Imagine…True Religion
Hugh Hewitt > Blog
Friday, September 12, 2025
I can’t shake the funk. I mean I know from assassination. I have been alive for JFK…1968 (MLK and RFK)…the nearly successful attempt on Ronald Reagan…most recently Trump. Not to mention a handful of less spectacular attempts on others. I hope and pray my generation is the only one to see this much assassination. But Charlie Kirk is different.
Jim Geraghty put his finger on some of the difference yesterday:
Horrific as it is, we’re almost used to people trying to kill a president or other elected official…Charlie Kirk . . . was just a young American, a married father of two small children, who went onto college campus and gave speeches and debated and stood up for his beliefs. He held no office. He had no government power. He controlled no policy. He was just some guy who wasn’t afraid to get up on a stage and say, “This is what I believe.”
Technically MLK held no office either, but his assassination seemed circular with Lincoln’s – it really was the Civil War extended. Kirk’s is purely ideological.
That, in a sense, makes it a shot in a religious war. For decades now, John Lennon’s “Imagine” has been an anthem for liberals. In it, Lennon imagines a world totally at peace:
Imagine there’s no countriesIt isn’t hard to doNothing to kill or die forAnd no religion, too
And while that song did not begin the liberal war on religion – it certainly put it to music and made an earworm out of it.
Many times in these spaces I have quoted G.K. Chesterton:
“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
And so, Lennon proves Chesterton. Absent God, liberal ideology has become a religion worth fighting a war over – worth killing and dying for.
But I keep thinking about how Jesus went out of His way to avoid war. His followers wanted Him to lead a rebellion against Rome – he chose instead to let Rome crucify Him. He healed one of the soldiers that arrested Him. He called His followers to humility. This is what makes Christianity unique among religions. This is what establishes Christianity as true religion and reveals the falsehood of all others, especially the religion of liberal ideology.
We need religion, but we need true religion. We need Christianity.
