By Beth Cavete, Op-ed contributor Wednesday, September 24, 2025Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow, speaks during the public memorial service for Christian activist Charlie Kirk at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, on Sept. 21, 2025. | PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty ImagesTwo days after his death, on September 12th, Charlie’s wife Erika stood alone behind his broadcasting chair, whispered a prayer, and addressed the whole world. She only spoke for a little over 10 minutes, but it was dynamic. After a decade of cultural girl-powerbrokers like Barbie, JLo, Megan Rapinoe, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, this grieving widow would obliterate lies and stereotypes with an entirely different vision of female power: a woman aflame with faithful love.Charlie’s target audience was the youth, and he was reaching them. Statistics show that conservatism, including valuing children and family, is steadily on the rise among young men. But those same studies show an inverse relationship with young unmarried women, who are leaning decidedly left. Conservative victories are shadowed by the most essential human dilemma: without young women, you’re facing extinction. Even Charlie’s winsome reason has not changed the trend. Unfortunately, studies also show heightening anxiety, isolation, and depression for these young women, despite record achievements. They are in turmoil. Charlie welcomed students to bring their turmoil to the microphone for debate. When I was young enough to be Charlie’s target audience, had he come to my college, he would have found me already conservative and devout, not disagreeing with him on most core issues. But underneath my convictions, the turmoil was there. If I had stood across from him and asked my burning question it would have been something like, “So our culture is in the grip of a fight to the death over truth and lies. What’s my place in that, as a woman?”Similar questions have been asked, and Charlie had an answer to give. It sounded something like this: young women should marry, have babies, and then homeschool them. Conservatives applauded him for having the boldness to tell it straight, but the downside is in the data. This message, accurate or not, is not appealing to this generation of young women like it is to men. From where I sit now as a mother of four mostly grown children, having done all those things, it is clear Charlie was right. The future of humanity depends on young women bearing the next generation. But if my college-age self were sitting in the audience, I can tell you without a doubt he would have lost me.I am not blaming Charlie. He could have written sonnets about the beauty of motherhood, but it wouldn’t have mattered. To me it would have sounded like he was saying the life I longed for — an impactful, broad, intellectual and purposeful life — was for men, not for me. I would have felt crushed and dismissed. For all his insight and intentions, he would not have reached me.But Erika would have.If a picture is worth a thousand words, the woman who has emerged from Charlie’s side is a treatise on a life of significance. She demonstrates fundamentals of love and creation that cannot be simply distilled into bullet points in a sermon on women’s roles. A force in her own rite, before marrying Charlie she was a college athlete, wore a crown as Miss Arizona, earned a Juris Master, and ran her own businesses. Though she has publicly embraced the calling to submit to her husband and support him, no one who saw this young widow’s speech on September 12th could confuse her for some subjugated second-tier, identity-less prop. On the contrary, her image was seared into the public consciousness with a visual impact. It was an Esther moment: palpable power, undeniable appointment, influence that cannot be bought came in the voice of a woman who had laid down her rights to all of that for the sake of love.Erika’s persuasion went far beyond the content of her speech. She beat the devil in debate by telling the whole world with a broken voice how Charlie loved her. We could all see the truth for ourselves. Of course, in God’s design, marriage is not man and his helper, but two becoming one. Of course, being cherished as your husband’s unrivaled prize results in utter flourishing of beauty and dignity. Of course, honoring and serving your beloved husband with all your heart produces determined, enthralling purpose. Of course, motherhood transforms affable young ladies into fierce and wise warriors. Of course, a woman aflame with love becomes the greatest version of herself, for “the greatest of all is love” (1Cor 13:13). And of course, all the world’s insistence otherwise, all that turmoil I felt as a young woman torn between the call to the home and the longing for significance, is borne out of lies. No need for debate. Erika made it obvious.We know that the gap between young men and women is growing perilously. Elon Musk has made falling birthrates a matter of conversation, and data scientists are filling in that bleak picture with evidence of a vast ideological chasm between the sexes. More than ever, young women are on the defense, divorced from the notion of wifehood, mothering, and femininity before they ever marry. Conservatives blame feminism for the abandonment of children and the home, while feminists blame male domination and failure. But setting aside the blame game, what is obvious is that what young women lack to embrace these ideals is not ideology, but trust. While not true of Charlie, many men on the right are fueling this by taking up a strident tone of enforcement with women. All over the internet, red-pilled Andrew Tate imitators freely throw around their imagined authority over females. Verbal abuse is rampant. Men who try to stand up for women are mocked in the foulest terms.The false hopes of feminism are written into the lines and lyrics of the scripts and soundtracks that shape young women’s worldviews, who too often spurn their own sacred sexuality in a lawless economy of transactional sex. Women who counter these norms are reduced to the trope of a “tradwife.” Add the devastating impact of pornography and rampant fatherlessness, and it is no wonder a generation of women see little reason to trust men, much less their notions of their God-ordained role.The Bible tells us that without vision, the people perish (Prov 29:18), and today’s young women are certainly perishing.Perhaps that’s why, though not one of the Old Testament’s 613 laws command young women to marry and have children, no Judeo-Christian culture in history has ever struggled with birthrates. Perhaps that’s why, instead of a law, we’re given the Song of Solomon, sublime poetry dedicated to the incomparable, singular love between a man and a woman. Perhaps that’s why the Bride and the Wedding Feast are pinnacles of celebratory extravagance in Scripture, because in God’s design, being prized and beloved should be the primary expectation to shape a girl’s aspirations. Perhaps that is why spectacular beauty was given to Eve and her daughters to perpetuate the human race, rather than reproductive quotas. Perhaps that’s why porn performers silently listened to Charlie Kirk talk about adoring his little daughter. Men in suit jackets have rightly said that God is love, and His design is good. But jaded young women need a witness, and vision, and that’s why Erika Kirk and women like her will reach them.Beth Cavete studied Philosophy and History at Wheaton College before marrying her husband in 2003. They traveled extensively doing ministry of all sorts together, including writing on the beauty of Christian marriage and discipling the church’s children. After witnessing abuse, error and wreckage, in 2013, she began writing as ‘Beth Cavete’ about detangling deception by contending for the true Gospel. She currently lives with her family in Colorado, where they run a business so they can send their four kids to college and spoil an Australian Shepherd.
Erika Kirk shows us how to reach young women
