The Faith of Charlie Kirk: A Guide

To understand Charlie Kirk's political legacy, one must understand his religious beliefs.

Charlie Kirk has been dead less than a day, but he has already passed from man to legend. To the Right, Kirk was a gentle hero of intellectual freedom and truth-telling. To the left, he was a bigot and a misogynist who called for violence. Both sides are wrong.

In some ways, it doesn’t matter what Kirk believed. Murder is wrong. Kirk was a father, a husband, and a human being. And whether assassinations are politically effective or not (and sometimes they are – just ask Yigal Amir), they are unethical acts that threaten civil society as a whole. Obviously, they must be condemned.

But in other ways, it matters a great deal what Kirk believed, as he will now surely become a symbol of MAGA, with myth already eclipsing fact. Moreover, while liberals of a certain stripe may be dimly aware of him as a bomb-throwing young activist who created a remarkably powerful political organization, this is only one part of Kirk’s relevance to our contemporary moment, and an unhelpful generalization.

In fact, understanding Kirk’s religion is essential to understanding Kirk.

Charlie Kirk started out as a basically secular conservative activist; from 2012 to around 2020, his organization, Turning Point USA, was focused on free markets and limited government. But his emphasis shifted around the time of the pandemic (and perhaps around the time of Kirk’s discipleship under megachurch pastor Rob McCoy), and his beliefs and rhetoric evolved into (and shaped) contemporary Christian Nationalism.

Kirk was never your father’s Christian conservative; he was smart, savvy, and blunt. Like conservatives from Father Coughlin to Barry Goldwater to Rush Limbaugh, Kirk’s gift was to say the taboo thing about race, women, immigrants, or ‘woke’ culture. Of course, conservative beliefs have never really been taboo; they’ve long been held by a third to half the country. But Kirk played on the sense of those who held them that elite institutions (universities, coastal elite media, government) had fallen sway to anti-Christian wokery, which he saw as his religious responsibility to resist. Yet Christian Nationalism is selective Christianity, affirming some traditional Christian teachings (on masculinity, sexuality, and so on) while rejecting others, such as the importance of empathy, humble speech, love for all people, and concern for the “least of these.” In contemporary Christian Nationalism, these virtues became vices.

Only by understanding this faith can we understand Kirk’s legacy, and the way in which it hangs in the balance.

1. The Fusion of Vulgarity and Faith

At first, it seems like a contradiction: figures like Kirk combine a fervent religious faith with an almost shocking vulgarity and meanness. This was not true of a previous generation of Christian conservatives; their piety extended to their speech. Nor is it true of other figures on the Religious Right: Ben Shapiro, for example, is a conservative firebrand, but he doesn’t use profanity or sexual imagery (and indeed, rails against it). But for Kirk, as we will see, vulgarity and faith reinforce one another.

Let’s look at the vulgarity first. In the last day, many right-wing figures have taken to TwitterX to laud Kirk’s efforts to create civil political discourse. For example:

But this is not reflective of the facts.

First, Kirk frequently phrased political debates not in terms of policy, or even ethics, but as spiritual warfare between good and evil. Last year at a Trump campaign rally in Georgia, Kirk said the election was a “spiritual battle” that would be “civilizational defining,” saying that “these next 12 days will define the future of our republic. The forces of darkness have tried everything they possibly can.” Is it “modeling civil discourse” to refer to one’s political opponents as “the forces of darkness”?

Second, Kirk didn’t shy away from vulgarity. Here is something he wrote two months ago:

Whatever this tweet tells us about Kirk’s tolerance for different cultural practices or his own personal hygiene practices, it is clearly not modeling ‘civil political discourse.’ Nor is apparently starting a brawl with ‘young Turk’ Cenk Uygur:

@thatssofetch333He’s so…. (Insert comment here) #charliekirk #embarrassing #debatefail #rankingtiktok #popculture #iconicmoments #worstmoments #cringecontent #fyp #viralvideo #politicaltiktok

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Again, no one deserves to die for vulgarizing our political discourse in this way, but let’s not pretend that he was elevating it.

Kirk also played fast and loose with the facts, combining – like Trump – numerous false claims with the air of certainty. For example, here is Kirk describing his experience speaking to a group of Cambridge University students in May, 2025:

The Cambridge student body might as well be stuck in the high summer of 2020. For all their learning and talent, the students were unprepared and appalled to hear takes that, by now, are mainstream and even boring in America. When I described lockdowns as pointless and forced submission to mRNA shots as tyranny, they seethed and muttered. When I said George Floyd died from a drug overdose rather than under a police officer’s knee, they went into an uproar.

