It’s okay to mix politics and religion.
T he left knows what it saw at the Charlie Kirk memorial, and it was a clear and present danger to the American republic.
NPR titled an interview with a writer from Christianity Today, “How Charlie Kirk’s memorial service galvanized the Christian nationalism movement.”
A dispatch from The Guardian was headlined, “‘The devil is not gonna win’: how Charlie Kirk became a Christian nationalist martyr.”
Mother Jones declared, “Charlie Kirk’s Memorial Was Christian Nationalism’s Biggest Moment.”
The problem with this is that Christian nationalism, in any meaningful sense, doesn’t exist. It would entail establishing a Christian state to impose Christian values by law, and no one of any consequence favors that.
Saying that we are a Christian nation (meaning that our people were overwhelmingly Christian at our inception, or our Founders thought we needed Christian virtue for the republic to survive) doesn’t count. Neither does trying to elect Christian leaders. Neither does trying to pass laws based on Christian morality. And neither, certainly, does cabinet officials taking about their faith at a memorial service.
Mother Jones was upset that at the service a pastor called for people to accept Jesus and immediately afterwards the National Anthem played — as if patriotism in any proximity to faith is an establishment of religion.
The fact is that what’s most objectionable about Trump’s second term isn’t the runaway Christianity but the effort to wreak revenge on his political enemies through the law and regulatory power. Needless to say, this isn’t a Christian project. Nor are his legally dubious strikes on drug boats in the Caribbean or his questionable deportation of alleged gang members to an El Salvador prison.
Although there are good reasons for Christian conservatives to support the president, Trump has never been a moralizer, and the administration’s emphasis is on strength and fighting our enemies rather than advancing — let alone imposing — a Biblical vision.
Trump is quite open about this. Amusingly, amid all the talk of the Gospel and loving our enemies at the memorial service, Trump stipulated that, actually, he hates his enemies.
George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism was much more Christian, and sure enough, he, too, was called a Christian nationalist. Never mind that Bush wasn’t a nationalist.
The charge of Christian nationalism may be more accurate now in the extremely limited sense that many Trump officials and MAGA figures are nationalists who are Christians or Christians who are nationalists. But they aren’t “Christian nationalists” pursuing a Christian nationalist agenda.
(It was in this sense that Kirk called himself a Christian nationalist, by the way. He said a few months ago: “I’ve never described myself as a Christian nationalist. I’m a Christian, and I’m a nationalist.”)
There’s nothing wrong, or theocratic, about mixing politics and faith. Nearly everyone does it. As NPR reported of Joe Biden in 2020, without any evident sense of alarm, his “speeches are woven with references to God, biblical language or the pope.”
Yes, there was a lot of religion and politics at the Kirk memorial service, but it was a memorial service, and one for a high-profile evangelical who was also a political activist tied into the highest echelons of the current administration.
The key word at the service was “revival,” a phenomenon that is driven from below — by religious passion and conversions — not by government edict.
When Erika Kirk spoke of reaching young men, it was via a Gospel-based message through the culture; she wasn’t advocating new government programs or regulations. The overwhelming sense of the service is that faith is prior to, and more important than, government.
For decades, the media and the left have highlighted a fringe figure or faction here or there to try to prove that the right is really committed to imposing Christian nationalism. But, in the United States of America, such a project would require overturning the Constitution to make for an establishment of religion, and where do we hear anything like that among conservative Christians?
After Kirk’s assassination, some people recalled Ross Douthat’s famous admonition that “if you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.”
Douthat may have been correct, but the reaction to the Kirk memorial service is a reminder that progressives still really dislike the religious right.