Charlie Kirk, Martyrdom, and America’s Authoritarian Apostles

I want to begin by once again condemning the murder of Charlie Kirk and extending my sorrow to his widow and children. I also want to express revulsion at the celebrations of his death and the suggestions that it was, in any way, justified. 

But Kirk’s killing now stands to become memorialized as a sacred event on the MAGA right, one that pushes the country further toward the abyss. The rhetoric around Kirk’s legacy has been explicitly religious, flavored with talk of blood sacrifice and divine vengeance. Kirk himself has been elevated to almost Christ-like stature. 

Despite the obvious tensions between fascism and Christian virtues, the entanglement of fascist politics and Christian imagery is not new. It is dangerously powerful, especially in the contemporary context of an American Christianity in the grips of a right-wing identity crisis. I want to elaborate on the way MAGA has portrayed Kirk since his assassination and connect it to the warped, spiritually dessicated version of Christianity that undergirds Trumpism today. I hope to highlight how degraded our moral situation has become. 

The passion of Charlie Kirk

I have seen more than a few allusions to Horst Wessel in the days since Kirk’s killing. Wessel, a young Nazi and member of the SA, was murdered by members of the Communist Party of Germany in 1930. His death became a rallying point for Nazi Party, and they adopted a march for which he’d written lyrics as the party anthem. 

The references are apt. Kirk is being valorized in service of a fascist project. But I want to turn in particular to the way historian Tom Holland examines Wessel’s martyrdom, in which he stresses the explicit Christ allegory, as an especially helpful point of comparison. 

As Holland observes in his book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, Nazi leaders were quick to grasp the utility of Wessel’s death and to wield it to great effect. He writes how Josef Goebbels understood the Christian power in making Wessel a martyr, even as the Nazis despised much of what Christianity stood for. Goebbels went so far as to proclaim at Wessel’s funeral service that he would rise once again. Holland writes: 

A shudder ran through the crowd, “As if God,” one of the mourners later recalled, “had made a decision and sent his holy breath upon the open grave and the flags, blessing the dead man and all who belonged to him.” One month later, Goebbels explicitly compared Wessel to Christ.

Since his killing, right-wing rhetoric around Kirk has become increasingly religious. In one hearing, Representative Troy Nehls of Texas declared “I would say if Charlie Kirk lived in Biblical times, he’d have been the 13th disciple.” 

Other comparisons have gone even further, likening Kirk not only to Christ’s disciples but to Christ himself. 

At Kirk’s memorial and in the days since his death, a key theme has been that Kirk was hated because he was a messenger of unflinching virtue—a framing that echoes the messianic and rabbinical roles of Christ in the Bible. 

Kirk’s own pastor, Rob McCoy, said on Fox News that Kirk himself never preached hate but rather that his critics “just hated his speech.” In Instagram, Isaiah Salvidae declared “Charlie Kirk got killed because he was preaching the Gospel.”

The memorial itself was overflowing with Christ metaphors. 

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. intoned “Christ died at 33 years old, but he changed the trajectory of history. Charlie died at 31 years old. But also now has changed the trajectory of history.”

President Trump remarked that “He’s bigger now than ever before, and he's eternal.”

But, perhaps most unnervingly, it was Stephen Miller who proclaimed:

The light will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened. They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us. Because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble. And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us. What do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing.

You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing.

You can create nothing.

Miller’s words drip with his own fascist salivation. It’s here that the Horst Wessel comparisons become most apt and feel most proximate. Miller is the architect of Trump’s immigration regime, and he is one of the key brains behind MAGA as a political force. It’s in his speech that I see the darkest potential legacy of Kirk’s death. Miller is not a subtle propagandist, but he is an opportunist. And he has rarely seen an opportunity like this. 

Blessed are the meek?

Kirk’s widow, Erika, offered words of forgiveness in her speech on Sunday. That is to her immense credit. 

But many of the calls from the right have been focused on retribution. And they have been in keeping with the long-standing trend in MAGA circles of emphasizing the virtues of strength and dominance over wet, liberal ideals of meekness, peacefulness, and understanding. 

Chaya Raichik, the woman behind Libs of TikTok, declared: “THIS IS WAR.”

Former acting U.S. Attorney for D.C., Ed Martin, posted to X, “For it is written. ‘Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,’ says the Lord.”

As President Trump expressed at Kirk’s memorial, “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want what’s best for them.”

If Christianity and its imagery offer useful tools for MAGA politics, as outlined above, they also ought to present complications. After all, this is a religion that extols the meek, the poor, and the peacemakers. Christ insists that the measure of faithfulness is what is done for the least among us and commands his followers to turn the other cheek. These are hardly virtues commensurate with the Trumpian fixation on domination, strength, and spite. 

Yet the American right and, indeed, American evangelicals have spent decades given over to Nietzschean cults of power worship, masculinity, and narcissism. It’s a theme captured in works like Kristen Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne. She writes that Donald Trump’s arrival offered a natural progression for American evangelicals:

Evangelicals hadn't betrayed their values. Donald Trump was the culmination of their half-century-long pursuit of a militant Christian masculinity. He was the reincarnation of John Wayne, sitting tall in the saddle, a man who wasn't afraid to resort to violence to bring order, who protected those deemed worthy of protection, who wouldn't let political correctness get in the way of saying what had to be said or the norms of democratic society keep him from doing what needed to be done.

