Death of an Evangelical

On Charlie Kirk's Protestant American legacy

If you lived in a “red state,” and you wanted to buy a ticket to Charlie Kirk’s memorial service in Phoenix, your work was cut out for you. Prices rose exponentially as soon as the date was announced. For some determined attendees, there was no choice but to drive to the nearest blue state and catch a seat on a Phoenix-bound plane there.

As one of those planes touched down, the passengers broke into the hymn “Amazing Grace.” “For Charlie!” someone exclaims in the clip.

This is a typical sample of how Kirk has been memorialized in death—peacefully, joyfully, with many prayers prayed and hymns sung. It prompted me to do a bit of Twitter satire, as I put on my best impression of an MSNBC anchor and warned everyone how important it is to speak out about this rising tide of right-wing aggression. If we don’t turn down the temperature now, who knows what horrors await? Next thing you know, I predicted ominously, they’ll be doing the high ending to “Great is Thy Faithfulness.” This joke is lost on people unfamiliar with evangelical hymnody, but as the kids say, if you know, you know. Most people were amused, though an enraged few read me literally, bless their hearts. Then again, the actual hate-posting has been so insane that I can forgive them for being a bit sensitive.

As it happened, both hymns were part of the background music for the Phoenix memorial. It proved to be a thoroughly evangelical event, in honor of a thoroughly evangelical man.

There are some Catholics, as well as the odd Eastern Orthodox cleric, who have tried to claim Charlie Kirk as something other than evangelical in death—or at least approaching something other than evangelical. To some extent, this is understandable. Kirk’s wife, Erika, was raised Catholic, and the family was sometimes seen attending mass together. This no doubt drove Kirk’s extensive study of Catholicism, fueling many a late-night debate with Catholic friends. A bishop who spoke with him shortly before his murder claims he was on the edge of conversion. Only God knows if there’s truth in that. But the fact remains that Kirk did his public-facing work in an evangelical key, and no evangelical of his generation stands ready to fill the cultural space he uniquely occupied.

While eulogizing Kirk, one of his colleagues described his campus events as “tent revivals” by another name. For all the topics over which Kirk and his adversaries roamed, he made his Christian faith the recurring theme of his song. A few have even suggested that in his millennial, 21st-century way, Kirk wore the mantle of Billy Graham. The difference, as Hillsdale historian Miles Smith notes, is that Graham addressed a culturally unified America, while Kirk entered hostile territory to speak into her post-modern divisions. For Billy Graham to be targeted by a young assassin would have been unthinkable. For Kirk, while it was shocking, it was sadly not unthinkable.

Kirk modeled a faith that was unabashed, uncompromising, and uncool. Although he was, in a sense, an elite—a self-made young captain of political industry, worth however many millions, with many friends in high places—he did not see it as his business to make evangelical Christianity palatable to its cultured despisers. His calling, as he saw it, was to take the unadorned gospel to the masses. J. D. Vance, whose adult conversion to Catholicism made a trendier story than Kirk’s slow ripening into “normie” evangelicalism, confessed in his Sunday eulogy that Kirk taught him something about public Christian witness. Vance was not always eager to talk openly about his faith, perhaps partly because he has a complicated relationship with his own low-brow evangelical roots. And indeed, Kirk himself admitted to a lover’s quarrel with the church of his youth, which felt too apolitical and anti-intellectual for the brash, ambitious young man. But as politicians for their part discouraged him from bringing the church into politics, he became bolder. And that boldness proved contagious.