their own poets. Kirk wasn’t quite that measured or that straightforward, but he did tell the unvarnished truth of Scripture, and he stayed at the table longer than many would have.
There were times his edge got the better of him, the way it does. The faith and the politics sometimes tangled in ways that probably cost him listeners. Still, he stayed.
That part I respected. I said as much last year, in the piece I wrote right after it happened.
Then I did something I probably shouldn’t have. I put a call out, asking younger readers, eighteen to thirty-five, to tell me what they thought of him. I told myself I wanted honest, Christ-centered reflection. I think that was true. But I also think some part of me wanted company. Wanted to hear from people who saw what I saw.
The responses were few, and mixed. An old friend I hadn’t seen in something like forty years surfaced just to say they disagreed with nearly everything Kirk stood for, though they were sorry for his family. Fair enough. That’s an honest answer and I have no complaint with it.
The other one sat wrong with me, and still does. Someone suggested we’d all be better off if we just stopped paying attention to men and looked to God instead. Said as if the two were in competition. As if noticing a man held a line costs you something you owe to God.
I didn’t say anything back. I didn’t get any other responses, so I moved on. That felt like humility at the time.
Here’s the part I’m only now willing to look at straight on. It isn’t only that disagreement costs connection, though I was raised believing that too. It’s that I know I’m no rhetorician. I read wide, on purpose, trying to get past whatever bubble I’m in, and what I mostly find is that everybody’s skewed, everybody’s dodgy in their own direction, and some folks are just a good deal more comfortable throwing an opinion out there than I am, dissenting ones included. I’ve watched enough of these exchanges to know how the techniques work—the reframing, the “gotcha,” the way a question gets turned back on you before you’ve finished asking it. I don’t have the stomach for that kind of fight, and I get plain angry when I feel cornered by it. So I’ve mostly stayed quiet. Told myself that was grace. Some of it probably was fear of losing, dressed up as not wanting to fight.
But it was never about wanting to win an argument. It isn’t now either. Peter didn’t tell the church to out-debate anybody. He told them to always be ready to give an answer, and to do it with gentleness and respect. Gentleness and respect aren’t the same as silence. I can hold a position without needing to out-maneuver somebody who’s better with words than I am. Kirk wasn’t always the sharper arguer in the room, from what I saw. He didn’t come to win. He came to stay standing at the table.
I share Babylon Bee stories sometimes, just to keep an edge on my faith. I don’t want a comfortable one. But sharing a satire link is cheap compared to saying out loud, to somebody who half-accused me of misplaced devotion, that they’d gotten it wrong. I know the difference. I’ve mostly chosen the cheap version.
I’m trying to lay that habit down. I’m too old now to keep compromising out of fear. There’s not enough runway left.
Back in the early 1980s, I used to walk through Free Speech Alley on the way to class at Louisiana State University. It was nothing grand—a pebbled-concrete bench along the north side of the Student Union, right at the edge of the Parade Ground, where thousands of students passed by every day.
I’d given my life to Christ as a child, but hadn’t yet learned that He could be someone you actually walked with day to day. I was very distracted back then and not looking for conviction from anybody.
There was a woman who showed up regularly—Sister Cindy, she was called—long skirts, straw hat, more fire than warmth. I thought she was a laugh riot in my ignorance. I wasn’t receptive then. I’ve caught up with her recently on social media and she’s still at it. Glad to see it. I’m not saying her method was above reproach, but I’ve learned that truth often hurts, upsets, or enrages. That’s what makes speaking the truth in love so dependent on really knowing the Person behind it: Jesus Christ. Otherwise it’s just our truth, and that and a quarter won’t get you very far.
The concrete around Free Speech Alley was often littered with flyers, empty bottles and cans, food wrappers. Voices bounced hard off the brick walls of Coates Hall and the Student Union. Most of it felt like performance. But some people showed up anyway. That’s part of why Kirk’s willingness to stay at the table stuck with me.
I don’t need to defend him. He had sharp edges and blind spots like all Christians do. But in a way, the strong reactions he still provokes, even a year after his death, underscore something important. Jesus is the only person who has ever been above reproach. The rest of us fall short. That realization has been clarifying.
My coffee is cooler now. I don’t have clean conclusions about any of this. But September 10 will land on some other day next year, and I don’t want it finding me still letting things go by and calling it peace. It’s late in coming. Late isn’t the same as too late.
Charles James Kirk (October 14, 1993 – September 10, 2025)