Charlie Kirk was Our “Frodo”
This has appeared in the October 9, 2025, issue of The Sounder.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was the most popular story written during the 20th Century. Peter Jackson’s masterful video recreations have propelled it into the 21st Century. The story lasts because it is more than just an inventive fantasy.
It is the story of supernatural evil in the form of Sauron, the power-mad ruler of Mordor, who has built an army of a savage, humanoid Orcs, designed to obliterate all that is good in the middle earth: its green forests, its immortal elves, its noble kings and warriors with their traditions of courtly love and sacrificial courage, and its cheerful little hobbits who just want to be left alone in their shire to enjoy neighborly festivals, second breakfasts, and birthday parties with their children.
The unlikely hero is a hobbit, Frodo, who must find a way into the heart of Mordor to destroy the power of Sauron by throwing the key to evil, the Ring of Power, into the Crack of Doom.
Written at a time when England, a small nation of shopkeepers living in peaceful shires, was preparing to stand against Hitler’s mighty military machine, the allusion is obvious. But it is a story true for every age.
Today, many of our own universities, once dedicated to preserving the wisdom of people like J.R.R. Tolkien, now preach the old Marxist gospel of oppression in the name of the oppressed. Having reduced life to little more than an endless struggle to control the Ring of Power, they serve as boot camps for orc armies to the tune of, “Ho, ho, Western civ has got to go.”
Whenever Charlie Kirk would pitch his small tent in the middle of a large university quad, we would see our Frodo entering the heart of Mordor to introduce “the lost young men of the West” to the values of the Shire—its joys of marriage, family, community, and hard work in the green earth. Whenever he urged them to find a church to explore a world that lasts beyond today, he was dropping that old addictive Ring of Power into the Crack of Doom.
Historians tell us that eleven of Jesus’s twelve intrepid disciples were martyred for their message of temporal and eternal freedom. That story was no dead fantasy. It is a living epic that lasts beyond time.