Article

America

Comment

Conspiracy theory

Politics

12 September 2025

6 min read

Charlie Kirk: the problem is not murder but anger

How to confront the rage in politics, in media, and in ourselves

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

An aerial view of a gazebo at the site of the Charlie Kirk shooting

The site of the shooting.

KSL News Utah, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The killing of Charlie Kirk has shaken most of us – including me. Over the past year or so, his pop-up debates on US university campuses kept appearing on my different social media channels, and they were fascinating. Here was a young, articulate conservative, venturing into college campuses – generally left-leaning, progressive places - opening up conversation, debate and challenge. He was opinionated, provocative, unafraid to voice unpopular opinions, generated hostility, but seldom seemed to show it himself. No question was off limits, he seemed to respect those who attacked him, and he made no secret of his Christian faith.

I agreed with some of what he said but by no means all of it – that’s the point of public debate. His views on gun control, Israel, and Donald Trump just for starters, would be some way from mine. But inviting debate on controversial issues, seeking to change other people’s minds by discussion and reasonable argument is the very heart of a well-functioning democracy. There are precious few spaces where progressives & conservatives talk – and Charlie Kirk’s campus debates were one of them. It’s tragic that they cost him his life.

In our times, such heinous acts are not usually committed by some secret, politically-motivated cabal, but often by an unhinged or deluded self-radicalised loner, influenced by fringe groups in politics or culture. In the UK, Axel Rudakubana, who killed three young girls in Southport, turned out not to be a terrorist after all (“he did not kill to further a political, religious or ideological cause” said the judge on sentencing) but a disturbed and lonely young man who killed for no apparent reason other than mental instability. The same was true for Ali Harbi Ali who stabbed the Conservative MP David Amess, Sirhan Sirhan who shot Robert F Kennedy, James L. Ray who murdered Martin Luther King, even (despite all the conspiracy theories) Lee Harvey Oswald who killed John F. Kennedy. All of them fit this category of lonely, unbalanced people who kill because of some grievance, sometimes loosely politically motivated, but usually acting alone. Conspiracy theories are alluring, but usually unfounded.

It's tempting when something like this happens to draw all kinds of wider political and cultural lessons. And there have been no shortage of them over these past days. “Because they could not prove him wrong, they murdered him” went one trope. The problem with that is that ‘they’ did not kill him. One young man - now in custody - did. To imply that every left-leaning person in the USA or elsewhere is somehow responsible for Kirk’s death ironically colludes with the darker motivations of this act.

It's Jesus who explains why. “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.' But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell.”

Sounds harsh. We all think murder is wrong, but losing your temper with a work colleague? Calling your neighbour an idiot because of who they vote for?

The saying points to the root of murder as rage. And boy, is there rage around today.

There are different kinds of anger. There is the red-hot furious kind where your blood boils and your temperature rises. Yet that kind of anger can settle into different mood - a hardened, determined malice, a fixed hatred of the person who provoked your anger in the first place and a determination to get your revenge, or to silence them once and for all. What both kinds have in common is the red mist that descends and remains, leaving an inability to see past the enmity, a refusal to see the humanity in the other person - the fact that they are, at the end of the day, a ‘brother’ as Jesus put it - a blindness to the essential commonality between you and the person you hate.

Anger is a dangerous thing for us humans. It deceives us into thinking that because we think we are in the right it gives us license to do despicable things.

Killings like this have always occurred, from Julius Caesar, to Abraham Lincoln, to Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to Yitzhak Rabin. And they always will. No political solution will ever erase the possibility of a mentally disturbed or angry person taking it into their own hands to murder another human being, particularly one with political prominence.

Yet we can do something. When we build algorithms that encourage the strongest and most extreme views, a media culture that highlights argument and division, refuse to see the common humanity in people we disagree with, when we demonise the opposition and blame them for all the ills of society that we see, we sow the seeds that enable this kind of tragic event to happen.

Another deceptively simple piece of New Testament wisdom runs: “Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.”

It is good advice. Yes, we will get angry from time to time. But don’t let it take root. Sometimes a certain righteous anger can be a good thing – but it’s rare. Anger is a dangerous thing for us humans. It deceives us into thinking that because we think we are in the right (and we may well be) it gives us license to do despicable things. The heart of Christian wisdom on anger is that it is God’s prerogative to exercise wrath. Our anger, however initially righteous, tends to harden into something more sinister. God alone can sustain righteous anger that will truly bring justice.

The right response to the murder of Charlie Kirk, the response that reflects the Christian faith that was so important to him, is not to blame it on an entire group of people, to tar them with the brush of the deluded young man who committed this terrible deed, but to see again the essential humanity that we share with our enemies. It is to actively cultivate a culture that encourages restraint rather than rage. It is to learn to be ruthless with our own tendency to hold grudges, our own deep-seated hostility to those whose views we find repulsive. It is to learn to hate racism, but to love the racist, to hate crime, but to love the criminal.

To respond wisely is to recognise that even my enemy - whether progressive or conservative - is a human being created and loved by God, a fellow sinner like me, and to look for the things we have in common, more than our differences. When Jesus taught us to love our enemies, he may have asked us to do something supremely difficult, but it is the only thing that can overcome the kind of malice that led to the tragic death of Charlie Kirk.

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Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.