Reflecting on the Kirk Assassination

 One of the most articulate interlocutors on behalf of God, and the religious experience is a former Catholic Nun, Karen Armstrong. Near the end of her work, The Case for God, she writes words that inform and inspire and clarify the religious experience:

The point of religion is to live intensely and richly here and now. Truly religious people are ambitious. They want lives overflowing with significance. They have always desired to integrate with their daily lives the moments of rapture and insight that came to them in dreams, in their contemplation of nature, and in their intercourse with one another and with the animal world. Instead of being crushed and embittered by the sorrow of life, they sought to retain their peace and serenity in the midst of their pain. They yearned for the courage to overcome their terror of mortality; instead of being grasping and mean-spirited, they aspired to live generously, large-heartedly, and justly, and to inhabit every singe part of their humanity. Instead of being a mere workaday cup, they wanted, as Confucius suggested, to transform themselves into a beautiful ritual vessel brimful of the sanctity that they were learning to see in life. They tried to honor the ineffable mystery they sensed in each human being and create societies that protected and welcomed the stranger, the alien, the poor, and the oppressed. Of course, they often failed, sometimes abysmally. But overall they found that the disciplines of religion helped them to do all this. Those who applied themselves most assiduously showed that it was possible for mortal men and women to live on a higher, divine, or godlike plane and thus wake up to their true selves. (Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, pps. 329-330)

This week in the United States, a political assassination occurred with the cold-blooded murder of one Charlie Kirk. An avowed Christian, and profoundly loyal and dedicated disciple of the current administration, (is that an unholy irreconcilable paradox?), Kirk was a long way from even aspiring to the kind of general and even specific aspirations listed by Armstrong above.

Here are some  Charlie Kirk quotes from The Guardian, September 12, 2025, in piece entitled, ‘Charlie Kirk in his own words: ‘prowling Blacks’ and ‘the great replacement strategy’ by Chris Stein:

On Race: If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like. Boy, I hope he’s qualified. (The Charlie Kirk Show, 23, January 2024)

‘If you’re a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States marine? (The Charlie Kirk Show, 8, December 2022)

Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more. (The Charlie Kirk Show, 19 May, 2023

If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because  of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action? (The Charlie Kirk Show, 3 January 2024)

If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee  and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us—You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously. (The Charlie Kirk Show, 13 July 2023)

We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately. (The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 April, 2024)

On gun violence: I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year to that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.

(Event organized by TPUSA Faith, the religious arm of Kirk’s conservative group Turing Point USA, on 5 April 2023)

On Immigration: America was ate its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to is lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that. (The Charlie Kirk Show, 22,  August 2025)

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)

On Islam: America has freedom of religion, of course, but we should be frank: large dedicated Islamic areas are a threat to America. (The Charlie Kirk Show, 30 April, 2025)

We’ve been warning about the rise of Islam on the show, to great among of backlash. We don’t care, that’s what we do here. And we said that Islam is not compatible with western civilization. (the Charlie Kirk Show, 24 June 2025)

Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America. (Charlie Kirk on social media post, 8 September 2025)

On religion: there is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists. (The Charlie Kirk Show, 6 July 2022)

The Kirk assassination may be a tipping point in America. Let it not be lost on whatever follows that this man’s rhetoric is ‘hate speech’ and does not contribute to the American ideal of freedom and justice; nor does it comport with any religious tenet or aspiration.