Charlie Kirk has been turned into the first martyr of the MAGA faith. And this matters because it is martyr veneration that helped both Christianity and Islam transform from small local movements centered on charismatic preachers into global religions. In launching its own martyrs, MAGA may be moving from a movement focused on one beguiling leader in the person of Donald Trump to a broader faith that could outlast him.
Since the assassination, a variety of MAGA-foe pundits have compared the MAGA response to Kirk’s murder — including Stephen Miller’s convenient claim that Kirk’s last message to him was a call to “dismantle the radical Left” — to the response to the killing of Horst Wessel, a German Nazi murdered by two members of Communist Party of Germany in 1930. In the hands of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, Wessel’s death became a rallying cry, and Wessel himself a heroic martyr whose death symbolized the Nazi struggle against Communism. Goebbels had Wessel mythologized through songs, rallies, and public ceremonies, creating a cult around him that galvanized support for the Nazi movement.
The comparisons to Horst Wessel are not without merit. His death was a major boon for Nazi propaganda, just as Kirk’s death has given MAGA and the Trump administration proximate cause to escalate attacks on their political adversaries. But those comparisons miss something crucial. Goebbels himself was consciously drawing on an earlier model, and it is that model, the Late Antique cult of the martyrs, that the MAGA faithful are now, consciously or not, also invoking.
Until now, the evangelical Christianity that Kirk embraced — and still the default mode of worship for American Christian nationalists — has had only a tenuous relationship with martyrdom. There have been powerful stories, to be sure: Cassie Bernall, the teenager at Columbine who supposedly declared her faith before being shot, or John Allen Chau, the young missionary killed on North Sentinel Island. But these episodes are remembered as isolated moments of witness-inspiring stories of faith, rather than built into an ongoing culture of veneration as evidenced by the official support for the efforts to celebrate Kirk’s memory, including from the president of the United States. Evangelicals have often been suspicious of martyr-saints in part because this brand of martyr veneration smacks of “works” and Catholic hagiography rather than the Evangelical emphasis on personal salvation.
That reluctance has been a weakness, because martyrs inspire the faithful, galvanize movements, and spread a message far more effectively than any sermon. After all, what better evidence of truth than that there were hundreds, nay thousands, prepared to die in witness to that truth?
In fact, while it is now common to claim that Christians were relentlessly persecuted by the Roman Empire, in recent years this idea has been widely challenged. Scholars like Candida Moss have convincingly argued that while individual Christians were persecuted and occasionally killed for their beliefs, the idea of persistent and widespread persecution was largely an invention of Christians themselves. Researchers have argued that stories of Christian persecution were insidiously crafted not just to inspire the faithful, but also to silence and shame nonconformists and keep the churches funded.
In a similar vein, the MAGA movement, ever resourceful and idiosyncratic, has seemingly turned to the medieval Christian traditions, creating a martyr who would be at home in any sixth-century book or church. And as MAGA’s first martyr, the myth being crafted around Kirk both mirrors that of earlier religions’ martyrs while still bearing the unique marks of the MAGA faith, including the reshaping of the Pentecostal Kirk into a generic “Christian,” who really loved America, by the way.
How to create a martyr
On September 9, Kirk had been a member of the MAGA manosphere, a community college dropout who argued with college students. The co-founder and face of the conservative activist group Turning Point USA, Kirk entered the national political scene as a teenager. At that time, he was part of what was even then a dying breed of secular American conservative, and, at least publicly, did not show much interest at all in religion, except to urge his fellow conservatives to respect the separation of church and state. Then, in 2021, Kirk partnered with Rob McCoy, the senior pastor of Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Thousand Oaks, California, to found TPUSA Faith, a faith-based version of Turning Point. This was part of an increasingly religious tenor in Kirk’s public statements and views; however, on September 9, few would have thought of Kirk as primarily — or even particularly — a religious figure.
Yet, the moment he was pronounced dead that began to change: Alongside portrayals of Kirk as a defender of free speech, there was the explicitly religious veneration and storytelling. All over the MAGA internet, and even in reactionary circles abroad, people said: Kirk was an evangelist, even a modern-day John the Baptist. His death will be the impetus for revival. Mainstream media repeated the claim that Kirk wanted Christianity to be his legacy. And official White House social media, too, referred to his memorial as a “revival.” The hagiography of Charlie Kirk had begun.
It’s especially clear that Kirk is being made into a martyr for the MAGA movement because he’s being celebrated as a generic “Christian.” In the process, his real religious background is blurred or even completely ignored. Kirk’s wife, Erika, is a Roman Catholic and Kirk has had nice things to say both about Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians. But make no mistake: Charlie Kirk himself, to the extent he had developed an adult religious identity over the past five years, was a Pentecostal, a particularly evangelical brand of Christianity.
