A Tribute to Charlie Kirk
The Firestone Files: Letters to My Grandchildren — Dr. Chris L. Firestone
September 15, 2025 · Episode 4 · 36:30
https://drchrisfirestone.com/episode/a-tribute-to-charlie-kirk/

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Hey everyone, welcome to the Firestone Files. I am Dr. Chris Firestone. On today's episode, I want to pay tribute to a man who was a beacon of truth, courage, and faith. His name is Charlie Kirk. That's coming at you today on the Firestone Files. Well, just days ago, Charlie was tragically assassinated at Utah Valley University. shot while speaking at one of his many events for Turning Point USA's American Comeback Tour. The news has left many of us who know Charlie shattered. We're griefstricken. We're angry. We're searching for meaning at this very dark moment in time, September 10th, just a day before September 11th. How much more tragedy can this country take?

I am uh working with his organization to establish a new program called Turning Point Education Prep Year. My plan was to have many of these Firestone files pre-recorded, but this one's going to be a break from what we were expecting to share today. I was did one on the life of the mind last week. I believe I was going to do one on the life of the heart. And instead, I'm speaking to you from the heart because we've lost somebody really precious, a once in a lifetime person who uh really can't be easily replaced.

And so in today's podcast, I just want to honor his life, his work, his profound impact that he's had on me, my students, and a generation hungry for truth. This is more of a personal heartfelt rooted in hope. The hope of the gospel that Charlie so boldly proclaimed in the places that I've called home for most of my life. the academy, universities, places that are supposed to uphold truth, beauty, and goodness. Well, Charlie tried to do that. He tried to infuse that back into these places, places that were founded on the gospel, on the Bible, on the person and work of Jesus Christ, but they've lost their way. And this non-oled educated man who was heart was grabbed by Jesus Christ decided to make it his mission to infuse salt and light back into the university.

So, I just want to do a little retrospective look at his life and its impact on me in the spirit of the Firestone Files. Take a little break from what we were going to do and then we'll get back to that in the coming weeks. I just felt like I had to do something now in honor of this man. For 25 years, I've uh taught philosophy. I've wrestled with the big questions of life of truth, the meaning of life, all of those sorts of things. Anybody who's had my classes in philosophy know we ask the big questions and we chew on them and try to give sound answers to them.

At Trinity International University, I started the Trinity debates and for 20 years we had these rigorous, engaging intellectual battles. I even was inspired by those activities to do some debating myself. I went to a school in Chicago, its name is slipping my mind at the moment, and debated a professor named Paul Gonberg at Chicago State University. And that wasn't something I would typically do. But as my career advanced, I um I kept feeling this nagging call that people like Paul Gamberg were ruling our inner city universities.

He's a communist, atheist, um anarchist. I'm not sure if he's still alive or not, but we had a debate. I was like 10, 15 years ago. I was trying to do my best to uh breathe life into the university. Never quite as good as Charlie, but you know, I felt like I had to do something. And I, you know, not only did I teach philosophy, but later on I started to teach apologetics. All because I understood that our universities were sick and they needed Christian philosophers to stand up and to argue for the truth. So I was inspired by giants like William Lane Craig, my friend Paul Copan and others.

Some people from the old Trinity community like John John Warwick Montgomery and Finebergs and people I studied under apologists who combined intellectual rigor with winsome grace. Yet none of us were ever quite as good as Charlie became. He captured a generation of young people. I would often pray in those old days that the Lord would provide us with someone who could reach the younger generation. Someone who could walk onto university campuses, face the toughest critics, and proclaim the veracity, the profoundity, and the beauty of the gospel.

I longed for a voice that could counter the tide of ideas that pulled young minds away from what is edifying and God-honoring. Charlie Kirk became for me that answer to my prayers. At just 18 years old, he co-founded Turning Point USA, a movement that grew into a powerhouse for conservative Christian values. He wasn't just a debater. He was a cultural warrior who stood toe-to-toe with students, professors, and activists. I remember his recent journey to Cambridge University, a place where I've given papers before, and he walked into a student union and faced all critics by himself. I mean, who does that kind of thing?

his courage to engage in open rational discourse with people who despise him, but to do it with charity and with love and with conviction that was unparalleled. He combined that rare personable nature, intellectual rigor, and just tenacity to stay in the fight, but to do so with grace, with courage, and with love. I knew Charlie personally, but I didn't know him as well as other people that I know in the Turning Point circle. Um, I've met him a number of times at Turning Point education events.

