Forgiving Charlie Kirk’s killer
PARIS — “I forgive him.” Erika Kirk’s emotional words Sunday…
Christians grapple with the complex legacy of Charlie Kirk
The assassination of the controversial, conservative political activist raises questions in pulpits across the nation.
|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
When co-workers told him that Charlie Kirk had been shot on a college campus just 12 miles to his north, Andrew Wheeler thought it was a hoax.
Wheeler, a technical writer for a software company and part-time preacher for a Church of Christ in Provo, Utah, quickly checked Google, which ran his inquiry through its artificial intelligence engine and claimed that the story was false.
“Turns out, it was just too soon for Google to pick up on it,” Wheeler said, “and the rest of that day was a stream of tragic revelations.”
View this post on Instagram
The initial confusion seems pertinent, given the questions raised about technology’s limitations, the role of social media and the use of artificial intelligence in the wake of Kirk’s Sept. 10 death. Security analysts warn that foreign actors, including Russian, Chinese and pro-Iranian groups are spreading misinformation about Kirk’s death in an effort to polarize debate about Kirk’s legacy.
Kirk, a conservative activist, longtime supporter of President Trump and founder of Turning Point USA was speaking to students at an open-air venue on the campus of Utah Valley University in Orem when a shooter perched on a rooftop fired a bolt-action hunting rifle, striking Kirk in the neck, according to police.
The murder of the 31-year-old husband and father set off a wave of social media posts, many filled with angry rhetoric. Supporters pointed to Kirk’s Christian faith and his belief in debate — exemplified by his many trips to university campuses, where he often would sit under a tent reading “PROVE ME WRONG” and allow students to ask him questions.
Others pointed to clips of Kirk’s statements about civil rights, transgender people and the Second Amendment as evidence that his views were extremist and deliberately provocative. Police arrested 22-year-old Tyler James Robinson and charged him with Kirk’s murder. Robinson was in a romantic relationship with a transgender individual, prosecutors said.
A Turning Point on campus
Across the nation, groups of Americans gathered on college campuses and in front of city halls and courthouses to show support for Kirk and to pray for his family.
“Today is not the day Charlie Kirk died,” said Jeremiah Delcour, vice president of Oklahoma Christian University’s chapter of Turning Point USA, in a Sept. 10 Instagram post. “Today is the day that Charlie Kirk LIVES with our Father in Heaven.”
View this post on Instagram
About 375 miles east of the university’s Oklahoma City campus, students from Harding University joined mourners at the Arkansas Capitol in Little Rock for a prayer vigil. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, about 100 students and community members gathered on the campus of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., for a vigil. All three universities are associated with Churches of Christ.
Pepperdine and Harding also have chapters of Turning Point USA, a nonprofit founded by Kirk in 2012 to advocate for conservative politics on high school and university campuses. The nonprofit has chapters on more than 800 campuses across the nation.
In the past week, more than 400 students filled out an interest survey on the Harding chapter’s Instagram page, faculty adviser David Kee said. Josh Cobb, a Harding student and member of the university’s football team, is the student leader of the chapter.
At Oklahoma Christian University, students write tributes to Charlie Kirk on a whiteboard next to an information table about the university’s chapter of Turning Point USA.
Harding students plan to join other community groups for another prayer vigil at 7 p.m. Sept. 18 on the lawn of the White County Courthouse in Searcy, Ark.
“We will gather to worship, reflect and pray for spiritual healing in our nation,” Cobb wrote.
The group plans to host an event on Harding’s Searcy campus Sept. 25. “It won’t be a typical Turning Point USA ‘Prove me Wrong’ event,” Kee said, “but rather a rally to build the community in support of Charlie Kirk’s legacy.”
View this post on Instagram
Pepperdine president Jim Gash and chancellor Sara Young Jackson were among the attendees at the Malibu vigil. Tim Spivey, vice president for Spiritual Life at Pepperdine, led a prayer.
“He was a courageous and relentless advocate for freedom and free thinking,” said Bethany Kronlund, a Pepperdine senior and president of the university’s Turning Point chapter. “His calm and respectful demeanor and his unwavering commitment to dialogue without violence continues to serve as an inspiration to us all.”
