Charlie Kirk was assassinated for free speech.

He was sitting down in broad daylight and accepting challenges from anyone at all to his beliefs and positions. He was distinguished for his ability to speak for the heart, with intelligence and with passion, and with respect. He listened to the people that came to talk to them and honored them with answers that were true to his own principles as well as responsive to the concerns of his questioners. He believed that in the American covenant, as in the marriage covenant, we have to talk out our differences. The alternative is destruction of the covenant and the looming likelihood of violence.

But he [Kirk] has left behind a powerful vision of free people freely and respectfully engaging each other.

It was his listening that made Charlie a very persuasive man and therefore an effective political force. People know when they are being heard. Very many responded in kind, listening to Charlie as he listened to them. That is how he won hearts and that is how he helped to win the last election.

As hard as he might argue ideas, his friendliness was evident even to those who staunchly defended their political differences. Kirk believed in people and in the government answerable to them and dismissible by their vote. As a traditional believer, he believed in the image of the Infinite present in each person was the eternal foundation for that government. He had to be open to correction himself if he were to motivate others to be open to him.

People who don’t like free speech are afraid of ideas they don’t like being heard. They sense the power of ideas that are presented well; they have no confidence that their ideas would be listened to and accepted on their own merits. They are afraid to admit any lack in their ideas, thinking that others will see them as weak. And then seals weakness in their lives. Therefore, they fear that the only way their ideas will triumph is if different ideas are silenced by whatever means necessary. They have no faith in the divine image within all people, only in their own exclusive and infallible insight, which they secretly know and cannot confess as partial as any human’s.

During the Reformation and in its aftermath, war after war was fought to enforce the dominance of ideas powerful people believed to be most important, by definition, religious ideas. In adopting the First Amendment, Americans decreed that citizens would be free of government interference in their religion and in their speech. The citizens identified these freedoms as rights, which their government had no permission to infringe. Freedom of religion and freedom of speech are intimately linked — religion is our thoughts and beliefs about the deepest and most meaningful things in our life, which naturally shape the way we talk and how we advocate for the policies that reflect those thoughts and beliefs.

When governments are subservient to a religion that compels its observance, there is no right to disagree with a law or government policy, for that would be disagreeing with the religion, which treats disagreement as revolt against G-d. America’s Founders saw that this was unnatural. Citizens did not derive their rights from a particular church’s consent or the laws made by the rulers the church ordained. No human is competent to interfere in another’s relation to the Ultimate.

Rather, they saw the truth was that each person is given rights directly from the Ultimate, and therefore no human is due greater deference by law to his or her opinions and beliefs. As George Washington put it in his letter to Newport’s Jews, “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.” No matter how much one believes in one’s own ideas, they can have no preference in law. All are free to worship and to speak their own ideas.

Recently, Senator Tim Kaine attacked the great idea of natural, God-given rights, the linchpin of reasoning of the Declaration and of the Constitution. He said: “The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator — that’s what the Iranian government believes.”

Indeed, he is right, but that doesn’t lead where he points. Why? The American idea is more inclusive than the Iranian. We, too, believe in God, as does Sen. Kaine himself. But that only argues for our position, which sees that base of rights in God disallows government from doing what Iran’s government does – outlawing other religions and opposing speech.

Sen. Kaine is also spectacularly wrong in his unavoidable implication that our civil rights are bestowed by governments and the laws they make. If those rights are created and bestowed by governments and the laws they make, then those rights are revokable when those who control the government want to. It does not jibe in the least with a constitution that begins with “We, the People”. If people owe their rights to other more privileged and powerful people, they cannot limit the power of that privileged government at all. The people cannot delegate powers to government as they have none the government does not give them; there are no rights reserved to them. What they have are just table scraps from the government, which may be withheld at will.

And since ideas influence action, the government has nothing to stop it from making sure no idea challenges its supremacy. And so, the new heresy hunters, who use not just a pile of logs at a stake to enforce their monopoly on ideas and expression, but cancellation, cybermobbing, doxing, threats, and now, a long gun from hundreds of yards away, first at Donald Trump and now at Charlie Kirk.

