When Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, stood to eulogize Charlie Kirk in September 2025, he told a story that captures both a personal tragedy and a national crossroads. It’s a story about a 19-year-old activist who was already becoming famous, but who lacked something essential that would require suffering to obtain.
“What should I do?” Charlie asked after Dr. Arnn exposed gaps in his knowledge.
“You have to suffer,” came the response. “If you want to grow, you have to suffer. It’s hard to learn, into the night, crack of dawn in the morning. Start with the Bible. Read the classics. Study the founding of America. In those places, you will find that there’s a ladder that reaches up toward God.”
Dr. Arnn thought he’d never hear from Charlie again. But within a month, Charlie texted him a certificate of completion from a Hillsdale College online course. He would complete 30 more. (Hillsdale courses are free. They are created for every American who wishes to embark upon a life-changing education in the greatest ideas and texts of Western Civilization. The only requirements are a desire for truth and a love of liberty.)
This story haunts me. Not just because of Charlie’s tragic death at the hands of an assassin, but because it reveals the precise medicine America desperately needs: the willingness to suffer through classical education to rediscover the moral order that sustains free societies.
The Ladder That Reaches Toward God
Dr. Arnn told Charlie about “a ladder that reaches up toward God” found in the Bible, the classics, and America’s founding. At the bottom of this ladder are “the ordinary good things that are around us everywhere.” This is the architecture of classical Christian education. It teaches us to see the divine fingerprints on creation itself.
The Founders understood this. Their revolutionary insight was that our rights flow from both rational observation of nature and divine revelation. Thomas Jefferson called these truths “self-evident,” visible to anyone willing to look honestly at the nature of things. The same Creator who endowed us with “unalienable Rights” also wove into the fabric of creation an unchangeable moral order.
This is why the Parable of the Good Samaritan resonates so deeply with American principles. The Samaritan didn’t need religious instruction to recognize the wounded man’s humanity. It was written in the laws of nature and conscience. He was liberated from the prejudices of his day because he could see truly. This is what classical learning cultivates: freedom from ignorance, confusion, prejudice, and delusion.
Christian classical learning elevates this further by connecting such liberation to becoming lifelong disciples of Christ. Education isn’t just about filling minds; it’s about cultivating souls who recognize their place in God’s grand narrative and their calling to love their neighbors.
Fred Rogers and the Fixed Moral Order
Fred Rogers once said, “We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It’s easy to say, ‘It’s not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.’ Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes.”
His gentle invitation, “Won’t you be my neighbor?” wasn’t just a personal preference or social convention. It was an acknowledgment of a moral reality as fixed as gravity. When he saw each person as worthy of dignity and love, he recognized what Jefferson called “self-evident” truths about human nature and divine design.
The profound truth emerges: our calling to neighborly love isn’t merely a suggestion or cultural construct. It’s woven into the very fabric of creation by “nature’s God.” Just as we’re born into a physical world with unchanging natural laws, we’re born into a moral universe with fixed principles, including the duty to love our neighbor as ourselves.
This divine order illuminates why the pursuit of happiness through material acquisition or political power alone ultimately falls flat. It attempts to violate the natural moral law that ties human flourishing to loving service. True happiness, as our Founders understood, comes from living in harmony with both natural and moral law. The Good Samaritan found fulfillment not in pursuing his own interests, but in aligning himself with the moral order by showing mercy.
Why Classical Education Saves American Culture
America’s founding principles and culture rest on Judeo-Christian values. These aren’t arbitrary preferences imposed from above. They reflect the created order itself. But here’s the challenge: we’ve raised generations who don’t know how to read the classics, who haven’t wrestled with the Bible, who can’t articulate why human dignity matters or what “self-evident” truths actually mean.
Charlie Kirk’s story reveals both the problem and the solution. At 19, he lacked the deep formation that classical education provides. He recognized this deficit and chose to suffer, to do the hard work of reading, studying, thinking into the night, and at the crack of dawn.
This is the suffering America needs. Not the suffering of division and hatred, but the suffering of intellectual and spiritual formation.
Classical education:
- Teaches us to discern truth in an age of confusion and deception. When we study logic, rhetoric, and the great books, we develop minds that can cut through propaganda and see reality clearly.
- Forms hearts that choose goodness even when it’s costly. The study of virtue ethics and biblical wisdom shapes our character, not just our opinions.
- Cultivates spirits that create beauty in service to God and neighbor. When we encounter beauty in literature, music, and art, we learn to reflect God’s creative nature.
Without this formation, we’re left with activism untethered from wisdom. Or worse, we abandon the public square entirely, retreating into private spirituality while our culture collapses.
The Intersection Where I Stand
I am convicted to serve as a catalyst for America, a coach whose style sits at the intersection of Charlie Kirk and Mister Fred Rogers. This might seem like an impossible fusion: the bold, confrontational activism of Kirk with the gentle, contemplative neighborliness of Rogers. But I believe this intersection is exactly where America needs voices to emerge.
Charlie understood that ideas have consequences and that we must fight evil and proclaim truth in the public square to save Western Civilization. Fred Rogers understood that every person bears the divine image and deserves dignity, gentleness, and love. Both recognized something profound about human nature and our created purpose.
Classical education is the bridge between these two approaches. It trains us to think clearly about truth, to speak boldly when necessary, and to do so with a heart formed by recognizing the sacred dignity of every neighbor.
This vision animates my podcast, Neighborly Love. Each episode explores the integration of classical education with teaching what it means to be a neighbor. I feature stories about education’s sacred potential, not merely to inform minds but to form souls who recognize the divine image in every neighbor they encounter.
The Parable of the Good Samaritan demonstrates what Christian classical education seeks to cultivate: the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty for the glory of God and the flourishing of both individuals and neighbors. The Samaritan’s liberation echoes what classical learning empowers: freedom from societal prejudice that allows us to see others truly.
Neighborly love prioritizes likeness over differences and others over self so that humans can live in community as genuine neighbors. Perhaps this is the glory of God made manifest: in minds that discern truth, hearts that choose goodness, and spirits that create beauty in a world desperately in need of neighborly love.
A Call to Sacred Suffering
Dr. Arnn concluded his eulogy with these words: “A good thing is a thing that has being. An assassin is not a thing that has being. The assassin must give up his humanity to destroy something that has being. Charlie lives on. The assassin will die.”
Charlie chose to suffer through classical education. He climbed the ladder toward God. He completed 31 courses because he understood that to effectively serve America, he needed formation, not just information. His legacy calls us to the same sacred suffering.
This is my conviction and calling: to coach a generation willing to do the hard work of classical Christian education, who will speak truth boldly like Charlie Kirk while loving neighbors gently like Fred Rogers. The same Creator who endowed us with unalienable rights calls us to express those rights through sacrificial service to our neighbors.
The invitation to grow neighborly love thus becomes more than a personal choice. It’s a call to align ourselves with the very structure of reality as designed by “nature’s God.” In doing so, we find what both America’s Founders, Charlie Kirk, and Fred Rogers understood: true liberty and authentic happiness flow from living under the divine moral order.
Will you join in this sacred dance of liberty and love? Will you suffer through the discipline of classical learning? In this holy conjunction of rights and responsibilities, found through education that forms the whole person, we find our truest freedom and deepest joy and perhaps, the salvation of American culture itself.
Marc Casciani is the author of Craft Your Calling and host of the Neighborly Love podcast, where he explores the integration of classical education with teaching what it means to be a neighbor
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