Pastor and history blogger Chris Mowley spoke to a bipartisan crowd at Akron University about the choices Americans faced after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The video transcript can be found below:
Video Transcript:
One of the drawbacks to moving on to the end is that inevitably someone else said what I was going to say. But being here is a privilege. I know I’m listed in the program there as a pastor. It’s one of the hats I’ve worn for most of my adult life, but I’m also a historian. It’s like my day’s work. And I think that’s how I got here. And I’m going to weave these two together a bit. And what I wanted to share tonight is that tonight we are gathering here to represent different parties, different backgrounds, different beliefs.
Some of us here are here because they praised Charlie Kirk. Some of us here are respectful critics who have profoundly opposed to him, but who are united in our fears, like his death.
We are gathering here to mourn, not to discuss it tonight. To lament the incident of his death, he was unable to find enough common ground in a place where he could talk to each other without becoming violent. And, as many others have said here, before Charlie Kirk becomes a public figure, he will tell you more than anything he is a man. He was his husband. For Erica, he was more of a child and a Christian of God than everything else. He was the father of two small children.
As my own father, of course, one of my biggest fears is what’s happening to my children. But the second is that one of my children has to grow up without parents. I grew up without parents, but I can’t imagine what his children have to face now. That voice they had in their lives, the voices that many of us had in our lives, are now gone.
To understand the life that Charlie Kirk lived, he must understand the choices he made. He chose from a very young age to enter the stage of ideas. He did not choose to find a safe space where he found only those who agreed with him, those who thought like him, those who spoke like him and those who believed like him. He was not looking for a sympathetic audience. He went to college campus where he found very well what he thought was an adversary audience.
He went to places where people were passionate and often disagree with his own opinion, but that’s what he was looking for. He had the courage to do it. He had the courage to say, “We need to talk.”
This tragedy, which we saw unfold on screen a few days ago, did not happen in a vacuum. It happened in a country that is tackling an identity crisis.
We are struggling with the people at our core. A country where differences of opinion are distorted too often, emptying people who think differently than us. When the enemy sees it as an enemy, not as a fellow citizen.
It happened in a country where our passion was tense, as one man said a long time ago. 164 years ago, as our country was on the verge of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln stood in front of the Capitol building for his first inauguration.
That plea reflects us today. It asks us that question. Is there a bond of affection like Americans still hold?
Do you see the friends behind political enemies, Americans, fellow citizens behind political labels? I asked, “Can I find a common foundation?”
For Charlie, his beliefs were rooted in his Christian faith, like me, and many of us. His views on the world and the faith that shaped his role in that world. Faith like many other great moral traditions resonates with high and often difficult standards of how to treat their followers rather than agreeing with each other.
The apostle Paul was writing letters to a community that was as divided as we did. And he said these words. He said, “Get compassion, kindness, humility, kindness, patience. Endure one another and forgive one another. On all these virtues, it becomes love that unites them in perfect unity.”
I would like to challenge us to respect those words.
Even if you are not a Christian, I would like to encourage you to follow those words of Paul. They do not require us to abandon our beliefs. They do not require us to compromise on the strongly held beliefs we have. They should not ask us to abandon the principles. They ask us to do something even more difficult. They ask us to endure each other.
We approach humility and disagreement to our enemies, at the baseline of human dignity. That’s the hard work of unity. It’s not emotion. It’s discipline. It is a choice to believe in what brings us together as humans and Americans as stronger than what tears us apart.
The person who pulled the trigger on a university campus in Utah last week didn’t want to kill a man. He tried to kill the conversation. He tried to replace the words with a bullet. He attempts to answer the argument in the assassination, in which he proves the tragic truth of something that Charlie Kirk himself said. This is one of the things I’ve seen and I’ve replayed the most from him in the last few days. He said, “When people stop talking, it’s when you get violence because you start to think that the other side is so evil and they’re losing their humanity.”
Take a look around you a bit. Do you see evil? Because I don’t. I don’t see evil here. I see fellow citizens, my fellow people. I see people who have the right to decency and dignity and love and respect. Whatever your background, men and women have strong beliefs, strong beliefs and willing to support them.
Sometimes, that means we stand on the other side on difficult issues. Sometimes, it means that we are enemies on the path of ideas and we now choose to advance in this country. d
o Will we continue on the path of dehumanization, light empt, irreparable despair, or irreparable evil, or in this shared tragic moment of tragedy? Because you don’t make any mistakes about it. Charlie Kirk was a conservative and he was a Republican. But this is a tragedy that we all share regardless of our background. This should make us all sad today.
Do we choose to find another way at this moment? So when I’m closed, I just want to say that the job of healing this country does not belong to the president or politician. It’s yours and I’m sitting here now. You, most of you, are university students. You are my daughter’s age. You knew a lot more about Charlie Kirk than most of us did this week. But it belongs to each and every one of us and chooses where to go from here, from here in our home, our community, our campus, online and in-person conversations.
Tonight’s call is not to abandon what we believe. It’s about protecting our beliefs with better discussion, not bitterness.
It is to express our principles without standing in the dignity of those who believe in different things than we do.
To prove that democracy still works.
Prove that disagreements are healthy. That we can still talk to each other.
I would like to encourage him to leave this place tonight. I would like to resolve to answer the plea that President Lincoln gave to the nation on the eve of the Civil War.
We have the same opportunity and I would like to close with these words he shared in his inauguration speech.
He said, “I hate closing. We are friends, not enemies. We must not be enemies. Passion should not make it tense, but we must not break the bond of affection.
