He Died with a Microphone in His Hand

By BISHOP ROBERT BARRON

Why has the murder of Charlie Kirk resonated so powerfully through the culture? Is it because he was cut down so brutally in his prime? That he left behind a wife and two very young children? That no one deserves to die that way? Certainly for all of those reasons. But I am convinced there is something more, and it has to do with the fact that he died with a microphone in his hand - not a gun or a knife or a grenade, but a microphone.

Charlie Kirk’s method, which he practiced on college campuses all over the country, was to invite into a public dialogue people who disagreed with him. In employing this method, Charlie was standing in a venerable tradition that stretches back to ancient times and provides one of the foundations of Western civilization. In the streets and byways of fifth century BC Athens, Socrates spoke, especially to the young, not through diatribes, but through conversations. Socrates’s greatest disciple Plato gave us, in his famous dialogues, a literary version of these complex conversations.

There is a Christian version of this in the work of my intellectual hero, St. Thomas Aquinas. In the universities of the Middle Ages, learning took place principally through what were called quaestiones disputatae (disputed questions). These were public exercises in which a master such as Aquinas would lay out his resolution of an issue and would subsequently entertain objections - sometimes dozens or hundreds - and finally respond to the objections one by one.

There are two basic assumptions that undergird this dialogic method, namely, the dignity of the human person and the objectivity of truth. If one doesn’t believe in the dignity of the individual, then the best way to get everyone to agree is simply to brutalize or eliminate one’s opponents. But if one holds to the intrinsic value of each human being, one will use words rather than guns. The second assumption is that there is a rational structure to the world and hence objective values, to which one can appeal when speaking to an opponent. If there is no such structure to which the two interlocutors can appeal, their argument will devolve into a shouting match.

Now, both of these assumptions are themselves predicated upon an even more fundamental axiom, namely, the existence of God. We revere the individual human being because he or she is a beloved child of God. And why do we think there is a shared framework of meaning? We do so because we believe that the intelligibility of the world and the objectivity of moral value are grounded in a Creator God who gave rise to them.

So, what happens when the existence of God is denied or when the practice of religion fades away? What happens is that the conditions for the possibility of civil conversation are fatally compromised. I came across just the other day a deeply disturbing statistic that fully 42% of Gen Z young people feel that it is sometimes permissible to respond to speech with violence. If argument is pointless, bombs and bullets become inevitable.

I cannot help but see a correspondence between that awful stat and the steady increase in disaffiliation from the churches, especially among the young. When people stop going to church, they stop thinking about God, they stop praying, they don’t hear about the Ten Commandments, they don’t attend to the cry of the prophets on behalf of the poor, they don’t read the Sermon on the Mount, they don’t take in “whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do it to me.” And when none of that is assimilated, people stop believing that their brothers and sisters should be cherished and that a morality beyond the clash of wills is possible.

And all of this brings me back to Charlie Kirk. To his dying moment, Charlie was engaging in a practice that goes back to Socrates and that informs the West at its best. And that is precisely why we all feel so unnerved by his death. We sense that something basic to our civilization is teetering. My sincere hope and prayer is that we can take renewed inspiration from a courageous and religious man who died, not with a gun in his hand, but rather an instrument of communication