Rev William Barber condemns Kirk's killing and warns against using religion to 'sanctify wrong' [View all]

Source: The Guardian

Mon 15 Sep 2025 17.02 EDT
Last modified on Mon 15 Sep 2025 20.10 EDT


Rev William Barber, a left-leaning pastor and social activist, has condemned last week’s “brutal, ugly” murder of Charlie Kirk while calling for a broader denunciation of political violence on all sides.

Barber, leader of the “Moral Monday” events staged by Repairing The Breach, a pro-social justice group, also appeared to criticize the rightwing political activist’s brand of Christianity.

Barber spoke out against the killing of Kirk – an ally of Donald Trump – during an online event commemorating the anniversary of one of the most notorious acts of political violence in US history, the bombing of a Black church by members of the Ku Klux Klan on 15 September 1963.

Three 14-year-old girls and another aged 11 were killed when an explosion caused by 19 sticks of dynamite attached to a timer ripped through the 16th Street Baptist Street church in Birmingham, Alabama, at a time when the city was a focal point of the Black civil rights movement. Martin Luther King, the late civil rights leader who Kirk once criticized as “awful”, described the bombing as “one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity”.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/15/rev-william-barber-charlie-kirk-killing-religion