On Sunday afternoon, Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated on Sept. 10, stood in front of tens of thousands of mourners in the State Farm Stadium and millions of others on TV and online and did something breathtaking: She forgave the man who murdered her husband.
“I forgive him because it was what Christ did and is what Charlie would do,” she said. “The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the Gospel is love and always love. Love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us.”
The crowd cheered. Watching at home, tears came to my eyes. Erika Kirk personified what it means for a Christian to imitate Christ, and she did so in a moment of maximum stress and pain. Much of the rest of the rally was a worship service — full of Christians expressing love for the Kirk family, grief at his death and hope for eternal life in the world to come.
But not all of the rally was the same. When President Trump and Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff, spoke, the message was different.
Speaking of Charlie Kirk, Trump said, “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. 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.”
Miller, for his part, had his own message for his enemies. Addressing those he said were trying to “foment hatred against us,” he said, “You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred.”
“You are nothing,” he repeated, “You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build.”
It wasn’t as though the crowd cheered Erika Kirk and booed or sat silently when Trump and Miller uttered words of pure hatred. The crowd cheered their comments, too. Particularly disturbing was the crescendo as Miller repeatedly declared other people — human beings whose lives are every bit as precious as those of every person in that stadium — to be “nothing.”
Many people who saw or read about the rally were puzzled by what they perceived as a contradiction. How can you cheer love and hate at the same time? How can you worship Jesus and cheer such a base and gross description of other human beings, people who are created in the image of God?
My reaction was different. Finally, I thought, curious Americans who tuned in got to see MAGA theology more completely — and what they witnessed was the best and worst of MAGA Christianity.
The good is still very good. Erika Kirk’s act of forgiveness should be remembered for a very long time. But MAGA Christianity is also rooted in a dangerous distortion of Christian theology, one that motivates otherwise good people to walk a dark and dangerous path.
To explain, let’s discuss two of the most famous passages in the Bible — Matthew 5 and Romans 13. Matthew 5 contains the beating heart of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. This is where you find the Beatitudes, such as “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” and “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”
The Sermon on the Mount contains the command that Erika Kirk repeated on Sunday, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your father who is in heaven.”
Romans 13 is quite different. In that passage, Paul describes the role of the ruling authorities, and his language is vivid. A ruler, Paul says, “is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.”
As a result, when you watch MAGA Christians cheering Kirk and Trump, they’ll argue that there’s no contradiction at all. Kirk and Trump occupy different roles, and they’re each fulfilling the roles that God intends. Kirk — as an individual — is loving her enemies. Trump and Miller — as the president and one of his chief advisers — are playing their divinely appointed roles as avengers.
There is a kernel of truth here. Properly understood, the passages from Matthew and Romans work together to provide room for both grace and justice. The fact that Kirk forgave her husband’s killer doesn’t mean that the State of Utah should drop murder charges against him. The reality of personal grace does not relieve the state of the obligation to impose punishment and protect its citizens from a dangerous man.
Or, in the context of wartime, there is no inconsistency between a soldier, say, forgiving the Japanese officer who mistreated him when he was a prisoner and yet still believing that the United States of America had no choice but to confront and defeat imperial Japan.
But to look at Romans 13 as excusing Trump is to make what amounts to an astonishing category error, in two ways. First, Scripture could not be more clear that a ruler is obligated to do justice and that the sword (to the extent it should be wielded) exists to protect the innocent, not to punish your enemies.
Consider, for example, the prophet Jeremiah’s admonition to the king of Judah, his officials and even the people who pass through the palace gates: “Do what is just and right. Rescue from the hand of the oppressor the one who has been robbed. Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place.”
Those same themes are present in other verses. For example, in Deuteronomy, Moses describes a God “who is not partial and takes no bribe. He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.”
The objection to Trump isn’t so much that he’s aggressive — Abraham Lincoln was aggressive against the Confederacy, just as Franklin D. Roosevelt was aggressive against the Axis powers — but that he’s malicious and unjust. And when Trump says that he hates his political enemies, it’s a confession that he’s governing through his basest desires.
There are endless examples of Trump’s malice, including a recent Truth Social post in which he declared Senator Adam Schiff, Attorney General Letitia James of New York and James Comey, a former director of the F.B.I., “guilty as hell.” He bragged about firing a U.S. attorney who didn’t do his bidding, calling him “a Woke RINO, who was never going to do his job.”
But God commands both individuals and nations to care for the poor and to treat foreigners with dignity. From start to finish, the Bible condemns corruption and favoritism.
Think of these biblical commands in light of Trump’s actions. Politically biased prosecution decisions and pardons are anathema to any conception of biblical justice; so are brutal deportations without due process; so are violations of constitutional rights; so is killing people without legal justification; so is the abuse of political power for financial gain.
Cheering Trump’s hatred is tantamount to cheering Trump’s corruption and abuse because hatred is at the root of his administration’s poisonous tree.
But that’s not the only theological mistake. You can’t apply Romans 13 to an American president because an American president is not a Roman emperor. He is not our ruler. Yes, he exercises authority, but the sovereign ruler of the American nation is the American people, and our rule is expressed through elections and — crucially — through constitutional law.
Our founders intentionally created a republic that was as different from the Roman Empire as day is from night. When it comes to the obligation to act justly, the buck doesn’t stop with Trump; that responsibility extends to the crowd that cheered for his hate and roared its approval for Miller’s dehumanization project.
If MAGA evangelicals cheer Trump’s hate, if they welcome it, if they adopt it and if they vote for it, then they are responsible for it. His malice becomes theirs.
The bottom line is that American Christians inherit both Scripture’s individual obligation to love their enemies and the national obligation to do justice. That is a high moral calling. Hatred and dehumanization are not viable moral options for us. There is no scenario in which we can cheer for or empower either one.
The opposite is the case. As coequal rulers of this republic — along with people of other faiths or no faith at all — we are not to sit idly by when a president abuses his power. The citizens, including evangelical citizens, have the responsibility to hold Trump accountable for his many grave wrongs. And the singular failure of MAGA Christianity to uphold this biblical obligation has helped unleash Trump’s hatred on our nation.
I hope the lasting legacy of Charlie Kirk’s memorial service is found not in Donald Trump’s hate but in Erika Kirk’s grace. But when grace is relegated to the individual sphere while hate is an element of the political project itself, the results will always be dire.
And so it is today. Countless Americans are enduring Trump’s vengeance. Far too few experience Christian kindness. It is a great tragedy of our time that so many Christians see Trump’s malice as an instrument of God’s divine plan.
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David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
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