One Year Without Charlie Kirk

Remembering the man who loved a generation enough to tell them the truth

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By Wendy M. Yurgo

One year ago, Charlie Kirk was taken from this world. I have thought a great deal about what I wanted to say on this anniversary, and I keep returning to the same thing.

I do not want to remember Charlie by the way he died.

I want to remember the way he lived.

I want to remember the young man who walked onto college campuses carrying an enormous burden for the generation he found there. I want to remember the speed of his mind, the command of his facts, the confidence with which he defended what he believed, and the grace he showed the person standing across from him. I want to remember his faith, because without understanding his faith, it is impossible to understand Charlie.

For nearly seven years, Charlie and I moved in the same world. We shared many of the same friends and belonged to the same movement. As the founder of a Christian conservative company serving the faith and freedom community, I was often in the same rooms and at the same events as Charlie. We were among people who believed we had been called to defend something precious and who understood that doing so could come at a cost.

Charlie understood that better than most.

The world came to know him as one of the most formidable debaters in America. His mind was astonishingly quick. He did not simply know facts. He knew how ideas fit together. He could hear a question, find the assumption buried inside it, and answer what was really being asked. He could identify a contradiction almost instantly, but he did not use that ability to make the young person standing at the microphone feel small.

Charlie was direct. He was unapologetic. He would not soften the truth to make it easier to receive. But he listened. He let people finish their questions, even when they were angry or openly hostile. He looked at them when he answered. He took them seriously.

There was a reason for that.

Charlie loved young people.

His critics saw clips of arguments and decided he went onto college campuses to defeat people. They never understood what was happening in front of them. Charlie was not there because he wanted to conquer the young person standing across from him. He was there because he wanted to reach that person.

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He saw what was happening to this generation. He saw young people who were isolated, anxious, medicated, confused, and searching desperately for somewhere to belong. He saw children being taught to distrust their parents, their country, their faith, and finally their own bodies. He saw them being told that their deepest discomfort proved God had made a mistake.

Charlie desperately wanted them to understand that this was not true.

You are not a mistake.

You were created in the image of God.

You are loved.

You are all right in the body God gave you.

That was not a political slogan to Charlie. It came from his faith, and it was personal. He understood that behind the anger and the rehearsed language was often a young person asking a much more painful question.

Is there something wrong with me?

Charlie wanted that young person to know that God does not make mistakes.

He never confused love with surrendering the truth. In fact, he believed love required the truth. But he also understood that the person arguing with him was still a human being created by God. He could reject an idea completely without treating the person expressing it as worthless.

That combination is rare. It is especially rare now.

We live in a culture where disagreement has become permission to hate. People no longer argue with an idea. They destroy the person who holds it. Charlie entered those spaces again and again, not because he hated the people inside them, but because he believed they were still worth reaching.

His critics mistook conviction for cruelty because they had come to believe that love requires agreement. Charlie knew better. He believed you could love someone enough to tell that person the truth and respect that person enough to remain at the table afterward.

Charlie did not go onto college campuses because he enjoyed defeating young people in debate.

He went because he loved them enough to tell them the truth.

One of my most treasured memories of Charlie did not happen before a crowd. It happened at a private Shabbat dinner with a small group of friends.

That evening, a visiting rabbi from Israel described Shabbat as the heartbeat of the Ten Commandments. His words stayed with me. Of all the commands God gave us, the command to stop, remember, worship, and rest sits at the center. It calls us out of the noise of the world and back into right relationship with God.

Charlie spoke about what the Sabbath had come to mean in his own life. From Friday evening until Saturday evening, he turned off his phone completely.

Think about that for a moment. Charlie carried a national movement. Millions of people listened to him. His days moved at a pace few of us could imagine, yet every week he deliberately became still. He put down the phone, stepped away from the demands, and made room for God and his family.

That evening, Charlie told me he was writing a book about the Sabbath. He wanted Christians to understand what he had discovered, that rest was not weakness or time stolen from the work. It was obedience. It was restoration. It was a gift from God.

Charlie completed that book shortly before he died. Stop, in the Name of God: Why Honoring the Sabbath Will Transform Your Life was published three months after his death.

When it was released, I thought about that dinner and Charlie sitting at the table, telling me about the book he was writing. He should have been here to place it into the world himself. He should have been here to speak about it, teach from it, and watch others discover the gift that had changed his own life.

But the book came anyway.

And there was Charlie again, still reaching people, still teaching, still calling us away from the noise of the world and back to God.

The world remembers Charlie with a microphone in his hand.

I remember that he knew when to put it down.

That evening helped me understand where his public courage came from. Charlie was not drawing his strength from the crowd. He was drawing it from God. Before he was a political force or the founder of one of the most consequential youth movements in American history, he was a husband, a father, and a child of God.

The Charlie who stood fearlessly before thousands of people and the Charlie who turned off his phone for the Sabbath were not two different men. The stillness made the courage possible. His surrender to God allowed him to stand before a hostile world without surrendering the truth.

Charlie began Turning Point USA when he was eighteen years old. By 31, he had awakened a generation.

That is what I believe his greatest achievement was. It was not the size of the organization or the number of people who came to hear him, although both were extraordinary. It was the young person who heard Charlie and stopped being afraid. It was the student who realized loving America was not something to hide. It was the young man who learned that strength could be honorable and the young woman who learned she did not have to reject faith, femininity, marriage, or motherhood to have value.

Charlie gave young people permission to stand when almost every institution around them was demanding that they kneel.

A year later, what he planted is still growing. Turning Point now reports more than 5,000 chapters across the country. Students who once stood in Charlie’s audience are stepping forward to lead. Young people are walking onto campuses Charlie will never again visit and carrying the message he spent his life building.

There is love in that legacy. There is hope in seeing that the work continues and that so many young people refuse to let what Charlie taught them disappear.

But there is also terrible loss.

A movement cannot take the place of a husband at the table. Thousands of chapters cannot replace a father in the lives of his children. No memorial, headline, or measure of influence can give Erika and their children back the man they loved.

Charlie should be here.

He should be walking onto another campus and inviting another young person to the microphone. He should be going home to Erika and their children. He should be turning off his phone on Friday evening. He should be watching the movement he built grow beyond anything even he imagined.

The calendar tells us a year has passed. Grief does not move so neatly. It is possible to be grateful for everything Charlie left behind and still feel the terrible wrongness of a world continuing without him in it.

I miss my friend. Our movement misses him. America misses him.

But I also see him everywhere.

I see him in the young person who refuses to be ashamed of faith. I see him in the student who finds the courage to stand at the microphone and speak. I see him in the young man or woman who finally understands that identity does not come from a screen, a diagnosis, a political movement, or the approval of strangers.

It comes from God.

The world will remember Charlie Kirk for the movement he built. Those of us who knew him will remember why he built it.

He loved God. He loved his family. He loved America.

And he loved a generation enough to tell them the truth.

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About the Author

Wendy M. Yurgo is a Christian, attorney, entrepreneur, and the Founder and CEO of Revere Payments, a conservative fintech company serving many of the nation’s leading faith based and freedom driven organizations. She writes about where faith collides with the systems shaping our culture, bringing a legal and executive lens to the most urgent issues of our time. Her work is rooted in light, guided by principle, and grounded in truth. Follow Wendy on Instagram @wendyyurgo and X @paymentsSHEEO.