Note that, for Kirk, these false claims are “mainstream and even boring.” But they are also false. The George Floyd claim, though popular on the Right, does not match the evidence in his autopsy, and has been completely rebutted by experts. Likewise, there was no “forced submission” to the Covid vaccine among the general population, and the evidence shows that most lockdowns were, in fact, effective, and the states with the most lenient Covid rules had the most Covid deaths.

These are facts, not opinions. (“Tyranny” is an opinion.) But despite his many online debates, Kirk did not allow these claims to be seriously interrogated. He did not debate experts; he usually debated college kids.

One would be forgiven for assuming, based on this rhetoric and casualness with the truth, that Kirk is simply a bro, part of the Tate/Schulz/Von/Fridman/Rogan manosphere. And he did have that aspect to his persona. Yet Kirk also espoused an extremely traditional form of Christian morality on some issues, while ignoring or inverting Christian teaching on others.

First, Kirk was explicit that a conservative interpretation of Christianity should form the basis of American society and politics. At the 2020 CPAC conference, he invoked “the seven mountains of cultural influence,” the dominionist view that Christians should have “dominion” over government, media, education, business, arts and entertainment, family and religion. This is not a ‘live and let live’ conservatism; it is a theocratic conservatism in which Christianity dominates all aspects of American civil life.

Or something like Christianity, anyway. As many progressive Christians have noted, Christian Nationalism is a radical rewriting of Christian belief and practice. A prior generation of Christian conservatives praised America because it was home to Christianity; this generation praise Christianity because it promotes American strength, patriotism, and nationalism. It’s hard to overestimate the importance of this change. Liberals (secular and religion) often wonder how professing Christians can ignore the offenses committed by ICE, for example, or the many authoritarian acts of Donald Trump, many of which target the most vulnerable. But for Christian nationalists, protecting the homeland is a Christian responsibility, and anything that gets in the way of that — the rule of law, ‘weak’ compassion for the vulnerable — is evil.

Perhaps the clearest example of this in Kirk’s case is his statement “I can't stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new-age term that does a lot of damage,” made during an October, 2022, episode of his show. (Though this feels similar to Elon Musk’s statement that empathy is a bug in human nature, I think the roots of the sentiment are somewhat different.)

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This is in clear contradiction to numerous Christian teachings, including Romans 12:15 ("Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Be of the same mind toward one another. Do not set your mind on high things, but associate with the humble. Do not be wise in your own opinion ), 1 Peter 3:8 ("have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind”), and Colossians 3:12 ("compassionate hearts, kindness, humility...") among numerous others.. Indeed, for many Christians, empathy is the defining feature of Jesus Christ himself, both in his ministry to the “least of these,” including lepers and prostitutes, and in his act of giving his life for others.

I think anti-empathy may be the Rosetta Stone for understanding Kirk’s other beliefs; it brings them all together. Here is Kirk fantasizing about a world where children could watch public executions as a form of initiation:

This is the my other problem with the death penalty - it takes too long. Too many appeals… It should be public. It should be quick. And it should be televised… You could have, like, brought to you by Coca Cola. And no. I'm not kidding. By the way, I would totally tune in to see some pedo get their head chopped off.

Where Jesus said that he who is without sin should cast the first stone, Charlie Kirk said that “I would totally tune in to see some pedo get their head chopped off.”

If we understand Christian Nationalism as a hyper-masculine, nationalist, militaristic revolt against empathy and ethics in the name of defending (white, Christian) America, then the contradictions in Kirk’s character begin to disappear. Kirk’s meanness was not despite his Christian faith, but because of it. As Kirk put it in one interview, citing Psalm 97:10, “As Christians we are called to fight evil… My call is to fight evil and proclaim truth.”

And you don’t fight evil with gentleness and decency; you fight it with everything you’ve got. Of course, for many Christians (and Jews), evil means, first and foremost, moral evil: cruelty, dehumanization, failing to support the poor, intolerance, and so on. But for this version of Christian nationalism, evil means anything that pushes against certain core conservative values or weakens America — which are always the same things.

2. Race and Gender

This ideological rubber hits the political road chiefly in the context of race (which includes immigration) and gender.

Kirk’s rhetoric was full of (at least) racist overtones. He called Floyd a “scumbag.” On his show in November 2023, he said that “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people” He frequently espoused the “Great Replacement” conspiracy, which claims that liberals are bringing non-white people in as immigrants to replace white people. The Left, he said, “won’t stop until you and your children… are eliminated.” He said that Haitian immigrants would “become your masters” if allowed in, stating Haiti is “legitimately infested with demonic voodoo” and amplifying the false claim that Haitian migrants were eating pet dogs and cats.

