Eight years ago, religious conservatives made a bargain with Donald Trump, accepting the leadership of a flagrant immoralist as the price of protection against a then-ascendant-seeming secular progressivism. The agonies involved in this political compromise fractured churches, divided pundits and seemed to introduce a further crisis into an American Christianity already dealing with scandal, disaffection and decline.
But today conservative Christians are eager to tell a different story, and Charlie Kirk’s memorial service on Sunday — a gathering of political figures where politics was subordinated to preaching, culminating in Erika Kirk’s extraordinarily moving message of forgiveness for her husband’s killer — was a stage for a narrative of revival, recovery, conversion, Christian strength.
Trump was there, of course, and still very much his un-Christian self. (His off-script comments about his inability to feel anything but hatred for his own enemies were funny in the Trumpian way, but also plainly true.) But the idea that the future belongs to a post-Christian right, a subject we’ve considered in this newsletter, seemed not just absent but almost absurd, as the leaders of the Republican Party lined up for a memorial that doubled as an evangelical revival, complete with altar calls.
Religious history invites us to expect the unexpected, and there’s no reason to rule out a future where Kirk’s martyrdom provides the impetus for a genuine revival. The story of the last five years, at least in my reading of the religious tea leaves, is one of secularization arrested, and a culture reconsidering religion — but not yet becoming notably more religious. That’s an equilibrium that could be tipped by dramatic events or examples, and to the extent that Kirk is remembered and emulated primarily for his faith, maybe we’ve just seen a tipping point.
In this scenario, rather than being a harbinger of a paganized American future, Trump himself would be seen as a transitional figure, an agent of destabilization who delivered the coup de grâce to the nostalgia-driven moralism of religious conservatism 1.0 while clearing the ground for religious conservatism 2.0, a more intentional and mission-driven and post-secular formation. In which case the Christian right’s bargain with Trumpism would look less corrupting and more necessary, in the strange ways that Providence writes straight with crooked lines.
But any Christian envisioning such a revival should keep other scenarios in mind. The Kirk service was more religious than political, the posthumous portrait of the slain father and husband emphasizing his faith over his political activism — but his memorial was still a fundamentally right-wing and Republican affair. It was a statement of evangelical resilience and an indicator of enduring religious influence within the G.O.P. (something that was by no means guaranteed a decade ago). But controlling a political coalition is not the same thing as converting a culture, and indeed the two can often be at odds.
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