Charlie Kirk Is No Martin Luther King Jr.

The difference is as vast as Heaven and Hell

When I saw a post on Twitter last night comparing the assassination of Charlie Kirk with Martin Luther King Jr., I wasn’t surprised—this was inevitable—but it still made me furious. Then, I saw this post on Facebook, and began writing.

Because yes, there are a few surface similarities: both were political figures who were publicly executed while fighting for a cause. But are they both martyrs? Heroes?

No.

The difference between them is as vast as the difference between heaven and hell.

The Beloved Community or the Valley of Slaughter

First, a brief description of what I mean by heaven and hell according to Jesus. Jesus’ message—what he called “the kingdom of God”—was not about a disembodied afterlife. It was an agenda for this life and this world: “on earth as it is in heaven.” He envisioned a community where the last are first, the poor are blessed, the hungry are filled, and the stranger is welcomed. A world where we recognize the image of God in “the least of these.”
The Kingdom of God is a world of love defined by our connection to one another—a world where we take it seriously that each and every person is marked by the invaluable image of God, and build a world that reflects that reality.

Hell, on the other hand—what Jesus called Gehenna—was not a torture chamber in the afterlife. It was a valley outside Jerusalem that became a symbol of judgment, a place Jeremiah described as the “Valley of Slaughter.” But this valley was not a punishment in the afterlife—it was real-world, historical destruction. God’s people failed to care for the poor and vulnerable, and Jesus says that the consequence is that their world waould end in flames, and in AD 70, it did. The chickens came home to roost, as they always do, and Jerusalem was destroyed, just as Jesus prophesied when he spoke of the coming hell. Hell was on earth then, and it is on earth now—it is always on earth. Hell is the world we create when we serve the empire rather than the oppressed. It is a world of domination instead of belonging.

These are the two paths, the two possible worlds we can build.

And King and Kirk almost perfectly embody those two worlds.

King’s Road: The Beloved Community

King spent his life battling for what he called “the beloved community,” a world of racial justice, material equality, and peace.

He worked to tear down the forces that rip us apart and the systems that dominate the vulnerable. His words inspired us to see the best in each other—towards empathy and solidarity. Examples of his inspirational compassion and courage are too numerous to count, but here is just one snippet of a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan:

Too seldom do we see people in their true humanness. . . . We fail to think of them as fellow human beings made from the same basic stuff as we, molded in the same divine image. . . . The good neighbor looks beyond the external accidents and discerns those inner qualities that make all men human and, therefore, brothers.

He concluded the sermon:

No longer can we afford the luxury of passing by on the other side. Such folly was once called moral failure; today it will lead to universal suicide. We cannot long survive spiritually separated in a world that is geographically together. In the final analysis, I must not ignore the wounded man on life’s Jericho Road, because he is a part of me and I am a part of him. His agony diminishes me, and his salvation enlarges me.

King showed us that we are “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” His triumph was the Civil Rights Movement, which secured dignity and civil liberties for Black Americans who had long been denied their humanity. At the end of his life, he was marching with sanitation workers carrying signs that read, “I Am a Man.”

In his final speech, I’ve Been to the Mountaintop, he declared:

“We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are saying that we are God’s children. And if we are God’s children, we don’t have to live like we are forced to live.”

His last words on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel were not of anger, but of song: “Ben, make sure you play ‘Precious Lord, Take My Hand’ in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty.”

King died how he lived: fighting for the dignity of those under the boot of empire, and envisioning a more just and beautiful world—the beloved community. The Kingdom of God.

Kirk’s Road: The Valley of Slaughter

Now, I know it is not polite to speak ill of the dead, but as conservatives attempt to paint Charlie Kirk as a martyr, we must examine the legacy he leaves, which provides a stark contrast.

Consider his own final words.

“Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” an audience member asked.
“Too many,” Kirk responded to applause.

