Jen Gerson: Finding the Kingdom of Heaven at a Charlie Kirk memorial

There were some genuine notes of grace over those 4.5 hours. But it felt a lot more like revenge than old-timey revival.

By: Jen Gerson

I received a notable email from an old, dear friend this week, appended to news that Jimmy Kimmel had been booted from polite network society after offending his fellow Americans with a poorly timed (and probably inaccurate) joke about Charlie Kirk.

This is what my friend had on her mind: “How much of the right-wing cancel-culture mob is self-aware enough to know that they are behaving the EXACT same way as the left- wing cancel-culture mob?”

This was before Kimmel was reinstated, and after it was decided that the jettisoning of a politically inconvenient performer in the midst of corporate merger talks that would need to be approved by the FCC was too cowardly and crass even for Disney.

“Of course they know,” I wrote back. “This is revenge.”

What’s passing as the American right is, as I write this, adopting every single nasty little tactic that had been normalized and justified by the progressive left over the past five years — the crybullying, the social media snitch tagging, the deplatforming, the emotionally manipulative exaltation of public martyrs. They’re taking all those lessons in enforcing a new social morality, doubling down on them, and then further enshrining the demands of conformity via the power of the state. To all the tired old tricks above, the right is adding arrests and threat thereof, databases of speech and decency code offenders, deportations, and threatening broadcast licenses.

Of course, the right isn’t doing all this in the pursuit of utopian equity, nor for the remediation of past historical sins. No, they’re in it for the highest and noblest of purposes: to serve the Glory of God. Take that, Commies.

It was hard not to think about all of this while watching the memorial for America’s Own Free Speech Martyr Charlie Kirk (™). And I watched all of it. All 4.5 hours, with the red-and-white branding for “Turning Point U.S.A.” emblazoned on the LED screens on the stadium walls as Kirk’s politically well-appointed friends took to the stage, one after the other. Many of them were wearing perfectly matched red ties and blue suits.

My first thought, which I shared with Line co-founder Matt, was that when I get assassinated — and I think the probability of that outcome is going to go way up after daring to speak about Charlie Kirk with even a hint of irreverence — please don’t plaster The Line branding all over my mid-market casket.

(Matt’s response: “I think we both agreed that I’d make the business decisions around here.”)

The second: watching Kirk’s pastor kick off the memorial by trying to peer pressure non-believers to stand up, and then follow the giant QR code on the screen to find true, Bible-following fellowship, was just about enough to send me right back into the ranks of smug materialistic atheism — and, goddammit, I saw an angel not three weeks ago. (On a related note, a few hours of this is probably a better cure for Kundalini Psychosis than Risperidone.)

Look, I take no pleasure in the murder of anybody — least of all a professional provocateur (gulp). I would even go so far as to say that listening to Kirk’s friends and co-workers, I felt a degree of admiration for the man; this was an individual with deep personal, political, and spiritual convictions, and one who was willing to sacrifice an enormous of amount of his time — and even his life — in the pursuit of those convictions.

But I have my convictions too, and those require me to be plain. This wasn’t a memorial service. It was an overt political rally that merged a poisonous strain of Christian Nationalism with right-wing political fanaticism. This was a lot of crass, partisan, will-to-power bullshit dressed up with the sentimentality of a funeral service in a manipulative bid to intimidate and obscure honest appraisal and criticism.

And I will further point out that this tactic is largely working. Few commentators or comedians have been willing to say the obvious: that the MAGA right is doing more than honouring Kirk’s legacy. They’re engaging in a conscious political canonization. They are knowingly coasting off the mythology of the martyrdom stories of Christians thrown to the lions in the first centuries after the death of Christ. And they’re doing it not just for spiritual enrichment, but for worldly aggrandizement. They are fusing faith and politics, cementing a deeply Manichean worldview in which they — the side of all truth, all goodness, and all light — are waging a pitched war against the Satanic Communist hordes seeking to prosecute Christians and pervert the children of America via Hollywood, college campuses, the gays, and all culture writ large.

This isn’t an exaggeration. Speaker after speaker at the Kirk memorial spelled the game out explicitly.

