No one should celebrate the assassination of Charlie Kirk; it’s a tragedy for his family and supporters and a violent blow to the health of our republic.

On the other hand, would you want to live in Kirk’s version of America?

Kirk often distanced himself from Christian nationalism, but he was sympathetic to its goals, which include Christian dominance in American politics and culture.

To Kirk, the separation of church and state was a “fiction.” He delighted in pointing out to callow college students that the term doesn’t actually appear in the Constitution.

But the separation principle is implicit and explicit in our founding document. The Founders knew a lot about a state church, and they understood that mixing the two does not serve either the state or the church very well.

It’s interesting to imagine Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, via some whimsical time warp, wandering into last week’s memorial service for Charlie Kirk in Arizona. They would have found a whole-of-government turnout—the Director of National Intelligence, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the White House Chief of Staff, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, uh, I mean War, the Vice President and the President himself—to participate in what was less a funeral than an evangelical camp meeting complete with altar call.

As Vice President JD Vance said, it was “a revival in celebration of Charlie Kirk and his Lord Jesus Christ.”

Would Franklin and Jefferson, rationalists both, have shaken their heads in bewilderment? Would their jaws have dropped in alarm? Would they have said, “This is not what we had in mind, at all”?

Because the event in Arizona was a very public, five-hour endorsement by our most prominent government officials of a particular religion: Christianity.

We often fancy ourselves as a “Christian nation,” but are we, really?

How many of us, as individuals or as a nation, “take no thought for the morrow” (Matthew 6:34)? Do we lay up our treasures in Heaven (Matthew 6:20) or do we invest in crypto? Do we, like the early church, hold all things in common and distribute resources to every man, as he has need? (Acts 2:44-45) Do we pay any attention to Jesus’s prescription for perfection: Sell everything you have and give it to the poor? (Matthew 19:21)

Christianity has always seemed an odd fit for a nation that aspires to equality among all its citizens. Like most religions Christianity is hierarchical: All authority derives from the top, from an entity so powerful he’s (a male, of course) called The Almighty. The Catholic Church is the best example of how this hierarchy works on earth: Popes, Cardinals, Archbishops and so on, down to the nuns.

All of this works fine for the Kingdom of Heaven, whose proper residence is within the human heart rather than Washington D.C. But for a nation?

Which brings us back to Charlie Kirk: He believed in a nation shaped and bound by Christianity. It also appears that he believed that the church hierarchy should extend to the family. He took Ephesians 5:22 seriously: “Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands.” (Yes, Kirk really said this.)

Women should also submit themselves (and their bodies) to the opinions of legislators. Kirk said that abortion is eight times worse than the Holocaust.

In fact, Kirk was asked what would happen if he had a 10-year-old daughter who was impregnated by a rapist: “The answer is yes, the baby would be delivered.”

Kirk believed in capital punishment and that “it should be public, it should be quick, it should be televised.” He would “totally tune in to see some pedo get their head chopped off.” Even kids should watch “at a certain age,” maybe around 12 or 14.

Of course, Kirk’s stock-in-trade was provocation, so it’s hard to know how serious these statements are. Still, it’s fair to judge people by what they say.

Submissive wives? Children forced to carry their rapists’ offspring to term? Televised beheadings with a kiddie matinee? Are you sure you would want to live in Charlie Kirk’s “Christian” America?

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