Let me pause here. In the last weeks of his life, one of Kirk’s primary talking points was to scapegoat trans people, framing them as especially violent and unwell. This is untrue and dangerously so—because trans people are actually more likely to be the victims of violence than the rest of us, not the perpetrators. Kirk had previously called trans women “perverts" with “weird fetishes,” and anti-trans rhetoric from pundits like Kirk has pushed a wave of anti-trans legislation across the country: 987 bills across 49 states. It is dangerous to be trans in this country, and Kirk poured fuel on those fires of hate and discrimination.

Back to Kirk’s last words.
Kirk’s debate partner continued, “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?”
Kirk’s final reply: “Counting or not counting gang violence?”

Kirk’s last word was violence. But there is even more going on in this statement. “Gang violence” is a dog whistle for young Black men, employed to redirect the problem of mass shooters—the majority of whom are white men—and single out gang violence as a separate category. This reinforces Kirk’s narrative that Black and brown people are the real danger, not structural problems like gun availability.

When a shooter is white, he’s “mentally ill.” But when he’s Black, it’s “gang violence.” By the way, when the shooter is Muslim, it’s terrorism, but white Christian nationalist violence is almost never called terrorism.

Just as he had a history of anti-LGBT statements, Kirk also has a history of racist statements. He questioned the qualifications of black pilots, and said that black women (including Michelle Obama) “did not have the brain processing power” and “had to go steal a white person’s spot to be taken seriously.”

He even said that King’s Civil Rights Act was “a huge mistake.”

At every turn, Kirk sided with the power structures, not the poor. While King emphasized our common humanity and appealed to our better natures, Kirk consistently reminded us of our differences—especially of the most vulnerable and marginalized populations. With his last words, he scapegoated trans people and stereotyped Black men.

Heaven or Hell

Kirk and King show us that there are two very, very different ways to die for a cause. You can die for resisting oppression, or for reinforcing it. For standing up to hate, or for stirring it up.

None of this means that I believe he deserved to be publicly executed. I abhor how he lived his life, but I do not wish to view the world in terms of deserving. I believe that we all deserve mercy and love, not punishment.
The question is not “what did Kirk deserve?” The question is, “what kind of world do we want to build?”

In the end, the point is not that Charlie Kirk deserved to go to hell. The point is that he spent his life creating hell—through division, scapegoating, and dehumanization, and that his own words condemned him (Matt 12:37).
Charlie Kirk once said that “when you allow gun ownership, you’re going to have gun deaths. There is a cost to liberty.”

Kirk paid that cost, to his god of wrath—a god of guns and violence, not the God of Jesus, who was a God of compassion.
When Jesus called us to “repent,” or experience hell, I believe this is exactly what he meant. We either build the beloved community, or we create hell on earth—for ourselves, and for others.

There is something worse than death, and that is living for the wrong thing. When Jesus said, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell,” I believe this is what he meant. Howard Thurman points this out in his mighty book, Jesus and the Disinherited. Thurman says that when we believe that we are all God’s children, it changes the way we relate to ourselves and everyone. He says that when we live in such a way that denies this reality, it is worse than death. To deny the true self, the image of God, the invaluable spark of the divine that connects us all—this is the death of the soul—this is hell on earth.

This is why, although Charlie Kirk scoffed at empathy as a “made-up term…that does a lot of damage,” I refuse to let it go. My soul is too important to me. What made King an agent of heaven was that he refused to let a dehumanizing world cause him to forget our deep kinship. He never abandoned empathy, never stopped insisting that we belong to one another.

Yet, according to Jesus, not only is empathy central to what religion and spirituality are all about, but its rejection is the very definition of hell.

So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets. Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.
Matthew 7:12–14

These gates are not waiting for us in the afterlife. They are right in front of us, even now. Every day we step through one or the other, into mercy or domination, solidarity or othering—into the beloved community, or into the valley of slaughter.

What kind of world are we going to build?

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If this reflection resonated with you, you will probably appreciate how I explore these themes in my upcoming book, Hell Bent: How the Fear of Hell Holds Christians Back from a Spirituality of Love