For more than a decade, I served as dean of the chapel at a small liberal arts college. Often, eager young street evangelists would drive to the edge of the campus and stake out their place on a sidewalk or plaza. Sometimes, I could hear them from my office in the chapel.
Once, the college president called me “Dwight, do something about that street preacher out there. He is disrupting things and accusing our students of awful behavior.” Or something like that. I replied, “We don’t need to get involved, Bill. I have already encouraged irritated students to get a Bible and go toe-to-toe with the street preacher. They can defend themselves quite well.”
All this came to mind as I watched videos of another street preacher, Charlie Kirk, get gunned down for doing the same thing.
Kirk was an exceptional young man. He was handsome, intelligent, personable, and energetic. He traveled the country finding a spot on the fringe of the campus, there to engage students with something different than what they heard in class: an attack on just about everything the university represented.
Kirk built an organization second to none in the country. This was funded by hundreds of millions of dollars from wealthy individuals and foundations. They were eager to pour money into Kirk’s attack on universities, political parties, and churches that refused to see the gospel the way Kirk did. Plus, he was galvanizing voters.
Such people, I suppose, play an important role in the grand scheme of things. The gospel accounts of Jesus begin with the story of just such a man. John the baptizer stayed on the edge of society, challenged just about everything that establishment religion and politics had to offer, and articulated a different vision for society. In the end, John the Baptizer was executed, by somebody who did not like what he was saying.
So it was with Charlie Kirk.
It did not have to be this way. It is shame that Kirk could not find his place in the university. He had all the gifts and callings to make a success of university life. He could have been a classroom star, an organizational leader, a champion debater, a writer of originality and insight, perhaps a student member of the board of trustees. He could have been Dr. Charles Kirk, talking on camera to the hosts of the News Hour or introducing his newest book at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion.
Best of all, he would have engaged in thoughtful and transformational ways the very issues that caused him problems as a street preacher. Like gender identity. He used verbal attacks on trans people to stir up the crowd and endear himself to his right-wing benefactors. But if he had registered for classes on these things, he would have learned about the anomalies that complicate sexual identity and behavior. He might have avoided the “hate speech” that so irritated that 22-year-old man who took his grandfather’s vintage rifle and put a bullet through Charlie Kirk’s neck.
Some will complain that my scenario sounds very much like the establishment absorbing the talents and insights of a young genius and submerging them into the muddy waters of degree requirements and retirement plans. Perhaps so, because that exact thing happens often.
But not always. Kirk himself aspired to West Point. Perhaps he was inspired by Dwight David Eisenhower who came up through the ranks to lead the Allies to victory in the Second World War before becoming, first, President of the United States, and second, president of Gettysburg College. He made a difference, in part because he took his own disposition and intelligence into the academy, there to be fashioned into a national and international leader.
Granted: not everybody is made for a college degree. The list of education misfits is long and impressive. Bob Dylan, comes to mind, as do Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey. And my own son, Ike Moody.
But I am one who dreams about what might have been, had the 31-year-old Charlie Kirk PhD been behind the podium of a 250-seat lecture hall instead of under a canopy facing 3,000 curious stares and one rifle scope 200 feet away.
