More Than a “Secular Kook”: Charlie Kirk’s Murder, Erika’s Grief, and Our Broken Story About Who Hates Whom

Why One Assassin Doesn’t Prove America Hates Christians

Introduction

The day Erika Kirk went on Fox and talked about her husband’s death, one line jumped out: her fear that “some secular kook” might show up and harass Charlie’s resting place.

You don’t have to agree with Charlie Kirk’s politics to understand the rawness in that. Her husband was assassinated in public, on video, and parts of the internet laughed, memed it, and spun conspiracy theories about it. In that context, a grieving widow wanting one sacred space—one corner of the world untouched by trolls and maniacs—is pretty easy to sympathize with.

But there’s another piece that needs saying.

The man accused of killing Charlie Kirk was not simply “secular.” He appears to be something more complicated: a young, disaffected, politically radicalized, extremely online person whose worldview was stitched together from internet subcultures, left-leaning identity politics, and personal grievance.

That matters, because it exposes a bigger problem with how we talk about these tragedies. Christians sometimes frame every hostile act against a prominent believer as proof that “secular America” hates them, or that the country is divided between a faithful remnant and a hostile, persecuting majority. Yes, there are extremists on both sides. Yes, Christians are sometimes targeted.

But that does not mean the country is neatly split into “religious vs. persecutors.”

Reality is messier—and if we misdiagnose the problem, we’ll miss the solution.

What Actually Happened to Charlie Kirk

On September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. He was on stage during the first stop of Turning Point USA’s “American Comeback Tour” when a sniper, later identified as 22-year-old Tyler James Robinson, fired from a rooftop about 140 yards away.

According to charging documents and subsequent reporting:

• Robinson allegedly used a high-powered bolt-action rifle.
• He surrendered the next day after his parents recognized him in images released by law enforcement and persuaded him to come in.
• Investigators say he confessed in private messages and referenced disposing of the weapon and a “manifesto.”
• Prosecutors have charged him with aggravated murder and related offenses and announced they will seek the death penalty, citing political targeting and the presence of children as aggravating factors.

Engraved bullet casings were recovered at the scene, with messages referencing anti-fascist slogans, online meme phrases, and even a famous Italian partisan song title—signaling a stew of internet culture, performative irony, and political hostility.

Utah’s governor has publicly said that Robinson appears to have drifted away from his conservative family, adopted left-leaning views, and become increasingly radicalized online after leaving school.

None of that paints a simple picture. This was not a church-burning atheist professor with a Dawkins quote tattooed on his arm. It wasn’t a clean caricature of “the secular left.” It looks more like what we keep seeing in the 21st century: political violence that grows out of isolation, identity confusion, internet radicalization, and grievance, then latches onto whatever ideology justifies the anger.

Erika’s Fear and the Human Side of “Secular Kook”

Against that backdrop, Erika Kirk has been doing what many grieving spouses do in a hyper-mediated age: trying to defend her husband’s memory and carve out dignity in the middle of a circus.

She’s had to contend with:

• People sharing and celebrating the shooting video online.
• Conspiracy theories about her husband, his death, and even her jewelry.
• Attacks and speculation coming from inside the conservative movement, including wild theories from figures like Candace Owens.

In interviews, she’s pushed back—calling the conspiracy narratives a “mind virus,” condemning those who laughed at her husband’s death, and begging for one thing that isn’t politicized: the peace of his resting place.

When a person in that position worries out loud about a “secular kook” desecrating a grave, it’s not hard to see what she’s reacting to:

• Years of culture-war rhetoric demonizing her husband.
• A real pattern of online harassment toward public figures, especially polarizing ones.
• Actual people on social media celebrating his death as “justice,” “karma,” or “good riddance.”

On the human level, that fear is understandable. If someone murdered your spouse in front of cameras and strangers online turned it into a punchline, you wouldn’t be thinking in careful, sociological categories either. You’d want the loud, cruel world kept as far from the grave as possible.

