Charlie Kirk's Theocracy

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-09-22-charlie-kirks-theocracy/



Until the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk, the alliance between the Christian right, the corporate right, and Trump’s MAGA right was just a marriage of convenience. After all, Donald Trump, serial womanizer, absent worshipper, and narcissistic hater, is a travesty of Christian love and far from a plausible figurehead. But yesterday at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, at Kirk’s memorial spectacle, we saw a full fusion of Church and State in a combination revival meeting and Nuremberg rally.

It remains to be seen whether this was a fleeting moment of theocratic glory, or in Kirk’s phrase, a “turning point” with durable political consequences. For more than three hours, speakers including several cabinet members stuck to a fuzzy and brilliantly produced script, rebranding Kirk as someone who cherished open debate and loved his enemies, and above all was Christlike. Some of it was genuinely moving if you suspended disbelief about what Charlie Kirk was actually promoting.

His widow, Erika Kirk, a former Miss Arizona, who is taking over as leader of Turning Point USA, was heartbroken, eloquent, and disciplined—a steel magnolia. She eulogized a model Christian husband whose goal, above all, was to rescue lost boys who were leading aimless and dissolute lives and bring them to Christ and conservatism. “My husband Charlie, he wanted to save young men,” she said, “just like the one who took his life. On the cross, our Savior said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’” She paused and dabbed at her eyes. “That young man, I forgive him. The answer to hate is not hate, the answer … is love.”

JD Vance followed on: “Because Charlie believed that we were all children of God, he treated everyone with grace … He knew it was right to love others, your neighbor, your interlocutor, your enemy.” Would that Vance, a convert to far-right Catholicism, practiced that brand of Christianity. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explicitly compared Kirk to Christ, adding, “Charlie’s other passion was free speech … He always gave the biggest microphone to the people who were most passionately aligned against him, because he believed that we need to talk to each other.”

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