A Latter-Day Socrates Is Gone

I admired Charlie Kirk a great deal.

I didn’t always agree with what he said, though I did agree with most of it. But there are two things Mr. Kirk held as absolute values, and with them I completely concur:

He believed in our Lord Jesus Christ.

And he believed in the power of rationality.

The second is not unrelated to the first.

Mr. Kirk made a living, it is true, but I believe he had something deeper. I believe he experienced a vocation, a mission, a duty.

I watched video after video of him welcoming challenge, welcoming correction, and yet piercing the bubbles of contemporary idols. I watched him pivot, argue, listen, respect, and offer rejoinder. He was a fierce debater, but an honest one.

And again and again I watched as people did more than disagree with him.

They hated him.

In their eyes, he wasn’t “wrong.” He wasn’t mistaken. He was an infidel. He was a blasphemer against the current godless orthodoxy. That’s how they treated him.

I’ve been sitting with the news of his attack and death for a little while. My thoughts have been jumbled and emotional. (I’m really sick too, which doesn’t help.) But I think I finally know who he reminds me of:

Charlie Kirk was a latter-day Socrates.

Athens was prosperous, liberal, enlightened, educated. Sophisticated people from around the world moved to her streets. She was everything that the West today aspires to be.

And Athens killed Socrates. For “corrupting the youth.”

Why?

Because Socrates was uneducated. He was a blue collar military vet, ugly and offensive, who asked impertinent questions. Again and again he exposed the pretensions of those who believed they knew. And he did it under a divine calling, according to his own testimony.

Socrates is a great man, carrying the aureate halo of classic magnificence, the mellowing patina of centuries of veneration. But everything we can see tells us most of his fellow citizens found him annoying, irritating, frustrating, and ultimately worthy to be murdered.

Had we walked the streets of Athens 2400 years ago, we wouldn’t have known Socrates’s later greatness. We would have merely seen an opinionated man, tricksy in logic, fierce in debate, uncomfortably pressing society on its assumptions. Who does that remind you of?

I think Charlie Kirk is a latter-day Socrates. And I do not say that lightly.

Pray for Mr. Kirk’s family. Pray for his soul. Pray for his murderer. Pray for all the witnesses, who will now be traumatized. And pray for our nation.

It is a dark day when a man is murdered simply because he asks uncomfortable questions. May God have mercy on us all.