At Charlie Kirk’s memorial service on Sunday, Sept. 21, his pastor, Rob McCoy, spoke first. He acknowledged that during the service, those assembled would hear from the most powerful political figures in the country. But as a pastor should, he turned the focus, at least for a while, away from “all earthly powers and principalities who will gather here,” saying Mr. Kirk would have wanted the attention to be on Jesus.

A few minutes after that, he said something that I have been puzzling over, trying to understand where it goes wrong, to figure out where precisely its apparent plausibility rings so false. Mr. McCoy said: “Charlie looked at politics as an on-ramp to Jesus. He knew if he could get all of you rowing in the streams of liberty, you’d come to its source, and that’s the Lord.”

I want to be clear: I do not think Mr. McCoy is misrepresenting either himself or Mr. Kirk. I trust that Mr. Kirk honestly hoped that his brand of politics would lead people to Jesus. I also trust that, as Mr. McCoy and many other speakers at the memorial service said, Mr. Kirk recognized this goal as higher than attaining worldly political power. But I want to be clear that these intentions being honest and connected to faith does not make them automatically good. In all human endeavors, even those in the service of the Gospel, people act out of many motives at once, and careful discernment is required to understand which spirit is ultimately being followed, especially when exercising power and authority.

After watching the entire memorial service, multiple parts of it more than once, I fear that whatever the best intentions of Mr. Kirk or his pastor or others connected to his Turning Point USA organization, the approach they take to politics results in treating the Gospel more as a means than an end. I will explain why. Yet I fear I may only convince those who already disagree with Mr. Kirk’s politics and find his ardent support of President Donald J. Trump unacceptable.

So before offering that explanation, I want to apply the Ignatian presupposition, trying to understand both Mr. Kirk and those who are lifting him up as a model of discipleship in the most charitable light I can see. I hope this will demonstrate the sincerity of my critique to those who share Mr. Kirk’s political aims. I also hope those who object to them will better understand how others are inspired by him.

In the days since his tragic assassination, many beyond Mr. Kirk’s immediate movement, including some Catholic leaders, have said he is an example to be emulated. Bishop Robert Barron called him an “apostle of civil discourse,” and Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who admitted that he had not known much about Mr. Kirk before his assasination, said, “[T]he more I learned about him, I thought, ‘this guy’s a modern-day St. Paul.’” Cardinal Dolan explained that he was impressed by the fact that Mr. Kirk was not “afraid to say the name of Jesus” and encouraged by the “revival” he saw among young people inspired by Mr. Kirk as “almost an elevation of the role of faith back into the public square where our founders intended it to be from the beginning.”

What has followed the assassination resembles the construction of a cult of sainthood, though I understand that Mr. Kirk, a devout evangelical Protestant, may not have appreciated it being described that way. I do not mean the term “construction” as a condemnation or dismissal; the Catholic Church has a long history of recognizing saints in ways that meet the needs of contemporary social reality. We have done so most recently in the canonization earlier this month of Carlo Acutis as the first saint of the millennial generation. Since even official canonization only recognizes the saint God has already made, it need not automatically be a source of scandal when more mundane motives are involved in determining which saints we focus on publicly.

We find and lift up examples of discipleship that we hope will inspire others to be generous and courageous in their faith. It is not uncommon for these examples to have some connection to politics. The church canonized St. Maximilian Kolbe, who was killed in Auschwitz in major part for his courageous resistance to the evils of Nazism. Blessed Miguel Pro, S.J., who was executed with the cry “¡Viva Cristo Rey!” on his lips, provided an example of faith in resistance against a Mexican persecution of the church. 

I also think of the more recent example of the martyrs of El Salvador, Jesuits and lay co-workers killed by soldiers trained and supported by the United States. Not yet officially canonized, these martyrs are prototypes of solidarity with the poor and commitment to social justice. Many students in Jesuit educational institutions have been introduced to their story and inspired by their example, thanks to dedicated effort and organizing aimed at bending political reality closer to the Gospel’s call to care for the poor.