Yet that hasn’t stopped both the reactionary American Catholic Cardinal Timothy Dolan from comparing Kirk to a “modern-day St. Paul.” Nor, most bizarrely of all, has it prevented Metropolitan Tikhon Shevkunov, an influential bishop in the Russian Orthodox Church known as “Putin’s Confessor,” from calling Kirk’s death “martyric” and declaring that Kirk “is truly effective in missionary work.” On social media and message boards, traditionalist Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians have declared with certainty that Kirk would have converted to their favored church if only permitted to live a bit longer, he was “interested” after all, although he never gave any real indication of any pending conversion (and many evangelical influencers have pushed back against this idea). It is a blurring of lines Kirk might have approved of. He has an upcoming book advocating that Christians adopt the Jewish practice of keeping the Sabbath, putting him in a long line of evangelicals who co-opt Jewish practice to their own ends.
The conflation of Kirk’s religious identity, both by him and his would-be hagiographers, makes most sense when placed within the larger story of how MAGA is remaking religion itself. For decades, the religious right sought to apply Christian scripture to American life; they were traditionalists, often theocrats, who wanted the law to conform to the church. But Trump’s new religious right reverses that relationship. In this movement, theology is bent to serve the nation, and churches exist to strengthen an America defined by nationalism, whiteness, and loyalty to Trump. The Religious Liberty Commission — packed not with the mainline Protestants that have dominated American religious life but with evangelicals, conservative Catholics, Orthodox Jews, and even Muslim converts — makes this explicit: It is not doctrine that binds them but a shared sense of cultural siege.
That is why Kirk’s memory works best for the movement if he is treated not as a Pentecostal, but as a generic “Christian” and specifically as a Christian whose Christian faith was explicitly tied to the MAGA cause. Theological specifics — once so divisive between Catholics, evangelicals, and Orthodox — matter far less than political utility. In a movement that builds theology to fit politics, Kirk can be cast as an evangelical evangelist, a Catholic saint, or even a hero for Russian Orthodoxy, because the point is not religious accuracy but political cohesion.
And frankly, the generalization of Kirk’s religious identity is only possible because he was part of the MAGA faithful and came to his faith that way. Thus, it was a “MAGA Christianity.” Take, for example, Kirk’s praise of the role of the Virgin Mary in Catholicism, which Catholics and Orthodox have cited as proof he would have eventually joined them. Kirk had not come to believe in the intercessory powers of Mary or been bowled over by the countless Marian miracles that dot the history of Christianity. No, Kirk thought the veneration of Mary was an antidote to “toxic feminism,” teasing in his noncommittal way it might even be enough to make him convert.
Medieval at the memorial
Oddly, those social media commentators desperate to be Kirk’s co-religionists might be on to something. On the surface, the memorial for Kirk on Sunday in Arizona has largely been noted for its evangelical character. And it is true, the event had contemporary Christian worship music and plenty of pleas for people to “read their Bibles,” subtle hints to experience the personal conversion at the heart of evangelicalism. But these aspects of evangelical worship and theology have long found their way into other parts of Christianity. Charismatic Catholics exist. And what took place at Kirk’s memorial, from the speeches to the memorabilia, was not simply evangelical enthusiasm. It echoed much older patterns, drawn straight out of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, eras that predate evangelicalism altogether.
First, there is the much-discussed contrast between the speeches given by Erika Kirk and Donald Trump. As many progressive commentators have pointed out, Erika Kirk said she forgave her husband’s killer. She was followed by the president, who immediately called for revenge. Both drew applause from the crowd.
This may simply reflect an audience willing to cheer anything, but it also echoes the world of the medieval saint. In that world, the virtuous woman, often a virgin or widow, pleads for mercy and forgiveness for the saint’s persecutors, while the strong Christian king seeks vengeance. The idea was central to medieval notions of queenship. It is a model that allows the language of Christian mercy to coexist with the harsh realities of authoritarian rule, which is exactly what MAGA is aiming for. It was also a model that allowed for women to have a significant public role while not transgressing normative ideas of femininity. Say, for example, Erika Kirk becoming the CEO of Turning Point USA.
Then, there’s the merch: hats, T-shirts, and cups sold bearing images of Kirk with a halo above his head or walking hand in hand with Christ in paradise; these would find more home in medieval Catholicism than among idol-fearing Evangelicals. These are all part of medieval Christianity, a pre-evangelical way of making and celebrating a martyr. It is a way of celebrating the saints that the evangelicals of the MAGA faith have seemingly embraced, a part of Catholicism they have embraced despite the theological contradictions.
The earliest Christians celebrated the Eucharist over the tombs of martyrs. To this day, the relics of saints are buried in the altars of Orthodox and Catholic churches. That is how central the cult of the martyrs was to the early Christian churches’ self-understanding, even if most of the stories were simply made up. Today, the religious movement that is being built in America at this moment is as dangerous and unprecedented as its new politics. And, just like Christianity two millennia ago, this new MAGA faith is going to need martyrs for all the reasons Christianity did: to inspire the faithful, punish dissenters, and keep the money flowing.
Martyrs made Christianity more than a small sect that would soon die out like so many before and after it; they made it a religion, offering the movement the political tools to grow and consolidate. The MAGA movement has, consciously or not, learned from this history.
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