Christian nationalists in the US are positioning Charlie Kirk as a martyr for their movement, one that has grown in popularity and whose rise was intertwined with Kirk\u2019s own political ascent.<\/p>\n
After Kirk\u2019s killing, his widow, Erika Kirk, wrote<\/a> on social media that the \u201cworld is evil\u201d, but God \u201cso good.\u201d The \u201csound of this widow weeping [echoes] throughout this world like a battle cry,\u201d she said. \u201cThey have no idea what they just ignited within this wife.\u201d<\/p>\n While Erika Kirk\u2019s private sorrow is no doubt very real, her public remarks are telling, said Jeff Sharlet, the author of several books on Christian nationalism and the far right. \u201cThat\u2019s holy war, that\u2019s accelerationism, and it\u2019s incredibly powerful,\u201d he said, particularly in the emotional context of a grieving widow.<\/p>\n Sharlet noted that although Kirk was best known for his non-religious political organizing, conservative eulogizing has overwhelmingly emphasized that he was a man of faith. Some people have gone further, and characterized Kirk\u2019s death as martyrdom for conservative Christian values.<\/p>\n \u201cWe know that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,\u201d Sean Feucht, a pastor who worked with Kirk and is known for his Christian nationalist views, said in an emotional video on social media. \u201cThe devil is not gonna win. The forces want us to be silent; they want us to shut up \u2026 We need to be more bold.\u201d<\/p>\n Matt Tuggle, a megachurch pastor, posted<\/a> a video of Kirk\u2019s death with the caption: \u201cIf your pastor isn\u2019t telling you the left believes a evil demonic belief system you are in the wrong church!\u201d<\/p>\n The rise of Trump-era Christian nationalism<\/p>\n Kirk\u2019s meteoric career as a pundit and <\/strong>far-right activist was in some ways a microcosm of the rise of Trump-era Christian nationalism. Kirk started as a publicly <\/strong>secular young Republican in the Alex P Keaton mold but came to embrace a strident Christian culture war, <\/strong>speaking<\/a> of a \u201cspiritual battle \u2026 coming to the West\u201d that would pit \u201cChristendom\u201d and \u201cthe American way of life\u201d against leftism and Islam.<\/p>\n Similarly, Turning Point USA, which Kirk founded in 2012, started as a pro-free market organization downstream of the late-2000s Tea Party movement against \u201cbig government\u201d, but by the time of his death he had leaned<\/a> into ideas associated with the Christian right. The organization may have done so because it spotted an opportunity.<\/p>\n Shortly before Donald Trump won his first election to the presidency, the mainstream Christian right was demoralized and open to more extreme and anti-democratic ideas, noted Matthew D Taylor, a scholar of contemporary Christianity<\/a> and the author of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening Our Democracy.<\/p>\n A man wheels a cross past a makeshift memorial for Kirk outside Turning Point USA\u2019s headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona, on 19 September 2025. Photograph: Charly Triballeau\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Christian nationalism is the belief that the US is and should be an explicitly Christian nation. Experts tend to view the ideology as existing on a continuum that ranges from relatively mainstream cultural conservatism to extreme religious supremacy. Defining it is difficult because Christian nationalism is less an organized movement than a tendency or way of thinking, Taylor and others said.<\/p>\n For many years, the Christian right was dominated by groups such as the Moral Majority, which emphasized the idea of organizing Christian voters to democratically achieve conservative outcomes, as well as efforts to train and elevate conservative jurists to influence the federal judiciary.<\/p>\n Yet two electoral victories by Barack Obama and the US supreme court\u2019s 2015 Obergefell ruling, which legalized same-sex marriage across the country, left Christian conservatives feeling that all their efforts were for nothing. Because of changing demographics and the ongoing secularization of society, the number of Americans who identified as Christian was also dropping \u2013 meaning that majoritarian democracy was no longer a reliable political tool for the Christian right.<\/p>\n \u201cThe early summer of 2015 \u2026 was a low point for them,\u201d Taylor said. \u201cThere was this sense of, \u2018What we\u2019re doing is not working. We need someone strong. We need a fighter.\u2019 And it just so happened that Trump kind of appeared on the scene at that moment, and I think that was, in part, the rocket fuel behind his appeal to evangelicals; he said: \u2018I will speak for you. I will defend you. I will give you more power.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Despite occasional misgivings, the Christian right soon enthusiastically aligned with Trump. But when he came into office, Trump did something new: he surrounded himself with Christian advisers from outside the traditional leadership of the Christian right. Led by Trump\u2019s longtime adviser, the pastor Paula White-Cain, his new consiglieres tended to be megachurch preachers who had big followings in their spheres of influence but were viewed as B-list \u2013 or C-list, or D-list \u2013 figures by the conservative Christian political establishment.<\/p>\n White-Cain \u201cwas an independent, charismatic televangelist and megachurch pastor and was on her third marriage, a female preacher, and preached the prosperity gospel,\u201d Taylor said \u2013 in other words, someone with many markers \u201cthat people in the conventional evangelical world would have either labeled heresy or just low-brow\u201d.