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Conor here: The following piece compares the hagiography surrounding Kirk to that of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Kobe Bryant, and Queen Elizabeth. Perhaps the author is treading carefully due to the “sensitivity” around the issue, but it seems painfully obvious that the Kirk case is in an altogether different stratosphere. While the memes and amount of social media posts might be comparable, the number of powerful forces aiming to benefit are not, which in the case of Kirk, include at least the following: the Trump administration, Israel, the military, national security state, ICE, private prison industry, tech accelerationists, Christian nationalists, and probably more I’m forgetting. Another obvious difference is that those individuals died of natural causes, or in the case of Bryant, an accident. Kirk was assassinated, and the official narrative has a lot of holes that may never be filled.
That being said, the following does provide a reminder of the usual baseline American hagiography for public figures, as well as its digital supercharge—both of which are being exploited now.
By Arthur “Art” Jipson, an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work at the University of Dayton. Originally published at The Conversation.
An AI-generated image of Charlie Kirk embracing Jesus. Another of Kirk posing with angel wings and halo. Then there’s the one of Kirk standing with George Floyd at the gates of heaven.
When prominent political or cultural figures die in the U.S., the remembrance of their life often veers into hagiography. And that’s what’s been happening since the gruesome killing of conservative activist and Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk.
The word hagiography comes from the Christian tradition of writing about saints’ lives, but the practice often spills into secular politics and media, falling under the umbrella of what’s called, in sociology, the “sacralization of politics.” Assassinations and violent deaths, in particular, tend to be interpreted in sacred terms: The person becomes a secular martyr who made a heroic sacrifice. They are portrayed as morally righteous and spiritually pure.
Well done, My good and faithful servant. pic.twitter.com/GIcJ6HjRK8
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) September 14, 2025
This is, to some degree, a natural part of mourning. But taking a closer look at why this happens – and how the internet accelerates it – offers some important insights into politics in the U.S. today.
From Presidents to Protest Leaders
The construction of Ronald Reagan’s postpresidential image is a prime example of this process.
After his presidency, Republican leaders steadily polished his memory into a symbol of conservative triumph, downplaying scandals such as Iran-Contra or Reagan’s early skepticism of civil rights. Today, Reagan is remembered less as a complex politician and more as a saint of free markets and patriotism.
Among liberals, Martin Luther King Jr. experienced a comparable transformation, though it took a different form. King’s critiques of capitalism, militarism and structural racism are often downplayed in most mainstream remembrances, leaving behind a softer image of peaceful dreamer. The annual holiday, scores of street renamings and public murals honor him, but they also tame his legacy into a universally palatable story of unity.
Even more contested figures such as John F. Kennedy or Abraham Lincoln show the same pattern. Their assassinations were followed by waves of mourning that elevated them into near-mythic status.
Decades after Kennedy’s death, his portrait hung in the homes of many American Catholics, often adjacent to religious iconography such as Virgin Mary statuettes. Lincoln, meanwhile, became a kind of civic saint: His memorial in Washington, D.C., looks like a temple, with words from his speeches etched into the walls.
Why It Happens and What It Means
The hagiography of public figures serves several purposes. It taps into deep human needs, helping grieving communities manage loss by providing moral clarity in the face of chaos.
It also allows political movements to consolidate power by sanctifying their leaders and discouraging dissent. And it reassures followers that their cause is righteous – even cosmic.
In a polarized environment, the elevation of a figure into a saint does more than honor the individual. It turns a political struggle into a sacred one. If you see someone as a martyr, then opposition to their movement is not merely disagreement, it is desecration. In this sense, hagiography is not simply about remembering the dead: It mobilizes the living.
But there are risks. Once someone is framed as a saint, criticism becomes taboo. The more sacralized a figure, the harder it becomes to discuss their flaws, mistakes or controversial actions. Hagiography flattens history and narrows democratic debate.
After Queen Elizabeth II’s death in 2022, for example, public mourning in the U.K. and abroad quickly elevated her legacy into a symbol of stability and continuity, with mass tributes, viral imagery and global ceremonies transforming a complex reign into a simplified story of devotion and service.
It also fuels polarization. If one side’s leader is a martyr, then the other side must be villainous. The framing is simple but powerful.