So it’s important to say this clearly: her grief and anger are real and legitimate. She’s not crazy for wanting to protect what’s left of her husband from more cruelty.

But then we have to move to the next level and ask: is “secular kook” really the right lens for what happened? And is it a useful way to talk about the threats we all face?

The Assassin Was More Than Secular

The phrase “secular kook” suggests a neat causal link: the absence of religion leads to crazy hatred of religious conservatives. From there, it’s only a short hop to the wider claim many Christians make today: that secular America is out to get them, and that the country is essentially split between “believers” and the rest of society that wants to persecute them.

But look at Robinson’s emerging profile:

• He came from a conservative, religious background but drifted ideologically as a young adult.
• His views reportedly shifted toward pro-LGBTQ positions, left-leaning politics, and strong dislike for Kirk’s rhetoric.
• Investigators and the governor have used terms like “leftist ideology” and pointed to internet radicalization as factors, even while saying a final motive remains under investigation.
  
• The engraved messages on bullet casings mixed anti-fascist language, ironic anime/furry and meme references, and slogans associated with resistance or violence—all signals of an extremely online, subculture-driven identity more than a clean philosophical stance.

That’s not “secular” in the simple sense of “doesn’t go to church.” It’s a cocktail of ideological drift, internet culture, political obsession, and performative extremism.

And if we’re honest, we’ve seen versions of that cocktail across all kinds of violence:

• Self-identified Christians committing atrocities and then justifying it with scripture or prophecy.
• Non-religious people using political ideology as a kind of ersatz religion, complete with heretics and holy wars.
• Mixed-up young men inventing their own Frankenstein beliefs out of half-digested memes, gamified violence, and rage.

In that world, “secular vs. religious” just doesn’t explain very much.

The more accurate picture is: our culture is producing isolated, angry, identity-fragile people who sometimes reach for politics or religion to give their rage meaning. If we license ourselves to blame “secularism” every time a non-religious person commits a crime, we’re doing the same thing the left does when it blames “white Christianity” or “toxic masculinity” every time a religious conservative does something awful.

It’s lazy—and it hides more than it reveals.

Extremists Exist on Both Sides. That Doesn’t Mean the Country Is Split Into Two Armies

There’s another trap here: the idea that because extremists exist on both the religious and secular sides, the country is basically two camps at war—saints and persecutors, believers and heathens, patriots and traitors.

That’s simply not how most people live.

Most Americans:

• Have mixed families—religious parents, secular kids; conservative siblings, liberal cousins.
• Co-work, coach teams, and share neighborhoods with people who disagree with them.
• Don’t spend their days plotting persecution of the other camp or fantasizing about their graves being vandalized.

The people who do behave that way are a small minority—loud, yes; online, absolutely; but not representative of 300-plus million people.

When Christians frame every insult, legal dispute, or online mob as if it proves they are an oppressed class and everyone else is united in hostile secularism, they’re doing two unhelpful things:

1. They’re borrowing, consciously or not, from the very persecution narrative that Jews actually lived through—state-backed legal discrimination, pogroms, expulsions, ghettos, culminating in the Holocaust. That’s not what’s happening to Christians in America. Being criticized, mocked, or even targeted individually is horrible, but it is not the same as living under an organized, systemic campaign to erase you from the public square.
2. They’re reinforcing the us-vs-them narrative that extremists on both sides thrive on. If your story of the world is “my group is righteous and under attack; the other group is fundamentally out to get us,” then every tragedy becomes more fuel—not for understanding and reform, but for escalation.

Yes, Christians get targeted sometimes. So do atheists, Muslims, Jews, LGBTQ people, conservatives, liberals, cops, and journalists. That doesn’t mean any one of those categories is locked in permanent civil war against all the others. It means we live in a big, fractured country where too many people are taught to see enemies instead of neighbors.