At Abilene Christian University in Texas, nearly 1,200 students, staff and community members gathered at Beauchamp Amphitheatre on campus Sept. 17 for a prayer vigil, KTAB/KRBC reported. Students organized the event, said Madelyne Arrowood, a senior at the university, which is associated with Churches of Christ.
“Tonight is a time just to stand together as Christians and mourn the sad divisions that we have in this country and pray to God to bless this nation and bring us a little closer together and end violence,” Arrowood told the TV station.
The university’s president, Phil Schubert, spoke during the vigil.
Abilene Christian University President Phil Schubert speaks during a prayer vigil on campus.
“You may feel anger. You have sadness, grief and sorrow, uncertainty, anxiety,” Schubert told the mourners. “I mean, any time we are watching events unfold around us that create those kinds of feelings in ourselves, the best thing we can do as a community is come together and try to process through that.”
For ACU students, Kirk’s death was “a shock that none of us has really felt before,” said Jacob Rose, a freshman from Naperville, Ill., in an interview with The Optimist, a student publication of ACU. “There’s never been a huge assassination that people have seen videos of in our age.”
View this post on Instagram
Rose and his friends led a worship night outside of ACU’s Wessel Hall after finding out about Kirk’s death.
“I’ve seen all over social media, ‘oh, it’s Left versus Right’ and all this stuff, but I think it’s good versus evil,” Rose said. “Honestly, I think it’s the devil trying to attack us. The devil wants us to go against each other. So I think what we have to do is … unite and have conversations.”
A student sings during a prayer vigil on ACU’s campus following the death of Charlie Kirk.
Fiery tongues
Kirk’s death resonated from pulpits four days after the shooting. Neal Pollard changed his Sunday sermon at the last minute — something he’s done only two other times in the past 25 years, he said. His topic: “When Faith is Targeted”
“I promise you that I did not do it for political reasons, never have. You know me,” Pollard told his congregation, the Cumberland Trace Church of Christ in Bowling Green, Ky. “But I don’t know that you realize what an impact (Kirk) makes on so many young people in our nation.”
Thousands — including many in Generation Z, now in their teens to mid-20s — listen to Kirk’s podcast and watch his YouTube videos, Pollard said, and recent studies show a trend toward conservatism and in favor of marriage among Gen Zers.
Now, many young people are unsettled by the death of “one who would stand up for the rights of the unborn,” Pollard said, “one who would stand up for the biblical definition of gender … one who would preach against the sin of pornography and so often quote the Bible as the authority for the position that he took.”
In his sermon, Pollard explored biblical truths revealed in Kirk’s assassination — there’s power in a voice, truth is absolute. And “our response to this act will make an eternal difference.”
Rick Atchley made the decision to address the shooting before his sermon for The Hills Church of Christ, which meets on multiple campuses throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. He acknowledged that he did not address the attempted assassination of President Trump nor the June 14 deaths of Democratic politician Melissa Hortman, her husband, Mark, and their dog at the hands of a gunman. Atchley also noted that the Sept. 3 mass shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis, which resulted in the deaths of two children and injuries to 21 people, went unmentioned from his pulpit.
He noted two of Kirk’s convictions — “that you deal with disagreement through debate, not through violence, and that every single person, including those you disagree with, is an image-bearer of God.”
Atchley cited Bible verses including James 3:6, “The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.” He urged Christians to refrain from responding to the tragedy with toxicity.
Orpheus Heyward
Or, as Orpheus Heyward put it, “Disagreement is inevitable, but dehumanization is inexcusable.”
Heyward, minister for the Renaissance Church of Christ in Atlanta, shared his thoughts on Kirk’s death in a Sept. 11 social media post.
“Truth must be tethered to love,” Heyward wrote. “Clarity without charity may satisfy the intellect, but it wounds the soul. Conviction that is not clothed in compassion can be perceived as cruelty masquerading as courage. Our task is not only to declare what we believe to be true but also to embody the love of Christ in how we declare it, ensuring that our words bring light rather than darkness.”
Christians should have no part in a culture that “yells and screams and demonizes each other,” Atchley said. “We will not post, we will not re-send these diatribes and rants that demonize people and radicalize the unstable. I do not think that is a political position. I think it is an ‘I follow Jesus’ position. And I remind us all that someday we will all stand before King Jesus. And none of us on that day wants to hear him say, ‘What part of “Love your enemies” did you not understand?’”
