A few hours after Charlie Kirk was killed, Sean Feucht, an influential right-wing Christian worship leader, filmed a selfie video from his home in California, his eyes brimming with tears.
The shooting of one of the nation’s most prominent conservative activists, Feucht declared, was no less than “a line in the sand” in a country descending into a spiritual darkness.
“The enemy thinks that he won, that there was a battle won today,” he said, referencing Satan. “No, man, there’s going to be millions of bold voices raised up out of the sacrifice and martyrdom of Charlie Kirk.”
Soon afterward, Pastor Matt Tuggle, who leads the Salt Lake City campus of the San Diego-based Awaken megachurch, posted a video of Kirk’s killing on Instagram, adding the caption: “If your pastor isn’t telling you the left believes a evil demonic belief system you are in the wrong church!”
Kirk’s death has triggered a range of reactions, much of it mournful sympathy for the 31-year-old activist and his family. But it also has sparked conspiracy theories, hot-take presumptions the left was responsible and calls for vengeance against Kirk’s perceived enemies.
At a vigil for Kirk in Huntington Beach this week, some attendees waved white flags depicting a red cross and the word “JESUS,” while some chanted, “White men, fight back!” Kirk spread a philosophy that liberals sought to disempower men, and some of his male supporters see his killing as an attack against them.
Whether the calls for vengeance will ebb or intensify remains to be seen, especially with President Trump’s announcement on Friday that authorities “with a high degree of certainty” have apprehended a suspect in the fatal shooting.
In life, Kirk, 31, spoke of what he called a “spiritual battle” being waged in the United States between Christians and a “Democrat Party that supports everything that God hates.”
In death, Kirk, one of the Republican Party’s most influential power brokers, is being hailed by conservative evangelical pastors and GOP politicians as a Christian killed for his religious beliefs.
Trump called Kirk a “martyr for truth and freedom,” and ordered flags to be flown at half-mast in his honor. He also blamed Kirk’s death on the rhetoric of the “radical left.” Vice President JD Vance, who helped carry Kirk’s casket to Air Force Two, retweeted a post Kirk wrote on X last month reading, “It’s all about Jesus.” And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, quoting Jesus, wrote on X: “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
Experts on faith and far-right extremism say they are troubled by the religious glorification of Kirk in this era of increased political violence — and the potential vengeance that may spring from it. The activist’s death, they say, seems to have ignited various factions on the right, ranging from white supremacists to hard-core Christian nationalists.
“The ‘spiritual warfare’ rhetoric will only increase,” and Kirk is now being lifted up as “a physical manifestation” of a religious battle, said Matthew Boedy, a professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of North Georgia, who has written a forthcoming book about Christian nationalism that prominently features Kirk.
“Spiritual warfare rhetoric was a big part of January 6,” he said of the deadly 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters. “Making a martyr out of Charlie Kirk will change our nation in severe ways.”
Samuel Perry, a sociologist at the University of Oklahoma and expert on Christian nationalism, said he is a Christian himself but that religion, cynically used, “has the potential to amplify what would otherwise be very secular political conflicts between Democrats and Republicans.”
“What if those are amplified with a cosmic and ultimate significance?” he said. “It becomes, ‘This is God vs. Satan. This is angels vs. demons — and if we lose this next election, we plunge the nation into a thousand years of darkness.’ … It basically provokes extremism.”
Feucht, a Christian nationalist and failed Northern California Republican congressional candidate, said “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church” and that, in the wake of Kirk’s death, “we have to do something.”
Kirk — who rallied his millions of online followers to vote for Trump in the 2024 election — declared that God was on the side of American conservatives and that there was “no separation of church and state.” He was also known for his vitriol against racial and religious minorities, LGBTQ+ people, childless women, progressives, and others who disagreed with him.
Kirk called transgender people “a throbbing middle finger to God.” He said the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was “a huge mistake” and called the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “awful.” On his podcast, he called with a smirk for “some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area who wants to really be a midterm hero” to bail out of jail the man who attacked former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer in their home in 2022.
In 2023, Kirk sat on the stage of Awaken Church in Salt Lake City and said: “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the 2nd Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”
Two days before his death, Kirk retweeted a video of himself saying a “spiritual battle is coming for the West,” with “wokeism or marxism combining with Islamism” to go after “the American way of life, which is, by the way, Christendom.”
Perry said, “There’s no need to whitewash the legacy of Charlie Kirk.”
“This is a tragedy, and no one deserves to die this way,” Perry said. “Yet, at the same time, Charlie Kirk is very much part of this polarization story in the U.S. who used quite divisive rhetoric, us vs. them, the left is evil.”
Perry noted that Kirk’s Turning Point USA had placed him on its Professor Watchlist, a website that says it aims to expose professors “who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda.” The entry on Perry flags him for “Anti-Judeo-Christian Values.”
Kirk was killed by a single sniper-style shot to the neck Wednesday during an outdoor speaking event at Utah Valley University.
Some of Kirk’s most prominent evangelical followers have said his death represents an attack on conservative Christian values and that he was gunned down for speaking “the truth.”
Jon Fleischman, Orange County-based conservative blogger and former executive director of the California Republican Party, who started out as a conservative college activist, knew Kirk and said “there is one hell of a martyr situation going on.”
“A lot of people are getting activated and are going to walk the walk, talk the talk, and give money as their way of trying to process and deal with losing someone they care about,” he told The Times.
In recent years, Kirk had become more outspoken about his Christian faith. He founded the nonprofit Turning Point USA in 2012 as an avowedly secular youth organization and became known for his college campus tours, with videos of his debates with liberal college students racking up tens of millions of views.
But in 2020, during the start of the pandemic, college campuses closed. Kirk started speaking at churches that stayed open in violation of local lockdown and mask orders, including Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Ventura County, which was led by Pastor Rob McCoy, a former Thousand Oaks mayor.
McCoy is now the co-chair of Turning Point USA Faith, which encourages pastors to become more politically outspoken. McCoy, who could not be reached for comment, wrote in a statement that Kirk “never used violence but was threatened every day with violence by those who couldn’t contend with logic and truth.”
Professor Boedy said McCoy turned Kirk toward Christian nationalism, specifically the Seven Mountains Mandate — the idea that Christians should try to hold sway over the seven pillars of cultural influence: arts and entertainment, business, education, family, government, media and religion.
Christian nationalism, which is rejected by mainline Christians, holds that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that the faith should have primacy in government and law.
Brian Levin, founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism and a professor emeritus at Cal State San Bernardino, said, “the more violent fringes of Christian nationalism has disturbing aspects that are eliminationist and anti-democratic.”
He noted that some of the same Christian nationalists and white supremacists who are now calling Kirk a martyr already deified Trump, especially after he survived two assassination attempts on the campaign trail last year and said he had been “saved by God to make America great again.”
Levin said many Christian nationalists portray Trump as “an armed Christian warrior protecting America from a disturbing assortment of immigrants, religious minorities, genders and sexual orientations.” And so, when he uses martyr language to describe Kirk, his adherents latch on.
“Where do martyrs come from? From violent conflicts and wars,” Levin said. “The fact of the matter is that this is a moment that Trump could have more effectively seized, but he veered into divisive territory.”
California Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones (R-Santee) also called Kirk “a modern-day martyr.” In a statement, Jones quoted Thomas Jefferson, who said, “ the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
He wrote: “Let us take care that we allow that tree to grow and blossom as it feeds on the lifeblood of Charles J. Kirk in the years to come.”
Times staff writer Seema Mehta contributed to this report.
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