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Can God save America, and if not, who or what can?Dear , Since finishing it this afternoon I see that Trump is threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act in response to, at the latest, Portland's riots against the operation of his Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, so you might want to add that in with the rest. Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk “Charlie” is what you call a friend named Charles when you know him well. Before 10 September 2025, hardly anyone in Australia knew who Charles James Kirk was. It’s odd how quickly we move to familiar name terms with a stranger - yet Kirk’s death marks an intersection in modern life that made the death of a stranger feel more real and consequential than the deaths of many closer to us. Indeed, it was a martyrdom, not merely a death. Charlie wasn’t just a political figure; he believed it was his Christian duty to witness on university campuses, and he was killed in the course of that witness. For Australians, his faith and politics are so closely entwined that his approach will seem bizarre to many - our notion of the separation of church and state is strongly entrenched. But it shouldn’t be bizarre. Christians are as entitled as Buddhists, Muslims, atheists, and even Marxists to be involved in political life, yet the latter are often celebrated for their diversity, while the former are condemned for their presumed morality. But why should people from any of group - even those we dislike - check their beliefs in at the door of the public square? When you vote for a representative, aren’t you voting for their values? What would it say about a person if those values were voluntarily abandoned when it came to political matters? Politics and religion have always been closer in the United States than in Australia, despite the US constitutional separation of church and state. The fundamental linkage in Charlie’s case is free speech - also enshrined in the US constitution. As a right, free speech really derives from the Reformation and is linked to Protestant doctrines that asserted the primacy of scripture and the right of individual believers to make their own decisions before God. Not that all Protestants have been passionate free-speech advocates, or all Catholics censors, but there was a preponderance of Protestants on the free-speech side - people like John Milton and John Locke (though Milton would have denied Papists that right). Charlie was an evangelical Protestant, a member of Calvary Chapel, a fellowship of some 1,800 non-denominational congregations. You can see how his religion worked alongside his secular arguments on issues like transgenderism - the issue that got him killed. He was happy at one time to say empirically, “The facts are that there are only two genders,” and at another to call transgenderism “so against our senses, so against the natural law, and - dare I say - a throbbing middle finger to God.” While his “prove me wrong” challenge was essentially secular, religion sometimes intruded: he would even pray for someone in the audience. Christians are exhorted by St Paul to “fight the good fight,” meaning spiritual war, not physical war. I’m sure Charlie saw himself fighting a spiritual as well as an intellectual battle. How ironic that physical war came to him and that his intellectual and spiritual fight was ended by a bullet. Kirk was a supporter of Trump. He called Trump an “imperfect vessel” but also the “bodyguard of Western civilisation,” and he was especially attracted to Trump’s defence of free speech. When Trump signed his “Free Inquiry” executive order on university funding in his first term, Charlie was in the White House. Kirk obviously wasn’t there on 29 September when Trump told 800 generals at Quantico, “We are under invasion from within, no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways, because they don't wear uniforms.” That declaration expands “fighting the good fight” beyond the spiritual and the intellectual to the physical, suggesting the US is in something like a civil war - an idea I have been considering for a while. Most wars are about ideology. Not simply Communism versus Capitalism, but the broader idea that, unless you prosecute war as pure theft, you need some ideological justification for taking something from your neighbour. You see this with Putin in Ukraine: while I cannot find any good reason for what he is doing, he offers justifications - “de-Nazification” or the claim that Ukraine has always been Russian - ideological and kinship claims that make his campaign rhetorically defensible. Wars don’t need to be about countries alone, which is why the ideological aspect matters. Globalisation and globalising technologies like jetliners and the Internet make sub- and supranational conflict more viable. The US faces wars of different kinds on many fronts. Australia is in a similar position, although our leadership tries not to acknowledge it. Domestically in the US there is a home-grown conflict between the neo-Marxist, globalist, “woke,” post-modern left and the capitalist, nationalist, realist conservatives. The former populate the Democratic Party, cosmopolises, the education sector, and many professional peaks; the latter are found in the Republican Party, the cities and hinterlands, business, and the trades. This is, of course, a simplification, but it is generally true. There is also a gender aspect: women are more likely to be in the first group, men in the second. Both US parties once tended toward the centre; that is no longer the case. Alarmingly, disputes have taken on absolute moral tones, with means defined as good or evil. In Kirk’s world sin was real, but you are supposed to love the sinner and hate the sin. Yet Rutgers University research shows that 38% of respondents thought it would be somewhat justified to murder President Trump (31.6% for Elon Musk). That’s summary capital punishment - something only justifiable for the most heinous crimes or an enemy combatant. Dissected by voting intention, 56% of left-of-centre voters supported the proposition. The left-wing response is not surprising: left-wingers tend to be collectivists and fantasists, and to keep a collective in line with fantasy you ultimately need coercion, if not force. Not that the right is free from political violence - 20.1% supported the proposition as well - but historically, in the last century, left-wing violence has outstripped right-wing violence when you count Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and others. Hitler is complicated to place on the left–right axis, but even if you place him on the right, the left would still be well ahead historically. In the US today the violence tends to come from the left. After Kirk’s murder there was no rioting, no shops boarded-up or burned down, unlike after George Floyd’s death. That’s because the Floyd unrest