Millions of Americans are now struggling to fully register and to fully understand, amidst shock and high emotion, the heinous political assassination and murder this past week of Charlie Kirk. As they painfully register the bare fact, and sorrowfully follow the news for details, they sense, quite correctly, that the country and the world in which they live with their loved ones was changed somehow by that terrible event. In their sorrow and anger, they are looking for a better understanding of the great spiritual forces at work, both within and around them. By such terrible events, the Lord Our Shepherd, with the hook of his shepherd's crook, draws us back to Him.
As one of the Lord's best, the great Calhoun said, this earthly life of man is "a struggle between good and evil." And this struggle is complicated and often bewildering, for finite man, because it is both internal and external.
For the Triune God's elect, it is an internal spiritual struggle against sin nature and the wiles of Satan, a struggle between the spirit and the flesh. But, also for the regenerate elect, it is an external struggle between Christians, aided by God, and atheists, aided by Satan; and these atheists include all unbelievers, including all false religionists, like Muslims and Judaic or Christ-rejecting Jews.
The ultimate outcome of this struggle between good and evil was determined by God, before the beginning of the world and for His glory, in favor of His bride the invisible Church, the body of Christian believers. And the performance of all humanity on this test, as individuals, was also determined before the beginning of the world, and again, to His glory, by His Providential dispensing of common and salvific and sanctifying grace, according to His perfect wisdom.
The great struggle that is this earthly life is further complicated by the fact that unbelievers, in their spiritually lost and dead condition, are yet energized and active in this world, despite their dead souls, because they possess living minds and bodies, which are common grace gifts from God, for His deep purposes. And with their living minds and bodies, but dead souls, unbelievers in that condition live their days fundamentally confused and deluded in their notions and beliefs about good and evil (Isaiah 5:20).
The natural inclination of these fallen and unregenerate people, who are physically alive but spiritually dead and living among us regenerate Christians, is to view -- as we once did when we were lost -- evil as "good" and good as "evil", and darkness as "light" and light as "darkness." And this is the deep reason why Christians and conservatives, on the one hand, and atheists and liberals, on the other hand, struggle to converse across that worldview chasm to good or constructive effect. And this is why the Lord said, I came not to unite but to divide (Luke 12:49-56).
Philosophers call this divided situation, one in which fundamentally different beliefs exist but cannot logically and peaceably co-exist, "polylogism", meaning literally, "many speeches", or different and irreconcilable conceptions of the good. And when sinful unbelievers get hyped up on ready-to-hand false philosophies and false religions that are, at bottom, merely elaborate legitimation doctrines of sin, and when moreover these unbelievers adopt wicked and perverse lifestyles sanctioned by these demonic doctrines, collisions between Christians and atheists in society are inevitable.
But no man can serve two masters. And no single society, if it is to remain united and viable vis-a-vis other and rival societies, can long worship two different and opposing gods.
And one great irony here is that, empirically, the very people in society who deny the reality of man's fallen and sinful nature are precisely those most responsible for crime and sin in the polity. And so, even if these sin-denying individuals are technically law-abiding, since our laws do not forbid all sins, and thereby evade prosecution and incarceration, these sin-deniers are in truth, by virtue of the policies they promote, the most criminal and violent portion of the population. This is why common criminals and atheistic Left-wing terrorists, and their backdoor funders and promoters, lie ultimately on the same criminal spectrum of disobedience to God and hatred of the Good. And the great difference. of course, between common criminals like thieves and rapists and murderers, on the one hand, and atheist liberals, on the other hand, is that common criminals expend far less effort trying to rationalize their sinful conduct.
Meanwhile, on the other side in the struggle between good and evil, the Christian, amidst this moral test and vale of troubles and tears that is the earthly life, struggles all the more because he so often forgets that God is sovereign over all, that He is perfect in goodness and perfect is greatness. We Christians forget, and, like worldly and lost people, we sometimes act as if we have never heard that there will be, at the Judgment, perfect justice for the reprobate and grace for the elect, according to HIs best of all possible plans. Because we forget God, and because we allow ourselves to be drawn away by the world or distracted from God — mentally pulled away from God, Who matters most -- we become discouraged, and sometimes even despair. And this law of the necessity of human closeness to God, our primal need to be cradled in His Hand (Psalm 139:10) is, by the way, why there can be no human flourishing (or even, existence) apart of God.
And then, there is the basic truism that Christians are, empirically speaking, far less violent than atheists and other false religionists.