View this post on Instagram
Until that day of judgement, Christians grieve for the families of the Hortmans, the children killed in Minneapolis and Kirk’s widow, Erika, Atchley said.
“And I hope her two children will grow up in a world that’s better than this one,” he added. “We’re going to start modeling what it looks like to hold convictions without harboring hate.”
A Christian martyr?
Like many of her fellow Christians, Christina Littlefield mourns for Kirk’s family and for the nation.
Christina Littlefield
“But this is my fear — that I’m already seeing among some Christian friends — that they are making him a martyr for Christianity to further co-opt the faith toward partisan ends,” said Littlefield, associate professor of communication and religion at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., which is associated with Churches of Christ.
Littlefield watched 60 hours of Kirk’s Freedom Nights for research articles that spun off the book she co-authored with Richard Hughes, “Christian America and the Kingdom of God: White Christian Nationalism from the Puritans to January 6, 2021.” Freedom Nights were part of TPUSA Faith, an initiative of Turning Point directed toward ministers and evangelical Christians.
“He was sincere in his faith,” Littlefield said, “but he presented a limited Gospel; his political project hybridized Christian identity with themes of conservatism, neoliberalism, ethnic-nationalism and fascist storytelling. … He believed that all people were made in the image of God. But he attacked efforts to address racial injustice as socialism … He repeatedly dismissed the contributions of Black people, never believing that they could succeed without help from affirmative action. He supported mass deportations. …
View this post on Instagram
“He did not promote care for the marginalized, the orphan, the widow or the foreigner. His vision for a godly society was limited to Genesis and Numbers, shaped by Prager U, not Christ.”
While the First Amendment protected Kirk’s speech, Littlefield and her fellow academics fear for that right in the wake of the shooting. The American Association of University Professors, a Washington-based organization dedicated to promoting academic freedom, issued a statement condemning the killing of Kirk and all acts of violence on college campuses.
Students on the campus of Abilene Christian University in Texas participate in a prayer vigil after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
The organization also “notes with great alarm the rash of recent administrative actions to discipline faculty, staff and student speech in the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk,” the statement reads. “We write to remind leaders of colleges and universities of their fundamental duty to protect academic freedom and the absolute necessity to ensure that the freedom to discuss topics of public import without constraint is not curtailed under political pressure.”
At the prayer vigil, other members of the Pepperdine community praised Kirk’s activisms and made remarks that contrasted with Littlefield’s description of the young conservative’s views.
Katie Zecharia compared Kirk’s assassination to the 1945 execution of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German preacher who defied the Nazi regime, the Pepperdine Graphic reported. Zecharia, a Pepperdine grad who once worked for the university and now serves as an attorney, political analyst and Fox News contributor, challenged those who call Kirk’s rhetoric hateful as she held up a copy of his book, “Right Wing Revolution: How to Beat the Woke and Save the West.”
“This entire book is predicated on taking courage when no one else will, to not be silent in the face of evil, to with great, great consequence and potential for loss of life as we saw him experience, to go and courageously fight the good fight at any cost,” Zacharia said. “As Bonhoeffer said, ‘Silence in the face of evil is evil itself.’”
What do we do (or don’t we do) now?
“What side are we on? Who do you support? Is this about race or culture?”
These questions emerged in the wake of Kirk’s murder, said leaders of the North Colony Church of Christ in a social media post.
The congregation, which meets in the north Dallas suburb of The Colony, Texas, will host a candid, online discussion among ministers for Churches of Christ at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 19.
“In spite of critics, the church is not silent when it comes to political and social controversy that impacts our world,” church leaders said.
Back in Utah, minister Andrew Wheeler is also asking questions.
“What do we do now? How should we respond?” he asked. “It seems a lot of folks are getting the wrong impression of what we should do next. This isn’t the dismal bell-toll warning us of impending civil war. It is not cause for the left and the right to move even further apart. It is a clarion call for unity in the country Charlie Kirk spent his adult life working to bring together.”
Rather than risk “drifting into the divisive negativity that haunts the aftermath of the assassination,” Wheeler recommended that believers take time to learn more about Charlie Kirk and his beliefs, look at relevant Scriptures that discuss loving your enemies (including Matthew 5:43-48) and force themselves to say something nice when tempted to lash out.
This Sunday, Wheeler plans to preach for a small congregation in Delta, Utah. His topic: “The things Jesus didn’t do.”