was organised; there are substantial violent organisations on the left - Antifa and parts of BLM - but barely any comparable organisations on the right aside from the Proud Boys. Moreover, Antifa and BLM operate as de facto paramilitaries of the Democratic party in a loose networked way - common branding and shared intelligence, decisions made chapter by chapter. The response to Kirk’s death was instructive. On the right it culminated in a memorial service where his wife spectacularly forgave his killer. On the left there was a lot of whataboutism and appeals to karma: yes, it was wrong that Kirk was killed, but he was “divisive,” and argued for gun ownership, which kills people, so perhaps this was ironic justice. If what he did was being divisive then I need to buy a bullet-proof vest today. I’m pro-car - would it be reasonable for someone to run me over? When a motion of condolence, celebration of Kirk’s legacy, and condemnation of violence was brought to the House, 58 Democrats voted against it. Their excuse was disagreement with the part of the motion honouring Kirk. Who would speak ill of the dead? Even during the Civil War Congress passed motions expressing sympathy for fallen members of the other side. By abandoning the usual civilities those 58 Democrats were tacitly justifying the violence. Beyond institutional politics, private actors are subverting the political order through extra-institutional means. We used to have private armies until it was decided they were too dangerous to central governments. The age of the billionaire has created a modern variant. Instead of outfitting troops, the fabulously wealthy now fund campaigns to elect district attorneys who will ignore laws they dislike, effectively repealing them without winning a general election. Or they fund disinformation campaigns by green lobbyists to close down reliable energy sources. To this one should also add the media companies, whether legacy or new, who largely lean left (but who are countered on the functional or ideologically right by privateers like Joe Rogan, or Megan Kelly). The “Deep State” also deserves to be in the spotlight. There is no doubt that the Secret Service was weaponised against Republicans during the Obama and Biden administrations. The Inland Revenue Service targeted conservative organisations, for example. And then there is the completely fake Russiagate hoax, or that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. This civilisational struggle is compounded by ethnic enclaves in the USA - particularly some Islamic communities - where large percentages do not accept Western norms. Their alliance with parts of the left is the “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” variety; it makes politics more explosive, even if combinations like “Gays for Palestine” sound paradoxical. Then there are more traditional interstate wars. Globalisation and the internet do not make the nation-state irrelevant, but they make it more porous and the long-tail effect allows niche minorities to organise. Countries have long deployed subversion: financing activists, sponsoring cells, or buying off politicians to influence opinion and obtain intelligence. Today this happens alongside commercial subversion. The CCP is widely acknowledged as the greatest strategic threat to the USA, yet business interests lobby for engagement because of China’s massive market. Ironically, many modern war sinews rely on materials China dominates, like rare earths. There is a more sinister angle: the prevalence of Chinese-made goods in the USA. If Mossad can attack Hezbollah with explosive pagers they made and sold to them, imagine what the CCP could do via EVs or solar panels. Reuters has reported “rogue modules” in some Chinese inverters and batteries. The CCP also operates through Chinese communities and through platforms like TikTok; ByteDance is being pressured to divest because of surveillance, algorithmic shaping of views, and addictive low-grade content. I’ll leave fentanyl aside for the moment, but perversely the precursors for that drug - devastating the US - come from China. China challenges the USA worldwide in soft power while building conventional forces at a peacetime rate few can match. It flexes power in the South China Sea. Vladimir Putin flies drones and aircraft near former Warsaw Pact airspace, threatening a broader European front and risking escalation if Ukraine obtains long-range missiles. In response, the US is frantically retooling, refinancing, and resupplying Fortress America while reinvigorating alliances and countering fifth columns and internal rebels at a pace not seen since FDR. The question is whether those efforts will relieve societal pressure or merely intensify it. The Kirk shooter appears to be a product of the pressure, not of an organisation – he was a physical meme riding the vibe. Which brings us back to free speech and Charlie Kirk. Can you ensure a civil polity and its capacity to withstand foreign enemies by imposing legal or coercive measures after winning elections? Or is that to play by the opponents’ game and entrench fractures? I guess I’m in the more martial camp – if it takes a kind of civil war, with Executive Orders rather than cannon fusillades, so be it. The alternative is to see the world that I thought we had - no Garden of Eden, but as close as any we’ve ever seen – lost because those who oppose this civilisation will see no downside to pursuing their repression of opposing opinion. I guess we could call that the Lincolnian position. What would the Kirkian position be? I think he’d lean on persuasion - that’s how Christianity mostly spread so that by 380 AD it had enough adherents to become the official religion of Rome. It spread through the convictions and actions of martyrs like him: of Jesus’ twelve disciples, only one is said to have died of old age. That inspired people to believe, as Kirk’s death appears to have inspired many. At the ARC conference earlier this year, public intellectuals such as Sir Niall Ferguson professed Christian conversion, and Christianity ran as an undertone through the event. I suspect that is because resistance in the West to neo-Marxism comes disproportionately from people of Christian faith, and because it is hard to dispute relativist moral positions if you do not believe in absolutes. Maybe what we need is not strictly a Christian revival, but rather a revival of high-Pagan virtues: Stoicism and the classical virtues of Wisdom, Justice, Courage, and Temperance don’t require a Christian God - Wisdom, which relies on truth, might be the antidote to postmodernism. What is certain to me is that without a change in people’s souls, the world I treasure is more vulnerable than ever. Whatever your faith, let us agree we can honour Charlie by fighting the fight. We might not know him, but he’s one of the best friends we could have at the moment. 
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