<\/p>\n \u2018He drew the church into Maga\u2019<\/p>\n After this changing of the guard, there were \u201csome pretty wild and extreme theologies\u201d that gained access to the Trump administration and conservative centers of power, Taylor said, including a far-right movement, popular in some charismatic and Pentecostal circles, that is sometimes called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). The NAR <\/strong>advocates for modern-day apostles and prophets to lead conservative Christians in turning the US into a dominion of Christ on Earth.<\/p>\n The NAR leaders who \u201cattached themselves to Trump and the Maga movement very early on,\u201d Taylor said, \u201chad a vision of social change, of societal conquest, that was far more aggressive than some of the old frameworks of the religious right.\u201d That vision was exciting and politically potent to people including Kirk, who adopted theories and language associated with the NAR.<\/p>\n The NAR has a distinctly minoritarian and anti-democratic valence. Rather than a Christian public lobbying to make government and society reflect its values, NAR ideas argue for Christians to take positions of power and push their values from the top down. A key NAR concept is something called the \u201cseven mountains mandate\u201d \u2013 the idea that \u201cspiritual war\u201d will not succeed until Christians have scaled and conquered seven summits of influence in public life, commonly identified as religion, the government, the media, education, culture, entertainment, and business.<\/p>\n \u201cThe seven mountains, as an ideology, is deeply ambivalent about democracy,\u201d Taylor said. \u201cIf democracy works, and gets you to positions of power, great, but if not, well, God\u2019s will is still for Christians to take over the seven mountains, and they need to do it by whatever means they can.\u201d<\/p>\n The concept of the seven mountains has existed since the 1970s but was popularized in the 2000s, according to Matthew Boedy, a professor of rhetoric at the University of North Georgia and the author of the forthcoming book The Seven Mountains Mandate: Exposing the Dangerous Plan to Christianize America and Destroy Democracy.<\/p>\n Kirk had been an evangelical Christian since childhood but earlier in his career expressed reluctance at politicizing <\/strong>his religious views. That changed during the peak of the early pandemic, when Kirk made the acquaintance of several charismatic megachurch pastors protesting church lockdowns. He began to traffic in ideas influenced by the NAR, <\/strong>including the seven-mountain mandate. Turning Point USA also began to forge partnerships with churches.<\/p>\n Charlie Kirk speaks at AmericaFest in Phoenix on 19 December 2024. Photograph: Cheney Orr\/Reuters<\/p>\n Kirk\u2019s own evolution was striking: he <\/strong>went<\/a> from saying, in 2018, that it was important that Christians respect the separation of church and state to denying that any such separation existed in the US constitution.<\/p>\n Kirk never used the exact phrase \u201cseven-mountain mandate\u201d, Boedy said, but at a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2020 Kirk praised Trump by saying: \u201cFinally, we have a president who understands the seven mountains of cultural influence,\u201d which was one of the most prominent mentions of the concept in the conservative mainstream. <\/strong>Kirk also attended conferences organized around the theme of the seven-mountain mandate.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Seven mountains\u2019 is a kind of weird, wonky theology,\u201d Sharlet said; Kirk \u201cnormalizes it and mainstreams it and smooths it out\u201d.<\/p>\n Kirk understood \u201cthe political and religious baggage that comes with the idea of Christian dominionism, of theocracy,\u201d Boedy believes, and was trying to gently popularize Christian nationalist ideas while avoiding their more <\/strong>negative connotations.<\/p>\n The \u201cAppeal to Heaven\u201d flags<\/a> seen at the January 6 riot and elsewhere are often an NAR symbol. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, has ties<\/a> to NAR circles and flies an Appeal to Heaven flag at his congressional office. <\/strong>Ch\u00e9 Ahn, the Republican candidate for governor of California and a charismatic preacher, is an adherent of NAR and \u201cseven-mountain\u201d ideas.<\/p>\n Kirk was an activist more interested in uniting conservative Christians than representing any one faction or denomination. Yet the NAR might be understood as one of three main currents of hardline contemporary Christian nationalism in the US, Taylor said. The other two streams are radical traditionalist Catholics and a certain aggressively \u201cmasculine\u201d reformed Protestantism embodied in Pete Hegseth<\/a>, the US secretary of defense.<\/p>\n In contrast to the Catholic and reformed Protestant camps, which tend to be very white and male in their leadership and intellectually influential but not widely popular, the NAR has roots in a rapidly growing international charismatic movement that is multi-ethnic, open to women in leadership, and viscerally exciting to rank-and-file churchgoers.<\/p>\n Yet the symbolism and rhetoric of Christian nationalism are also attractive to broad swathes of conservative Americans, including those who are not actively religious, Sharlet noted. Although the Christian nationalism of popular imagination is a strict, Handmaid\u2019s Tale-style piety, he said he often encounters Maga conservatives who are intensely dedicated to Christian nationalist ideas despite the fact that they do not attend church.<\/p>\n \u201cIt wasn\u2019t so much that [Kirk] joined the church as he drew the church into Maga,\u201d Sharlet feels. \u201cAnd I think he made a kind of influencer-lifestyle Christian nationalism that was appealing, that you could adopt [as a] kind of performance without having to change your life too much.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNo civilization has ever collapsed because it prays too much,\u201d Kirk declared<\/a> not long before he died. But he also gestured at a broader and more potent theme: that \u201ca civilization that abandons God will deteriorate and ultimately collapse from the inside out.\u201d<\/p>\n