He once called me on his way to see his mother-in-law who was suffering from a difficult ailment. I believe it was Parkinson's and we had an opportunity to talk and uh just such a gracious guy even on the move. He's constantly on the move driven. He wanted to work and work and work for the kingdom, for the for the country, for his family. And that was inspiring. I like to work too, but that guy outworked everybody. And it was someone who I could get behind. he managed to come to uh one of the turning point education uh summits and uh gave the opening speech a couple of months ago and uh he was just winsome.

He greeted me. He was so kind and he talked about the promise of this new initiative that we were working on called Prep Year. I was just amazed at how he could remember names, how he could remember people, how he could remember initiatives, and how he knew he had to keep the plate spinning in order to see them be successful because he was the one providing the wake in which all these other initiatives would travel. my uh my pastor and the president of Champion Christian College and the and uh he's the pastor of Gospel Light Church. He's currently preaching a series on the disciples.

And one of the things I've learned from that, these were just ordinary, uneducated men, fishermen, tax collectors that Jesus chose to change the world. Charlie Kirk was cut out of that same cloth. He never went to college and that he was self taught and an intellectual powerhouse and just driven by his calling to follow Christ. What a what a rare gift he was. He loved people, even those who disagreed with him. He treated people with dignity. His debates weren't about winning arguments, but about winning souls and pointing them to the truth of Christ. His work with Turning Point USA mobilized millions to stand for biblical values and principles that sit at the base that the founding of our very nation.

I'm a Chicago guy, born and raised in Chicago in the northwest suburbs, just like Charlie. I think that's probably part of the affinity I had for him. My buddy Huts Herzburg, Charlie Kirk, and myself, we all came from that core. my other friends, some of my other very influential friends like Nathan Jacobs. Um, they all we we all come from the within about a five mile radius of each other there in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. Sometimes wonder why God put guys like us there. And I think it's because he was preparing us to speak to this generation at least in some me measure. But Charlie was like cream that rose to the top.

Um, I went to the University of Illinois. I earned a master's degree at Trinity. I did a PhD at the University of Edinburgh. And eventually, I dove into philosophy and into the deep and dark world of Khan studies. I was convinced, like many Christian philosophers, that a renaissance in Christian thought might save our universities. I was inspired by the work of Francis Schaefer to roll up my sleeves and to do that hard academic work. This Francis Schaefer believed that if Christians would do the hard philosophical work, we could make a difference downstream before culture unraveled.

And so that's why I dove into Khan studies because of apologists like Francis Schaefer and after many many many years of hard work I was able with the help of friends like Nathan Jacobs and some of my other students to make a difference in that corridor. Um but then COVID came and like many other people there was something that it wasn't just a virus of the body but it was something that triggered a virus of the mind in our culture. I don't really understand it. I mean I understand maybe some of the philosophical roots of it.

I trace it back to the 19th century and Marx Nichze forbach Victa and some of those philosophers might call them kind of well that trajectory the sort of left-wing Hegelians I understood that those those were some of the sources of the ills of our society and I set my own career to examine the philosophy of Emanuel Kant as an anecdote to those 19th century philosophies that had become a real problem in the 20th and the 21st centuries. And I had up until co the belief that this renaissance in Christian philosophy which was really making its way throughout the country in some of our major universities might be the thing that turned the ship around.

But something happened in co and in and it infected culture. and infected the the sort of what what what Charles Taylor calls the social imaginary and the demons as it were were let out. But Charlie Kirk seemed to be a guy who was unafraid of these turns. He would step into these dark corridors and fearlessly proclaimed the gospel. He defended pro-life. He defended traditional marriage. He defended um the the the the uh dual nature of you know human gender. Um in the face of some pretty staunch critics whose arguments though lacking were loud and powerful because they had the levers of cultural power behind them.

didn't bother Charlie. He would step out and step into those worlds and winsomely and seamlessly and and effectively present arguments rooted in the Bible and in sound intellectual judgment to stand as a bull work against these things and to give young people hope in the midst of these very very dark intellectual times. Charlie was that fearless antidote that um I was hoping to become with my meager philosophical efforts. He just combined both philosophical, theological rigor with political and and and and social currency unlike anything we had ever seen.