And, by the way, as simplistic and unnuanced as that worldview is, I don’t think it ought to be banned or threatened. Individuals are allowed to believe these things, and to make the case for them accordingly. But as an underlying ethic, this stark dualism just isn’t compatible with a pluralistic democracy.

Whatever his personal convictions once were, Kirk began his career as a conservative crusader espousing a secular worldview. Over the past ten years, those views fell much more in line with ascendant Christian nationalism. To wit: “There is no separation of church and state,” Kirk said on his podcast in 2022. “It’s a fabrication. It’s a fiction. It’s not in the Constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.”

Make the guy a religious martyr to your heart’s content, but stuff like this makes me absolutely leery about regarding him as a holy sacrifice of the free speech kind.

For those of us who have a genuine commitment to free speech, political non-violence, and dialogue, we always run the risk of watching our convictions be hijacked by those who hold deeply illiberal personal agendas. Of course — of course! — that doesn’t mean people who hold those agendas ought to be threatened, harmed, or killed. People are allowed to hold these views. And my own belief in the liberal project requires me to hold a different kind of faith — faith that agendas of conformity and intolerance are not ones that the great mass of people will ultimately choose. It’s a faith that in the long run, human societies do move forward, albeit in fits and starts, and with the occasional backslide.

It’s a faith, I guess, in people — in general if not specific terms.

That’s not to say everything in Kirk’s memorial was bad. There were several speakers, including Eric Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, and even Tucker Carlson, who demonstrated genuine (and sometimes surprising) care and fortitude. Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, entered the stage with clear tears in her voice and her eyes, and forgave her husband’s killer. This was Christian grace at its highest and best.

But when politics took the wheel — and this came early and often — the memorial derailed into something else entirely. A parade of underqualified Trump loyalists jumping on stage, stating Kirk’s martyrdom would save Western civilization, proclaiming their desire to wear the “armour of God” and engage in wholesale “spiritual warfare” and for the life of me, I couldn’t tell who was speaking in metaphor anymore.

Trump took the podium to literal fireworks (another bauble to consider for my own funeral, if whatever heretical church takes ownership of my mortal remains can get the fire code approval).

“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 said. The audience still had enough shame to laugh uncomfortably.

Perhaps right then might have been a good moment to shine that QR code back on the stage. A signal to lost souls looking for real, Bible-believing churches.
The problem here isn’t that I disagree with a lot of this crowd’s stated principles. I don’t believe that words are violence; nor do I believe that violence is an acceptable corrective to bad ideologies. I do believe in freedom of speech. I do think societies are healthier when they foster dialogue and debate and a pluralistic range of views.

The problem is that I don’t believe in these people.

I don’t believe any of these guys when they claim they are fighting for freedom. I think what they are really fighting for is freedom for themselves and themselves alone. And a freedom that doesn’t apply to your opponents, even to the opponents who wish you harm — well, that ain’t freedom. That’s conquest.

The Kingdom of Heaven does not and can never exist here on Earth. We are fallen creatures. Our terrible and ironic fate is to learn that the more zealously we lust for utopia, the more certain we will lose ourselves on the path to hell in the pursuit of that unattainable perfection. It doesn’t matter one bit what version of that heaven we are chasing.

And I think what these people want is a heaven on earth of a degraded kind, the one that grants them certainty to see the world in black and white; the moral clarity that allows them to hate their enemies and to call that hate Christian love. Something about that bothers me more than the hate that doesn’t bother to try to disguise itself from itself. At least hate of the latter kind has the virtue of being honest.

I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps Kirk’s death really will bring about the resurgence of the Old-Time religion, the return of the tent “Revival” his memorial was so consciously and purposefully trying to evoke.

But this doesn’t look like revival to me. To me, it looks like revenge.

---

The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded — no federal subsidy for us! If you value our work, have already subscribed, and still worry about what will happen when the conventional media finishes collapsing, please make a donation today. Please note: a donation is not a subscription, and will not grant access to paywalled content. It’s just a way of thanking us for what we do. If you’re looking to subscribe and get full access, it’s that other blue button!

---

The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Please follow us on social media! Facebook x 2: On The Line Podcast here, and The Line Podcast here. Instagram. Also: TikTok. BlueSky. LinkedIn. Matt’s Twitter. The Line’s Twitter. Jen’s Twitter. Contact us by email: lineeditor@protonmail.com.