Sometimes, that commitment to justice can be held up as an example to be emulated even distinct from the Gospel faith that inspired the martyrs themselves. In part, this reflects a classically Jesuit “in by their door, out by your own” tactic, and perhaps something similar was at least partially at work in the idea of “politics as an on-ramp to Jesus.” But we should remember that when Ignatius proposed this approach to some of his first companions being sent to dialogue with people in Ireland in the context of Henry VIII’s split with the Roman church, he described it as a method that was also often used by the evil spirit. That is why it requires such careful discernment to use it in the service of the Gospel.

So through what good door was Mr. Kirk trying to lead people through an embrace of conservative politics? I had not fully appreciated this before watching his memorial service, but I found one clear example in a frequent challenge from Mr. Kirk that at least four of the speakers referenced—his advice to young men to get married and start a family. In a video montage played during the memorial service, Mr. Kirk described this as “a difficult but deep decision” requiring courage. Clearly, that call to courage resonated with many who heard him—and even when criticizing the narrowness of Mr. Kirk’s theology of gender roles, marriage and family life, it should be acknowledged that he proposed this call to others and tried to live it himself as a vocation of generosity and self-sacrifice.

Mr. Kirk and many of his followers found inspiration in calls to courage that they often identified with confronting the dominant culture. They shared a zeal for that confrontation, welcoming the clarity of a sharp distinction between right and wrong, between true and false. Mr. Kirk’s faith was a source of confidence in making and arguing for those distinctions as he saw them, and he hoped that his confidence would inspire others to seek the same source.

But he also put that zeal for confrontation to political use and ran a sophisticated and powerful political operation that he devoted, successfully, to securing Mr. Trump’s election in 2024. So it is fair to ask which goal—political or evangelical—is ultimately being served by lifting up Mr. Kirk as a model for discipleship.

The final three speeches at Mr. Kirk’s memorial service were given, respectively, by Vice President JD Vance, by Erika Kirk, his widow, and by President Trump. Mr. Vance said that because of Mr. Kirk, he has talked more about Jesus in the last two weeks than ever before in his political life, and said that his friend prayed for friend and enemy alike. Ms. Kirk spoke movingly of her husband’s passionate desire “to reach and save the lost boys of the West.” That would have included the young man who took his life, she said. Quoting Jesus’ prayer of forgiveness from the cross, she then forgave her husband’s killer. Even if you are not willing to watch or trust anything else related to Mr. Kirk, you should at least watch Ms. Kirk’s witness to forgiveness and pray that it be more widely emulated across contemporary American politics.

After Ms. Kirk, President Trump spoke for just over 40 minutes. He also acknowledged Mr. Kirk’s refusal to hate his opponent, but then went on to say: “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry. I am sorry, Erika. But now Erika can talk to me and the whole group and maybe they can convince me that that’s not right.”

Maybe they can, but they have not yet been able to do so. And on that “maybe” hangs the whole question of who is being served by lifting up Charlie Kirk as a model of discipleship and dialogue.

Watching the memorial service, seeing the “powers and principalities” come to pay their respects to Mr. Kirk, I found myself remembering Jesus’ response to the dilemma posed to him about taxes: “Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God” (Mk 12:17). And in the days since, I have found myself reflecting on the concern that Cardinal Dolan expressed later in the same discussion during which he compared Mr. Kirk to St. Paul: “A great many, I fear, are consuming videos and posts that reinforce and deepen the idea that ‘the other guy’ is evil, a threat, something that must be destroyed.”

A frightening amount of time during the memorial—most especially the speech by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff—was devoted to reinforcing precisely that idea of the threat of the other and arguing that the other must be destroyed. While that does not and cannot undo the grace of seeing Erika Kirk forgive her husband’s killer, it must enter into the discernment of spirits and the question of who is entering by whose door.

The powers of this world came to Charlie Kirk’s funeral, and some of them spoke the words of the Gospel. But they also spoke the words of Caesar, and while we should all wish that the service had been structured differently to end with Mrs. Kirk, Caesar was given the last word instead.

In the end, of course, faith in Christ assures that it is God whose mercy, justice and peace will emerge victorious over all worldly power. Mr. Kirk’s hope to lead people to Jesus through politics may often have been used, and is being used by many of those powers even now, to further lure us into division. Against those who seek such strife, Jesus’ counsel remains the best: Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God.