Charlie Kirk, Martyrdom, and America’s Authoritarian Apostles: The entanglement of fascist politics and Christian imagery is not new, and it is dangerously powerful (Adam Gurri, 25 Sep 2025, Liberal Currents)
Despite the obvious tensions between fascism and Christian virtues, the entanglement of fascist politics and Christian imagery is not new. It is dangerously powerful, especially in the contemporary context of an American Christianity in the grips of a right-wing identity crisis. I want to elaborate on the way MAGA has portrayed Kirk since his assassination and connect it to the warped, spiritually dessicated version of Christianity that undergirds Trumpism today. I hope to highlight how degraded our moral situation has become.
I have seen more than a few allusions to Horst Wessel in the days since Kirk’s killing. Wessel, a young Nazi and member of the SA, was murdered by members of the Communist Party of Germany in 1930. His death became a rallying point for Nazi Party, and they adopted a march for which he’d written lyrics as the party anthem.The references are apt. Kirk is being valorized in service of a fascist project. But I want to turn in particular to the way historian Tom Holland examines Wessel’s martyrdom, in which he stresses the explicit Christ allegory, as an especially helpful point of comparison.
As Holland observes in his book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, Nazi leaders were quick to grasp the utility of Wessel’s death and to wield it to great effect. He writes how Josef Goebbels understood the Christian power in making Wessel a martyr, even as the Nazis despised much of what Christianity stood for. Goebbels went so far as to proclaim at Wessel’s funeral service that he would rise once again. Holland writes:
A shudder ran through the crowd, “As if God,” one of the mourners later recalled, “had made a decision and sent his holy breath upon the open grave and the flags, blessing the dead man and all who belonged to him.” One month later, Goebbels explicitly compared Wessel to Christ.
Since his killing, right-wing rhetoric around Kirk has become increasingly religious. In one hearing, Representative Troy Nehls of Texas declared “I would say if Charlie Kirk lived in Biblical times, he’d have been the 13th disciple.”
Hard to see Christ organizing Identitarian groups.