I spent a week in Provo, Utah, this summer attending the preliminary hearing of Tyler Robinson, the man accused of killing the 31-year-old conservative youth activist Charlie Kirk a year ago Thursday. I was struck to learn that many of the people who had camped outside the courthouse in hopes of grabbing a seat inside had known almost nothing about Mr. Kirk before he died. Since his death, however, they have come to regard him in intensely personal terms.

They see him as a spiritual leader, a political martyr, an erstwhile son — someone they did not know they had until he was taken away. They and others can now see his image on billboards, on posters affixed to the office walls of Republican members of Congress and in televised political campaign ads. His conservative youth organization, Turning Point USA, continues to disseminate content of its fallen leader, and to stream “The Charlie Kirk Show” daily in his absence.

Many who did know Mr. Kirk have also come to view him in larger-than-life terms. They have often expressed to me that things started coming unglued in the fractious conservative movement after his death. For them, “Charlie would have prevented all this from happening” is axiomatic.

Their sentiment is understandable. Mr. Kirk was widely seen in the political world as a generational talent. Even the macabre dissections of his death from an assassin’s bullet on a Utah college campus amount to a recognition of his reach, the extent of which was perhaps not fully appreciated while he was alive.