Charlie Kirk and the State of Our Nation

Commentary

The nation is rightly traumatized by the horrible assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk.

Media outlets are filled, also rightly, with give and take, trying to understand what can and should be done so that we don’t see more of the same.

But unfortunately, much of what I hear is informed by the same misguided sense of right and wrong that brought the horrible act to fruition.

That is, who do we blame?

Homicide is unfortunately not so exceptional in our country. Among industrialized nations, the U.S. homicide rate, hovering at about six per 100,000 people, is one of the highest.

Somehow it seems to bother us more when someone is gunned down for his political expression than when people are gunned down in gang violence in an inner city, in a robbery, or in a horrible, meaningless mass murder perpetrated by some lost and deranged individual.

A hot button here is the element of free speech.

Free speech is the oxygen of a free society. The threat of terrorists or the government impeding it is horrifying.

Our freedom has degenerated into chaos because we have forgotten why it is vital and precious.

Why does our Constitution’s preamble speak of “the blessings of liberty”?

To answer, we must have a discussion that so many do not want to have.

Is ours a free nation under God or not? Is a free nation that is not under God possible?

My view is this: Generally, our discussions today about freedom ignore what makes freedom meaningful and critical—that is, the fact that each human being has free choice. Free choice means that it matters what we choose. It means that there is good and evil and that man was created to take responsibility to choose and make a world that our creator wants.

Our nation was founded by Christians seeking freedom to live a faithful life. Our founding was a great meeting between the Christian population and the Founders, many of them enthusiasts of the modern age of reason, who designed a government to protect its citizens and allow them to live according to their free choices.

In other words, political man was there to protect religious man and enable him to take responsibility for his life and live free.

But with the great success of this arrangement, hubris, as always, set in. Many came to believe that our great success was a result of the political arrangement rather than the choices of free religious men and women.

Gradually, religion was pushed out the door, and we increasingly became a political society.

Liberty was transformed from a blessing shared by all to the alleged right of every individual to determine for himself what is good and what is evil, what is true and what is false.

The heights of the politicization of what was once a free nation under God were the Roe v. Wade decision, which declared that women were free to destroy their unborn children, and the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which gave the state authority to define marriage.

In a free nation under God, life is sacred, as is the holy institution of marriage between a man and a woman.

The result is the chaos in which we find ourselves. Politics has become our God, and individuals feel personally entitled to determine what is good and evil. And with tragic inevitability, some emerge who feel empowered to determine who will live and who will die.

Celebrating a United States that is not a free nation under God and a flag that does not represent standards of good and evil as transmitted to us by our creator is what the ancients called idol worship.

We must restore and build a country in which each sees his neighbor in the image of God and in which each feels personal responsibility to take charge of his own life and allows others to take similar responsibility, knowing that the ultimate judge is above.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.