A supporter of Charlie Kirk holds banners outside State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., during Kirk’s public memorial service on Sept. 21, 2025. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
In Kirk’s case, many of his supporters described him as a truth seeker whose death underscored a deeper moral message. At Kirk’s memorial service in Arizona, President Donald Trump called him a “martyr for American freedom.” On social media, Turning Point USA and Kirk’s official X account described him as “America’s greatest martyr to free speech.”
In doing so, they elevated his death as symbolic of larger battles over censorship. By emphasizing the fact that he died while simply speaking, they also reinforced the idea that liberals and the left are more likely to resort to violence to silence their ideological enemies, even as evidence shows otherwise.
The Digital Supercharge
Treating public figures like saints is not new, but the speed and scale of the process is. Over the past two decades, social media has turned hagiography from a slow cultural drift into a rapid-fire production cycle.
Memes, livestreams and hashtags now allow anyone to canonize someone they admire. When NBA Hall-of-Famer Kobe Bryant died in 2020, social media was flooded within hours with devotional images, murals and video compilations that cast him as more than an athlete: He became a spiritual icon of perseverance.
Kobe Bryant#KobeBryant #Kobe #RIP pic.twitter.com/5FaNIavkU6
— Addictive AI 🖼️ (@AddictiveAI) August 14, 2024
Similarly, after Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, the “Notorious RBG” meme ecosystem instantly expanded to include digital portraits and merchandise that cast her as a saintly defender of justice.
The same dynamics surrounded Charlie Kirk. Within hours of his assassination, memes appeared of Kirk draped in an American flag, being carried by Jesus.
In the days after his death, AI-generated audio clips of Kirk styled as “sermons” began circulating online, while supporters shared Bible verses that they claimed matched the exact timing of his passing. Together, these acts cast his death in religious terms: It wasn’t just a political assassination – it was a moment of spiritual significance.
Such clips and verses spread effortlessly across social media, where narratives about public figures can solidify within hours, often before facts are confirmed, leaving little room for nuance or investigation.
Easy-to-create memes and videos also enable ordinary users to participate in a sacralization process, making it more of a grassroots effort than something that’s imposed from the top down.
In other words, digital culture transforms what was once the slow work of monuments and textbooks into a living, flexible folk religion of culture and politics.
Toward Clearer Politics
Hagiography will not disappear. It meets emotional and political needs too effectively. But acknowledging its patterns helps citizens and journalists resist its distortions. The task is not to deny grief or admiration but to preserve space for nuance and accountability.
In the U.S., where religion, culture and politics frequently intertwine, recognizing that sainthood in politics is always constructed – and often strategic – can better allow people to honor loss without letting mythmaking dictate the terms of public life.
Much of the phenomena described here is kitsch. Kitsch is melodramatic and points at the feelings that the viewer / participant is “supposed” to have. This is why certain other santificated aspects of U.S. culture such as “Hamilton” and “Oklahoma” aren’t much more than kitsch.
The reason the Catholic Church takes its time in canonizing people is to sift the initial reactions, the kitsch, and the required miracles, with the benefit of time. The instant saint Pope Wojtyla is a perfect example of what happens when the Catholic Church loses self-control — all of those images of Wojtyla clinging to his miter and making goofy faces in his final performance of suffering.
The main secular saints are more complicated indeed: “Decades after Kennedy’s death, his portrait hung in the homes of many American Catholics, often adjacent to religious iconography such as Virgin Mary statuettes. Lincoln, meanwhile, became a kind of civic saint: His memorial in Washington, D.C., looks like a temple, with words from his speeches etched into the walls.”
For Catholics, and I recall this well, given that Italians / Italian-Americans were black in the U.S. system of racial apartheid till they/we somehow became white around 1945, the election of John F. Kennedy was a signal of a kind of acceptance. It was tempered by that embarrassing and conciliatory visit he had to make to the Divines of Texas to assure them that he wouldn’t hand their America over to the Popester.
With Lincoln, what makes a deep impression is photographs from the time of the funeral train going from Washington to Chicago to Springfield, Illinois, with crowds lining the tracks.
https://www.rogerjnorton.com/photos/funeralgallery.html
In the case of Kennedy and Lincoln, the brutality of their deaths as well as what may be called the sacral side of the presidency of the U S of A factor in.
Among the others listed, in a few years, they will have faded away. Just as other media-savvy saints like Mother Teresa have faded away.
Last year in November you introduced me to Youtuber @shoeonhead. Thanks for which, many laughs have followed from that. Yesterday I watched her reaction video that went up 8 days after Kirk’s murder. Have you seen it? and if so does kitsch describe that too? melodramatic pointers at the feelings that the she and we are supposed to have.
