The Murder of Charlie Kirk and the Violence in Us
How Charlie Kirk’s murder revealed a dangerous cultural inversion: words as violence, and violence as justice.
When Words Become Violence, and Violence Becomes Deserved
How you speak about someone when they die shows who you are. – Charlie Kirk
Charlie Kirk’s murder prompts this short article. Let me be clear at the outset: I did not agree with everything Kirk said, nor with many of the positions he took publicly. This piece is not about defending his politics or his rhetoric. It is also not about the battle for free speech that Kirk stood in the middle of. It is not about left and right.
It is instead about us.
What compels me to write is what his killing revealed in us—in the reactions it provoked almost instantly. People are celebrating his death. Others insist he brought it upon himself. Voices declare him a fascist or Nazi, as if those labels excused the violence. Most unsettling of all for me is people I know and respect needing to vent about him so forcefully in the very moment of his murder.
Why?
Why, when a young man is brutally killed, do we not reach instinctively for grief, for lament, or for forgiveness? Why do we grasp instead for condemnation and rage? What is going on at large in us that we would rather use his death to unleash anger than to seek reconciliation or even silence?
Instead of reaching for forgiveness, reconciliation, or peacemaking—those fragile but necessary gestures of human community—something more ugly has emerged: justification of violence, reversal of victim and perpetrator, and even delight in brutality.
Concept Creep: The Psychology of Reversal
People often find ways to excuse or explain away violence so they don’t feel guilty about it. Psychologists call this moral disengagement—for example, by blaming the victim and saying they brought it on themselves. Linked to this is the just-world belief, the idea that bad things only happen to people who somehow deserve it.
At the same time, our culture has stretched the meaning of words like trauma, abuse, and violence. Because of this “concept creep,” even disagreement can feel like an attack. And when people tie their beliefs to things they see as sacred, any challenge is felt not as debate, but as a kind of violation.
So instead of seeing disagreement as normal civic life, more and more people experience it as a personal assault.1
The Gaslight and the Aftermath
When violence happens, people feel torn: they know it’s wrong, but they may also feel relief or satisfaction. To ease that inner conflict, they often say things like, “We don’t support violence, but he brought it on himself.” That way, they appear to condemn violence while actually excusing it.
More subtle is the rhetorical device of “Of course I don’t support violence, but he was [insert adjectives of choice]”.
This is a kind of gaslighting on a large scale. The victim’s suffering is denied or twisted, making it seem like the harm isn’t real or is being exaggerated. Psychologists call this secondary victimisation—the victim is hurt not just by the attack itself, but also by the way people respond afterwards.
And sometimes the victim is even accused of using their suffering to gain sympathy or power. And I have seen this extensively about Kirk, that those aggrieved by Kirk fear his death being used against them. That’s scapegoating: blaming and excluding the victim so the community feels united and justified, as if the violence was necessary or even reasonable.2
Putting it all together
This process is a cycle of moral inflation (words = violence) → justification of violence (they provoked it) → gaslit denunciation (we condemn, but really they’re to blame) → secondary victimisation (their protest is opportunistic).
It functions to protect the aggrieved’s worldview, preserve group identity, and neutralise the moral claim of the actual victim.
A Word to Those Who Despised Him
Some of you reading this might be one of the aggrieved I mention, so hurt and feeling abused by Kirk that you think I am minimising your need to speak about him.
Many people truly believed Kirk was a fascist, a Nazi, or an abuser of others. Perhaps some are convinced his words caused deep harm. But if that is the case, then how people respond to his death matters even more, for it is possible to become so sure of someone’s malignancy that we begin to speak from a dangerous place.
When murder is met with gloating and satisfaction, or denouncement of the person murdered, people risk allowing the same logic that justifies violence to take root in themselves. Participation in the victim inversion that declares they deserved it corrodes compassion and blinds us to our own complicity in cycles of violence.
When Conviction Turns into Condemnation
There is a vital difference between condemning someone’s actions and declaring the person themselves intrinsically malignant and bad. To call views and beliefs harmful or oppressive is part of moral discernment. Even when it is hinted at indirectly or wrapped in clever language, suggesting that someone might be malign and somehow ‘deserving’ of death is to step into dehumanisation. We can do this in subtle, passive-aggressive ways—sneering, insinuating, or implying things about his death without ever saying them outright. That way, we tell ourselves we have not crossed the line, while still feeding the same hostility and contempt.
It gives us the comfort of moral cover—I never said he deserved it—yet the meaning is clear enough. In reality, this disguises rather than removes the harm.
When we speak like this, we are not only stripping away the dignity of the other person, but also diminishing our own.
It pushes us further from compassion, and draws us nearer to the cycles of anger and violence that corrode community. If we allow ourselves to speak from that place, we risk becoming what we most despise.
