The American Christian Crusade That Killed Charlie Kirk.
Exploring American Christian History and What Causes Hate-based Killings.
There's a peculiar alchemy that occurs when someone dies. The harsh edges of a life get smoothed over, the contradictions resolved, the uncomfortable truths buried deeper than the body itself. We've witnessed this transformation countless times—controversial figures like Charlie Kirk suddenly becoming "complicated" or "products of their time," their obituaries reading like carefully edited résumés rather than honest reckonings with full human complexity. But when we examine the landscape of American Christianity over the past fifty years, the sanitization has happened while the perpetrators are still very much alive, still collecting tax-exempt donations, still wrapping themselves in the flag and the cross while leaving a trail of documented carnage that would make a cartel boss blush.
The dirty little secret about American Christianity isn't that it's been corrupted by politics or money—though Lord knows it has been—it's that it's been systematically weaponized to enable the very sins it claims to condemn. We're not talking about garden-variety hypocrisy here, the sort of "do as I say, not as I do" nonsense that's plagued religious institutions since time immemorial. This is something far more sinister: a documented pattern of violence, abuse, corruption, and discrimination that spans decades and denominational lines, all justified through theological gymnastics that would make a contortionist weep.
Consider the charming Robert Jay Mathews, who in the 1980s decided that Jesus wanted him to murder radio host Alan Berg and bomb the only synagogue in Boise, Idaho. Mathews and his merry band of Christian Identity terrorists called themselves The Order, and over two years they conducted what they genuinely believed was a "racial holy war" ordained by the Almighty. They weren't freelancing—this was part of a coordinated network that included groups like Aryan Nations, which hosted annual conferences in Idaho where KKK members and neo-Nazis gathered around the doctrine that whites were the "true Israelites" and Jews were "Satan's spawn." It's remarkable how creative theology can become when you need divine permission for mass murder.
The anti-abortion violence movement has been equally inventive in its interpretations of Christian love. Scott Roeder, the charming fellow who shot Dr. George Tiller in the head while the doctor attended church services in 2009, claimed he was a "warrior for the babies." The Army of God network has turned clinic bombings and assassinations into a kind of religious performance art, with perpetrators like Paul Jennings Hill becoming martyred figures after their executions. Eric Rudolph spent years bombing abortion clinics and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, citing Christian beliefs as justification for maiming nurse Emily Lyons and killing security guard Robert Sanderson. The message was clear: love thy neighbor, unless thy neighbor provides reproductive healthcare, in which case, bombs away.
But if you think the violence is shocking, wait until you discover the scale of institutional abuse that's been festering like a cancer in America's most prominent religious organizations. The 2002 Boston Globe Spotlight investigation—you know, the one that inspired the Oscar-winning film—revealed that Cardinal Bernard Law and church hierarchy had systematically protected over 130 documented abusers. Father John Geoghan alone molested children across multiple parishes for decades while church leaders played an elaborate shell game, moving him from parish to parish like a malignant chess piece. The archdiocese eventually paid $85 million to 552 victims, but here's the kicker: that was just one diocese.
The Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report of 2018 makes the Boston scandal look quaint by comparison. Over 300 "predator priests" across six dioceses with more than 1,000 identified victims over 70 years. The investigating grand jury concluded there were likely "thousands more" victims whose cases couldn't be documented because the church had destroyed records and intimidated witnesses with the efficiency of a professional crime syndicate.
If you're thinking this is just a Catholic problem, think again. The Southern Baptist Convention—America's largest Protestant denomination—maintained a secret database of over 700 accused offenders while publicly claiming they had no ability to track abusers. The 2022 independent investigation revealed that SBC leaders routinely blamed survivors, pressured them to forgive their abusers, and accused those seeking justice of "doing Satan's work." At least 25% of documented cases involved youth pastors, and the pattern affected the denomination's 47,000 affiliated churches. When Robert Morris, founder of Gateway Church with 100,000 members and a Trump spiritual advisor, was finally indicted in 2025 for child sex crimes dating to the 1980s, church elders admitted they'd known about allegations since 2005 but allowed him to continue in leadership for nearly two decades. Apparently, forgiveness is easier when the collection plate is full.