Unencumbered by traditional Christian virtue, he was a warrior in the tradition (if not the actual physical form) of Mel Gibson's William Wallace. He was a hero for God-and-country Christians in the line of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Oliver North, one suited for Duck Dynasty Americans and American Christians. He was the latest and greatest high priest of the evangelical cult of masculinity.

These fetishizations apply to the MAGA right more generally and find increasingly toxic expression online. Influencers extol violence, abuse, and contempt for the weak across platforms like YouTube and Instagram. As Marc Ramirez recently reported for USA Today, right-wing Christian ideas about traditional gender roles are a natural complement to the misogynistic subcultures of the manosphere. 

But it isn’t only men’s perspectives being pedaled. Right-wing evangelical thought leader Allie Beth Stuckey is among the influencers warning her fellow travelers to be wary of having too much empathy, authoring her own book on the topic, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. To quote one passage: “When they call you hateful, bigoted, racist, or any other epithet, it usually means they don't know why they believe what they believe, so their insecurity manifests itself in anger.”

Stuckey paints Democrats as manipulators convincing soft-hearted Christians to tolerate sinful lifestyles and accept generous welfare policies that ought to be rejected on rational and Biblical grounds. Elsewhere, Stuckey has hosted episodes of her podcast attacking the Indian Child Welfare Act and assaulting “wokeness” in child protective services alongside right-wing policy analyst Naomi Schaefer Riley. All of it amounts to a sense that compassion is a weakness that can be exploited and that any emotion that might give way to a liberal policy preference is suspect. 

As expert Bradley Onishi elaborated this week on his podcast, Straight White American Jesus, many of MAGA’s Christian nationalists “want a woman who forgives the man that murdered her husband and a president who’s going to hate him enough to execute him…They want a Christianity based on strife and conflict.”

For his part, Kirk called the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights act a “huge mistake,” labeled Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and Michelle Obama “affirmative action picks,” dismissed MLK as “a bad guy,” and branded George Floyd a “scumbag.” 

In doing so, these evangelicals and others like them have led a growing chorus of MAGA-aligned Christians arguing in contravention of the very core tenets of their faith. I don’t hesitate to call such arguments fundamentally anti-Christ in their formulation. And it’s a set of attachments that empowered the first generation of fascists in Europe during their rise. 

Nietzsche, that beacon for Nazi thought, fixated on the need to overcome Christian virtues like meekness and humility that undermined the vitality of both society and man himself. Turning once again to Tom Holland:

That Nietzsche himself was a short-sighted invalid prone to violent migraines had done nothing to inhibit his admiration for the aristocracies of antiquity, and their heedlessness towards the sick and the weak. A society focused on the feeble was a society enfeebled itself. This it was that had rendered Christians such malevolent blood-suckers. If it was the taming of the Romans that Nietzsche chiefly rued, then he regretted as well how they had battened onto other nations.

It is not so hard to hear in this Trump’s constant refrain that his enemies have died, been beaten, or begged before him like dogs. 

Indeed, it was Christianity’s gentleness and compassion that made it so repellent to the Nazis. As Holland explains, “The churches had had their day. The new order, if it were to endure for a millennium, would require a new order of man. It would require ubermensch.” 

Trumpism, too, requires a new man. To the MAGA mind, this is a healthy, White, reproductive, and muscular sort of American. In truth, it’s a self-pitying sort, beset by enemies and contemptuous of outsiders and liberals, and marinated in online conspiracy theories. 

Authoritarianism’s apostles

I wrote last week that the current attempts to revise American history are about an attempt to remake the American electorate. Reducing historical knowledge also reduces understanding and so also both sympathy and empathy for groups that have been oppressed and marginalized. 

What I see in MAGA in its current form is an evangelical undertaking—an attempt to wholly reconfigure American cultural life and thought. This is, in part, why Kevin Elliott argued back in April that Trump’s administration is in fact fascist. 

There is a clear attempt now to use Kirk’s killing to launch a renewed push to reshape the country. The attempted, and now failed, cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel is one highly visible example. It’s good that Kimmel is back on air. But, as Mona Charen recently observed for The Bulwark, “Alongside the norm-shattering, law-flouting, and witchcraft-embracing politics of Trump 2.0 is the moral injury this administration is inflicting.”

And Kirk’s killing stands to reinvigorate these moral assaults.  

In the wake of revelations about Kirk’s assassin, Megyn Kelly took to her podcast to declare that she has a new mission: the elimination of trans people. Kelly stated,

To Charlie’s killer: There’s no such thing as a trans child. Men cannot have babies or ‘chestfeed an infant.’ A man cannot become a woman. A woman cannot become a man. Those are truths and you will hear them here relentlessly

My fear is that we are only going to see a further intensification of MAGA politics over the next few months. Charlie Kirk’s assassination, in a different time and place, could have been a moment for the country to pull back from the brink. Instead, it has become a religious “revival” for Trumpism, one that has created new missionaries of authoritarianism. 

Featured image is Communion of the Apostles, by Luca Signorelli