Kirk’s Christian Supporters Mourn Him as a Martyr
“Charlie died for what he believed in,” said Jackson Lahmeyer, a pastor in Oklahoma.
“Charlie died for what he believed in,” said Jackson Lahmeyer, a pastor in Oklahoma.
www.nytimes.com
“… Intercessors for America, a Christian group with ties to the Trump administration, emailed supporters on Wednesday night with a suggested prayer in response to Mr. Kirk’s death. The subject line referred to “Charlie Kirk, a modern day MLK.”
… Mr. Kirk began his career as a secular provocateur. He said little about the role of religion in American politics in his early years as an activist.
That started to change during the Covid pandemic, he
told The New York Times this year. He was disappointed in church leaders who failed to speak up against lockdowns, he said, and began reading and asking larger questions about the idea of shared morality.
Mr. Kirk emerged from the pandemic, and from Mr. Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, ready to evangelize for more than political causes and candidates. In 2021, he founded TPUSA Faith to influence pastors and other Christians to “counter falsehoods and illuminate the inextricable link between faith and God-given liberty.” He hosted monthly events at a large evangelical megachurch in Arizona and spoke regularly in personal terms about his own faith.
… To many conservative Christians, his death was a sign that the spiritual battle they had been fighting was far from over.
…
“Jesus told us this would happen,” said Shane Winnings, who heads Promise Keepers, an evangelical men’s organization that has leaned into partisan politics under his leadership. “There’s a real spiritual war going on.”
Mr. Kirk spoke at a Promise Keepers event in Oklahoma last year and invited Mr. Winnings to speak at several of his own gatherings.
Within hours of Mr. Kirk’s death, Mr. Winnings and other conservative Christian leaders were speaking of the event as a demarcation in the nation’s history, one that would lead only to the strengthening of the religious movement Mr. Kirk embodied.
“When Jesus was killed and then rose from the dead and visited the disciples and he ascended, they moved forward and they spawned the early church,” Mr. Winnings said. “I am more filled with determination than ever to continue the mission that I’m on.”…”