By Nick Catoggio
Monday, September 22, 2025
I didn’t watch Charlie Kirk’s funeral. With most of the
executive branch scheduled to speak, I thought it was destined to be a fash-ier version of Paul
Wellstone’s infamous memorial service. Demagogues are always looking for
opportunities to demonize their opponents, and a martyred ally’s nationally
televised send-off is a hell of an opportunity.
Funerals should comfort the anguished. A political
movement whose cardinal rule is that conciliation
is for the weak could not rise to that occasion, I believed, and I was
right.
Stephen Miller sounded like Stephen Miller.
Tucker Carlson told the audience that Jesus was killed by “a bunch of guys
eating hummus,” a pungent spin on blame for the crucifixion given his focus
lately on Charlie
Kirk’s views of Israel. Then the president came onstage and—well, we’ll
come back to that.
The funeral was what I thought it would be. Until Erika
Kirk spoke, and then it was something else.
“My husband Charlie, he wanted to save young men, just
like the one who took his life,” she told the mourners.
“On the cross, our savior said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what
they do.’ That young man, I forgive him.”
The last place you would look for grace in American
public life in 2025 is at a Republican political rally, especially one where
the usual lust for ruthlessness has been juiced by wrath and grief. For Mrs.
Kirk to muster it in this setting, at this moment, despite the singular anguish
with which she’s been burdened, felt almost miraculous even to a non-believer
like me.
“The answer to hate is not hate,” she went
on. “The answer we know from the gospel is love and always love, love for
our enemies and love for those who persecute us.”
Erika Kirk set a stellar moral example yesterday despite
immense emotional and political temptation to be vindictive. All but uniquely
for a MAGA Republican, her country is better today for her public influence.
Then the president spoke.
“He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for
them,” Donald Trump said of
Charlie Kirk, seemingly praising the dead. Then he veered off-script: “That’s
where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best
for them. I’m sorry. I am sorry, Erika.”
He joked that maybe she could convince him that hating
one’s enemies isn’t right, which turned her moving statement of Christian
witness into a set-up for a punch line. The crowd laughed.
When it was over, Mrs. Kirk embraced him.
I’ve heard of political “big tents,” but I’ve never heard
of one big enough to accommodate two moral systems that aren’t just
contradictory but irreconcilable. “Christ’s message, followed by its very
antithesis,” philosophy professor Edward Feser wrote
of the contrast between Kirk’s and Trump’s remarks. “It’s almost as if the
audience is being put to a test.”
Almost, yeah.
It’s been many years since I read the gospels, but I do
remember Matthew 6:24:
“No one can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or
be devoted to one and despise the other.” That’s the test. Many American
Christians, possibly including Erika Kirk, seem to reject the premise.
An eye for an eye.
A few hours before the funeral, the New
York Times published an interview with her that ended with Kirk
contemplating capital punishment for her husband’s killer. “I told our lawyer,
I want the government to decide this,” she said. “I do not want that man’s
blood on my ledger. Because when I get to heaven, and Jesus is like: ‘Uh, eye
for an eye? Is that how we do it?’ And that keeps me from being in heaven, from
being with Charlie?”
In hindsight, that was a preview of her eulogy. Erika
Kirk is serious enough in her faith to distinguish its moral demands from the
political demands of her tribe and to prioritize the former when the two
conflict. That’s not unusual among religious conservatives who’ve grown
disaffected with the postliberal GOP and drifted away, but for a prominent
Trump ally who’s now a major MAGA figure in her own right, it’s extraordinary.
What struck me about what she said, though, were the
words she attributed to her savior. “An eye for an eye” is so repugnant to
Christianity as a moral ethos, in Kirk’s view, that those who follow it risk
being denied salvation. Jesus himself will hold it against you when you’re
judged.
But as it happens, “an eye for an eye” is the
president’s favorite Bible verse. And he lives his faith: As Feser explained,
Trump believes so deeply in revenge that he’s boasted of ending friendships
with people whom he deemed “weak” for declining to retaliate against others who
wronged them. Like Erika Kirk did in her eulogy.
