Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow and new messiah of MAGA Christianity
View attachment 150625
The wife of the slain Trump activist has emerged as a rising public figure at the crossroads of politics and religion in US conservatism
Her words, especially when contrasted with those spoken shortly afterward by Trump — “I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them. I am sorry Erika” — won praise from both sides of the political spectrum. They even drew approval from Jimmy Kimmel, the comedian who had been briefly suspended from his show after a remark about Robinson — a move that sparked criticism of the
government attacks on free expression. “If you believe in the teachings of Jesus as I do,” Kimmel said, his voice breaking, during the
monologue marking his return to the air, “there it was, that’s it. A selfless act of grace, forgiveness from a grieving widow.”
“Of course, the rhetoric of forgiveness is preferable to that of holy war, but we mustn’t forget that she has also used that rhetoric,” explains Jeff Sharlet, an expert on the relationship between religion and political power in the United States and author of
The Family in a telephone interview. Sharlet is referring to the speech Erika Kirk gave a couple of days after her husband’s murder, in which she said: “You have no idea the fire that you ignited within this wife, the cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry.”
“We also shouldn’t forget that her forgiveness came after other speakers [in particular Stephen Miller, deputy to the White House chief of staff] compared her to a ‘storm,’ a ‘sword,’ and a ‘dragon,’ and before Trump spoke openly of hatred, only to then embrace her in a hug — almost like a representation of the male and female archetypes of Christian nationalism,” says Sharlet, referring to one of the core tenets of a certain strand of the American right: the blind faith that American identity can only be Christian.
According to Sharlet, “few did more for that idea than Charlie Kirk. He told his followers to go to church, yes, but above all, he brought the church into the MAGA world, because now MAGA is the true faith: that is Christian nationalism.”
Trump and the widow have known each other since 2012, when the Republican owned the Miss USA pageant and Erika Kirk was the contestant representing Arizona. As a teenager, she set up a foundation. She studied political science and law. She worked on Trump’s first campaign. She met her future husband when he interviewed her for a job at
Turning Point USA (TPUSA), the nonprofit he had founded at age 18 alongside a powerful Tea Party activist. During that meeting, he told her: “I don’t want to hire you, I want to date you.” They married in 2021.
Although always in her husband’s shadow, Erika, now 36, already had a public profile before the assassination. It included a weekly religious podcast (one of its episodes, featuring both of them, was titled “Submission Is Not a Bad Word”), a line of “faith-based clothing,” and an annual TPUSA women’s event that brings together leading female voices in the United States against feminism. In an interview earlier this year, when asked which of the two was more conservative, Charlie Kirk replied: “She is. Next to her, I’m a moderate.”
www.foxnews.com
