(RNS) — Had I been born four decades later or he four decades earlier, I would have been Charlie Kirk’s target audience.

As a Christian and politically conservative graduate student at a liberal state university back then, I felt marginalized and silenced by most (not all) of my professors and my peers, including my officemate, who asked me to remove my pro-life signs from our office door, which was already festooned with her pro-LGBTQ material. My campus pro-life club received threats of violence, because of which the administration refused to grant permission to hold an event until we put up a hefty bond. (We sued and the university settled with us, allowing the event to go on.)

When we tried to hold debates on the abortion issue, no one would debate us — a strategic move, we later learned, to make sure that abortion was not debated and to effectively silence those of us who were opposed. We refused to be silenced. When then-U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno came to town to speak about youth violence, my friends and I spray-painted a sheet calling for free speech for pro-lifers, smuggled it into the room where Reno was talking and unfurled it in front of the stage, where it lay open for the few brief moments before Secret Service agents caught up with us and politely ushered us out of the room.

Those experiences turned me into a free speech radical. 

This is the same campus ethos that Charlie Kirk would step into decades later and challenge. He vigorously defended and modeled the principles of free speech, open debate and lively discussion, particularly on college campuses. That is, tragically, the very thing Kirk was doing yesterday when he was murdered by an assassin on the campus of Utah Valley University.

Freedom of speech is a form of life and governance, a way of living in a society that is not dependent upon the content — a how, not a what. Kirk employed his free speech unapologetically in the cause of the ongoing culture wars and just as unapologetically on behalf of the MAGA cause. Thus, I can disagree and disagree vehemently with many of Charlie Kirk’s views on church and state, on race relations, on vaccinations, election security, cash grabs and more, but strongly affirm his commitment to free speech and the open exchange of ideas and to modeling that commitment so consistently and so long. (I’m very glad he didn’t back off calling for transparency on the Epstein files.)

Free speech and the history of free speech advocacy led me to different ideas than those espoused by Kirk. I was also led to a different way of engaging the culture.

I was bolstered in my beliefs in my campus days by the likes of journalist and civil libertarian Nat Hentoff, whose 1992 book, “Free Speech for Me but Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other,” helped me know I wasn’t the only one seeing the inconsistencies from both corners of my world. Censorship is not a left problem or a right problem: It is a human problem. So, too, is the violence that circumvents not only our speech but our humanity as well.

This basic principle of free speech — and consequently of modern democracy — was famously articulated by John Milton in his 1644 pamphlet “Areopagitica.” Milton attempted to dissuade the censorship of his fellow Puritans in the English Parliament by arguing that our beliefs must be tested and tried by opposing views:

Well knows he who uses to consider, that our faith and knowledge thrives
by exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion. Truth is compared in
Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual
progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.

Milton wrote in an age in which political imprisonment and assassinations were common ways of resolving conflict.

We need not — must not — return to this barbaric past. For all he got wrong in my view, Kirk got right the power of free speech. It’s a power those who oppose his ideas have every right and freedom to tap into. The way to counter bad speech is with more speech. Rather than canceling, denouncing or placing on a watch list those with objectionable views, the positive vision of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), for example, advocates for free speech rather than against those whose speech is disagreeable.

One of the most powerful aspects of free speech is that there are so many ways to express it. You need not be on a campus lawn surrounded by thousands. You can write to your newspaper, go to your town meeting, preach behind your pulpit, talk to — and listen to — your neighbors. And if you really want to do more talking and listening to neighbors as a way of bridging divides and seeking healing from our divisions, you can look into the excellent work being done by Braver Angels, Living Room Conversations, the Center for Public Christianity, the Center for Christianity and Public Life, and Heterodox Academy. 

In this moment, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that our very lives may depend on our ability to regain our willingness to talk and listen to one another. Charlie Kirk’s certainly did.