I am writing thousands of miles above the earth, somewhere between Phoenix and home. The hum of the engines is constant, but what reverberates within me is not the altitude, not the passage over desert and plain. What reverberates within me is the quake in America’s soul I witnessed on Sunday. I was there, at the memorial for Charlie Kirk, slain only weeks ago, and it felt less like a service than a convulsion of history.
Over 200,000 people packed into an arena and the surrounding streets—a football stadium and hockey stadium side by side, overflowing—while more than 100 million watched online, the audience continuing to grow by the day as clips and testimonies ripple outward. Some of the most powerful leaders in America, perhaps the world, stood on that stage. And yet the most remarkable thing was not their presence but what was placed at the center: faith—not as an ornament, not as a perfunctory nod to heritage, but as the fabric of meaning and order itself.
Religion was not a backdrop but a foundation.
Founders’ Wisdom, Our Forgetfulness
John Adams once warned that the Constitution was “made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” George Washington, in his Farewell Address, cautioned that national morality could not be sustained apart from religious principle. These two Founders were not indulging pious flourishes. They were stating an axiom of civilization: political freedom depends on moral order, and moral order depends on reverence for a Law above ourselves.
Cecil B. DeMille put it more bluntly: “We cannot break the Ten Commandments. We can only break ourselves against them.”
We live in a culture eager to forget this. We imagine ourselves masters of reality, sovereigns of desire, curators of our own truths. Yet the evidence piles up in our families, our communities, our bodies: truth is not determined but discovered, and always in Someone beyond us. The data confirm it: health collapses where sexual anarchy reigns; sociological surveys tie stable marriages to educational outcomes, economic stability, and civic virtue; psychologists know that unbounded desire breeds despair.
What Adams called “virtue” is not private luxury; it is civic necessity.
The Landscape of Disorder
Every one of us knows disorder. Some of mine may not be yours. Yours may not be your neighbor’s. But the fact is universal. The modern temptation is to enshrine our disorders as identities, to rationalize them, to institutionalize them in law and policy, and then to demand others celebrate them. This is not liberation but slavery.
The alternative is harder but truer: to recognize desire can be bent, to cultivate self-mastery, to order passion toward truth and goodness.
This is not merely personal. Government already regulates behavior that threatens the community: fentanyl is illegal, buildings require codes, medicine demands standards. To imagine sexuality has no communal consequence is delusion. There is no such thing as a purely private moral choice.
Consider the cascading effects of fatherlessness. Unwed motherhood is not just a personal drama but an economic and civic crisis. The costs bleed into welfare budgets, classroom disruptions, crime statistics, tax burdens. Ask any teacher trying to instruct 30 children while navigating the wounds of fatherless homes: morality is never private. Disorder reverberates.
More Than a Memorial: A Revival
This is what gave yesterday’s gathering its singular force. It was not about Charlie Kirk as an individual—though his loss was grievous, his family’s pain palpable. It was about what Charlie stood for.
Throughout the stadium, thousands rose to their feet, many declaring first-time commitments to Jesus Christ. You could sense the authenticity—a hunger deeper than politics. For all the speeches, the policies debated, the headlines written, the underlying issue was painfully human: sincerity. Are we willing to live what we profess? Or will hypocrisy fuel the cynicism of those who despise us?
Even in grief, even in rage at the assassin’s bullet, the question hovered like judgment: Do our lives reflect the faith we proclaim?
The Crescendo of Forgiveness
The answer came in a way that left the air electric. Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow, stood to speak. Her husband had been stolen from her only two weeks earlier. Her children had been robbed of a loving father. Her face bore grief, but her words bore something more.
She forgave.
The crowd erupted—not in political cheer but in awe. Of all the ovations that day, none was louder, none more enduring, than for forgiveness. Presidents and governors may wield power, but they cannot compel what erupted from that woman’s soul.
Her act dwarfed policy. It dwarfed tweets and podiums. It was the power of the Gospel, alive, defiant, radiant.
And then Erika pressed further: it was for souls like her husband’s alleged assassin—Tyler Robinson—that Charlie lived and labored. Not to trade barbs in ideological crossfire, but to reach the broken. To love the enemy. To call the lost home.
That was the moment when the quake of grief became a tremor of revival.
In this, the line of our cultural moment was laid bare. It is not simply Left vs. Right, Conservative vs. Progressive. It is far simpler, far deeper: Will we accept our identity in God or reject it?
One path leads to flourishing; the other to languishing.
As America approaches its 250th anniversary, the question becomes inescapable: Will we remember what the Founders knew? Will we awaken from amnesia? Alexis de Tocqueville, observing the young republic, famously remarked that America’s greatness lay not in its fields or factories but in its churches, “on the lips of her people.” When America ceases to be good, he warned, it will cease to be great.
We are there. The soil is quaking beneath us.
