Sep 27, 2025 By Dave Ball 5 min read

When Charlie Kirk was assassinated, one commentator bluntly noted: this was not a political killing. It was an attack by the forces of evil against a man they feared.

That observation raises a disturbing question. Why did evil see Kirk as more dangerous than the institutional church?

This is not new. Evil rarely fears polite institutions. It directs its fury against individuals who refuse to be silent.

John the Baptist was beheaded for calling out sin in power. Stephen was stoned for speaking truth to religious elites. Polycarp was burned for his refusal to swear allegiance to Caesar. Tyndale was strangled because his work translating the Bible to English threatened the Roman Catholic monopoly. Bonhoeffer was hanged for resisting the Nazis. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot for challenging social injustice.

Meanwhile, institutions often prefer caution. Bureaucracies seek stability. Committees focus on consensus. Leaders soften commentary to keep members comfortable. Evil, sensing little danger, looks elsewhere for real threats.

The pattern is clear: institutions hesitate. Prophets confront. And it is the prophets that evil fears.

Why is the church of our day so cautious, so fearful to confront or engage?

Many fear offending, mistaking politeness for holiness.

Others fear losing members, or contributions, by preaching uncomfortable truth.

Sermons are often softened into feel-good pep talks; worship into entertainment.

Pastors lose the fire to name sin or clearly expose Satan’s schemes.

Members, more shaped by Netflix and TikTok than by Scripture, no longer recognize evil when they see it.

Even when the church does see evil, it hesitates. It worries about being “judgmental.” It fears lawsuits, social media backlash, or the exodus of those who don’t want to be told they must repent. Love gets redefined as silence, and obedience is replaced with convenience.

The result is a cautious, conflict-averse institution. It entertains rather than convicts. It soothes rather than warns. It avoids rather than confronts.

Evil sees this and responds accordingly. The church can be ignored.

History shows what happens when the church is silent: darkness advances. History also shows what happens when the silence is broken: Times of spiritual decline have again and again given way to awakenings, sparked by the convicted and courageous, who spoke with boldness when institutions would not. Examples include:

The First Great Awakening (1730s-1940s): Churches were lifeless. Then Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield preached sin, repentance and new birth. Tens of thousands were awakened. Colleges were founded. American culture was reshaped.

The Second Great Awakening (1790s-1840s): Faith on the frontier was crumbling. Charles Finney and his camp meetings called people to repentance and holiness. The result: explosive church growth and many social reform movements including abolitionist groups and new missionary societies.

The Welsh Revival (1904-05): Churches were cold, drunkenness and crime ruled the day. Evan Roberts and a movement of prayer lit the nation on fire. More than 100,000 came to faith in months. Bars closed. Crime plummeted.

Azusa Street (1906): A humble preacher, William Seymour, prayed in a rundown building. Prayer meetings sparked a global Pentecostal movement.

The pattern is always the same: lethargy and decline, then bold preaching of repentance, then transformation. Revivals start when someone dares to speak what the comfortable church will not.

This brings us back to Charlie Kirk.

Against the backdrop of lethargy and decline, Kirk’s role becomes clearer. Agree or disagree with his politics, he was outspoken in ways the church consistently avoids. He named cultural lies. He challenged destructive ideologies. He said plainly what many leaders only whisper.

That made him a target.

Evil does not fear politeness. It fears clarity. It fears courage. It fears conviction. And Kirk’s voice carried enough of those qualities to attract hostility that the church, in its caution, has largely avoided.

There is tragedy in that. Not only because a man was killed, but because he bore the prophetic burden the whole church should have shared.

The real question is not only, “Why did evil target Kirk?” The deeper question is, “Why did evil not fear the church?”

The answer is sobering: the church has often traded confrontation for comfort, boldness for niceness, truth for accommodation. But history shows that silence does not last forever. Revivals have come before. They can come again.

Charlie Kirk’s death is more than a tragedy – it is a test. Evil feared his courage because courage confronts. Evil ignored the church because silence accommodates. The choice before us is stark: will we keep playing it safe, or will we bear the cost of truth?

History tells us that revival never begins with comfort. It begins with fire. If the church is to matter again, it must stop whispering and start declaring. Evil is not waiting for another Charlie Kirk. It is waiting to see if the church still believes its own gospel.

Dave Ball is the former chairman of the Washington County Republican Party.