C2025-09

Two versions of Christianity battle for America’s soul Charlie Kirk’s memorial showed how politics is reshaping the faith.

September 29, 2025 at 6:45 a.m. EDTToday at 6:45 a.m. EDT 9 min

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(Washington Post illustration) There are two forms of Christianity pulling American politics in opposite directions. Oddly enough, the moment that might define the faith’s political future happened not in a church but in a football stadium. At Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, tens of thousands of mourners witnessed something extraordinary: the explicit theological division of the American right. On one level, they saw faith calling for forgiveness and loving one’s enemy. But they also saw a faith that weaponizes politics through righteous anger — and the chasm between them might be unbridgeable.

Two of the speeches offered a stark contrast. Erika Kirk, the slain conservative activist’s widow, delivered the service’s most powerful moment. Standing before a crowd that included President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, she channeled Jesus’ words from the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Then, she applied them directly to her husband’s killer. “That man — that young man — I forgive him. I forgive him because it was what Jesus did and is what Charlie would do.”

When Trump appeared onstage afterward, he looked out at that same crowd and rejected Erika Kirk’s Christian witness: “[Charlie] did not hate his opponents; he wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.”

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Here was a disagreement over political strategy. It was also much more than that. This was one of Christianity’s deepest theological questions playing out in real time: Can one turn the other cheek and still engage in the combative work of democratic politics? And more to the point: Why do so many Christians seem indifferent to one of Christ’s core teachings: of elevation of the weak over the strong, of virtue over power.

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Follow For those of us who are not Christian, the contradictions of American Christianity can be puzzling. As someone who has spent considerable time thinking about how my own religion, Islam, engages with modern politics — often uncomfortably so — I’ve come to appreciate what Christian political philosopher Samuel Kimbriel told me recently: “Christianity tends to be fighting at a deeper level than Islam — it’s just extremely awkward at human politics.” This awkwardness, he suggested, manifests in contradictory ways, “sometimes ending up in these quasi-authoritarian arrangements of authority, other times in bloodless self-conflicted liberalism, and other times in Anabaptist-style pacifism.”

The stadium that day offered a case study in this awkwardness. On one side stood Erika Kirk, embodying Christianity’s radical call to both forgive and love one’s enemies — a witness so pure it was almost otherworldly. It takes seriously Jesus’ command to bless those who curse you and to respond to evil with sacrificial good. This is the Christianity of the early martyrs who grew the church through preaching and example rather than conquest, seeing themselves as exiles and strangers in a fallen world.

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The second Christianity, embraced by Trump and amplified by other speakers, described Charlie Kirk’s assassination as part of an epic battle between forces of light and darkness. Echoing a verse from the Book of Ephesians, podcaster Jack Posobiec asked the crowd, “Are you ready to put on the full armor of God and face the evil in high places and the spiritual warfare before us?” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared, “This is not a political war, it’s not even a cultural war. It’s a spiritual war.” These are not careless remarks or mere metaphor. They represent the intentional framing of politics as religious combat, in which political opponents are seen as demonic forces requiring defeat rather than conversion.

What struck me weren’t just the theological contradictions but the way each side seemed to acknowledge that standard democratic politics couldn’t contain their deepest commitments. Erika Kirk’s forgiveness was beautiful because it seemed so removed from our polarized politics. Trump’s language of political warfare is compelling to many Americans — including the growing ranks who identify as Christian but do not attend church or pray regularly — precisely because it abandoned any pretense of Christ-like transformation, favoring a weaponized Christianity characterized by tribal loyalty and blood-and-soil nationalism.

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The day before Kirk’s memorial, Hegseth encapsulated this muscular, martial Christianity when he shared a promotional video for the newly minted “Department of War” that interspersed the Lord’s Prayer with images of American troops, tanks and stealth bombers.

The theological gulf between Erika Kirk’s message of forgiveness and Hegseth’s fantasies of forever war runs deeper than most realize. Russell Moore, a former top official in the Southern Baptist Convention and a fierce Trump critic, told NPR that when pastors quote Jesus’ words about turning the other cheek, congregants increasingly ask, “Where did you get those liberal talking points?” When pastors respond that they’re “literally quoting Jesus Christ,” the answer comes back: “Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.”

If this sounds like a remarkable shift, that’s because it is. Millions of Trump-supporting Christians now seem to question whether Jesus’ own teachings on forgiving and loving one’s enemies are even relevant for politics. The reasoning is simple. Because the American way and Western civilization are facing off against a depraved and even demonic left, Jesus’ admonitions in the Sermon on the Mount no longer apply. As Michael Wear, the rare evangelical who served in the Obama White House, told me, “the result is that immoral tactics are justified by the morality of the pursued outcome” because “the opposition is so evil and the political outcome is so paramount.”

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Or to put it in secular terms: Desperate times call for desperate measures.

The early church was largely powerless and pacifist for three centuries, until the Roman emperor Constantine’s conversion transformed Christianity’s relationship with state power and state violence. As theologian and pastor Greg Boyd noted, “No sooner did Christians gain political power than they began persecuting and even putting to death non-Christians.” As with any faith, Christianity has been shaped by its own political history. But what remains striking is how pockets of American Christianity are openly rejecting Jesus’ ethics as politically naive.

This should unsettle anyone who has criticized Islam for its political entanglements. American Christianity now faces its own version of the political theology crisis: How can a faith tradition emphasizing sacrifice, humility and enemy-love navigate the messy — and increasingly violent — world of American politics?

James Wood, an evangelical theologian at Redeemer University, offers a more sympathetic reading of what might be called the combative Christian position. As he told me, “The ethic of Jesus in the gospels is not opposed to the state and the use of force as a deterrent to evil and wickedness. There’s a distinction between how you as a private individual are to treat your personal opponents versus how the state is to curb evil.”

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But here’s what makes this crisis so intractable: Both sides can claim at least some biblical grounding. The “love your enemy” Christianity of Erika Kirk draws directly from Jesus’ words. The spiritual-warfare Christianity pushed by Hegseth and others draws from Paul’s letters about putting on the “armor of God” to stand against the devil’s schemes. Meanwhile, evangelical luminaries such as Jerry Falwell and John Hagee have drawn on the apocalyptic Book of Revelation, in which a sword-bearing Jesus returns at the end times to lead the armies of heaven and destroys his enemies.

Some interpretations might be more correct than others, but there’s no way to resolve such questions of political theology before the second coming, when presumably Jesus will clarify his true intent, as both Christians and Muslims believe he will. Until then, this is not a divide that dialogue can easily bridge, because it’s not just about biblical interpretation — it’s about the nature of political engagement itself. Can Christian love be politically effective or does politics require the kind of strategic enmity that Trump embraces? Can you simultaneously bless your enemies while viewing them as evil forces who require nothing short of total defeat?

The secular hope has been that declining religiosity would produce more rational, less intense politics. But as American church attendance hovers around all-time lows, including among young Republicans, the Kirk memorial suggests the opposite: American faith is becoming more politically charged, not less. As Christian institutions decline in influence, conservatives find inspiration in the MAGA movement, whose undisputed leader is Trump, a man often portrayed as a kind of new American savior.

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Wood argues that authentic Christian witness “requires a Christian’s primary social loyalty to be in the church, which will cause you to have some guardrails on your national loyalty where you can’t just do anything you want in the name of the nation.” At the memorial, there were some exceptions — most notably Erika Kirk — but the church appeared largely subordinated to the dictates of a political movement defined by righteous anger.

What emerged at the memorial wasn’t so much Christianity shaping politics but politics reshaping Christianity. The question is no longer whether faith should influence political life but whether political l