With the evident exception of Enoch (Gen. 5:24), no man is born a Christian. So the Christian in this life is made to remember, for his own good, his "old man." He is made to remember his once deep and lost and unrepentant sinfulness, his wretched existence before Christ alone -- and not the man himself or any other agency -- saved and regenerated him. With this living memory of his own former deadness and lostness, and with his ongoing recognition of residual sin still in him, the Christian is naturally inclined to be more understanding and more patient with those yet unsaved, remembering and reflecting on the Lord's great patience and forbearance with him. And since finite man cannot see inside others, as God can, he cannot reasonably pronounce another, still living, a reprobate, meaning one predestined by God to suffer eternally in hell.
And this is why the great Christian philosopher Leibniz (1646-1716), in his great love of God and for his fellow man, stressed how Christians are duty-bound to pray fervently for all men, including all their enemies, including the persecutors of the Church, as the Apostle Paul had been as Saul, until the very last second of their earthly lives. Why? Because the Lord may have predetermined that some would be snatched from the flame at the last second of life.
And this is why, in the current raging culture war in America, the opposing sides behave so differently. This explains why Democrats and liberals behave as they do, and why Republicans and conservatives behave as they do. This is why liberals in Congress scream and howl like demons at calls for prayer for a murdered man's family.
And so, it is only by a sound Christian theological framework — such as the one above that you just read -- that we can understand rightly the wicked and horrendous and despicable and heartbreaking political assassination and murder, this past week, of Charlie Kirk.
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The heinous political assassination of Charlie Kirk, a young man who courageously and energetically championed open debate and freedom of speech, with the sincerest respect and consideration for those with whom he debated and disagreed, poses an emotional and intellectual challenge for those inclined to forget — and for those who do not know -- that God holds all the things, including HIs enemies, in His mighty Hand.
America reached a turning point the day Mr. Kirk was murdered in front of nearly 3000 young students at a college in Utah. At work that day, I saw the stunned faces of younger colleagues who knew of this man and were struggling to register the heinous deed.
We are now at a turning point in America, not merely because of the infamous murder committed by the shooter on a palpably and obviously good and Christian family man, but especially because of the shameless and truly demonic applause of that murder by many that continues to follow the deed.
The hard realization of the better folk among us is that wicked and deluded and murderous liberals live all among us, people who have become, by sin nature and false philosophy, unreachable by facts or reason or logic. We feel now as if we have suddenly awakened from sleep and found ourselves in a pit, surrounded by rattlesnakes. Having lost the election last November in a landslide rejection by the American people, and unable to maintain a political party capable of winning by ballot, radicalized liberals have now turned to political violence. And so now, what is to be done?
In recent years, good Americans have come to view their often bad government with skepticism, and this is sensible and natural and a necessary first step toward reform. But government, we have found since last January, can be better, if the people controlling it are better; and government, though imperfect, can then perform its legitimate duty of protecting society, instead of making war on that society.
But since our radicalized and violent liberals, in their deep spiritual lostness, now call evil "good" and good "evil", and since they have become unreachable by conversation and civil debate and by the other gentler forms of Christian love, all that remains as an option for Christians, including prayer, is the more Hobbesian, hard-love use of restraining and punitive physical force. And, in fact, this is precisely why the Lord, in His Providence, ordained government to protect society.
And while we work to forcibly restrain the murderous evil of the anti-Christ Marxist-liberals among us, in our general society and even within our families, we as Christians are duty-bound to ever remember that this world is our Father's world. We must stand firm in it, like the Spartan warriors under King Leonidas at Thermopylae, and like Charles Martel ("The Hammer") and his Christian knights defeating and expelling the Muslims at Tours. We must push back and defeat, by a firm and humane use of physical force, the reasonless liberal infidels who, with their wicked delusions, now threaten the destruction of all society and of all civilization worthy of the name. Above all, in God's name, we must defend and promote the natural family, and especially the Christian family, which is, as Marx and Engels admitted long ago, the greatest impediment in creation to totalitarian communist-liberalism.
But within this general struggle, there is a very particular task now to be performed by Christians.
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In the spirit of Charlie Kirk, we must defeat anti-Christ totalitarian communist-liberalism by besieging and capturing their long-held stronghold — the colleges and universities of American academia, both public and private. In the spirit of Charlie Kirk, we must restore our schools as bastions of real learning and free inquiry and open debate. In this struggle to retake and redeem academia, those homeschooled in Christian households in recent years, being now the best educated and most literate portion of our youth, will play a key role.
Across America, many of our colleges and universities were originally Christian and were bastions of extensive intellectual freedom, free inquiry, and open debate. These schools adhered to the principle of freedom of inquiry and expression articulated and enshrined in the wonderful tract "Areopagitica" by the great Puritan John Milton (1608-1674), author of Paradise Lost. ( I have explored this fundamental principle in two lectures on Sermon Audio.)
