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Charlie Kirk is the Founder and President of Turning Point USA, the largest and fastest growing conservative youth activist organization in the country with over 250,000 student members, over 150 full-time staff, and a presence on over 2,000 high school and college campuses nationwide. Charlie is also the Chairman of Students for Trump, which aims to activate one million new college voters on campuses in battleground states in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election. His social media reaches over 100 million people per month and according to Axios, he is one of the "top 10 most engaged" Twitter handles in the world. He is also the host of “The Charlie Kirk Show,” which regularly ranks among the top news shows on Apple podcast charts.
Charlie Kirk on Evil, Free Will, and Why Atheism Cannot Explain Morality After Minneapolis Tragedy
Charlie Kirk addresses a profound question sent to him following a tragic church shooting in Minneapolis: How can anyone believe in God when such evil exists? Rather than dismissing the concern, Kirk tackles the philosophical problem of evil head-on, arguing that atheism cannot actually explain why anything is evil at all. Without a transcendent moral standard, he contends, we're left with nothing but preferences. Drawing from Genesis, Romans, and the Book of Job, Kirk explains why Christianity uniquely offers an answer to evil through the cross, while atheists must explain away the entirety of existence as random chance. This response explores free will, the nature of good and evil, and why our very ability to recognize wickedness points toward God's existence.
Following a horrific shooting at a church in Minneapolis where young people were targeted during mass, Charlie Kirk received an email that many people wrestle with in moments of tragedy: "Charlie, this is why I can't believe in God. How could you believe in God after this?" Rather than offering a dismissive answer, Kirk acknowledges this as an important question that deserves serious consideration. The problem of evil has challenged believers for millennia, and Kirk argues that understanding this problem actually reveals something profound about the nature of morality itself.
Atheists Have Evil, No Problem—Literally
Kirk presents a counterintuitive argument: while Christians and Jews must wrestle with the problem of evil, atheists face a different dilemma entirely. On an atheistic worldview, Kirk argues, evil cannot truly exist as an objective category. If God does not exist and humans are nothing more than clusters of cells that evolved by accident over millions of years, then there is no transcendent standard by which to judge anything as genuinely evil. Actions become mere preferences, not moral absolutes.
To illustrate this point, Kirk uses the analogy of a crooked line. When we see a squiggly, crooked line drawn on paper, we immediately recognize it as crooked—but only because we have a concept of what a straight line should be. We judge the crooked line against the standard of straightness. Similarly, we only recognize something as evil because we're comparing it to a transcendent standard of good. Without that standard—without God—the very concept of evil becomes meaningless.
Free Will and the Choice to Do Evil
Kirk addresses the theological question of free will, acknowledging that this topic is "hotly debated" among Christians. While some Christian traditions emphasize God's sovereignty to the point of diminishing human agency, Kirk personally believes in genuine free will. He argues that individuals have the ability to choose, and the shooter in Minneapolis made a horrific choice to use that free will to murder children. That act was evil, and we recognize it as such because we're appealing to a transcendent truth standard—a principle shared by both Jewish and Christian ethics.
Kirk notes that we know very little about the shooter except that he was in his early twenties and is now dead, having been stopped before he could kill even more people. The shooter exhibited what Kirk describes as "existential emptiness," and it's significant that he was drawn specifically to a church to commit this act of violence against young people at mass. This wasn't random chaos—it was targeted evil.
What Atheism Must Explain
While Christians and Jews must grapple with the problem of evil and natural disasters, Kirk argues that atheists face an even larger explanatory burden. They must explain everything else about existence without appealing to a Creator. This includes:
The origin of life itself
DNA, which Kirk calls "the longest sentence ever recorded"
The fine-tuning of the universe
Why Earth exists and is habitable
The laws of physics
The laws of reason and logic
The laws of thermodynamics
Atheists must attribute all of this to randomness and chance. But if everything—including human consciousness and moral intuition—is just the product of random processes, then morality itself must be random. There's no grounding for calling anything truly right or wrong.
Being Angry at God Is Not the Same as Not Believing
Kirk makes an important distinction for those who struggle with belief in the face of evil. If someone responds to tragedy by asking "How can I believe in God after this?" they're actually implying belief in God. Their anger, their sense of injustice, their conviction that something deeply wrong has occurred—all of these point toward a belief in a moral order that transcends human opinion. You might be angry at God, wrestling with God, even convinced that God has acted unjustly. But that's fundamentally different from not believing in God at all.
In fact, Kirk notes, we're called to wrestle with God. Throughout the Old Testament, people cry out to God in disgust or anger. This wrestling isn't always justified, but it's very normal and even expected in the life of faith.
The Biblical Framework for Understanding Evil
Christianity offers a comprehensive framework for understanding evil, Kirk argues. The problem of evil can only be wrestled with because of God and our belief in God. Moreover, Christianity is the answer to the problem of evil. There would be no need for Jesus to sacrifice himself if humans had never sinned. Christ's redemptive work will ultimately fix all the wrongs that have contaminated this earth.
God created a good world in the beginning. As Genesis describes, God created the heavens and the earth, and evil was not part of God's original design. Evil entered through human rebellion, as described in Genesis 3. In Romans 5:12, found in what Kirk calls "the believer's constitution," Paul writes: "Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned."
God's Sovereignty Over Evil
While evil exists, it's not outside of God's control. Kirk explains that God can overrule and redeem evil, though at times He allows it to happen. One of Kirk's favorite verses is Genesis 50:20, which declares that what the enemy meant for evil, God will use for good. This verse comes from Joseph's story, where his brothers' betrayal ultimately positioned him to save many lives during famine.
The Book of Job—which Kirk notes is actually the oldest book of the Bible, written even before Genesis—shows Satan as active in the world, yet God sets boundaries on what he can do. This demonstrates that while evil is very real, God bends it toward His perfect purposes. Evil operates within limits set by divine sovereignty.
The Cross: Christianity's Answer to Evil
Kirk's central argument is that the cross is God's answer to evil, and this is what makes Christianity uniquely compelling. Atheists have no answer to evil—they can't even adequately define it. Christians, by contrast, have a robust answer: God himself entered into human suffering, experienced the full weight of evil and injustice, and defeated it through resurrection.
Kirk doesn't discount the pain, mystery, and confusion that people experience when confronting evil. But he emphasizes that we're only able to articulate what is evil because we know what is good. We have a reference point, a standard, a plumb line by which to measure moral deviation.
Reframing the Question
The atheist dilemma, as Kirk sees it, is insurmountable. If we're nothing more than particles and chemicals that accidentally evolved over millions of years, morality becomes arbitrary. Any moral framework must come through revelation that transcends human reason.
Kirk suggests that the problem should be reframed entirely. The question shouldn't be "Why does evil exist?" but rather "What has God done about it?" And the answer to that question is the cross—God's ultimate response to the problem of evil, where justice and mercy meet, where sin is defeated, and where redemption becomes possible for all who believe.
