A young man from Illinois was sitting in the front row when Charlie Kirk was shot and killed. He saw everything.
“I wasn’t necessarily drawn to that rally because of the politics,” he said. “There’s a lot of hate generated with debating and from both sides. But I just wanted to support a Christian man in his efforts to educate other people on Jesus Christ.”
September 10 was Trent Cooper’s birthday, and he arrived early to hear Kirk. That placed him about 20 feet away from the speaker’s tent on the campus courtyard, with about 3,000 students around.
Kirk was starting his “American Comeback Tour” in Orem, Utah. Both Christian apologist and political provocateur, Kirk had developed a wide following with videos of his debates with college students at his “Prove Me Wrong” table.
“For me it was his faith (that drew me), but for a lot of my friends, it was that he said it’s OK to be a straight, white male in America again,” Cooper said. “He defused radical beliefs with just a few words sometimes.”
A graduate of Cerro Gordo High School in Illinois, Cooper is a new student at Utah Valley University, in his first semester studying business. He arrived early at the terraced amphitheater—and landed on the front row of history. The killing right in front of him was bloody, brutal, and traumatic. The single shot came as Kirk was answering a question about mass killings.
“Charlie had tossed out Trump hats. In that moment, I realized the hat might make me a target, so I threw it off, and then we all ran.” Back at his apartment with his roommates, they hugged, cried, prayed, and waited for the adrenaline-fueled anxiety to subside.
Soon after, his grandmother was sending her friends prayer requests for the grandson who had frequently joined her at one of our churches in Central Illinois.
Galvanizing young people
Trent Cooper is representative of millions of young adults who flocked to Charlie Kirk and his message. Kirk did not hold back from his frank analysis of the liberal culture and his conservative political views that were rooted in his evangelical Christian faith.
“I didn’t always agree with everything he said,” stated Richard Ulrich, pastor of Lincoln Avenue Baptist Church in Jacksonville, “but I appreciated that he was having the conversations. I especially appreciated his willingness to integrate his faith into those conversations, instead of just sharing his political ideology.”
As journalist Dave Weigel posted on the day of the killing, “Pulled this quote from my last in-person interview with Kirk. His pitch wasn’t just ‘join the GOP, you’ll get lower taxes’—it was that you could give yourself to Jesus Christ and have a life worth living.”
Weigel, who formerly wrote for the Washington Post and now reports for Semafor news platform, posted excerpts from his meeting with Kirk at the 2024 Republican National Convention.
“Younger audiences love this contrarian heterodox approach,” Kirk said. “The mantra is not that if you’re a man, you’re an oppressor. It’s not that having children is a plague on the planet… We’re here to say actually, no, having children is a gift from God and it’s a wonderful thing… We’re saying marriage is awesome and you can reject hook-up culture.”
And they heard Kirk—by the millions. Kirk founded his political action group, Turning Point USA, when he was 18. Kirk was an Illinois native, born in Arlington Heights and reared in Prospect Heights in the Chicago suburbs. Kirk’s faith was shaped under the teaching of James MacDonald at Harvest Bible Chapel in Rolling Meadows, where he was a member.
Age 31 at the time he was killed, Kirk had brought masses of young adults to conservative ranks. President Trump, in his public statements of grief, credited Kirk with significant turnout in his re-election. And Kirk continued to have influence in the White House.
But it is his influence with young men and the hope of an awakening among them that some Christian leaders especially recall.
The morning after Kirk was killed, students at Southern Seminary in Louisville gathered in chapel. Citing Kirk’s sway with young men, especially those at their undergrad Boyce College, President Al Mohler scrapped the usual service and brought scholars to the platform, among them Illinoisan Andrew Walker.
“I would argue that there’s no one who has been as explicit about their Christian faith as someone like Charlie Kirk,” Walker said. “And especially bringing that down to a youth culture and, happily, seeing great progress and transformation in his own understanding of how he integrates his faith in his politics.”
A recent post by Kirk reported by the New York Times demonstrates that: “The future is bright for a generation of Christians who are willing to evangelize their culture, their culture to Christ.”
Cooper was immediately planning to prayer walk the Utah campus with others from the church plant he has joined who are trying to reach the mostly Mormon community. He was expecting the hard questions.
Now we wait to see who is willing to step up next.
Baptists lament and rally
On the Sunday after Kirk’s death, many Southern Baptist churches had special prayer in response. They prayed for Kirk’s widow, Erika, and his two small children, and for the millions who followed his social media accounts. (At well over 7 million on Instagram, YouTube, Tik Tok, and X before his death, another 8 million joined within three days of his death, CNN reported.)
SBC leaders called for lament and also for justice for the man charged in his death. The broader issue of violence in our culture was also raised, as news reports and pray-ers cited the recent killings of politicians and school children in Minnesota, and a Ukrainian war refugee stabbed to death on a bus in Charlotte.
“Political violence is a grave sin and it represents a threat to our nation and its government. The murder of Charlie Kirk is a grave warning to us all as we consider the health of our nation and society,” the statement said.
Endorsed by all 12 SBC entity leaders, SBC 1st Vice President Daniel Ritchie, and 2nd Vice President Craig Carlisle, the statement is a call for justice in light of a wave of violence in the United States, SBC President Clint Pressley told Baptist Press.
“Scripture calls God’s people to hate what is evil and cling to what is good and to do so in the name of the Lord Jesus. We believe this statement is a way we can do that while upholding the gospel,” he said.
The statement was posted online for others to add their names and can be found here.