When my university collapsed a couple of years ago or started to collapse, I faced a crossroads. I was a seasoned professor with publications at Cambridge, Notre Dame, and a variety of other of those elite publishers. Yet, I felt God calling me to something new. That's when I had a providential meeting with a old friend of mine, Huts Herzburg, who's a vice one of the vice presidents at Turning Point USA. We met on the staircase. He was going down, I was going up and we started to talk and we remembered some of the old days when I knew him as a chaplain back at Trinity some 20 years earlier.

And he was on fire for Charlie's vision. Now I knew of Charlie Kirk at that point but I was a academic philosopher. He was an apologist and a little bit of a brash one for me. I'm used to working with professors with a certain level of discourse and Charlie was more kind of in your face it seemed and so I wasn't too sure about it but Huterzbury was absolutely convinced. And as we talked about our common vision I realized man we have a lot in common. Um, and he began to convince me over the next several weeks and months that this guy Charlie Kerr might just be the way of breaking through the barriers at universities and winning back the hearts and minds of our young people from these mesmerizing 19th century and 20th century philosophies.

At first, I hesitated. Why leave the academy for a brash, uncredentialed young man like Charlie? But Hud's passion and Charlie's results began to convince me. Charlie wasn't just talk. He was building a movement to reclaim education for truth and faith. Joining TPUSA on this journey to establish the prepar program felt like stepping out of the ivory tower and that to be honest scared me. I'd grown comfortable. I like to keep my head down, not get into the fray. But Charlie was where the real battle was.

And as uh my son went off to Iraq and then to Syria, I said, "Am I really going to send my sons out to fight my battles for him, or am I going to roll up my sleeves and get in this fight? I love my family. I love my country. And I love the hope that contending for the truth gives us. And that was this guy Charlie Kirk. So when some of my colleagues started to question my judgment saying Firestone is really going to work with Turning Point, I was like, what else would we do? We've been praying for this guy to arrive and here he is on our shores and you guys are going back into the ivory tower.

Don't you know the cultural moment that we're living in? Shame on you. Shame on you. I feel that in the churches as well. churches that proclaim the gospel and proclaim biblical truth and then cower so as to be winsome to society while it crumbles all around the I'd had enough of that. So to my academic colleagues, my decision to join TPUSA in this new quest to help them establish the prep year was indeed baffling. Why align with a populist like Charlie Kirk with no formal education and just stirring the pot this guy? But they didn't see what I saw. A man who embodied the hope of restoring Christ to the center of learning. See that word university the uni used to matter. The unifying feature was the person and work of Jesus Christ. That's how we got Harvard. That's how we got Yale. That's how we got the best university system in the world. And then that university became a diversity, became an adversity and became a calamity.

I call shame on my fellow professors who sit idly by while this nonsense is being promoted as truth. pull up your bootstraps, get out of those ivory towers, and begin making a difference. I don't want to say that we shouldn't do research. I don't want to say that those corridors of deep philosophical insight like Emanuel Khan's studies, which I spent a lot of my time in, that those things don't matter. They do matter. I wouldn't be the person sitting here making these claims without many years of studies in these fields. One thing I learned studying the philosophy of Emanuel Kant is just how difficult good philosophy is.

And making a difference is a marathon, not a sprint. It took seven years to write the first book in defense of cons religion. and it took another bunch of years to write the next book and next book. And those things I feel like have made a difference in those fields. But the urgency in culture and in society has never been greater. And if there be courageous intellectuals out there, I would ask you to join with me in following the legacy of Charlie Kirk. that un uneducated, as it were, guy without a college degree has made more difference than the lot of us.