Other Kirk statements on race include, “I'm sorry, if I see a Black pilot, I'm going to be like, boy, I hope he's qualified." And, speaking of Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (a graduate of Harvard Law School), Kirk said,

They're coming out, and they're saying, ‘I'm only here because of affirmative action.’ Yeah, we know. 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 be taken somewhat seriously.

As with Kirk’s other assertions, these statements fly in the face of actual facts. They take Black racial inferiority as a premise, and then reason from there that a Black person must have less “brain processing” than a white person. But it is again tied to an Edenic vision of a past America where hierarchies were clear and power was held by the people at the top of them.

Similarly, Kirk’s views on women and family are traditionalist, rejecting feminism entirely. Here, for example, is Kirk’s response to the engagement of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, from his August 26, 2025, show:

Maybe one of the reasons why Taylor Swift has been so, just, kind of annoyingly liberal over the last couple of years is that she's not yet married and she doesn't have children. I say this non-sarcastically. I say this as a husband and a father. Having children changes you. Getting married changes you… Taylor Swift might go from a cat lady to a JD Vance supporter, and I think we should celebrate that… We want Taylor Swift on team America. We want you to leave the island of the wokeys. And we would welcome you with open arms. One of the reasons why so many people on the right have been just skeptical or at least a little bit negative on Taylor Swift is, up until this point, that's not a great role model for young women, to wait all the way until you're 35 and just put your career first. We just talked about this with Katie Miller. However, there's a great chance to change that…

It's a great chance for Taylor Swift now to get married and have a ton of children… Engage in reality more and get outside of the abstract clouds. Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You're not in charge.

Again, contrary to liberal generalizations, this is not simply a bunch of hateful name-calling. It is an articulate, reactionary anti-feminism that does not pause for a moment to reflect on how different women may want different things in life, what ‘submission’ to a husband means for women in abusive relationships, or that femininity itself may not be the same for all women. It is far more insidious than simple hate speech, because it offers itself as, at once, radical protest and shared common sense.

Of course, this rhetoric resonates with young men who resent that their former status and power has been somewhat diminished by the advent of feminism, as well as with the growing ‘trad-wife’ phenomenon. But it depends on an unwillingness to entertain the voices of women who have a different view of themselves or of the world.

Kirk also didn’t believe women’s accounts of being sexually assaulted:

It is so materially insane to think that one in five American women will be raped in their life … meaning that they're lying about being raped, that they're lying about being sexually assaulted. Like a fraternity guy and a sorority girl at age 19 hooking up, both five drinks in at 2 a.m. and all of a sudden, like, she removes consent. Yeah, like, that's a murky, middle gray area.

There are other issues that Kirk has spoken about, of course. Many have posted his tragically ironic statements about deaths being ‘worth it’ to maintain gun freedoms. Turning Point USA played a central role in the 2020 ‘Stop the Steal’ campaigns to undermine the election. And even more than most, Kirk was outspoken in his rhetoric against transgender people, at one point calling for a ‘Nuremburg-like’ trial for physicians.

But the primary concerns of what has been called the “alt lite” remain that of race, gender, and sexuality. As the ADL put it in its profile of Turning Point USA:

The “alt lite” is a spin-off movement from the white supremacist alt right. Its adherents typically eschew the explicit white supremacy of the alt right but otherwise share its extremism and its prejudices, including against Muslims, immigrants, LGBTQ people (especially transgender people), and women.

These were Kirk’s primary concerns as well. His performative hyper-masculinity, his ‘muscular’ Christianity, his affinity for Trump’s authoritarian impulses — all of these are bound together into a single ideology, which has now become popular among millions of people.

There is, of course, an important difference between Kirk’s views and those of a more liberal bent: Kirk would impose them on others. Many times, Kirk described abortion as being worse than the Holocaust, and he, among with many others, won the battle, with abortion now illegal in twelve states. And while conservatives may describe ‘gender ideology’ and LGBTQ equality as forcing them to accept a kind of orthodoxy, that is still less invasive than ending my family’s legal recognition or condemning a trans person either to social ostracism or lifelong gender dysphoria. Not to mention the legitimation of ICE’s cruel tactics, which depend upon the dehumanization of migrants, or at least non-white ones.

This is what is Karl Popper called the paradox of tolerance: that to maintain a tolerant society, society must be intolerant of intolerance. Yet if unlimited tolerance is extended to intolerant groups, they could exploit that tolerance to suppress others and destroy tolerance itself. While Kirk preached a kind of ideological tolerance, his politics practiced a profound intolerance of all those who diverged from his worldview.