His administration was organized around the idea of
taking “retribution”
on those who cross him, and it’s making good on that promise. The day before
Kirk’s funeral, a U.S. attorney in Virginia resigned
because the president was set to fire him for not filing bogus criminal charges
against a political enemy, New York Attorney General Letitia James. Later Trump
posted an open
message to Attorney General Pam Bondi on Truth Social hinting that she,
too, might be sacked unless she moves quickly to exact a little prosecutorial
retribution by charging James, Sen. Adam Schiff, and former FBI Director James
Comey with … something.
An eye for an eye is precisely “how we do it” in this
government, to borrow Kirk’s phrase. How do she and others justify aligning
themselves with that political ethos when it conflicts so sharply with the
ethos of their faith?
The pat answer to that will be that one should render
unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s. We don’t expect our
government to turn the other cheek when America is attacked, for example, or to
refuse to guard its borders because foreigners are God’s children too. Once you
accept the concept of a nation, you’re forced to accept that sustaining it will
require the nation’s priorities to diverge from religion’s priorities and
therefore that policy will need to diverge somewhat from ethical Christian
behavior. The state turning some people away at the border is different from a
church turning those same people away at the door.
Diverge—but not directly contradict. Many pro-life
conservatives refuse to support Democrats because the left’s permissive
political ethos on killing innocent life in the womb conflicts too sharply with
their own moral ethos that life is sacred. “Rendering unto Caesar” isn’t an
excuse to compartmentalize one’s faith from one’s politics so hermetically that
you end up voting for the opposite of your religious convictions.
But that’s what we saw on Sunday in Arizona. Erika Kirk
said, “The answer to hate is not hate.” Donald Trump said that it is, at least
for him. Kirk evangelized for Christianity. Trump evangelized for what can only
be described as anti-Christianity. In fact, I’ve made the case before that
Trumpism is less an ideology or an approach to governance than a
new (or very old) morality for 21st-century right-wingers. This is from
May:
It’s too dependent on the
president’s daily whims to be a coherent political program, but its moral
vision is clear and consistent: “Strength” is the cardinal virtue and
unapologetic ruthlessness
in advancing one’s interests is the way in which that virtue is practiced.
I wouldn’t equate it with “might makes right” because it expresses no interest
in the concept of “right,” only in what might be gained in any situation.
We could summarize it as “Do unto
others whatever you think you can get away with doing.” It’s a genuinely
Nietzschean, will-to-power rebuttal to conventional Christianity, a
bona fide anti-morality that regards empathy
as weakness. It resembles a religious cult in its authoritarian demands for
absolute loyalty and obedience more so than a political movement.
And there it was, on display at Charlie Kirk’s funeral.
The president wasn’t merely incapable of emulating Erika Kirk’s grace, he
regarded what she said as so immoral—according to his own anti-morality—that he
felt obliged to rebuke it. At a funeral service. For her dead husband.
What on earth is she still doing in his movement? How
much rendering unto Caesar are good Christians obliged to do when Caesar is out
there every day, by deed and now by word, trying to convince Americans that
Christian morality is for suckers?
No one can serve two masters.
Turning point.
But I’m guessing that Erika Kirk will try.
In addition to being a devout believer, a widow, and a
mother to two very young children, she’s the new leader of her husband’s group,
Turning Point USA. Few conservatives in the United States will have as much
political influence as she does in that job, especially over younger adults.
She’s also the most sympathetic Republican in the country
and may remain that way for a long time. (How many sympathetic Republicans are
there in 2025, really?) Politicians will beg for her endorsement. Right-wing
media outlets will scramble to provide her with a platform. And because of the
ordeal she’s suffered and the moral authority she established for herself in
Sunday’s eulogy, she’ll be free to speak her mind to an unusual degree for a
member of Donald Trump’s party. In a party of boorish self-styled “fighters,”
no one will want to fight with Erika Kirk.
