Many Black pastors and Christians are contesting the fond memorialization of conservative activist Charlie Kirk within the political right and pockets of evangelicalism, saying they denounce Kirk’s assassination but can’t honor the legacy of a man who used harmful racial rhetoric.
The divide mirrors a national rift over how to remember the influential 31-year-old, who was fatally shot this month while speaking at a college in Utah. Kirk’s death sparked renewed fears about the rise of political violence in America and ushered in heated debates about the activist, a close ally of President Donald Trump who organized young conservatives across the country.
Supporters of Kirk, including some who spoke at his memorial service earlier this week, have lionized the activist as a martyr who died defending Christian values. But in pulpits, media interviews, and social media posts, many Black leaders and Christians are highlighting a litany of Kirk’s past statements they consider insulting, racist, and out of line with Scripture. That, they say, should also color how the country recounts and remembers his legacy.
“I agree (we need to) lament over his unfortunate, senseless and I’ll go so far as saying demonic murder,” said Dwight McKissic, senior pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas. “We can all identify with a wife losing her husband and children losing their father.”
But, McKissic added, “we cannot overlook the fact that his remarks about race are unfortunate and reprehensible.”
Kirk’s critics point to several statements the activist made over the years including a comment he made while discussing crime on his radio show in 2023: In urban America, he said, “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people.”
That same year, Kirk said four prominent Black women who supported affirmative action—including former first lady Michelle Obama and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—“do not have the brain processing power” to be taken seriously and “had to go steal a white person’s spot.”
Separately, a news story published last year quotes Kirk as saying Martin Luther King Jr. was “awful” and the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a “huge mistake” because it ushered in a “permanent DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion) “bureaucracy.” While discussing DEI programs another time, he said he wanted a “cookie-cutter” pilot and not someone named “LaQueesha James.”
After the assassination, the Southern Baptist Convention released a statement of lament and a call for justice: Christians are “rightly grateful for Charlie Kirk’s public witness to Christ,” pro-life causes, and “a host of other moral issues.” Kirk, who founded the youth organization Turning Point USA, went onto college campuses, set up a table, and debated with students on a range of hot-button issues, including gender and sexuality.
“We rightly appreciate the profound impact Charlie Kirk has had on our young people, inspiring them to live with bold conviction and take righteous action,” said the statement, which listed leaders of various SBC entities as signatories.
But the SBC did not mention any areas of disagreement. McKissic, whose church loosened ties with the denomination in recent years, said that in 2009, the SBC passed a resolution applauding the electoral victory of former president Barack Obama while also criticizing some of his policies. He criticized the “double standard” on X, saying, “Along with the unanimously agreed upon lament, … why can’t you mention the areas of disagreement?” One SBC-affiliated pastor who has done that from the pulpit, though, has suffered backlash.
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The most widely circulated criticisms of Kirk have come from progressive voices within the traditional Black church, which has historically spoken out on social and racial issues. Howard-John Wesley, senior pastor of Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia, said in a sermon at his church that the activist “did not deserve to be assassinated.” But at the same time, Wesley said he was “overwhelmed” seeing the US flag at half-staff and honoring a man who had “spent all of his life sowing seeds of division and hate into this land.”
“How you die does not redeem how you lived,” the Baptist pastor said in a passionate sermon which received applause from the congregation. His statements have since made the rounds on social media, as have similar pulpit statements by other prominent Black pastors, including Atlanta’s Jamal Bryant and Frederick D. Haynes III, the senior pastor of Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas.
Others have taken a more subdued tone. The Church of God in Christ (COGIC), the largest Pentecostal denomination in the US, said in a public statement that comments on Kirk’s death “from individual leaders that do not reflect love, healing, and compassion” do not represent its official position.
“Even in moments of disagreement or division, the Church must stand as an agent of healing, a beacon of light and reconciliation. Our denomination’s voice is one of compassion, not condemnation,” said J. Drew Sheard, COGIC’s presiding bishop. Meanwhile, Patrick L. Wooden Sr., a COGIC bishop who oversees churches in three East Coast states, is encouraging people to do their own research into Kirk instead of listening to sound bites.
“Many times, some of those voices that you trust—they’re just simply not telling you the truth,” Wooden said in a video posted on his church’s YouTube page while recounting how Kirk had penned a supportive foreword for a book written by his son-in-law, John Amanchukwu. “He said this … about a Black man,” Wooden noted after reading the foreword. “That doesn’t sound like a racist to me.”
A subset of Black Christians say that they acknowledge Kirk has made racially harmful statements but that emphasizing it so quickly in the aftermath of his assassination also sends the wrong message.
“I’m disappointed in both sides and how they’ve responded,” Justin Giboney, a Black minister who leads a Christian civic organization called the And Campaign, told the rapper Lecrae on a podcast episode released this week. “Even if you look at it from the center-left of the church, I think we missed an opportunity, because one of the biggest parts of moral clarity is rightly ordering and prioritizing things.”
An honest discussion about Kirk and his statements needs to be had, Giboney said, but “the number one lesson the church should have wanted people to get out of this was that this was tragic, wicked, and it never should have happened. A lot of people on the left said that, but then they said ‘but’ real quick” so they can frame the narrative around his life.
Giboney concluded, “The problem is that it got very tribal.”
