Charlie Kirk’s assassination is a national tragedy, an unmistakable symptom of civic decay. Kirk’s murder deserves clear condemnation. But condemnation need not include canonization. Kirk’s shock-jock rhetoric served only to divide people and does not suddenly become virtuous because he was killed by an unhinged ideologue. Those of us trying to reverse the decay of whatever whimpers of democracy may remain in this country must discover new ways of talking to one another. The alternative is an end to politics and the beginning of civil war.
In the last few days, I’ve shared critical responses to two women with near opposite views on Kirk’s assassination. Rachel Donald and Hannah Spier both succumbed to what I believe are morally incoherent extremes. I wanted to expand on my earlier notes and comments in this post.
First is Rachel Donald’s “You Don’t Have To Mourn Charlie Kirk.” Donald writes: “I do not believe in the inherent value of single lives, but rather value the web of relationships which keeps us all alive.” As a process philosopher, I’d agree that there are no isolated individuals, only whirlpools in a river of relations. But there’s a crucial clarification: it is only in the experience of individuals that value is realized. In a process-relational view, value isn’t free floating but felt and realized in concrete centers of experience—human and non-human. To say personhood is relational is not to license performative indifference to a life. It’s to say the river makes the whirlpool possible, and the whirlpool makes the river matter. The rights to life and due process cannot be reduced to bourgeois fetishes, at least not if we are serious about rebuilding a democratic polity. These rights are the social grammar that keeps civic disagreements from devolving into blood feuds.
People on the fringe left gleefully celebrating Kirk’s murder are contributing to a downward spiral into increasingly unhinged violence. Yes, right wing political violence thus far vastly outweighs that on the left. But that doesn’t change the moral incoherence of claiming you fight for justice when you so brazenly deny the value of an individual life simply because you disagree with their anthropological or theological views. As much as progressives may hate to admit it, Kirk was actually a moderating voice within MAGA, preventing young men from venturing even further right into actual Nazi Nick Fuentes’ territory. Those on the left pushing such an anti-liberal position should think hard about what is motivating their lust for extra-judicial killing, and about where it is likely to lead. I certainly would not trust anyone celebrating murder with political power. You know we’ve reached a dark place when those who imagine themselves to be on the side of democracy and justice are welcoming the murder of individuals they disagree with. The wokeshevism of the assassination-justifying extreme left seems to me to be accurately characterized as a kind of confused Christianity without God, where the transcendent anchor in universal salvation is gone, leading absolute evil to be projected outward onto political enemies.
Then, earlier today, I saw that Iain McGilchrist shared Hannah Spier’s “The Psychological Mechanisms behind the Cult of Progressivism.” She names real pathologies in the most extreme edge of the woke left: purity spirals, projection, moral narcissism. But let’s not pretend MAGA is a monastery of sober republican virtue. Cultish dynamics abound: the worship of strongman Trump (“I alone can fix it!”), apocalyptic grievances, mythic enemies. The projection of evil onto a demonized out-group isn’t a left-only tick. Spier seems to conveniently forget Q-lore about a stolen 2020 election that justified an attempted insurrection and hanging of their own VP. Not to mention MAGA fantasies about all the child-harvesting Democrat elites, a conspiracy Trump could easily confirm if he’d just stop keeping the Epstein files as his own wonderful secret! Oh, wait.
Spier doesn’t help her case by leaning on false or exaggerated claims about Tyler Robinson in the second paragraph of her post. Robinson’s father owns a construction company and is not a cop. Robinson went to Dixie Technical College to study electrical engineering; I’m guessing there aren’t too many postmodern neomarxists there. The Discord server he posted in was decidedly apolitical, not “antifa.” I can find no photos of him wearing communist t-shirts, only a veterans shirt with an American flag (I mean the photo originally shared by the FBI during the manhunt; there was also a photo of him wearing a plain t-shirt going around that right and left alike were trying to deepfake by adding the logos of their political opponents). The words engraved on his bullet casings are references to video games (e.g., Helldivers 2) and groyper memes.
Spier also ignores the plain fact that the trendlines are not symmetrical. Even with recent outliers, long-series data still show that right-wing political violence and plots have predominated in the U.S. in recent decades. Here is the Federal Government’s own recent study on the matter, which the Trump White House just deleted from the Department of Justice website but which the Wayback Machine preserves: https://web.archive.org/web/20250912005717/https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/306123.pdf
I quote from page 1:
Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives.1 In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.
I admit that prior to his assassination I had only encountered a handful of incendiary clips of Kirk at his most hateful. Over the last week, I’ve seen more clips, and more context for some remarks, and while I’ve not been persuaded he was making a positive contribution to healing the body politic, I can see that he was not quite the Hitler many progressives had been claiming. I completely disagree with basically everything I’ve heard him say, but I do believe he should have the right to say it. Progressives often pretend that they stand on theologically neutral ground, or that politics can be done free of any deeper metaphysical commitments. This is why they find Kirk’s religious rhetoric so shocking. But the truth is, we cannot avoid political theology.
My counter to Kirk’s Christian nationalism is thus no less theological. Kirk and thinkers like Carl Schmitt translate an omnipotent deity into an omnipotent sovereign. Instead, I follow Whitehead’s process theological track by secularizing God instead of sacralizing the State. The persuasive rather than the punitive becomes the measure of the political. If your picture of the divine is an angry cosmic dictator, you will build a politics of command and coercion. If your picture of the divine is a loving co-creative poet, you will build a politics of participation and repair.
The church once “gave unto God the attributes of Caesar,” as Whitehead puts it, and we have been living under that mis-enchantment ever since, confusing majesty with domination. Process theology disenchants the idolatrous image of God as dictator and, in doing so, disarms the sovereign fantasy that haunts authoritarian politics on both extreme ends of the spectrum (even if the left prefers to do its political theology unconsciously).
A democratic state’s powers are supposed to be corralled by law, and the exercise of its monopoly on violence is to be treated as tragic necessity, not a public sacrament. The moral climate of a republic depends on whether it worships violence or treats it as a last resort.
Two practical corollaries follow (which the essay on political theology I link to above explores in great detail). First, a personalist anthropology: liberalism has found itself hollowed out because it needs persons, not just procedures. A process reading affirms rights because persons are real centers of value. Abstract formalism without the personal forgets that law is for lives, not the other way around. Second, an integrative approach to deliberative democracy: not the arithmetic of winners and losers but the alchemy of encounter, a co-active process where your wants and mine are transformed in the process of negotiating a common world.
This dovetails with social threefolding: differentiating cultural freedom, political rights, and economic association so no one sphere colonizes the others. That differentiation is civic hygiene against both fascist and wokeshevik forms of ressentiment.
Let me reiterate: I condemn his murder but refuse to canonize Kirk. His killer did this country a grave disservice by acting on his petty hatred. Kirk, for his part, routinely indulged in racially charged contempt (eg, the “brain processing power” smear aimed at Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson), contributed to the reduction of political discourse to punitive spectacle (eg, death-penalty maximalism, public-execution talk, and a habit of treating preventable gun deaths as acceptable collateral for ideological purity about the Second Amendment).
So I won’t celebrate Kirk or his murder. Both the MAGA and wokeshevik taste for sacrificial catharsis represents a failure of political imagination, symmetrical errors symptomatic of a deeper crisis of meaning.
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?