Charlie Kirk: Part 2: Hero or Heretic?

This question was inspired by the number of people who have commented either that Charlie Kirk was a new Christian hero, or one of the worst heretics of our time. One comment said he was the leader of a cult, and another said “I have a hard time recollecting anyone who has made a bigger impact for good on all of humanity outside of Jesus himself.”

That’s a pretty wide range of opinions there.

So, let’s take them one by one.

Was Charlie Kirk the leader of a cult?

I’m pretty comfortable saying “No” to this one. The primary characteristic of a cult is that there is a leader who demands that every one follow them, that they are the chosen one, that they have all the answers, everyone else is lying, and so forth. Charlie Kirk may have been a lot of things, but I don’t recall him ever drawing attention to himself in that way. I think he argued that he had answers, but not that he was the answer.

I do think one could argue he was in a cult, or at least a cult-like political movement. Clearly Donald Trump does do all of those things listed above, and Kirk certainly was a strong supporter of Trump and his family. He spent a lot of time with Donald Trump Jr in particular, and he did talk about Trump being chosen by God and so forth. So maybe “yes” for that.

Be that as it may, I’m pretty confident saying that Kirk was not the head of a cult per se.

Was Charlie Kirk a Heretic?

This is going to surprise a lot of people who know me (and in light of what I write later), but I again think the answer is “No” here. What is a heretic? It’s someone who believes something that is counter to the teachings of the church.

It’s tough to define “church teaching” here, but I usually refer to the Apostle’s or Nicene Creed. Some of you probably recite those every week in your church service. In general these are the “core” issues the church has agreed are central to Christian belief throughout history. They include God as Creator, Jesus as his only begotten son and redeemer of Man, the Holy Spirit proceeding from…well, let’s not get started on that.

In short, it’s the basic outline of “what does a Christian believe?”

To my knowledge, Charlie Kirk did not believe or teach anything counter to the historic creeds. He did not deny the divinity of Jesus the way, for example, as the Jehovah’s Witness or Arians might. He didn’t claim the Holy Spirit was just a “force.” He didn’t argue for modalism or any of the normal heresies. He didn’t claim that God had given him new revelations about Scripture, or that the Church had been wrong about “something” and he was here to correct it.

As far as I know, going through samples of his teachings and videos, he pretty much stuck to Christian orthodoxy, in the same that Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, Pentecostals, Baptists, and Anglicans all do. That doesn’t mean they agree on everything, but there is a common thread that binds them altogether, and I think overall, Kirk agreed with that thread.

So, no, I don’t think he was a heretic either.

Was Kirk a Hero?

This one’s a little more complicated, especially considering the way he died, but I’m willing to concede a solid “maybe” on this one.

On one hand, he didn’t run into a burning building or jump in front of a bullet or make a choice to put himself immediately in harm’s way. So in that way, I would say he wasn’t a hero in the sense that we would use for firefighters or soldiers. Yes, he was shot, but that wasn’t because he went into a war zone to preach; he was in one of the safest places in one of the safest countries on the planet.

But he did put himself in uncomfortable situations (sort of), and he did things that “represented” people who wanted to do what he did, but were either afraid or less skilled or something. And that takes some courage. So in that way, he was a hero to them. People need someone who stands for them or what they wish they could do, and I think Charlie Kirk was that for a lot of people.

This may sound a little harsh, but I would say he was not a hero for me, but I can accept that he was a hero for some other people.

So what then?

So if he’s none of those things, what do I think he was?

Well, like a lot of people, he was complicated, and I don’t want to boil his life down to a single sentence. But, and you’ll have to bear with me a little bit here, I think the word that best describes him is “Pharisee.”

Now, before you start chucking heavy objects at me, hear me out.

I have a separate article that goes into this in more detail that I will link to once I get it finished, but I think that Pharisees get a lot of bad press in the Bible. We know they’re supposed to be the bad guys, and so we think “obviously that’s not me.” But let’s look at it from the outside a little bit.

Quick History Break

The Pharisees grew out of the Exile and Post-Exilic time periods in Jewish history. Before the exile, the Jews centered their worship of God around the Temple. But what do you do when you can no longer use the temple because the Babylonians have turned it into a pile of ash?

The answer to this was to have people gather once a week, study the word of God, pray together, maybe sing a bit, and have a teacher preach. If that sounds familiar, our modern church services are directly influenced by it. So the Pharisees became the leaders of these local gatherings, even after the temple was rebuilt.

(Just a note, I’m simplifying things a lot here. Lot of scholarly work on this if you want the more accurate version.)

After the temple was rebuilt, the Pharisees asked themselves, “why did God punish us with the Exile?” The answer was simple – because we forgot the Law. So what can we do? Make sure we never forget the Law again. In fact, to make sure we don’t accidentally break the law, let’s add a few “safeguards,” just to keep the people from getting too close to the line.

For example, the Law says to remember the Sabbath. The Pharisees thought, just to make sure no one does that, let’s have a few laws that clarify what you can and can’t do on the Sabbath. Riding a donkey, that’s ok. Carrying a stick to nudge it? Not so much.

We might think these are ridiculous, but don’t we do the same thing? The Bible says not to get too attached to wine, and we say “well, just to make sure, we’ll make it a law to say you can’t have alcohol ever.” Sure, the Bible doesn’t say that, but we’ll just make sure no one accidentally does it.

This is the foundation of fundamentalism. We want to make sure that we don’t accidentally sin, so we create a whole system of “new” sins, and make people follow those. Just to help them out and to make sure we all stay holy enough.

By the time Jesus rolled around, the Pharisees had a pretty extensive list, and Jesus calls them out on it. He tells them their laws are adding to what God said, and it’s a burden that no one could keep.

But hear it from the Pharisees viewpoint – they were striving to follow God’s law so the nation wouldn’t slide into sin, and here comes this guy saying “hey, forget all those laws, just love each other.” I’m sure you can kind of understand their reaction.

And the Pharisees decided: “it’s better that one man die than that the whole nation should perish” (John 11:50). It was better to have a few extra rules and to be a little more aggressive to the “enemy,” if it meant the greater good and maintaining a “spiritual nation” for God to use.

The Mirror

Do you have a little more sympathy for the Pharisees? We don’t really want to, because they’re clearly the ones Jesus is calling out in the Gospels. We don’t want to see ourselves as the bad guys, because we’re clearly more like the disciples, right? But doesn’t their motive sound familiar? What if we’re so busy believing that we aren’t the Pharisees that we miss what they can teach us about ourselves?

Isn’t that what Charlie Kirk was all about? Wasn’t that his well-intentioned motivation? He didn’t want America to be destroyed. How many times did he say “we won’t have a nation anymore” or “they just want to destroy our culture” or “if you don’t stand and fight and save America, who will?” He was driven to recover the “original intent” of the Founding Fathers, as he himself wrote and said many times. He was very strong on social ills – transgenderism, abortion, etc.

And yet like Saul of Tarsus, I fear that Kirk’s good intentions and even commitment to the words of Scripture blinded him to the teachings of Scripture. I worry that the example he set encourages other people to track down and stone Stephens who dare to teach against the “conservative” religious viewpoint. I worry that he was strong on the letter, but “neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness.” (Matthew 23:23)

I worry that in his zeal to create a Christian Nation, he missed out on creating Christians.