The racism woven through American Christianity is equally documented and equally nauseating. Bob Jones University—that bastion of Christian education—completely excluded Black students until 1971, then maintained a ban on interracial dating and marriage until the IRS revoked its tax-exempt status in 1983. University leaders argued their discriminatory policies were based on a "genuine belief that the Bible forbids interracial dating and marriage." The Southern Baptist Convention, formed in 1845 specifically to defend slavery, didn't issue a formal apology for its racist history until 1995—150 years after its founding. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints maintained a 126-year priesthood ban that excluded Black members from essential religious practices, claiming Black people were descendants of cursed Cain and had been "less valiant in pre-mortal life." Even after the 1978 revelation supposedly lifting the ban, a 2016 survey found 60% of LDS members still believed the ban was "God's will."
The systematic oppression of women reads like something from a dystopian novel, except it's all too real. Warren Jeffs, leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, received a life sentence plus 20 years in 2011 for sexually assaulting child brides aged 12 and 15. The evidence included audio recordings of the assaults and DNA evidence from forced marriages. The FLDS maintained secret abuse lists with over 700 people and controlled entire towns in Utah and Arizona like feudal kingdoms. Bill Gothard's Institute in Basic Life Principles influenced millions of homeschooling families while Gothard allegedly molested over 34 women and girls, some as young as 13. His organization's "umbrella of protection" doctrine required absolute submission to male authority, creating conditions that enabled systematic abuse from the 1980s through 2014.
A 1980s survey of 5,700 pastors found 26% would tell abused women to "continue to submit," and 71% would never advise separation due to abuse. This isn't ancient history—these attitudes persist in communities where biblical passages about male headship and female submission are twisted into justifications for domestic violence.
The financial corruption is breathtaking in its scope and shamelessness. Jim Bakker's PTL empire defrauded viewers of $158 million through fake "lifetime partnerships" while misappropriating funds intended for foreign missions. Bakker served five years of a 45-year sentence, but the template was established: promise miracles, deliver mansions for the ministry leaders. Robert Tilton's Success-N-Life ministry generated $80 million annually by promising miraculous wealth in exchange for donations, while prayer requests were literally discarded unread in dumpsters. The 2007 Senate investigation into the "Prosperity Six"—Kenneth Copeland, Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn, Joyce Meyer, Paula White, and Eddie Long—revealed lavish lifestyles funded by tax-exempt donations, including private jets and multiple luxury homes.
The grift continues with admirable consistency. Brooklyn pastor Lamor Whitehead received a 9-year federal sentence in 2024 for extorting $90,000 from a single mother parishioner while promising home ownership and investment returns. Kirbyjon Caldwell, spiritual advisor to Presidents Bush and Obama, served over three years for a $3.6 million scheme targeting elderly church members with worthless Chinese heritage bonds. Kent Hovind claimed everything belonged to God and was therefore tax-exempt, never paying taxes on over $1 million in income. He served 10 years in federal prison after threatening IRS investigators.
The political manipulation is perhaps the most corrosive of all. Branch Ministries became the first and only church to lose its tax-exempt status in 1995 after placing full-page ads in USA Today and The Washington Times urging Christians not to vote for Bill Clinton. Pat Robertson used his Christian Broadcasting Network platform to spread demonstrably false political claims, including that Haiti's 2010 earthquake was divine punishment for a "pact with the devil" during the 1791 slave rebellion—a claim that was historically inaccurate since Napoleon III wasn't even born until 1808.
Recent investigations by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune identified 18 churches systematically violating federal law by endorsing political candidates from the pulpit between 2020-2022—more violations than the IRS had investigated in the previous decade. KingdomLife Church pastor Brandon Burden explicitly endorsed candidates while declaring "I got a candidate that God wants to win" and performed "spiritual warfare" ceremonies against an incumbent mayor. Gateway Church and First Baptist Grapevine developed sophisticated tactics of displaying candidate names during services while claiming they weren't "endorsing," resulting in 8 of 9 mentioned candidates winning their races.
