Right-wing commentator and youth organizer Charlie Kirk spoke Monday night at Sunset Avenue Church of God in North Carolina, where he made a variety of historically and biblically baseless claims about why right-wing Christians must be politically engaged.
Kirk, the Christian nationalist founder of Turning Point USA who has millions of followers on social media, spoke with Sunset Avenue’s pastor Boyd Byerly, who asked Kirk to explain to the audience why it is “important for pastors and church people to get involved and to make a difference in our communities and not to sit on the sidelines.”
“First, the Bible commands us to do it,” Kirk replied. “Jeremiah 29:7: ‘Demand the welfare of the nation that you are in because your welfare is tied to your nation’s welfare.’ Daniel, Esther, Mordecai, Nehemiah, Jeremiah, and others were all counselors to secular government for God’s purpose. So, unless you want to remove every single one of those people that cared about the government, cared about the political implications, then you’re not on good theological standing for people that say that. Zechariah 8:16-17 [contain] direct orders: demand justice, demand love in my name. I’m paraphrasing the Scripture, but there’s direct orders of what to do politically.”
“The Founders had trust in a constitutional style government because they always thought the church would be the counselor to the king,” Kirk claimed. “So, that’s why they didn’t have to build it into any of the outward mechanisms. By the way, every single one of the separation of powers, checks and balances, independent judiciary, they’re all Christian, they’re all biblical. For example, Isaiah 33:22 … it basically says God is the king, he’s the interpreter of laws, he’s the maker of laws. I wonder where that is? Oh, you mean the executive branch, the judicial branch, the legislative branch? The Founding Fathers wrote in the Federalist Papers [that] only God should have the power of those three branches, so they made it intentional to separate those three; the first government in human history ever do that. Consent of the governed comes right out of Isaiah as well. [An] independent judiciary comes right out of Leviticus.”
Let’s take a look at Kirk’s claims, such as his assertion that Jeremiah 29:7 commands Christians to be involved in politics makes little sense considering that the biblical passage is actually a command that the Jews in Babylon pray for the city into which they had been exiled: “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”
Similarly, Zechariah 8:16-17 is simply a command to “speak the truth to one another; render in your gates judgments that are true and make for peace; do not devise evil in your hearts against one another, and love no false oath, for all these things I hate, declares the Lord.”
These two passages are hardly explicit “commands” for modern-day American Christians to be involved in government, much less “direct orders of what to do politically.”
By the same token, there is no evidence to support Kirk’s claim that the founders who drafted the Constitution relied on the Bible for the concept of consent of the governed or in establishing checks and balances and an independent judiciary, nor is there any mention in the Federalist Papers of Isaiah 33:22 being the inspiration for the Constitution’s separation of powers.
One has to wonder how many other baseless claims Kirk has made to his millions of followers to justify Christian nationalism.
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