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Until the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk, the alliance between the Christian right, the corporate right, and Trump’s MAGA right was just a marriage of convenience. After all, Donald Trump, serial womanizer, absent worshipper, and narcissistic hater, is a travesty of Christian love and far from a plausible figurehead. But yesterday at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, at Kirk’s memorial spectacle, we saw a full fusion of Church and State in a combination revival meeting and Nuremberg rally.
It remains to be seen whether this was a fleeting moment of theocratic glory, or in Kirk’s phrase, a “turning point” with durable political consequences. For more than three hours, speakers including several cabinet members stuck to a fuzzy and brilliantly produced script, rebranding Kirk as someone who cherished open debate and loved his enemies, and above all was Christlike. Some of it was genuinely moving if you suspended disbelief about what Charlie Kirk was actually promoting.
His widow, Erika Kirk, a former Miss Arizona, who is taking over as leader of Turning Point USA, was heartbroken, eloquent, and disciplined—a steel magnolia. She eulogized a model Christian husband whose goal, above all, was to rescue lost boys who were leading aimless and dissolute lives and bring them to Christ and conservatism. “My husband Charlie, he wanted to save young men,” she said, “just like the one who took his life. On the cross, our Savior said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’” She paused and dabbed at her eyes. “That young man, I forgive him. The answer to hate is not hate, the answer … is love.”
JD Vance followed on: “Because Charlie believed that we were all children of God, he treated everyone with grace … He knew it was right to love others, your neighbor, your interlocutor, your enemy.” Would that Vance, a convert to far-right Catholicism, practiced that brand of Christianity.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explicitly compared Kirk to Christ, adding, “Charlie’s other passion was free speech … He always gave the biggest microphone to the people who were most passionately aligned against him, because he believed that we need to talk to each other.”
To hear several of the speakers invoke Kirk as a martyred champion of free speech, you might have thought this was an ACLU convention. Erika Kirk said, “The First Amendment of our Constitution is the most human amendment … Because when you stop the conversation, when you stop the dialogue, this is what happens.”
Well, yes, but Charlie Kirk was devoted to an administration determined to destroy free speech.
And then, as the closer, Donald Trump spoke.
His scripted remarks were carefully in keeping with the soft airbrushed tone of the afternoon. “He’s a martyr now for American freedom,” Trump said. “I know I speak for everyone here today when I say that none of us will ever forget Charlie Kirk, and neither now will history.” But then Trump, being Trump, could not resist hogging the spotlight and raining on Kirk’s carefully choreographed parade.
Trump kept wandering off-script and promoting his tariffs, his cure for autism, his greatest election victory ever. And at one point, he effectively ruined the halo effect that Kirk’s Christlike martyrdom was supposed to extend to his own presidency. “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them,” Trump said, reading the script. But then he blurted out, “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry. I am sorry, Erika.”
Trump thus blew open the hypocrisy that was so thick in speech after speech in the massive stadium that an innocent observer could almost miss it. Hypocrisy, as La Rochefoucauld said, is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Vance, Kennedy, and company invoked Christian love in their words, but not in their earthly deeds. |