Which master will she serve in exercising that freedom?
If Republicans lose the midterms next fall and the
president bellows that the vote was rigged—and he will—how will Turning Point
navigate that moment? Is “thou shalt not bear false witness” the highest
priority in that situation, or is it spreading the conspiratorial gospel of
Donald Trump?
If news breaks that the president’s immigration czar was
caught on tape accepting
a bag of money in return for a promise to steer government contracts to
shady businessmen, what’s the appropriate takeaway? Is it that stealing is
wrong, a Christian moral belief? Or is it “We DO NOT CARE”
because one’s political allies should have carte blanche to behave immorally, a
Trumpist anti-Christian conviction?
Erika Kirk surprised us (or me, anyway) by serving the
better master of the two before her on Sunday. She could do meaningful good for
America by using her access to the president to continue in that vein, pushing
him in more conciliatory directions. She told the Times
that when she spoke to him after Charlie’s death, she said, “My husband just
loved conversing with you and using you as a sounding board for all sorts of
things. Could we continue that?” Trump agreed. It’ll be good to have a real
Christian in his ear.
But as her role in politics becomes less private and more
public, she’ll face the same pressure Charlie Kirk did to satisfy a populist
audience that wishes to be told, and told and told and told, that its enemies
are unforgivable. If she insists on giving them Christian morality when they’re
clamoring for Trumpist anti-morality, many will be dissatisfied. Turning
Point’s influence might slip. Charlie’s legacy has been betrayed, disgruntled
fans might tell her.
So my guess is that she’ll do what most Christians have
done since 2015. She’ll compartmentalize ruthlessly. Thou shalt not lie, but
it’s fine for Trump to squeal about rigged elections because maybe it’s not a
lie? Bribe-taking by public officials is bad, but the “deep state” is worse. We
shouldn’t be blowing
up foreigners illegally on the off chance that they’re drug dealers, but
doing so might at least deter some actual drug dealers. We probably shouldn’t
have doomed
tens of thousands of impoverished Africans to die by cutting the equivalent
of a nickel from the federal budget, but saving money is always nice.
Christian and anti-Christian: You can serve two
masters, perhaps, if you don’t think too hard about what each is asking of you.
The rise of Christian nationalism proves that Jesus was right, that by trying
to serve both you’ll inevitably end up more devoted to one than to the other,
but many people have convinced themselves since 2015 that there’s no direct
contradiction between
Christ’s teachings and a politics that glorifies ruthlessness and tribalism.
And the president’s political capital depends on retaining their support.
Erika Kirk may be unusually valuable to him in that
regard. Watching them hug on Sunday after he’d repudiated her call for
forgiveness seemed to signal that even the most heartfelt Christian believers,
fresh from a moment of supreme grace, should feel no qualms about embracing a
radically anti-Christian politics. If Mrs. Kirk can separate her fervent moral
beliefs from her political loyalties to remain on the team, so can you.
It’s similar to the role that legacy right-wing media has
played in the GOP since 2016, providing ideological cover for grassroots
Reaganites to stick with the party amid their queasiness about Trump’s agenda.
If the president is conservative enough to satisfy most conservative pundits,
he should be conservative enough for you. And if he’s moral enough to satisfy
Erika Kirk, a person who follows Jesus’ example closely enough to absolve her
own husband’s assassin, he’s got to be moral enough for you as well.
Having her on their side to provide that sort of
benediction may come in especially handy to the White House as it leans into
free-speech crackdowns, abusive prosecutions, historically
spectacular graft, and intimidation as the central means of political
influence in the United States. Trump’s politics boil down to the proposition
that, indeed, no one can serve two masters, and the master that Americans
should be serving is him.
It’s a very big tent indeed that can fit Christianity and
anti-Christianity. There’s a place of honor reserved inside for Mrs. Kirk if
she wants it.
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