3. The Reaction

In the period immediately following Kirk’s death, numerous right-wing figures continued the rhetoric of warfare and vengeance that Kirk used during his life.

First, it’s worth contrasting the reactions to Kirk’s assassination with those of other victims of political violence, including Minnesota State Senator Melissa Hortman gunned down by a right-wing assassin in Minneapolis; and Officer David Rose, who was killed by a right-wing terrorist at the CDC headquarters; as well as the attempted murder of Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband Paul, also by a right-wing extremist.

First, while every single national Democrat has unequivocally condemned Kirk’s murder, some Republicans – most importantly, Donald Trump – often didn’t even mention these others. And when they did, it was often to mock them. It’s now been over a month since the attack on the CDC campus in Atlanta; Trump has never once mentioned it. And when it came to the attack on the Pelosis, Republicans spread a whole net of misinformation, alleging that the attack was a gay thing, that the Pelosis knew the attacker, and so on. Meanwhile, here’s a now-deleted Instagram post by Donald Trump Jr. after the attack on the Pelosis, parroting those same lies:

Of course, that’s just hilarious, as long as the attacker is a white, right-wing extremist radicalized by right-wing media’s decades-long demonization of Nancy Pelosi. I have not seen any similar joke posts from anyone in the Democratic party mainstream, despite Kirk’s decade of rhetoric calling for spiritual warfare against them. I’m sure some amoral idiot on the far left has said something irresponsible, but not the president’s son and confidante.

And of course, white, right-wing terrorists are just deranged lunatics in need of mental healthcare, whereas any left-wing terrorists are part of a vast left-wing conspiracy.

Second, some rhetoric surrounding Kirk’s death — even before we know the identity or beliefs of the murderer — has been violent and vengeful, with far right figures calling for civil war and even mainstream figures using language of violence and retribution.

“They are at war with us, whether we want to accept it or not,” Jesse Watters, the right-wing Fox News commentator, said on Wednesday, threatening that “we are going to avenge Charlie’s death in the way that Charlie wanted to be avenged.” Similarly, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said “all of us must now dedicate ourselves to defeating the evil that stole Charlie from this world.” Again, this is before the murderer was found.

Meanwhile, Christopher Rufo, sure that the “radical Left” is orchestrating a “wave of terror” (no one is a deranged lone gunman except young white men on the right), posted:

There is simply no both-sidesing the partisan responses to political violence. To be sure, many Republicans have called for calm. But many others have called explicitly for vengeance, characterizing half of the country as domestic terrorists, again, before we even know who committed this heinous act and why. That includes, of course, Donald Trump who — again before we know anything about the killer’s motives — said from the Oval Office that

For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today. And it must stop right now… We will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it. From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a health care executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others, radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.

That should fill anyone who cares about liberal democracy with dread, especially as Trump omits right-wing political violence entirely. Then again, Trump himself encouraged perhaps the greatest incident of American political violence since the Civil War, so one hardly expects him to be even-handed. And there is no parallel to this on the Left; all Democrats have condemned all of the left-wing violence Trump listed, none have called for vengeance or retribution, and none have pretended as though all the violence is on one side.

In the end, how the Right, and thus the government, chooses to respond to Kirk’s murder may determine how Kirk’s legacy is understood.

On the one hand, there is the rhetoric of Kirk’s eulogizers, and his own stated claims, that he is for free speech, honest debate, and tolerance of different perspectives; as noted above, Kirk explicitly renounced violence, as have many Republicans (including Rep. Mike Johnson) in the wake of his murder. On the other hand, there is the way in which Kirk’s words can easily be interpreted, or misinterpreted, as a call for actual warfare against evildoers.

This dichotomy, of course, is present in organized religion itself. There are teachings that urge compassion and empathy, and those that urge strength, violence, and even cruelty in the defense of the good — the latter being currently put into practice by Israel’s Jewish radical right, Islam’s radical right, and Christianity’s radical right. And both were present in Charlie Kirk.

Perhaps in the next few months, we’ll see which version of Charlie Kirk prevails.

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Note: The initial version of this article included the frequently repeated but inaccurate statement that Kirk yelled the Anti-Asian slur “Chink” at an event attendee, when in fact he yelled “Cenk” as in the commentator “Cenk Uygur.” This has been corrected.

I admit that my main emotion right now is dread — dread of what the government and right-wing mobs are going to do, assuming the murderer turns out to have left-wing or pro-trans ideas. That, itself, should tell you something. Here’s a prayer that political violence will be renounced.

I’ll share some favorite reads and other material next week.