Charlie Kirk, Mass Shootings, and the Human Heart

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”

— Jeremiah 17:9

---

The Shock of Another Bullet

On September 10, 2025, America witnessed a chilling moment. Conservative activist Charlie Kirk was gunned down while speaking at Utah Valley University, answering a student’s question about mass shootings. A single bullet pierced his throat before thousands of horrified students. Within hours, Kirk was pronounced dead.

This was not an ordinary crime—it was an assassination in broad daylight, targeting a political figure. The shockwaves were immediate. Some rushed to blame lax security. Others blamed incendiary rhetoric. Still others pointed to America’s never-ending crisis of gun violence.

But as tragic as Kirk’s death is—and as urgent as the problem of mass shootings has become—we would be blind if we stopped there. The deeper issue is not simply firearms, security lapses, or even political polarization. The root lies in something far more fundamental, far darker, and far older: the moral sickness of the human heart, compounded by a cultural belief in moral relativism.

As Christians, we also recognize that Charlie Kirk’s voice for the Savior will be missed. He spoke boldly and unashamedly of his faith, and his loss is a call for all believers to step forward, to speak the truth, and to stand courageously in a world that desperately needs Christ.

Surface Issues vs. Deeper Evils

When mass shootings dominate the headlines, the explanations come quickly:

• “It’s the guns.”
• “It’s the mental health crisis.”
• “It’s toxic politics and rhetoric.”
• “It’s violent video games.”
• “It’s social media.”

Each of these explanations contains some truth. But they stop at the surface. Guns are tools. Words may inflame. Social media amplifies division. But none of these alone explain why a human being can look at another human being and decide their life is expendable.

The truer answer is found in the ancient words of Scripture: “Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander” (Matthew 15:19). The problem isn’t external—it’s internal. It isn’t just societal—it’s spiritual.

This is where the modern world often falters. We look everywhere for solutions except the human heart. We try to legislate morality, rewire social structures, or design better security systems. But unless the heart is transformed, the violence will persist.

The Rise of Moral Relativism

Why does this matter now more than ever? Because Western culture no longer believes in objective morality.

For centuries, morality was understood as rooted in God’s character and God’s law. The Ten Commandments provided a moral anchor. “You shall not murder” was not a suggestion—it was a divine command. To disobey was not merely to break a social contract but to sin against the Creator.

But with the rise of secularism, postmodernism, and relativism, morality has been severed from its anchor. Friedrich Nietzsche declared, “God is dead,” and warned that if society no longer believed in God, we would lose any binding moral framework. He was right. When the transcendent foundation of morality is removed, all we have left are shifting human preferences.

Relativism says:

• “What’s true for you is true for you.”
• “What’s right for me is right for me.”
• “Speak your truth.”
• “Morality is subjective, created by cultures, individuals, or communities.”

At first, relativism may sound harmless—even liberating. But what happens when a shooter decides it is “right” for him to open fire on innocents? What happens when an assassin believes it is “true” that silencing a political figure serves justice? Without objective morality, we have no grounds to call such acts evil. We can dislike them. We can lament them. But we cannot condemn them as objectively wrong.

Relativism Meets the Human Heart

Here’s the deadly equation:

A deceitful human heart + moral relativism = a license for evil.

Scripture consistently warns that human beings are not neutral. We are not blank slates waiting to be shaped by society. We are sinners by nature and by choice. From Cain’s murder of Abel to the political violence of our own time, the trajectory of the human heart without God bends toward selfishness, corruption, and destruction.

Moral relativism doesn’t restrain this—it unleashes it. If every individual determines right and wrong for themselves, then evil gains a cloak of justification. The murderer can say, “It was right for me.” The tyrant can say, “It was necessary.” The relativist cannot answer with authority—only with preference.

Judges 21:25 sums it up with haunting clarity: “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” That ancient description is today’s reality.

A Flood of Violence in the Headlines

We don’t have to look far to see this playing out. The headlines of the past few weeks alone testify to it:

A woman was beaten in the streets of Cincinnati as bystanders stood idly by, some even recording the assault for their social media pages. A young person opened fire on schoolchildren attending Mass. A politician and her husband were slain in their own home by someone impersonating a police officer. A Ukrainian refugee was fatally stabbed in the neck while riding a light-rail train in Charlotte as fellow passengers sat by and did nothing to help her. A 17-year-old girl in the Bronx later died from injuries she suffered during a gang-related shooting at a basketball tournament. And the list goes on—tragic, senseless acts piling up in just the past few weeks. In Chicago alone over the Labor Day weekend, 58 people were shot and eight were killed across dozens of separate incidents.

It should also be noted that many openly celebrated Charlie Kirk’s death. Social media platforms were filled with comments from people rejoicing, mocking, and even justifying the assassination. This is nothing new. Much like the crowds of old who cheered as Christians were fed to lions in Roman arenas, modern hearts reveal the same sickness. As Jeremiah says, “The heart is deceitful above all things.” But Christ offers the cure: “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26).

Mass Shootings: Symptom, Not Disease

Mass shootings, assassinations, and political violence are not the disease—they are symptoms. The disease is sin.