There is a theology implicit in such a view as Kaine’s words implied. God can command piety, for Kaine claims piety for himself and there is no reason to disbelieve him. But the god implicit in Kaine’s view is not involved in worldly politics. In this world, outside of that god, government is supreme, not because the people have invested it with power, but because the people have no rights the government doesn’t give them. It is, in effect, a belief in two deities, each with its distinct realm, into which the other does not mix: what people traditionally call God is here a purely transcendent being, not only irrelevant but a malevolent trespasser in human politics, whose actions in that off-limits realm result in obscenities like the terror mullahs’ regime.

Who then is the deity in this world? Clearly, the Government, which knows what is right and wrong and can stop you from expressing opinions contrary to the truth only they know adequately. Sen. Kaine’s piety, considered from this angle, would be simply part of the power-sharing deal he makes with the god of the transcendent realm.

This is nowhere near what most Americans believe. Even a modestly skilled politician knows that such an odd theology must not be expressed clearly to the voters. Rather, like Obama’s Iran policy or ObamaCare, the truth has to be concealed from the people until it is too late. But this would cause no qualms to such elites. Implicit in their system in which government is god is that the people have no right to know or decide anything the government does not allow them.

But the belief of the founders of American democracy and their predecessors in England and Holland was different. They relied, as we have written of before, on a concept of a God who has created humans in the divine image, and therefore all have creative power — ideas and beliefs and the words to express them and bring others to concert themselves in governments deriving their powers from the consent of the governed. This is a God who is both transcendent and present in mundane affairs, demanding the pursuit of justice but simultaneously acting with the greatest compassion, setting out great universals and yet always manifest in the least blade of grass, grain of sand, or in the lowliest and least powerful people.

Charlie Kirk’s life was dedicated to such a God. He listened to everyone and spoke to to everyone with his whole heart and with his considerable intelligence. To him, this was doing the work of God. He was dangerous only to those who loath people who think for themselves, to those people who divided God up even as they divided people from each other and only occasionally deigning to grant a right or two.

One of those people decided that he was empowered to withdraw Charlie’s right to life.

But Charlie’s lifework — to which he and his family devoted their lives’ energy — lives on. It is the great vision of a people truly united, strengthened by debate and good-faith controversy, resulting in a nation whose life is a shining light to all the world, inspiring emulation.

It is an old and true vision, often hidden, but always in great crises emerging to defeat tyrannical human evil. The rarest of politicians — and Charlie was one of those — are capable of rousing the beauty and the triumphant power of a free people.

Here is a remembrance written by Harold Nicolson, of just such a man. Nicolson, belonging to a different party than Winston Churchill, testified to Churchill’s ability to unite all sides to the great task of saving democracy and civilization. Here he describes Churchill’s address at the reopening of Parliament late in 1944:

He spoke of tradition as the flywheel of the State. He spoke of the need of youth — “Youth, youth, youth, and renovation, energy, boundless energy” — and as he said these words, he bent his knees and pounded the air like a pugilist — “and of controversy, health-giving controversy”. “I am not afraid of it in this country,” he said, and then he took off his glasses and grinned round at the Conservative benches. “We are a decent lot,” he said, beaming upon them. Then he swung round and leant forward over the box right into the faces of the Labour people: “All of us,” he added, “the whole nation.”

This is the vision that had been so drastically lacking of late, and revived in a new form by Charlie Kirk. It is a vision which we need. Churchill deeply believed in the power of his people and devoted his considerable powers of expression to persuading them to join together and triumph over the deadly threat of tyranny. He believed that this persuasion was the work of what he often called Christian civilization, in which he wholeheartedly believed as the keystone of his personal faith. The vision manifest in Nicolson’s brilliantly described scene impels us all towards a vision of such a generous and free nation.

Charlie Kirk was not granted a life even half as long as Churchill’s. But he has left behind a powerful vision of free people freely and respectfully engaging each other with the affairs of their country and their world and forging a nation capable of inspiring the world throughout time. Like all who devote themselves to God, Charlie knew that the good deeds and true ideas he worked for would be his true life and will not die. Let us testify to that truth with our own devotion to that most worthy vision for which he lived and to which he bravely and humbly offered his sacrifice.

READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:

The Religious Roots of Separation of Church and State

Choosing Survival Over Politics

Group Allegiances Are Good. Just Not the Fake Ones of DEI.