.Tom:
I watched Shoe0nHead’s video twice. I think that it is the video of a young person (she must be about 32) dealing with violence, a random murder, and her own mortality.
She’s a bread-and-roses lefty, as am I. But her virtual world is now a mess.
Much to contemplate
I couldn’t get your phrase from a few days ago out of my head as I watched and later thought about it, “we are seeing how social media are the home of the stupid”. Making jokes by selecting the most egregious bad behavior in that home was Shoe’s strong suit and I got a lot of laughs from that in the past. Here she made an analogous selection and seemed very upset about it. First I found myself rather shocked at the idea that she appears to think that stuff represents much of anything. Then later I felt afraid that perhaps it’s me that doesn’t understand. If enough people believe that the image they see in social media is real then really it does represent a lot.
The British royalty is the classic case of kitsch in all its aspects. So I don’t expect the status of QEII to fade away. Kirk, Bryant, Ginsberg, Navalny, and the other kitschy “sanctified dead” of the month will be forgotten a lot sooner, because the massive publicity to inflate their personal tragedies into national or international hysteria only reveals how much they were niche celebrities, extremely important to the small subset of the population that were paying attention to them but barely visible to others. The Queen and her family didn’t have to do much of anything to merit a kitschy write-up in the newspapers/websites. The others had to die at a convenient moment to be so worthy of endless and fulsome praise.
I’d suggest the situation regarding the kitsch surrounding the British Monarch/y (there’s very little attached to the family now) is complex. The Monarch still has constitutional clout behind the curtain – there’s little doubt QEII did rein in the ‘enthusiasm’ of several Prime Ministers – eg Thatcher – from the extreme implemnation of their proposals and stopped Johnson’s dream of being a UK Trump in its tracks via the threat of confrontation. This was only possible because of the ‘kitsch’ that (still) garnishes the Throne with a glamour and supra-political reality in the popular mind – something the US Constitution lacks. A Monarch who lives at 16 Buckingham Street, East Cheam and has a day job packing shelves isn’t going to have the same ability to stand up to a Trump-like take-over of the UK as one who lives in a Palace and can (appear to) look down on the world impartially, with their best interests at heart. Or as words written on a piece of paper that can mean whatever the powerful decide they mean.
And kitsch can work the other way, too. The Monarch who is aware that but for a stroke of fate he could be living in East Cheam packing shelves all day, and only lives in a Palace because of the public’s suspension of disbelief re the kitsch that surrounds him, knows he has to play his part in the bargain if he isn’t to end up in East Cheam or, worse, share the fate of the last Tsar or Louis XIV.
I understand where some people would like to take Charlie Kirk’s death. First, for anyone less inclined, I think it’s important to say that Charlie Kirk had no right to call himself a Christian. Kirk was a supporter of Israel and Israel is committing genocide.
Second, as a Christian it’s not necessary to love Jesus and/or God 24/7, you should love your enemy, as well as pray for them. As Jesus said, let’s face it, loving somebody who loves you is hardly a big stretch in the eyes of god. And you should help those who need help. Who needs more help today than the Palestinians?
Kirk deserves credit as an organizer and political activist but there is no way anybody should allow Christianity to jack up his legacy.
Well his wife did say she forgives his killer although Larry Johnson says we don’t yet know who that was. The above is an interesting post in that “vicitimization narratives” seem to be universal and also in our personal lives and not just social. They are a staple of the movie world where the victimization typically turns into a vengeance narrative, perhaps starring Liam Neeson. Some of us grew up with the Kennedy cult and only later learned something of the “dark side of Camelot.” American culture in general doesn’t seem to be very good at nuance.
Went to our neighbor-town to shop yesterday, not so blue. Saw two ‘Charlie’s, one a handwritten on a pickup waving a flag, meeting expectations. The other was on a clean Tahoe, back window right, only one other sticker down-left, no other adornments on the shiny black behemoth. Sticker was very professional.
This is a good article by Jepson, but Conor is on the right track. It would be an enormous misunderestimation to assume the past cases of the sacralization technique indicate the depth of this issue. Our church fired a minister for simply skirting the edge of politics a few years ago, but Charlie Kirk got his name said from the stage.
