‘Leave a legacy, be courageous’ — what Charlie Kirk leaves the nation he loved

In June, while posting a sweet video that was widely circulated on social media, Charlie Kirk told his 5 million-plus followers to get married and have children.

He also encouraged his fans to “leave a legacy,” instruction that is unsettling in light of Kirk’s tragic death this week at age 31.

Kirk, who died Wednesday after being shot by a gunman at Utah Valley University, knew there were people who wished him harm. He had spoken about death threats he regularly received. He had thought, at least in passing, about his own legacy, having been asked about it in interviews.

Now, with the hunt for the gunman continuing, a nation still stunned by the shooting is considering Kirk’s legacy, too.

Writing for The Bulwark, a news organization critical of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, Will Sommer said Kirk had been “brutal and acidic to our politics,” but had redefined what it means to be a conservative today.

“His most lasting legacy may be that he showed the Republican Party the way to compete in today’s frenetic media world. More than anyone else without the surname Trump, Kirk is the figure whose rise best illustrates the changing of the American right,” Sommer wrote.

But the legacy of Kirk, recently described in a Deseret News profile by Brigham Tomco as “too big to ignore,” cannot be confined to politics. He had cultural and spiritual influence, too.

Why Charlie Kirk promoted family

A legacy can be a biological one, like a family, or a material one, what we have earned or constructed. Kirk leaves both of those. But people also leave a legacy of values when they die, which the authors of one study found was the most meaningful legacy to people contemplating the end of their life.

In Kirk’s case, chief among his values was his patriotism, his religious faith, and his enthusiastic promotion of family life.

“There’s no question that Charlie Kirk was a political warrior, and a happy warrior at that. But it was also clear to all who watched the man that two things were more important to him than politics: faith and family,” said University of Virginia professor Brad Wilcox, the author of “Get Married.”

“He frequently gave voice to his faith in God and tried to treat people who disagreed with him with the dignity they deserved as creatures of God. And, in this world, he prized, above all, his wife, Erika, and their two little children,” Wilcox said, adding “America has lost a powerful voice for faith and family.”

Kirk, an Evangelical Christian, leaves a 3-year-old daughter and a 1-year-old son.

While he didn’t share his children’s names or faces on social media, Kirk frequently spoke of how meaningful his family life was and he encouraged his followers to get married and start a family.

“Having children is more important than having a good career,” he told Laura Ingraham on Fox News in one of his last interviews.

Kirk touched on some of the same themes in his interview with Tomco, saying, “My job every single day is actively trying to stop a revolution. This is where you have to try to point them towards ultimate purposes and towards getting back to the church, getting back to faith, getting married, having children.”

This message was broadcast regularly to a vast audience. Last year, Tomco wrote, Kirk’s content was viewed 15 billion times — on his own platforms alone.

What made Charlie Kirk unique

Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who focuses on family issues, said that while he didn’t always agree with Kirk’s message or its delivery and wasn’t part of the Turning Point movement, he had noticed that Kirk’s emphasis became more value-oriented in recent years.

When Kirk first emerged on the scene, Brown said, he was “much more of a firebrand, a little more intentionally provocative.”

“But once he got married and had his kids — and my heart goes out to his family — you could sense, in the clips that made it to social media and in the interview with Brigham Tomco, he was really focusing on the idea that politics isn’t the end-all and be-all as it is for so many other online provocateurs. He was trying to get to the heart of some of these cultural questions: how do we get people to take their religion seriously, to start a family, to have kids?”

“Would he use language that I would always use? No, obviously we’d have some disagreements. … But there was a willingness to engage and a recognition that ‘owning the lib’ is not enough to help people get married and invest in their communities and start a family. I think part of what made him so unique was being able to harness the sort of red-meat populism that fuels a lot of the online conversation, but also to have a very traditional message of faith, family and freedom, a core conservative message that I think he took very seriously,” Brown said.

He added: “That’s something his imitators aren’t going to be able to do in the same way.”

It’s hard to see anyone on the political left who is the equivalent of Kirk, or who could potentially replace him on the right, Brown said.

“He clearly had his finger on the pulse of where young men were. .. whether or not that would have borne fruit in years to come in marriage rates, who knows? But he was able to tap into that into a significant way.”

Charlie Kirk’s legacy of faith

Jackson Lahmeyer, the pastor of Sheridan Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and founder of Pastors for Trump, said he met Kirk several years ago when they were both speaking at the same event.

“We were babies here,” he wrote in a post on X, captioning a picture of the two men standing together.

While almost everyone knows of Kirk’s influence in politics, Lahmeyer said in an interview that his friend’s impact on America’s religious landscape was more under the radar, but as effective as his political muscle.

“Charlie had a door open to him where he could speak to pastors and help embolden pastors because the pulpits had gone silent for so long on issues that are political in nature but also are biblical issues like gay marriage and life and gender. … Charlie had a unique ability to motivate, inspire and challenge pastors to have a stronger voice in an area where unfortunately I think pastors had kind of lost their voice.”

In addition, he said, “Charlie’s ability to spread the Gospel to a younger generation far outweighs anything he ever accomplished politically. .. That’s an eternal legacy.”

Four years ago, Kirk founded a Turning Point affiliate, TPUSA Faith. “America needs a strong church,” its website says. It also says the group exists to “unite the church around primary doctrine and to eliminate wokeism from the American pulpit.”

To pastors, Lahmeyer said, Kirk offered a “spark of courage.”

“These men of God, they already knew what the Bible said … but Charlie sparked the courage within many pastors to say, if this young kid, who is not a pastor, can proclaim the truth of God’s word, then what excuse do I have? So his legacy, to me, is far greater from a spiritual sense than a political one, and that’s saying something, because he has a great political legacy.”

Kirk was also one of the few conservative personalities who would push back when confronted with offensive language. When he appeared on Gavin Newsom’s podcast earlier this year, for example, he rebuked the California governor for “taking the name of my Lord and Savior in vain.”

A turning point in the USA?

It will be some time before anyone can assess the future of the networks that Kirk built without him at the helm. But some are speculating that Kirk’s influence will grow, not diminish, because of his death.

The Chronicle of Higher Education published a piece entitled “The Making of a Martyr,” in which writers Jack Stripling and Nell Gluckman posit that Kirk’s movement will grow even larger.

They quote Stetson University law professor Peter F. Lake, who said, “This is a moment when a martyr is born. It’s hard to see it any other way.”

Conservative commentator Benny Johnson also called Kirk a martyr, writing, “His example is not just inspiring, it is a call to all of us. To stand firm in our beliefs, to shine light into darkness, speak truth and to live boldly in our faith. Charlie showed us what it means to live, and die, with purpose.”

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, many commentators said they felt like something had changed, a switch had been flipped. Fox News personality Dana Perino described it as a “watershed moment.”

What happens after that moment is as hard to see as the shooting itself, with some people calling for more unity, others for more action.

“We have to be bolder and louder now than ever,” The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh wrote on X, while journalist and former ESPN broadcaster Sage Steele said in a video, “I love you, Charlie Kirk. Thank you for what you did for me, for millions of others, for our country. I promise to never again live in fear, and to honor your legacy forever.”

Writing for the journal First Things, R.R. Reno foresees a turning point separate from the one that Kirk founded.

“Assassinations are sometimes more than symptoms; they can become catalysts. Innocent blood is a powerful reality. It turns the wheel of history. I believe Kirk’s murder will have this effect.”

Kirk’s personal X account may be evidence of that. Despite not having any new content, the account had gained 1,000 followers within a few hours on Thursday.