A Memorial and White Christian Nationalism

The memorial for Charlie Kirk is over, and I have been trying to process what it all means. Of course, I want to acknowledge the grief of his family. People have lost someone they loved deeply. His children will grow up without their father. Erika Kirk has lost her husband to senseless violence. And, to my mind, there is no reason to question the sincerity of their grief. Like death, love and loss cut across political ideology. One day, we all will experience what it means to lose someone we loved. And one day we all will take our last breath. Politics be damned.

But the political spectacle of the memorial bothered me. Grief and mourning were overshadowed by the politics and weaponization of Kirk’s death. I kept thinking as God, Christianity, and MAGA blurred that something deeply troubling was on full display: a public witness of the white Christian nationalism undergirding Trumpism. No longer mentioned in hushed terms. This Christian nationalist stuff was now in the open for all to see.

Conservative podcaster, Benny Johnson, was clear in the ambition of the memorial. “The Apostle Paul describes how God establishes the rulers of the nations in the audience…. Right now, there are rulers of our land represented,” he said as he acknowledged Trump and members of administration. “Right here is the State Department, the Department of War, the Department of Justice, the Chief executive. God has instituted them. God has given them power over our nation and our land. God saved our President, President Trump, from an assassin’s bullet for this moment.”

What do you make of the idea that “God saved Trump for this moment”? That Kirk’s death – and they view him as a martyr – somehow is figured as a part of Trump’s divine mission? That Trump’s presence at the memorial announced to the country, and to the world, that Christianity (as they understand it) remains on the throne of this country?

I had already been disturbed by the MAGA canonization of Kirk: the heavenly memes, the declarations of his sainthood, even Catholic Cardinal Tim Dolan hailed him as a “modern-day Saint Paul.” “He was a missionary,” Cardinal Dolan said, “he’s an evangelist, he’s a hero.” All in the service of mainstreaming Kirk’s views and coercing consent.

But the memorial with its blending of the rituals of grief and patriotism made explicit the connection between MAGA and a certain view of evangelical Christianity. Kirk’s death is its vehicle. Trump declared, “We want to bring God back into our beautiful USA like never before.” JD Vance said, “I have talked more about Jesus Christ in the past two weeks than I have my entire time in public life.” This evangelical zeal intensifies MAGAism; it gives it the power of certainty—the force of divine will.

Erika Kirk invoked love. She said, with tears in her eyes, that she forgave the shooter, “because it was what Christ did. And what Charlie would do.” She went on to say that “the answer to hate is not to hate. The answer we know from the gospel is love and always love. Love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us.” The words resonated. They sounded familiar. But I felt something different in the way the language was invoked amid this nationalist spectacle.

Enemies and the persecuted. Who are the enemies here, and who are the persecuted? Lines drawn. And Stephen Miller’s harrowing remarks made it all explicit.

“The storm whispers to the warrior that, ‘You cannot withstand my strength.’ And the warrior whispers back, ‘I am the storm.” Miller said in reference to Erika Kirk. “Erika is the storm.” The people in attendance and all those grieving Kirk’s death are the storm. “And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion,” Miller declared.

And to those enemies (who they were told to love), Miller said, “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. We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity.”

The dragon has been awakened, he declared. This isn’t the way I have come to understand the invocation of love. This is the language of white nationalist who aim to “save this civilization, to save the West, to save this republic.”

All of this was on full display. And no effort to focus solely on the grief can hide this ugliness from view or diminish the threat that it represents to American democracy and to people who look like me.

As he watched the memorial, with an excitement that bordered on euphoria, Steven Bannon on Fox news, described the moment: “the whole service was muscular Christianity…, a form of Christian nationalism was put forward in the memorial service for a slain American martyr.” He didn’t bite his tongue, and he knows what it portends. And these people know what they are doing. I hope and pray that we do too.

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