What Charlie Kirk Actually Was
There’s something a bit off about the way the media headlines are reporting on the assassination of Charlie Kirk. They are calling him a “conservative activist” (CNN), a “right-wing activist” (BBC), an “influential figure on the right” (WSJ), a “conservative influencer” (NYT), and a “fearless patriot” (Fox).
It feels to me like they are all dancing around the thing that preceded and grounded all of Kirk’s beliefs.
He was a Christian.
He was a Jesus-follower, a believer, a man of faith. This is not determined or affected by the positions he took on various social and political issues. It was determined by the position he took on the nature of Jesus of Nazareth. Charlie unambiguously called Jesus Lord and Savior.
He was a Christian.
Pretending his faith was irrelevant to his moral viewpoints is like pretending the sun is irrelevant to daylight. Given that it appears that the murderer’s motive was objection to Kirk’s moral views, this was not merely a political act; it was the religious persecution of a Christian who outspokenly preached the message of the gospel. As such, when he was killed for his beliefs, he became a martyr. He is a martyr who died on American soil in a public and grisly way.
So I don’t want us also dancing around two consequences, the way we’re dancing around who he was.
A Consequence For Christians
First, the martyrdom of a Christian on American soil is de facto an attack on all Christians. We are one body. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it (1st Cor. 12:26). We can no longer charge Christians with paranoia when they talk about being persecuted for their faith in America.
Christians around the world suffer persecution to an extent that most Americans do not imagine. Estimates from the UK Parliament suggest that 1 in every 7 Christians in the world endures some kind of persecution, defining persecution as hostility directed at the target because of their identification with Jesus Christ. The Pew Research Center reports that Christians experience harassment in nearly 75% of countries worldwide. In some countries, they are murdered for their faith or face discrimination that is legally protected.
In America, Christians have enjoyed the status of a majority – influencing laws, education, and culture. Anxiety about persecution among well-to-do, comfortable Christians has largely seemed laughable. Harassment has typically been little more than social bristling.
But now that is not the case. A scale tipped. This is not mockery from the stage or condescension from the university lectern, which Christians have endured for decades. This is murder for faith.
Christians should be aware that we stand on new ground. We are not relieved of Jesus’ command to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, to repay evil with good and bless rather than curse. We are to double down on these things. We also can’t be naive about where we are. More clearly than ever, this is not the Promised Land. This is Babylon. Practice the faith so as to keep it alive in a foreign land.
A Consequence for America
Secondly, there are spiritual consequences for the making of martyrs. It is the cry of the saints that brought down God’s wrath on Pharaoh in the book of Exodus, on Haman in the book of Esther, on Saul when he went after David, on David when he murdered Uriah, on the ruling class when they oppressed the poor, and on Rome when they began martyring Christians.
“The martyrs’ blood is the seed of the church,” said the 2nd century church leader, Tertullian. He knew; he had witnessed the martyrdoms in Carthage. He’s not being poetic when he says this. He’s talking about a spiritual reality that when blood is shed, it calls out from the ground to God, and God gets angry. And God responds.
Secularism in America has taken an evil turn. It is no longer merely the intellectual skepticism of well-mannered agnostics. It has a wing that is seething with hatred and callous towards goodness and towards life.
So let’s be clear. Faith matters when you choose how to conduct your daily life. Faith matters to what you do behind closed doors. Faith matters when you choose who to vote for and when you choose who to date. Faith matters when you decide what to do with your money. It matters to how you form your moral commitments and to what you tell your friends. People of faith can live with deep peace, but we cannot relax. Faith needs to matter in everything we do in Babylon.
Faith must shape our identity, our families, our calling, and our citizenship. Let the people of faith stand up and be counted, unashamed and unafraid, doing everything in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Hardwired 
In this climate of extremes, many are conflating Charlie Kirk with those around him, accusing him of beliefs he never held and commands he never gave. I agree that many are setting aside Charlie Kirk’s faith to focus only on his politics. However, you seem to be doing the opposite – setting aside his politics to focus only on his faith. To Charlie Kirk, these things were deeply entwined, so setting either one aside seems like a denial of what he stood for.
I’ve spoken with a number of people who credit Charlie Kirk’s activism with bringing them to the faith. He both said and did many good things in God’s name, and his early political actions lent a voice to many who felt suppressed in their environments – including at my own college. There, a mob who marched onto the freeway and was struck by traffic was openly praised by the administration for practicing their free speech. Meanwhile posters for the opposing side were torn down, their speakers cancelled, their sidewalk chalk washed away and condemned as vandalism. Charlie Kirk fought against that kind of thing, and many were grateful.