Guns may be the tools, but they are wielded by hands moved by hatred, resentment, despair, or ideology. Security failures may provide opportunity, but opportunity is useless without intent. Even political rhetoric, as heated as it can be, only lights fires where flammable hearts already exist.

America has become numb to the litany of names: Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Las Vegas, Uvalde. Now Charlie Kirk’s name is added to the list, though in a different category—political assassination.

If history teaches us anything, it is this: when societies lose their moral foundation, violence multiplies. Rome decayed. Nazi Germany rose. Stalin’s USSR crushed millions. In each case, moral relativism merged with corrupted human hearts to justify horrors.

The Illusion of Human Progress

Modern people like to imagine that we are morally superior to our ancestors. We think technology makes us enlightened, science makes us rational, education makes us civilized. But the 20th century—arguably the most educated century in history—was also the bloodiest, with over 100 million killed by war, genocide, and tyranny.

Progress in technology has not been matched by progress in morality. We carry supercomputers in our pockets, but we still kill one another in schools, concerts, and churches. We split the atom, but also built nuclear bombs. We explore the stars, but can’t stop murdering on earth.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observed after surviving the Soviet gulag: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart.”

The Christian Response: Objective Morality in God

So where do we find hope? In the truth that morality is not relative, not shifting, not subjective. It is grounded in the eternal character of God.

• Murder is wrong, not because society dislikes it, but because life is sacred—created in God’s image (Genesis 1:27).
• Theft is wrong, not because it disrupts the economy, but because God commands honesty.
• Lying is wrong, not because it erodes trust, but because God is truth.

C.S. Lewis put it plainly in Mere Christianity: “If a rule of moral obligation really exists, then so must a Giver of that rule.” Objective morality points beyond itself to a transcendent Lawgiver—God.

Without God, morality collapses into taste. With God, morality stands as absolute, binding, and unchanging.

Hope Beyond Violence: The Cross

But Christianity offers more than an objective moral framework—it offers transformation.

At the cross, Jesus confronted both moral relativism and human evil. The world said, “Truth is relative,” but Jesus declared, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). The world embraced violence, but Jesus bore it—absorbing humanity’s sin, including murder and hatred, and rising victorious.

The gospel is not just forgiveness for murderers; it is transformation for all sinners. It turns Saul the persecutor into Paul the apostle. It turns hearts of stone into hearts of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26). It plants seeds of love where hate once reigned.

Society changes only when hearts change. And hearts change only when Christ reigns.

Challenge to Atheistic Thinking

This is where atheism falters. If there is no God, morality is subjective. If morality is subjective, why is assassination wrong? Why are mass shootings wrong? Why is genocide wrong?

The atheist can say, “I don’t like it.” Society can say, “We condemn it.” But condemnation without foundation is preference dressed up as principle. The atheist must borrow from the Christian worldview—an objective moral standard—to make sense of their outrage.

Consider this syllogism:

1. Objective moral values and duties exist.
   • Every human instinctively recognizes certain acts (murder, abuse, genocide) as truly wrong, not just socially inconvenient.
2. If objective moral values and duties exist, they require a transcendent source.
   • Morality cannot be grounded in personal preference, cultural opinion, or evolutionary survival strategies, since these are subjective and changeable.
3. Human laws and social contracts cannot be the foundation of objective morality.
   • Governments and societies disagree, contradict themselves, and often justify atrocities (slavery, genocide, political assassinations). If morality is rooted in man, it cannot rise above man’s failures.
4. Evolution and biology cannot account for objective moral duties.
   • Evolution may explain why humans develop cooperative behavior, but it cannot make an action actually right or wrong. It only explains survival advantage, not moral obligation.
5. Therefore, only a transcendent moral lawgiver can account for objective moral values and duties.
   • This lawgiver must be personal (to give commands), authoritative (to bind conscience), and unchanging (to ground morality across cultures and times).
6. The best explanation for the existence of objective morality is the existence of God.
   • Without God, morality collapses into relativism and preference. With God, morality is anchored in His eternal, righteous character.
7. Therefore, the very act of condemning atrocities such as assassination, mass shootings, and societal violence affirms the existence of God.
   • Our outrage testifies to a moral law written on the heart (Romans 2:15).

When we condemn shootings as evil, we prove moral relativism false and affirm the need for God.

The Choice Before Us

Charlie Kirk’s assassination is a tragedy. Mass shootings are horrors. But they are not anomalies—they are symptoms of a world that has abandoned God and embraced relativism.

We stand at a crossroads. Either we continue down the path of “everyone does what is right in his own eyes,” or we return to the truth that morality is objective, grounded in God’s law, revealed in Christ, and written on the human conscience.

The problem is not merely guns, politics, or rhetoric. The problem is sin. The cure is not mere legislation or reform. The cure is Christ.

We mourn the dead, we grieve the violence, but we must also repent of the relativism and rebellion that fuel it. For only when the heart is transformed can the hands cease from violence.

As Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God” (Matthew 5:9). The world needs more than policies—it needs peacemakers with transformed hearts.

And that begins with us.