The Shameful Idolatry and Fraudulent Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk

by | Sep 20, 2025 | Opinions & Commentary

Charlie Kirk speaking at the 2025 Young Women’s Leadership Summit in Grapevine, Texas. Image: Gage Skidmore, Wiki Commons

The Shameful Idolatry and Fraudulent Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk

by | Sep 20, 2025 | Opinions & Commentary

Charlie Kirk speaking at the 2025 Young Women’s Leadership Summit in Grapevine, Texas. Image: Gage Skidmore, Wiki Commons

Conservative Christians need to stop pretending Charlie Kirk was doing God’s work here, because his actual words and the actual words of Jesus are compelling testimony that he wasn’t.

Republished with permission from John Pavlovitz

As news of his shooting broke, the Jesus-washing of Charlie Kirk’s life by Conservative Christians began almost immediately.

My social media feed quickly flooded with urgent pleas of protection made by religious people for a supposed “warrior for Christ” and “devoted man of God.”

A pastor I once partnered with posted an emotional video calling Kirk a “man who loves the Lord, stands on the morals and the traditional values of the Bible, and believes in Jesus and is a follower of Christ”—and within minutes of Kirk’s death, announced a public prayer vigil to pray for Charlie Kirk’s family and for “revival” to come to our nation.

And with every passing second since his reprehensible killing, the Right has worked tirelessly to turn Kirk into a modern-day martyr; a supposed unabashed lover of Jesus whose brutal murder proved he lived and died for the Lord, violently taken by the Godless Left, and crystallizing the righteousness of the MAGA movement.

I’d like to be shocked at the theological gymnastics of this, but these are the same self-identified Christians who’ve spent the last decade lionizing a vile, amoral, serial predator and court-adjudicated rapist, so the bar for sainthood is now subterranean.

Though it will likely never happen, I wish the tens of millions of Conservative Christians would take a few minutes from their performative, garment-rending histrionics to read or listen to Charlie Kirk’s own words, to look objectively at the agenda he spent the last years of his life promoting with his massive platform—and show me how they connect the dots from that to Jesus:

  • Kirk had claimed that passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a “huge mistake” that has now become an “anti-white weapon.”
  • During a September 2024 episode of the debate show Surrounded, Kirk stated that even if his 10-year-old daughter became pregnant due to rape, she would be forced to carry the baby to term.
  • On a January 3rd, 2024, episode of his show, Kirk continued his incessant verbal assaults on women of color, saying “If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder, is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?
  • During an April 5, 2023, appearance at the Salt Lake City campus of Awaken Church, Kirk said, “It’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.That is a prudent deal.”
  • In March of 2024, Kirk said on his show: The great replacement strategy, which is well underway every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.
  • Kirk decried what he described as the “myth” of Martin Luther King Jr , calling him “awful” and “not a good person,” another time declaring him “a serial adulterer, an alleged rapist, a reparations proponent, and a race Marxist.”
  • A fierce opponent of DEI initiatives designed to give underrepresented and marginalized communities equal opportunities, he “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.” (The Charlie Kirk Show, 23 January 2024.)
  • On an April 30th, 2025 episode of his show, Kirk reiterated his unapologetic Islamophobia, saying “large dedicated Islamic areas are a threat to America.”
  • In a 2024 episode of his show, Kirk quoted a Leviticus passage calling for gay people to be stoned to death, referring to it as “God’s perfect law,” and called for “a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor.”
  • And though Jesus’ life and ministry overflowed with compassion for the poor, the sick, the vulnerable, Kirk recently said, “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new-age term that does a lot of damage.”

I’m left to wonder and to ask professed Christians posthumously elevating Charlie Kirk as some hero of their faith:

  • Is this what you think followers of Jesus do?
  • Is this what Christianity is to you?
  • How can you call any of this Christlike?

As someone MAGA Christians see as a Godless, sinful heathen, I’m sure they will choose not to thoughtfully consider what I’ve shared, but that won’t change what is.

Kirk has left a hateful, dehumanizing legacy of words that Conservative Christians are either choosing to ignore in their zeal to canonize him, or they simply share his racist, phobic, misogynist, Islamophobic, antisemitic, supremacist sentiments, and in Trump’s garish, Jesus-less remodeling of the Christian faith in America, now imagine them righteous.

Evangelicals in America have so lost the plot of their faith’s namesake that they can overlook decades of blatant, unreprentant attacks on the most vulnerable members of our community (the very people Jesus showed great care for while he was here) in their quest to fuel the rage their movement requires.

Their tribal, cultic religion is so fueled by the narrative of a national holy war with ever-encroaching enemies and adversaries that it must have martyrs to rally around to justify their continual attacks on people who pose them no threat.

Charlie Kirk’s murder is a despicable, vile, fully condemnable act, but that doesn’t erase the incalculable harm he has done to people of color, to women, to immigrants, to queer people, as well as to the minds of young Conservative white men.

And no Jesus-washing, reality-covering revisionist history from MAGA Christians and Republican politicians will cover the reality that the compassionate, kind, neighbor-loving, diversity-embracing, foreigner-welcoming teachings of Jesus are fully antithetical to the caustic, divisive, dehumanizing empire Kirk built.

Jesus’ central command was to love. How exactly did Kirk love immigrants and people of color and women and Trans teens and Muslims and Democrats and atheists? Precisely what of his work and words made them feel more seen, heard, respected, valued?

Charlie Kirk was a human being, a husband, a father, a leader to a movement, an adept communicator, and his murder was an act of unconscionable barbarism.

But Conservative Christians need to stop pretending he was doing God’s work here, because Kirk’s actual words and the actual words of Jesus are compelling testimony that he wasn’t.

John Pavlovitz

John Pavlovitz

John Pavlovitz is a writer, pastor, and activist from Wake Forest, North Carolina. A 25-year veteran in the trenches of local church ministry, John is committed to equality, diversity, and justice—both inside and outside faith communities. When not actively working for a more compassionate planet, John enjoys spending time with his family, exercising, cooking, and having time in nature. He is the author of A Bigger Table, Hope and Other Superpowers, Low, and Stuff That Needs to Be Said.

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