The scope of institutional failure is staggering. The Catholic Church has paid over $1.5 billion in settlements, multiple dioceses have declared bankruptcy, and over 6,000 clergy have been credibly accused of abuse. The Southern Baptist Convention's membership has declined by 1.5 million since 2018 as scandals have emerged. Major evangelical institutions like Bob Jones University and prominent televangelists have faced federal prosecution, lost tax exemptions, or collapsed entirely.
These aren't isolated incidents or the actions of a few bad apples. They represent systematic patterns enabled by religious authority and institutional protection. The common tactics are depressingly consistent: biblical misinterpretation to justify discrimination and abuse, internal handling of criminal matters to avoid accountability, financial opacity enabled by tax-exempt status, and the leveraging of religious trust for political and personal gain.
What we're witnessing isn't the decline of American Christianity—it's the revelation of what it's actually been for decades. The sanitization isn't happening posthumously; it's happening in real time, with each scandal dismissed as an aberration, each criminal conviction treated as a one-off tragedy, each pattern of abuse reframed as a crisis of faith rather than a crisis of power.
The fruits of this poisonous tree are all around us: terrorist networks justified through theology, millions of abuse victims silenced by religious authority, systematic racism sanctified by scripture, billions of dollars stolen from the faithful, and democratic institutions undermined by tax-exempt political operations. When ideology becomes a tool for division rather than unity, when it transforms neighbors into threats, when it sanctifies hate rather than challenging it, we see the same bitter fruit regardless of the tree that bears it.
The tragedy isn't theological—it's tactical. By hitching their wagon to political power and personal enrichment, American Christianity's leaders have hollowed out their own moral authority. When your primary identity becomes partisan rather than prophetic, you lose the ability to speak truth to power because you've become the power you once challenged. They've succeeded brilliantly in creating a religion that blesses inequality, sanctifies exclusion, and transforms the Gospel of love into a weapon of division.
And now, in September 2025, we've witnessed the inevitable conclusion of this poisonous trajectory. Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA who built his career weaponizing faith for political gain, was shot and killed while speaking at Utah Valley University—martyred, as it were, for the very movement he helped create. The irony is as bitter as it is perfect: Kirk, who spent over a decade teaching young Christians that their enemies were domestic and that political violence was justified in defense of their "values," died exactly as he lived—as a casualty of the culture war he helped orchestrate.
Kirk wasn't some innocent bystander caught in crossfire. He was patient zero of a movement that taught college students to see their professors as enemies, their classmates as threats, and their political opponents as literal agents of Satan. His "American Comeback Tour" was designed, in Turning Point's own words, to help students "push back against left-wing indoctrination" and "reclaim their right to free speech"—code words for the kind of aggressive confrontation that turns campuses into battlegrounds. When you spend a decade telling people they're at war, eventually someone takes you seriously enough to start shooting.
The sanitization began before Kirk's body was cold. Trump called him a "martyr for truth and freedom," conveniently forgetting that Kirk built his empire by spreading conspiracy theories and training young people to see violence as patriotic. His widow Erika vowed that "the movement my husband built will not die," apparently unaware that the movement her husband built is precisely what killed him. The same religious-political machinery that enabled decades of abuse, corruption, and extremism immediately pivoted to canonize its latest casualty, transforming a propagandist into a saint without missing a beat.
Kirk's assassination wasn't random political violence—it was the logical endpoint of a movement that convinced its followers they were fighting a holy war. When you teach people that their faith requires them to treat politics as spiritual warfare, when you sanctify hatred in the name of righteousness, when you transform churches into recruitment centers for extremism, eventually someone decides to move beyond rhetoric to action. The only surprise is that it took this long.
The question isn't whether this represents authentic Christianity—clearly, it doesn't. The question is whether Kirk's death will finally wake people up to what this movement has become, or whether it will simply provide more fuel for the martyrdom complex that's been driving Christian nationalism from the beginning. His widow's promise to continue his work suggests the latter, which means the sanitization will continue, the victims will multiply, and the rest of us will be left to deal with the wreckage of what happens when the sacred becomes a cover for the profane, and when prophets are replaced by propagandists who end up dying for the very poison they've been peddling.
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It’s becoming impossible to distinguish how christian nationalism indoctrinates its members and legitimizes using violence against those who are different from how the Taliban and radical Islam does the same.