Anyone watch the interview with the ‘Bama quarterback yesterday? No smoove, jaw flapping all directions, three references to JC & the Almighty, hick-hopping around full yayhoo after. During the game? Complete focus, no qualm, mistake free. Ocular clarity. Not to be underestimated.
This brief post is an interesting postscript to Nat Wilson Turner’s excellent piece here that taught me more about the online weirdness surrounding the Kirk shooting than I ever imagined existing. Thank you.
I was somewhat intimidated by the sight of the flag at our nearby volunteer fire department lowered to half mast… and who decided ?… then last night I was forwarding some Black Lives Matter info to a new friend and learned that governor Stein of NC had decreed the flag lowering as a tribute to North Carolina’s Black civil rights pioneer Joseph McNeil who just died after a long and remarkable career. He was one of the four university students in Greensboro who launched a sit-in to integrate the Woolworth lunch counter.
Charlie makes for a good Wal*Martyr, photogenic as all get up, one of those people that couldn’t take a bad photo, it’d be as if Billy Graham was struck down by an assassin’s bullet in the midst of McCarthyism run amok.
Kirk’s life and the memorials of his death are ugly examples of the destruction of the message of Jesus and its transformation into the racist, war mongering, political ideology of Christian nationalism. This bastardization of the figure of Jesus as lovingly embracing unrepentant practitioners and enthusiasts of white supremacy, lynching, genocide, colonialism, “the white man’s burden” and the patriotic mass murder of war is not new. It has its roots in the Roman Emperor Constantine’s adoption of “Christianity” as the official, unifying religion of the empire. According to the mythology surrounding his conversion, in a dream Constantine saw a the cross of Jesus in the sky encircled with the words “In hoc signo vinces” — in this sign you will conquer. In case you were looking for the roots of the hatred and persecution of Jews, you will also find them right there.
Charlie Kirk was an adept rabble rouser. His skilled use of public forums to denigrate opponents and promote national-socialist memes was, at best, a perversion of free speech.
At times like this I think back to the absolute white-hot fury of Clinton supporters after the 2016 election. They were allowed to be seditiously furious yet Hillary Clinton is still alive and doing well. Charlie Kirk is dead. Accept that his supporters are allowed to mourn. Why is a topic for closed door discussions. Public criticism at this time is, as Babylon Bee has opined, a Westboro Baptist style funeral protest.
P.S. The poltiical blowback from overdone mourning is zilch. The blowback on protesting the mourning? Lasts forever and is passed on to subsequent generations. Kirk’s supporters are not the ones waving a bloody shirt here.
Huh? You have not even remotely been paying attention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplinary_actions_for_commentary_on_the_assassination_of_Charlie_Kirk
There’s a lot more where that came from.
One established and highly credible reader told me a younger relative was fired over critical online statements about Kirk. So the retaliation reaches very far.
And the Trump Administration is using the Kirk murder (which we have been led to believe is the work of a lone shooter) to call for a witch hunt against the “left”:
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/trumps-nspm-7-labels-common-beliefs
I watched some Kirk debates in the UK where he did not have pre-screened counterparts. He did not perform well. He made shit up persistently and got loud and bullied when he was on the ropes rhetorically. No one should be murdered but I do not see anything wrong with challenging the idolatry.
Briahna Joy Gray, in an interview with Sabrina Salvati (Sabby Sabs), makes the same point about Kirk’s debating tactics and skills, in search of soundbites.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoCCzAr7hf4
example interview video clip at 7:30
After Charlie calmed down, Briahna says after about 20 minutes, he conceded her point. She also notes the discussion was a setup where Kirk wanted a black person opposite him to score points about redlining as not racist – even though redlining is the definition of racism – because a few of the very few black banks (what does a black bank even mean?) also followed the practice.
Thanks for that ISL. We’ve seen this style of “debate” often. Mehdi Hasan seems to consider himself its World Grand Master. The Hasan method requires careful prep to know exactly how you’re going to win and avoid any contests that involve risk. Charlie doesn’t look well prepared in that example with Briahna.
On the one hand open discourse is fundamental and necessary to democracy but on the other this kind of competitive charisma sport they call debate is not. If defeating your political enemy is the goal then finding areas for compromise is probably not.
A friend of mine lost his job as an assistant professor in S. Carolina for some pretty tame social media comments.
You can be factually correct about everything and still miss how the zeitgeist is shifting. Journalism is all in past tense, politics is about being a step ahead of everyone else as well as understanding how different groups are seeing the same things and no, there really aren’t any good politicians left out there.
