Like many others, I watched and listened to the speeches at Charlie Kirk’s memorial ceremony with a profound sense of awe. The initial sense of sadness and anger I felt the day he was assassinated was transformed as friends, family, employees, donors, pastors, and politicians pointed beyond the senseless killing to Jesus who remains seated on his throne.
It is obvious now in his death, as it was to those who were close to him in his life, that Charlie’s faith in his Savior animated everything he did whether he was debating students on college campuses or caring for his wife and children at home. In an event that straddled Christian funeral and political rally at times, there was no doubt that, for Charlie at least, faith always preceded politics. The power of the Gospel changed Charlie’s life. Why should we not hope that it can change a nation?
As a Reformed Christian and pastor committed to the ordinary means of grace, I feel duty bound to remind us all that revivals, by definition, are tricky things. We do well to humble ourselves before the Almighty God whose ways are above our own. Any attempt to forecast with authority what the Holy Spirit will surely do in future days puts us on par with prophets of the Old Testament. Go read about what happened to them when they got it wrong.
That being said, humility about the future does not preclude us from hope. And Sunday provided us many reasons to hope.
The ceremony began with a simple call to personal faith in Jesus that is standard fare among American evangelicals. Somewhere close to 100 million people both in person and streaming online heard it. It is a reminder that all hope about the future of our families, our churches, and our nation emanates from the hope of the Gospel, of the judgment of the wicked and the vindication of the righteous, and of resurrection life in Christ’s eternal kingdom.
That eternal hope was emphasized throughout the ceremony as our nation’s most prominent public figures offered surprisingly profound articulations of Christian theology.
Tucker Carlson’s short speech spoke to the doctrine of original sin, the need for all people regardless of political affiliation to repent, and to place our ultimate hope not in princes of this world but in Jesus, the King of Kings.
Marco Rubio capped his address with a summary of the Nicene Creed similar to the one Vice President J.D. Vance delivered on Charlie Kirk’s show just days after the shooting. Vance admitted on stage that he had spoken more about his personal faith in Jesus in the last two weeks than he had in all of his previous time in public office.
The most memorable part of the night, however, was not the appearance of the President but the resolve of Erika Kirk. In a beautiful testimony to the supernatural power of the Gospel, Erika publicly forgave her late husband’s assassin. Charlie would have wanted nothing less, she said. In contrast, President Trump spoke about harboring no love for his enemies in remarks that felt disjointed from the ceremony as a whole.
All of this suggests that Kirk’s death may mark a shift in the development of the New Right. What was, under Trump, a movement that certainly welcomed Christians and promised to deliver on their political goals may be giving way to a new iteration led by men and women of true Christian convictions. Whatever the future holds, it certainly looks like Christianity will be an indispensable element of the party ethos going forward. The only question that remains is what it looks like in practice.
There are those who espouse legitimate concerns about so-called “Christian Nationalism.” They worry that we are returning to a Bush-era syncretism of evangelical politics albeit with a harder right-wing hue. They argue that such conditions threaten true Christian liberty over political issues, and I tend to agree.
And while there was some of that on Sunday, it paled in comparison to the echoes of an older and much more biblical arrangement between Christianity and society. The speeches from Carlson, Rubio, Vance, Mrs. Kirk and others spoke about Christianity, not as a self-contained political program, but as supplying the necessary pre-political foundations for any society to thrive. As Charlie so often argued before his audiences, those foundations are obvious to careful readers of the great American literary tradition—in documents like the Declaration of Independence and speeches like Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.
For a long time now, both parties have insisted on an artificial unity around mere mental assent to the principles espoused in our political tradition while denying the philosophical and religious presuppositions upon which those principles are built. True, one need not be a Christian to be an American, but can you truly understand America and her history without appreciation for the Christian tradition that shaped the political imaginations of our founding generations? Charlie spent a lot of his public life arguing you couldn’t. As more information about the assassin is released, I suspect we’ll learn it was also the reason he was killed.
Sunday enlisted all of us in a mission to carry on the legacy of Charlie Kirk, which is really no different than carrying on the legacy of all great Americans that have gone before us. We must renew our fearless commitment to the good, the true, and the beautiful and a humble submission to the laws of nature and Nature’s God. We’re all Charlie Kirk now.
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