At the same time, we cannot disconnect Charlie Kirk from those more controversial beliefs he not only held, but widely-disseminated. Nor can we overlook his calls to action that seem to go against his Christian ideals. You rail against a culture of blame, yet Charlie Kirk was no stranger to blame. He blamed repression of speech on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for which he blamed Martin Luther King Jr., who he said “was awful. He’s not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn’t believe.” (Wired, Snopes) And of course, he blamed a great many things on the political left, with such statements as “The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white. They love it when America gets overwhelmed, and we keep on saying this.” (The Charlie Kirk Show, Guardian) Where Jesus called the Roman-employed tax collector and the Jewish zealot alike, Kirk frequently sought to drive away people with different beliefs and different backgrounds, both out of the country and out of positions of authority. In criticizing affirmative action, for example, he said of former first lady Michelle Obama, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, US Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, and fellow political commentator Joy Reid, “You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.” (TCKS, Guardian) And while supporting Israel even in its conquest of Palestine, a nation he denied even existed (public debate, video widely circulated), he was eager to lay all of these things at the feet of Jewish people, saying “Jewish donors have been the No. 1 funding mechanism of radical open-border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions and nonprofits. This is a beast created by secular Jews and now they’re coming for Jews, and they’re like, ‘What on Earth happened?’ And it’s not just the colleges. It’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.” (NYT, USA Today). Blame, hatred, and division were all a critical part of the belief system of Charlie Kirk.
This of course only covers the ideas he believed and taught, no actual harm he inflicted. Of course, the argument can be made that hateful and divisive language like this leads to hate crimes, but we can’t take that stand without discarding free speech – which, like Charlie Kirk, I believe is essential to a just society. However, what I can’t call free speech is blatant deception and disinformation, especially that which causes harm. We could talk about his major role in election denial and its divisive and violent impacts, but I refer more to his speech about vaccines, COVID-19, and climate change. On critical matters of public health, where Christians ought to have been the first to set aside personal interest for the sake of others, Charlie Kirk was advocating for personal liberty as a higher principle. Sending out messages and speakers telling people to refuse the vaccines (Washington Post), setting up “watchlists” for schools that required vaccines and masks (NPR, US News), repeatedly claiming that the vaccine’s rapid development was because of cutting corners on safety and regulations, despite the ample documentation to the contrary (TCKS, Science Feedback), and saying that it “might be true” that 1.2 million people had died due to the COVID vaccine, most charitably based on a bad understanding of statistics (TCKS, Yahoo, NYT), as well as hosting and supporting those who made even bolder claims about athletes dropping dead in the field (NYT). More than 1 million died of COVID-19 in the United States, more than any other country (Johns Hopkins), and while we obviously cannot say how many of those had any connection at all to Charlie Kirk, he was clearly and openly a central figure in the movement to oppose measures against the spread of COVID-19. The deaths that many lay at his feet for this include not just those who chose to believe him, but their children who were prevented from receiving care, and others who could not be vaccinated who were infected as a result.
And of course, if there’s anything we can hold somebody accountable for, it is their actual actions. Charlie Kirk once tweeted that we was sending “80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president” (NYT, archived tweet), though the actual number he ended up sending was 7 buses containing 350 people (NYT, Reuters). Those buses of course arriving to a rally on January 6th, which would transition into a riot where nine people would die, and many members of government would have close brushes with danger and death. “This historic event will likely be one of the largest and most consequential in American history”, he said of a rally for the outgoing president while the votes were being counted nearby.
Charlie Kirk was not killed for his faith. He was killed for his politics. Did he believe those were rooted in his faith? Absolutely, I have no reason to believe otherwise. But I would ask you to say with a straight face that all of the beliefs above align with your own faith, the faith in Jesus Christ you preach every week.
You now discuss consequences for Christians in America, and I agree that there will be consequences. Because Charlie Kirk said and did all these things in Christ’s name, he became a major reason for the conflation of radical right-wing politics with Christian, the crisis of the “Christian nationalist”. Long have the opponents of the faith tried to paint it as hateful, as oppressive, as unscientific, as selfish, as a force of evil. Some of Charlie Kirk’s beliefs, and the actions his supporters have taken as a result, have proven this in the eyes of many Americans, and others around the world. Christian persecution has indeed arrived on the shores of our safe haven, but that does not begin with Charlie Kirk’s death. The name of his organization his fitting, as he has been a primary contributor to bringing about this Turning Point.
None of this is to say that Charlie Kirk should have been assassinated. Violence begets violence, it isn’t a tool of discourse. But when you call this man a martyr, when you analogize him to the saints, that seems to be an affirmation of all his beliefs and statements. Not just an affirmation that these beliefs match your own, but that they are Christian. To call him a martyr, to say that all these ideas flow from a faith we share with him, is to fly in the face of the faith I’ve spent the last fifteen years learning. From you.
Wow, where to begin? I don’t believe that Charlie Kirk was shot because of his faith. I think that maybe he and many others who have been shot at schools and churches were killed because there are too many damned guns in our country that can be easily acquired by unstable and dangerous individuals. I do agree with you that Christianity is under attack. However I am less concerned about secularist than I am evangelical Christians who claim to follow Jesus but instead follow and worship a man whose actions and words are the opposite of what Jesus taught.
Thanks for your comments, Randall. I don’t see how Kirk’s words and actions were the opposite of what Jesus taught. I don’t think that accusation holds up looking at the span of things that he has said.
I think there is a difference between a mentally ill person who decides to kill people to do evil, and someone who strategically plots assassination on ideological grounds.
Nonetheless, thanks for your thoughts.