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Charlie Kirk’s death stopped the world last week, and it has started again, but at a slower pace than usual. Personally, if somebody asked me whether an assassination of Kirk would have such a major global impact, I’d have said, “It will be big news, but it won’t be treated in the same way as, say, the assassination of a world leader.”

I would have been wrong. It was so treated.

Let’s analyse this very briefly. Charlie Kirk was a political and moral conservative, and an unabashed MAGA supporter. He was an outspoken culture warrior. He was also an evangelical Christian and Christian nationalist (whatever that means, but we’re told it’s bad). And yet world leaders stopped to acknowledge his death, and millions of unchurched people have been grieving.

A Mere Sideshow?

Now, the cultured Christian despisers of political conservatism, and MAGA especially, the cultured despisers of culture war discourse, have been telling us for years that everything Charlie embodied will just alienate people, and that the culture wars are a mere sideshow. “Trump evangelicals are driving people away from Christ!” we were told. The term “culture warrior” to, say, the Gospel Coalition crowd or the CPX crowd, is a low-key insult.

Did Gospel Coalition Australia or CPX have anything to say about any of this when Charlie was assassinated?

But here’s the thing. All over social media, I’m finding literally thousands of people who are grieving Charlie Kirk. In my own private life, I have friends who aren’t regular church-attenders who are grieving Charlie Kirk and had watched his reels over the years.

Normal people who may not have opened a Bible or cast a shadow in a church for years are grieving this man who meant something to them. This man, who was MAGA, a Christian nationalist, and loved nothing more than sharing his simple defence of the risen, triumphant Jesus to university students and anyone who would listen.

Serious question to all the cultured despisers of the culture wars, you know who you are: If somebody asked you before yesterday what you thought of Charlie Kirk’s thought and work, what would you have said? If you know deep down that you would have basically dismissed it as a weird sideshow to REALLY important things, to more nuanced ways of thinking, how do you now feel admitting that?

It should make you feel very uncomfortable, because often it is people just like you who assume the mantle of teacher to help everyone else think about how to engage culture effectively as Christians.

The Learned vs His Legacy

May I suggest that it’s time to consider the possibility that just because you have a PhD and have read Tom Holland’s Dominion all the way through, that that’s no reason to think you actually know a lot about where culture is actually at? What if I told you that you actually have no insight into culture at all, and what you tend to do is fix your eyes and ears not on the real world of real people, but on texts, ideas, and an ongoing conversation among your peers, all the while as the world moves on without you even noticing? In other words, what if I told you, intellectual, that you are a pretty typical intellectual.

In fact, if your attitude to Charlie before last week was basically pretty dismissive, retire now from telling anyone about how to engage in cultural apologetics, because you manifestly have no clue and are usurping the authority of a teacher. The jig is up. Knock it off. Get an honest job.

Charlie’s death should generate a paradigm shift in the thinking of the Christian cultured despisers of the culture wars. The paradigm you so pooh-poohed for years as a sideshow at best, and maybe even a freak show, is actually the main event. It was Charlie Kirk, a man with no university degree, who was a MAGA supporter, with a simple American-style message about Jesus that captured the attention of mass culture in a way that the learned teachers of “cultural engagement” have so laughably failed at doing over the past 20 years.

Again, I ask you to just look at your own online engagement stats. They’re public, and they’re an embarrassment. My cat Laki gets more views, and no patrons (other than myself) are bankrolling her.

The global reaction to Charlie’s death and the manifestly massive impact this MAGA-supporting, culture warrior preacher has should be a MASSIVE wake-up call to so many Christian intellectuals, that they actually have no idea about modern culture, they are in no way in touch with mass culture, and that most of them are in fact in no way qualified to teach others about cultural engagement.

Let your paradigm shift begin and finally become part of the actual conversation that is taking place in the world, and soak up everything you can from the life and legacy of that non-degree-holding, MAGA-supporting, Christian nationalist follower of Jesus, Charlie Kirk.

I truly wish you well.

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Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.