Charlie Kirk: Part 3: Is the Church Better or Worse?

This is one of the questions that I ask myself many times – Is what I’m doing making the Church better or worse? Am I drawing people to Jesus? Am I helping the Church, in Jesus’ own words, grow “so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” (John 17:23)

So when people ask me if I think Charlie Kirk has been good or bad for the church, this is the lens I’m looking through. Did the way he lived his life and represented Jesus bring the church closer in unity, or closer to disunity? Did it bring peace? Did it show “love for one another,” in a way that the world would know that we are His disciples?

In my opinion, the answer is “no” to these questions. I do not think he was known for bringing peace. On the contrary, even the people closest to him said he “thrived” in controversy; he loved the in-your-force argument style. And I believe that brings division to the Church as a whole.

One of the major divisions in the Church today is over political parties. Notably, in the United States, this falls along racial lines. As I’ve mentioned many times, 86% of Black evangelicals voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, while 78% of white evangelicals voted for Trump. These are groups of Christians that have nearly all the same beliefs (on average, black evangelicals are slightly more orthodox in their belief than white evangelicals), and yet are strongly divided on partisan voting.

In my own neck of the theological woods, in 2020, 78% of the Assemblies of God voted for Trump, while only 17% of the Church of God in Christ. These are two denominations with even MORE in common – both are Pentecostal denominations founded around the turn of the 20th century with almost identical theological beliefs. So what’s the difference? The COGIC is predominantly a black denomination, and the AoG was historically white (though to be fair, it has grown far more diverse).

Do you see my concern? The church in America is heavily divided along racial and political lines, not theological ones. That means that what we need, in my opinion, is church leaders striving to rise above those conflicts, and bring unity to the church despite our political differences.

Did Charlie Kirk do that? I think emphatically “no.” He clearly saw Democrats as the enemy, and that implies that so many minority Christians are not just differently opinionated, they are immoral. Imagine you are a black Christian in America, who believes the Democratic party is the one who best represents love of neighbor and God’s justice, and then you hear a fellow Christian say things like this:

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Democrats “stand for everything God hates.”

“Hard stop, there is not a single biblical issue guided by God’s law that the Democrat Party embraces.” – Kirk said on Lance Wallnau’s podcast (more on Wallnau in the other article)

“The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.” – The Charlie Kirk Show, 20 March 2024

“The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.” – The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 March 2024

“l[The Left] have always hated this country. They have always had contempt for our history…I’m so sick and tired of saying that the Democrat party and liberals mean well. They do not mean well.” – CPAC 2019

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So I ask you, knowing that the church is divided along racial/cultural lines, knowing that large segments of our brothers and sisters consider themselves Democrats/Left, do you think that this is strengthening the church? Is this bringing us together? Does this unite us in love under Jesus? I would argue that it does not; it simply adds to the division by saying “if you vote for this party, you are unBiblical.” What then?

The Least

As another model for the church, let’s look at Matthew 25:

For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink. I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’ “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’“ He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

It’s hard to talk about the sickness aspect, unless someone knew him personally. I do know that Kirk was strongly against national healthcare, so I guess one can take that for what it is. He argued that 90% of all health issues are related to nutrition and exercise. From what I’ve seen, as far as death’s go, diet/exercise account for about 16%, but I have no idea how one would go about tracking overall health issues. In any case, I would argue that Kirk believed that sickness was an individual’s responsibility. But I’m ready to be corrected if someone has other information to share with me.

What about the prison one? Did Charlie Kirk seem to have compassion on people in prison? To quote one of his own tweets, “Did you know: There are 42,034 illegal immigrants in federal prison. Every single one of them should be deported immediately.”

To me, this does not sound like looking after people in prison. It sounds more like they are a burden to me financially, so let’s kick them out.

What about the stranger? These are some of his comments on immigration:

“America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever.”

“It’s time to ban third-world immigration, legal or illegal. We’ve reached our limit, and we have a huge cultural, educational, housing, financial and essential services problem to fix now because of it. We need a net-zero immigration moratorium with a ban on all third-worlders.”

“The fact that our leaders in both parties are more focused on what’s happening in Ukraine than our southern border is a moral disgrace in our country.”

Note what’s happening here. It’d be pretty hard to argue this is welcoming to the stranger, but even more than that, he’s equating it to a “moral” issue. That is, allowing immigration is not only against policy, it’s immoral. This puts a stronger, and I’d argue more spiritual, bent to the argument, and I think encourages other people in the church to be less welcoming as well.

Theology

In a theological sense, I have some very strong concerns that Kirk believed and promoted an idea called “Seven Mountain Dominionism.” I decided to write a separate article about the Christianity specific concerns I had with Kirk, so that will be in that section, but I’ll mention it here because I think it directly affects the church.

Overall, I think the church has grown more tied to nationalism, more tied to partisanship, more divided, more theologically unsteady and more worldly because of his influence. I mean “wordly” here in the sense of striving to defeat our enemies, win politically, dominate areas of influence and so forth. These are worldy ways of looking at others, not Christlike ways.

I would argue that Charlie Kirk’s promotion of these ideas, barring the stranger, discounting the sick, criticizing the prisoner, and the theological issues I’ll discuss elsewhere, do not strengthen the church’s witness. It looks to me like this is more about taking care of one’s self rather than looking after the other. And looking after the other is specifically what we are called to do.

Therefore, I come to the conclusion that the Church is most likely worse off because of Kirk’s work. I know that this is a harsh assessment, and I know for some people his will be deeply offensive. I understand that Kirk did speak to Biblical issues on occasion, and I’ll address that in a different post. I also understand that there are some people that were personally impacted by his life and witness and grew closer to Jesus because of it.

But overall, by adding to the division within the church and by promulgating unChristlike concern for the Least of these, and by the spread of questionable theology, I think the Church as a whole has a lot of work to do to undo the damage done by Kirk. It’s unfortunate, because I don’t think that was his intention, but I think that will be the result.