Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk

"Charlie" is what you call a friend named Charles when you know him well. Before 10 September 2025, hardly anyone in Australia knew who Charles James Kirk was. It's odd how quickly we move to familiar name terms with a stranger - yet Kirk's death marks an intersection of modern life that made the death of a stranger feel more real and consequential than the deaths of many closer to us.

Indeed, it was a martyrdom, not merely a death. Charlie wasn't just a political figure; he believed it was his Christian duty to witness on university campuses, and he was killed in the course of that witness. For Australians, his faith and politics are so closely entwined that his approach will seem bizarre to many - our notion of the separation of church and state is strongly entrenched. But it shouldn't be bizarre.

Christians are as entitled as Buddhists, Muslims, atheists, and even Marxists to be involved in political life, yet the latter are often celebrated for their diversity, while the former are condemned for their presumed morality. But why should people from any of group - even those we dislike - check their beliefs in at the door of the public square? When you vote for a representative, aren't you voting for their values? What would it say about a person if those values were voluntarily abandoned when it came to political matters?

Politics and religion have always been closer in the United States than in Australia, despite the US constitutional separation of church and state. The fundamental linkage in Charlie's case is free speech - also enshrined in the US constitution. As a right, free speech really derives from the Reformation and is linked to Protestant doctrines that asserted the primacy of scripture and the right of individual believers to make their own decisions before God.

Not that all Protestants have been passionate free-speech advocates, or all Catholics censors, but there was a preponderance of Protestants on the free-speech side - people like John Milton and John Locke (though Milton would have denied Papists that right).

Charlie was an evangelical Protestant, a member of Calvary Chapel, a fellowship of some 1,800 non-denominational congregations. You can see how his religion worked alongside his secular arguments on issues like transgenderism - the issue that got him killed. He was happy at one time to say empirically, "The facts are that there are only two genders," and at another to call transgenderism "so against our senses, so against the natural law, and - dare I say - a throbbing middle finger to God." While his "prove me wrong" challenge was essentially secular, religion sometimes intruded: he would even pray for someone in the audience.

Christians are exhorted by St Paul to "fight the good fight," meaning spiritual war, not physical war. I'm sure Charlie saw himself fighting a spiritual as well as an intellectual battle. How ironic that physical war came to him and that his intellectual and spiritual fight was ended by a bullet.

Kirk was a supporter of Trump. He called Trump an "imperfect vessel" but also the "bodyguard of Western civilisation," and he was especially attracted to Trump's defence of free speech. When Trump signed his "Free Inquiry" executive order on university funding in his first term, Charlie was in the White House.

Kirk obviously wasn't there on 29 September when Trump told 800 generals at Quantico, "We are under invasion from within, no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways, because they don't wear uniforms." That declaration expands "fighting the good fight" beyond the spiritual and the intellectual to the physical, suggesting the US is in something like a civil war - an idea I have been considering for a while.

Most wars are about ideology. Not simply Communism versus Capitalism, but the broader idea that, unless you prosecute war as pure theft, you need some ideological justification for taking something from your neighbour. You see this with Putin in Ukraine: while I cannot find any good reason for what he is doing, he offers justifications - "de-Nazification" or the claim that Ukraine has always been Russian - ideological and kinship claims that make his campaign rhetorically defensible.

Wars don't need to be about countries alone, which is why the ideological aspect matters. Globalisation and globalising technologies like jetliners and the Internet make sub- and supranational conflict more viable.

The US faces wars of different kinds on many fronts. Australia is in a similar position, although our leadership tries not to acknowledge it. Domestically in the US there is a home-grown conflict between the neo-Marxist, globalist, "woke," post-modern left and the capitalist, nationalist, realist conservatives. The former populate the Democratic Party, cosmopolises, the education sector, and many professional peaks; the latter are found in the Republican Party, the cities and hinterlands, business, and the trades. This is, of course, a simplification, but it is generally true. There is also a gender aspect: women are more likely to be in the first group, men in the second.