Over the past three years, I've poured my heart into this new initiative to infuse our universities with the basics. Again, the Bible, the Western intellectual tradition, and the founding documents of our country. These are three things that ground turning point education prep year. They're also the founding elements of the new honors program that I've started at Champion Christian College. And they ought to be at the very ground of our university education. But systematically these pillars of American education are being attacked and undermined, dismissed and marginalized. We study the Bible as any old other piece of literature, not with the reverence that it deserves.

The western intellectual tradition is under attack as though it were somehow embedded in in in colonialism or in domination or structures of power. Those things are absolute nonsense. They are why we have our universities today and why we have been the greatest country in the face of the earth for so long. The founding documents, what an amazing I mean I'm I'm putting together curriculum and programs on these founding documents now and they are the simplicity and the beauty of them is absolutely extraordinary. But even today they are being shaken from within by people who would challenge the ideals that have proven to be so effective.

We are indeed a beacon of light here. But that light is becoming dimmer. It became a lot dimmer with the loss of Charlie Kirk. I'm reminded of when Jesus was looking over Jerusalem and he wept in Luke 19:41. And then when he was sweating blood in Gethsemane in Luke 22:44, the loss of Charlie has been um almost too much to bear. Charlie looked at the broken world and refused to stay silent. He was willing to overturn tables. He was willing to defend the western intellectual tradition. He was willing to defend life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

His death feels like a wound to the soul to many of us. Yet, we grieve with hope. We're not like other people. We know that to live is Christ and to die is gain as it says in Philippians. So let Charlie's assassination be a wake-up call to us all. We cannot retreat. We must honor him by continuing to move forward in the fight, teaching, debating, proclaiming the gospel in every sphere, but especially in universities. That was a beautiful place for Charlie to die. He loved universities even though he thought they'd become a scam. because they were not delivering on their promises. But he kept going there.

He kept going there. And it's there that he would give his life. Charlie Kirk was a gift. He was a warrior. He was a brother in Christ. His voice may be silenced, but Lord willing, his his message will echo in all of us and there will be a thousand new Charlie Kirks to rise up to have the kind of courage that he had to prove to the world that we've gone wrong somewhere along the way. Not with hate, but with truth and love, the beauty of the gospel. Well, onward we must go. Charlie would want it no other way.

And so I want to thank you for listening. I want to thank you for allowing me to interject into the Firestone Files this tribute to Charlie Kirk. What an amazing an amazing man. It was an honor to know him, however briefly. And I pray that we will carry on his legacy in the days to come. I thought I'd end this tribute to Charlie Kirk by reading a couple of passages of scripture that I think are appropriate for this terrible moment that we find ourselves in. I'm turning to the book of Job. Book of Job is all about suffering, about calamity, about injustice. For philosophers, it's about the problem of evil.

And Job and his friends and uh you know they do this long sort of theological philosophical debate about what's wrong with Job. and he's trying to convey his innocence and he's demanding an audience with God. And so for the first 37 chapters of Job, you have a intriguing and enlightening and very interesting discussion about suffering and injustice and the life of an innocent man. Then we get to chapter 38 and now the whole thing is reframed because the Lord speaks. It says, "Then the Lord answered Job out of the storm.

He said, "Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man. I will question you, and you shall answer me. Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know who stretched a measuring line across it. On what were its footings set? Or who laid its cornerstone while the morning stars rang together and all the angels shouted for joy. It goes on with God correcting Job's queries and his attitude in the face of the gift of life that God's given him in all of creation. After God speaks, we move over to ver to uh chapter 42 and we hear Job's all too appropriate reply.

And it's a reply that I believe all of us should consider in the face of this travesty, the death of Charlie Kurt. Then Job replied to the Lord, "I know that you can do all things. No plan of yours can be thwarted." You asked, "Who is this that obscures my counsel without knowledge?" Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know. You said, "Listen now, and I will speak. I will question you and you shall answer me."

My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore, I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes. In the face of this incredible travesty, this calamity, the death of Charlie Kerr, my prayer is that we will all repent in dust and ashes. so that we might continue on in this great experiment that we call our beloved country, the United States of America. So, I just pray that Charlie would be honored by these simple words that I've had to offer here. That's it for the Firestone Files. Bye for now.