But, a few decades ago, communist intellectuals in America, inspired by the murderous Chairman Mao — the bloodiest tyrant in history -- and his long march in China to communist revolutionary power, launched a campaign to take over and transform our American colleges and universities. The Marxist-Jew Herbert Marcuse advocated a communist takeover of American society and government by a "long march through the institutions", starting with our colleges and universities. Marcuse and his ilk have been highly successful in their efforts to transform our schools into Maoist and Stalinist re-education and indoctrination camps.
In our lifetime, the Marxist takeover has swept over more than the originally Christian Ivy-League schools like Harvard and Yale and Princeton. By now the red tide has swept over the hinterland, over all of our state universities and smaller colleges and even technical colleges and schools, not to mention, of course, the catastrophically failed public grade-schools. Locally, the red tide has consumed formerly Christian schools like Furman University (once Baptist) and Emory University (once Methodist), and has made extensive inroads into smaller schools including even Bob Jones University (non-denominational fundamentalist) and Erskine College (nominally ARP Presbyterian), in remote and tiny (but idyllic and beautiful) Due West, South Carolina.
Decades ago, while the Reds were consolidating and extending their capture of our colleges and universities and public-school systems, they successfully advanced from that stronghold into our government, our private industry, and our entertainment industries, including Hollywood, to promote their campaigns for indoctrination, intimidation, and immoral filth. Their ultimate goal is the Godless subjection and enslavement of the American people and the destruction of American society and families. Wickedly denouncing all conservative and Christian opposition to atheistic communism as "fascist" — that is the trademark of the communist-liberal.
But God works all things — including the political murder of Charlie Kirk -- to the good of those who believe in Him, and His written Word, the Bible, details the ultimate futility of all disobedience to God. Over and over, in those pages, God's enemies are overcome and defeated after a season of waxing in sinful pride and depravity.
This past week, many younger Americans, especially young white men, the natural future leaders of our country and families, were fully roused to action by Charlie Kirk's murder. At work on that terrible day, I saw it in their eyes and in their facial expressions. I heard it in the tone of their cracked and furious voices. The best and the brightest of our younger generation, grown up under the thumb of wokeness and political correctness that has targeted and discriminated against them, as white and male, from the very womb, are now on full alert.
That day, my bright young engineering colleagues, stunned and bewildered by the terrible news and looking for clarity and course, looked at me, their older colleague, for some word of advice. I told them that America's greatest political thinker, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, taught that true liberty is a Providential reward for moral and intellectual virtue, and that slavery, in nearly every historical instance, is the just Providential punishment for the ignorance, sloth, and depravity of the slave. These young men immediately nodded in recognition of that fundamental Christian truth. They got it, and now, like young and valiant Joshua of old (Joshua 24:15), they are off to change America and the world for the better.
Later that same day, in a workplace once oppressed by anti-American and totalitarian political correctness, I heard them using Scripture itself to rebut the liberals' characteristically lame and wicked rationalizations of Kirk's murder. How wonderful it was to hear young men talking among themselves that way. Magnificent!, and what an encouragement that was to me, who has been in this battle against Godless liberalism for so long.
But where do things in our society stand now?
This past week, liberalism, in its drunken ideological pride and madness, woefully overstepped. The bullet that cut down Charlie Kirk has raised up hundreds and thousands of Charlie Kirks who will now, in their implacable and righteous fury, employ their common grace moral and intellectual gifts from God to righteously put down our liberal oppressors. Charlie Kirk, having fought a very good fight indeed, is now with the Lord in heaven. Those he inspired by his words and example, the very backbone and hope of future America, will avenge Charlie and carry on his work. They will avenge him, as he would have it, by a Christian re-construction and redemption of American academia; and this American example will in time, I predict, be emulated by other nations. This retaking and redemption of American academia will, I also predict, break the back of liberalism in America; and it will move the Overton Window of political opinion and belief in America back toward the Right and toward what is right and therefore closer to the Lord.
One last thought: As an older man seeing the righteous rage and determination of my highly-gifted younger colleagues on that day and since, I almost pity the poor and stupid totalitarian liberals for the just reward of retribution they will soon receive — ALMOST.
The tree is liberty is watered by the blood of patriots. Charlie Kirk, murdered by anti-Christ and pervert liberalism at 31, was an American patriot and a Christian husband and father. But in this dark hour, a light of new hope, by His Providence, now shines. The Lord graciously calls on His Christian children to share in His glory of opposing evil. Let us now claim that share of glory offered.
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Winston McCuen, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Furman University, holds a Ph.D. In philosophy from Emory University and is a John C. Calhoun scholar. A native of Greenville County, South Carolina, he is the son of William Garrison McCuen, Sr. and Anne Ballenger King McCuen.