Ripping on Kirk post-mortem may be journalism but it is very bad politcs (i.e. it earns you NO votes and motivates the opposition). Kirk is untouchable right now, there is nothing to be gained as I don’t think this some kind of virtue signaling, just people venting inappropriately. Kirk should have been gone after when he was busy helping Trump win the 2024 election. Doing so now serves no purpose. If you get positive proof that he slept with Hitler’s ashes, save it for October of an election year.
I tore Kirk a new one plenty of times in my blogging days but he had matured. Never would have been anyone I voted for (assuming HRC never runs again) but he was making all the right moves to be the guy who replaces Vance a decade from now. I’m assuming a lot but that’s what you do when you try to see down the road. You also look to see how Kirk was received by Rubio or anyone else who might run. Kirk had a future, politically speaking. The GOP has a future, politically speaking.
Almost every staff person you see surrounding major candidates whose names you don’t know and will probably never learn? Everyone of them is every bit as “mean” as Charlie Kirk or they wouldn’t be standing there.
TDS was a terrible look for Democrats for years, KDS is a worse look, especially in an off-off year for elections.
Given the participation of multibillion dollar companies in digital infrastructure, compute, and AI pumping with visions of total dominance over human affairs, and the large-scale funding efforts from billionaire bankrolled think tanks, nation states and social media botnets towards the subject and generation of the content, it’s a little rich of Dr. Jipson to claim the process of hagiography and digital martyrdom is now an organic, bottom up folk process.
In fairness to the author, “making it more of a grassroots effort than something that’s imposed from the top down” does not say whether it is significantly or negligibly more grassroots.
The article’s important point, it seems to me, is the resultant immunity to criticism of Saint XXXX, explaining the urgency of tying official agendas to the recently martyred.
I don’t know how long Kirk’s fame will last. As DJG says, it could be mostly kitsch.
But there’s nothing artificial about the martyrdom. Kirk was a political activist, who was killed on account of his beliefs. That is martyrdom.
Anyone who rankles at his canonization need only blame the murderer. His ideas and rhetoric didn’t seem all that remarkable to me, but his blood is authentic.
Witch-hunts, proscriptions, and purges are all the usual features of a polity riven with factionalism. I think we can expect more of these sorts of things. Regardless of which faction is in office, the secret police will be eager to serve and protect, in their customary fashion.
However, I can imagine that, for Trump, there might be something personal in this, beyond political advantage. After all, the leader of the MAGA faction himself came only an inch or two away from suffering Kirk’s fate, during last year’s election campaign. Or does Donny really “piss ice water” ?
The murderer? Who are the murderers exactly?
Interesting how the murder of one person is treated as “martyrdom” while the mass murders, genocide and starvation of possibly 100s of thousands in Palestine is ignored. Of course, no one should be murdered, but: Can we say “rank hypocrisy” boys and girls?
I have trouble believing the likes of Kirk as a “martyr.” If you face the choice between death for your belief and comfortable life after recanting and you still choose the former, then you are a martyr. If you are forced to choose between pretending to recant your faith and having your community suffer deaths while insisting on your stubborn pride and choose the former, you are still a martyr, probably (channeling Shusaku Endo for the latter.) Kirk faced no such choice.
In addition to the other beneficiaries already mentioned of this most suspicious of murders, we have the constant distraction and division of the plebs. There is so much high-level corruption, incompetence, ignorance, high crimes, scandal etc. to be distracted from that this murder was timely and very convenient for the beneficiaries. That alone appears suspicious.
Maybe I’ve watched too many British crime dramas, but we have means, motives, and opportunity here, All the dots are coming together: irrational FBI story-line, media saturation hysteria, the crowding out of Genocide from the hegemonic discourse, etc…something does not smell right.
Curiouser and curiouser. They need to get a more convincing pack of lies, but I have chronic unrealistic expectations from public discourse. .One thing is clear is that the plebs must be divided and distracted at all times.
Divide and rule on steroids is the order of the day.
Even if I were a conservative, I would hesitate to call someone who was killed because of anti-transgender beliefs a martyr.
Jimmy Dore has an interesting vid out about the “shooting”.
*Sigh* His theories have been out out in the wild and have been well debunked by Larry Johnson, who not only knows a few things about ballistics, but also conferred with medics who have operated in war theaters, as in have seen many gunshot wounds.