I’ve seen conservatives on social media, many of my age, labeling Charlie Kirk as a Christian martyr who was killed because of speaking truth to power. Hook, line, and sinker, young conservatives have fallen into the authoritarian trap willingly.
Erica Kirk addressed the crowd at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service in Glendale, Arizona, on September 21
As MAGA mourns the death of Charlie Kirk, the Trump administration makes a daring political move. President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance took the stage with Erika Kirk to deliver a eulogy for the late Charlie on September 21. The alarming sight is such: several members of the Trump administration spoke, transforming the service from a memorial to a political rally. Six other members of the administration joined Trump and Vance to speak. They were not there to pay respects to a fallen man. Instead, they used Kirk’s funeral as an opportunity to garner public support for a faster slide to authoritarianism by combining two elements of authoritarian rhetoric: an appeal to a mythic past and establishing a MAGA political and religious martyr.
The president could not help himself from making incendiary remarks while he was at the podium. He said, “He was a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose. He 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.” The audience cheered at this proclamation, changing the meaning of the whole event. Now, the event on September 21, 2025 is less like a memorial and more of a rally cry for retribution, anger, hate, and authoritarianism.
Enter White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, Stephen Miller. He opened his speech saying that “angels wept” the day Kirk was killed, further setting the tone of a religious event. Kirk then served only as a means to rally support for state-sanctioned violence. Miller employed two authoritarian rhetorical strategies: appealing to a mythic past and invoking divine providence. The mythic past can be described as instilling a nostalgic feeling for a time that never actually existed, or the greatness of it is exaggerated. It is also used to push a narrative of the superiority of a specific group of people – the descendants of this “once great society.” He says, “Erika is the storm. We are the storm. And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion. Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello. Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture. They built the industry.” In this brief passage, we see Miller’s appeal to the mythic past. He invokes Athens and Rome in ways that portray these civilizations as worthy of nostalgia, of reverting back to their practices; they are the best civilizations humanity has to offer. He says of his enemies, “You have nothing,” again reinforcing this mythic past of Athens’ and Rome’s unsurpassed Western greatness and superiority.
He finishes by saying, “And we will defend this world. We will defend goodness. We will defend light. We will defend virtue. You cannot terrify us. You cannot frighten us. You cannot threaten us. Because we are on the side of goodness. We are on the side of God.” The final sentence of this passage invokes divine providence, that the MAGA base has been chosen by God to defend virtue and righteousness. Choosing these words after claiming the immortality of Charlie Kirk establishes the creation of a new religious figure. To the MAGA base, Kirk is now a martyr sent by God to speak truth and to convert skeptics.
As Miller successfully makes Kirk a religious martyr and considers those who support him the descendants of the greatest societies, the transformation of MAGA from a political movement to a religious one is complete. This, to me, makes it much more difficult to combat the threat to democracy that it is. Rank-and-file MAGA voters no longer have cause to question the actions of the state; they have God on their side, therefore everything the state does is virtuous. The censorship? God wills it. The militarization of ICE? The Greeks and Romans had strong armies and were brutal to their opponents. To cheers from a crowd, Trump’s administration filled what little room there was for independent thought in the MAGA base, solidifying their brand of politics for years to come.