When Ben Shapiro announced he was taking up Charlie Kirk’s campus tour tradition, I had a mixed reaction. On paper, Shapiro seemed the obvious heir. And I have nothing against Ben. I admire his extraordinary intellect. But his style has always been about winning the debate, not winning the person. Kirk’s was the reverse. And that difference matters.
Debate is a duel. Persuasion is a walk. One aims to defeat, the other to lead. A debater sees an opponent; a persuader sees a potential ally who just hasn’t come around yet. You can dominate a room through debate, but you can only change a mind through persuasion.
That’s why the college tour format is so delicate. When a skeptical student challenges a conservative speaker, they might actually be curious. But humiliate them in front of their peers, and curiosity turns to resentment. The audience may cheer, the clip may go viral, but no one leaves converted. Kirk understood this instinctively. Shapiro, by contrast, turns every encounter into a sparring match, and sparring matches rarely end in friendship.
There’s a YouTube clip of Shapiro dismantling a student over the minimum wage. He argues (unpersuasively), that if you don’t want government interference in who you can marry, why want government interference in what you can pay? It’s quick, witty, seems to expose some inconsistency, and completely ineffective. Most people don’t care whether their positions are perfectly consistent, especially when comparing two completely unrelated things. They care whether you understand why they care.
Persuasion doesn’t mean surrendering logic, it means using logic to serve empathy. It says: “You care about low-wage workers, and so do I. But if someone can only produce $14 of value, a $15 minimum wage locks them out of work. Let’s help them without hurting them.” The first approach wins applause. The second wins converts.
The difference is not cosmetic. Debate wins arguments; persuasion wins people. Debate produces clips; persuasion produces change. And to understand why Shapiro and Kirk diverge so completely in method, you have to understand their formation.
Shapiro came through Harvard Law, a world built on combat. He trained, via the Socratic method of perpetual questioning, for debate, for precision argument, for mental fencing. But though he studied law, he never practiced as a litigator, and the courtroom is where debate graduates into persuasion. There, you learn quickly that the jury doesn’t care how clever you are; they care whether they trust you. The best lawyers don’t make jurors feel outsmarted, they make them feel seen. True persuasion feels less like conversion than recognition.
In fact, when you really understand what’s going on in a courtroom, you see that the truly great attorneys are those who convince jurors and judges that what the attorney is saying is what they were thinking all along. Persuasion, at its highest form, feels less like an imposition than a recognition.
Kirk came from outside the academic. No Ivy League credentials (or even college degree), no legal pedigree, just instinct and curiosity. His success came not from lecturing to people but from listening to them. He didn’t speak above students, he spoke with them. And that difference, between talking at and talking with, made all the difference in the world.
But I suggest there’s a deeper explanation, one that goes beyond personality or profession. It goes to faith. Here we tread carefully, because religion is the most dangerous topic of all, but it’s also unavoidable if you want to understand these two men.
Ben Shapiro is formed by the Orthodox Jewish tradition, where debate is sacred. The Talmud itself is a tapestry of argument: rabbis questioning, challenging, refining one another’s interpretations. Disagreement isn’t failure; it’s faithfulness. In yeshiva study, students pair off (in chevruta) and argue passionately, often for hours, because “through debate, the truth emerges.” It’s a magnificent system for sharpening minds. But it doesn’t teach you to win hearts.
Charlie Kirk, by contrast, is an evangelical Christian. The word evangelical literally means “to bring good news.” The goal isn’t to outwit, but to invite. Jesus debated the scholars, yes, but with the crowds, he told stories—parables. Lessons that met people where they were and led them somewhere higher. He didn’t corner them with syllogisms; he captured them with meaning.
That difference in formation—one culture of debate, the other of invitation—explains almost everything. Shapiro argues to clarify truth; Kirk speaks to share it. One seeks victory, the other seeks unity. Shapiro is a polemicist; Kirk was an evangelist. Neither is necessarily wrong, but one wins applause and the other wins souls.
Let us be clear: I argue here not that Christianity is superior to Judaism, or that Christians are superior to Jews. I am myself an evangelical Christian, and aggressively pro-Semitic. Christ and all his disciples were themselves Jewish, and the Christian Old Testament is the Jewish Torah. That some revolting people have used the Christian faith as a pretext for anti-Semitism is the worst sort of sin. This essay should not be read as a denigration of Judaism or Jewish people, whose contributions to Western thought and civilization are incalculable. Judaism gave us the intellectual rigor that built the West; Christianity gave us the missionary impulse that spread it. Both are indispensable.
But the traditions form different instincts. Kirk’s faith trains him to connect. Shapiro’s trains him to contend. Both have served conservatism—but if our movement is to grow, it will take more than intellect. It will take persuasion: the slow, patient work of walking with people until they see the truth for themselves.
Debate may win the night. But persuasion wins the future.
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