Christian tradition has always been wary of naming individuals as inherently malignant. Malignancy is real, but no one person is its sole embodiment. Christ died for sinners, not for the righteous. To speak from a place of certainty about another’s evil risks stepping into God’s seat of judgment. That is perilous ground—for leaders, for communities, for all of us.
Leaders especially must resist this temptation. When leaders model disdain, their communities learn disdain. When leaders justify hostility, their people learn hostility. But when leaders name evil without condemning persons as irredeemable, they protect their communities from sliding into the same inversion that baptises violence as virtue.
Why This Matters for Leadership
Leadership is always exercised in the contested space of meaning. How we speak in moments like this—what we choose to say or not say—shapes the moral and emotional imagination of our communities. If words are treated as violence, and violence as deserved, then leaders must resist: telling the truth, protecting victims from being re-victimised, and reminding people that disagreement is not desecration.
To lead faithfully is to hold space for difference without collapse, to protect the vulnerable from scapegoating, and to refuse to baptise violence with moral justification. This is affective work—tending to the emotions, fears, and sacred values that drive our distortions.
If we sneer, dismiss, or even hint that Kirk “deserved” his death, we model a way of speaking others will imitate. Communities take tone as permission. When disdain is normalised, it multiplies. When violence is excused, it becomes acceptable, even when veiled in hints and insinuations.
But if we speak with care, we show another way. We demonstrate that it is possible to disagree profoundly with someone’s life and words, yet still respond to their death with gravity, restraint, and lament. Leadership sets the temperature: our words shape how others live together.
What temperature are you setting?
The Christian Call to Resist Violence
But as Christians, we are called to something deeper still. The way of Christ refuses the logic that words justify violence or that violence redeems. At the cross, Jesus bore the violence of the world without returning it. He absorbed the scapegoating of the crowd, and in his dying breath offered forgiveness: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
To follow Christ is to refuse to let violence wear the mask of virtue. It is to reject the narrative that victims bring suffering on themselves. It is to resist the temptation to delight in the downfall of an enemy.
The murder of Charlie Kirk revealed something more about us than about him. And it is this “us” that God is addressing, calling us away from vengeance and into the costly, cruciform work of love.
At a moment as brutal as this, the call of Christ comes to us: blessed are the peacemakers.
There is real power when, even while we are aggrieved and wounded, we resist the pull of contempt and instead reach out in love. In a culture quick to sneer, justify, and divide, such a response offers a different path—one marked by lament, forgiveness, and reconciliation. To choose peace in grief is not weakness but strength, for it breaks the cycle of violence and begins the work of healing.
References
Bandura, A. (1999). Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209.
Campbell, R., & Raja, S. (1999). Secondary victimization of rape victims: Insights from mental health professionals who treat survivors of violence. Violence and Victims, 14(3), 261–275.
Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press.
Girard, R. (1986). The Scapegoat. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon.
Haslam, N. (2016). Concept creep: Psychology’s expanding concepts of harm and pathology. Psychological Inquiry, 27(1), 1–17.
Lerner, M. J. (1980). The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion. Springer.
Psychologists call this moral disengagement—the process of neutralising guilt and reframing violence as justified (Bandura 1999). One of its key mechanisms is blaming the victim. Closely related is the just-world hypothesis—our psychological need to believe the world is fair, which leads us to assume that people’s suffering must be deserved (Lerner 1980).
There has also been a broader cultural drift. Nick Haslam (2016) describes concept creep—the expansion of harm-related concepts such as “trauma,” “abuse,” and “violence.” As these terms stretch, disagreement itself can come to be felt as a form of violence. Jonathan Haidt (2012) shows how, when beliefs are bound to sacred values, opposing them is no longer seen as debate but as desecration.
And so, disagreement is not tolerated as part of civic life but experienced as a violation of identity.
Once violence occurs, the contradictions intensify. Here cognitive dissonance helps explain the response (Festinger 1957). People who know violence is wrong but feel satisfaction in seeing it done resolve the tension by a faux denunciation: “Of course we condemn violence, but he brought it on himself.”
This is gaslighting at the social scale: a denial of the victim’s reality, a twisting of harm into performance. As trauma scholars point out, this leads to secondary victimization, where victims are not only harmed by the initial act but also invalidated by the community’s reactions (Campbell & Raja 1999).
Worse still, victims are accused of “using” their suffering to advance their cause. This is classic scapegoating: as René Girard (1986) argued, communities often bind themselves together through the expulsion of a victim, allowing violence to appear necessary and virtuous.
Hard words here, Jason. Yet summed up beautifully in this: "To follow Christ is to refuse to let violence wear the mask of virtue."