Christians Are Not the Only Ones Targeted—And Not Everyone Who Targets Them Is “The Other Side”

One of the strange ironies in the Kirk aftermath is that some of the ugliest behavior hasn’t come from militant atheists or “godless leftists,” but from within his own political ecosystem:

• Conspiracy theorists on the right spinning elaborate stories about Deep State plots, foreign intelligence agencies, or internal betrayal.
• A public feud between Erika and Candace Owens, where Owens accuses a grieving widow of using “BLM tactics” because Erika wants conspiracy theories about her husband to stop.

When your own “side” is capable of exploiting your tragedy, attacking your spouse, and undermining your memory, it’s hard to maintain a simple narrative where the line between good and evil maps perfectly onto religious vs. secular or conservative vs. liberal.

More broadly, if we’re honest, people of faith have not always been gentle toward others either:

• Some Christians have cheered or excused violence against abortion providers or LGBTQ people.
• Christian rhetoric has sometimes painted atheists, Muslims, or “the left” as less than human, as tools of Satan, as enemies of God.
• Whole subcultures on the right talk about “owning the libs” or “christian nationalism” in ways that mirror the same dehumanizing language they complain about when aimed at them.

None of that justifies murder. But it does remind us that sin, cruelty, and fanaticism are human problems, not simply secular ones.

Grief Is Personal. Narratives Are Political. We Shouldn’t Confuse the Two

When Erika Kirk says she doesn’t want a “secular kook” at her husband’s grave, she’s speaking from the raw place of personal grief. That deserves compassion, not nitpicking. She’s a widow, not a think tank.

But once her words are lifted from that context and turned into a narrative—“the real threat to Christians is secular America”—it becomes fair to push back.

Because the real threats look more like this:

• Young men radicalized in algorithm-driven echo chambers.
• Conspiracy firestorms that dehumanize public figures and turn death into content.
• Political rhetoric on both sides that treats opponents as existential enemies instead of fellow citizens.
• A culture that teaches people to interpret every bad thing that happens as proof that their own group is uniquely victimized.

You can find deeply religious versions of that, and totally secular ones. You can find those dynamics on Fox, on MSNBC, on TikTok, and in countless niche subreddits and group chats.

And if we let those dynamics define how we see each other, it almost doesn’t matter who believes in God and who doesn’t. We’ll be too busy aiming at each other to notice we’re all standing in the same burning building.

Why This Matters

This isn’t just about one widow’s phrase or one horrific assassination. It’s about how we tell the story of who we are as a country.

If we buy into the idea that:

• Christians = persecuted minority
• Secular people = hostile mob

then every incident becomes confirmation of the script. That script, in turn, justifies more anger, more isolation, more preparation for conflict.

A better story looks like this:

• We are a mixed people, with believers and non-believers, conservatives and liberals, and everything in between.
• Most of us don’t want anyone’s grave desecrated, anyone assassinated, anyone mocked in their grief.
• A small number of extremists and opportunists—religious and secular—are driving the worst of our discourse and our political violence.
• Our job is not to defeat the other half of the country, but to isolate the tiny percentage that actually wants blood, chaos, and humiliation.

That doesn’t make what happened to Charlie Kirk any less evil. It doesn’t minimize what Erika and her family are going through. It just refuses to turn their suffering into one more brick in a wall between “us” and “them.”

If we want fewer assassinations, fewer death threats, fewer graves at risk of vandalism, we don’t need a holy war. We need less mythologizing, more reality; less “secular vs. religious,” more “sane vs. unhinged, humane vs. cruel.”

And that’s a line that crosses every label we like to put on each other.

References

Assassination of Charlie Kirk. (2025). Wikipedia entry summarizing the shooting, suspect, charges, and investigation. Wikipedia

Halloran, W. (2025, September 12). Engravings on ammunition offer clues into motive in Charlie Kirk assassination. KUTV. KUTV

NBC Chicago. (2025, September 12). Messages written on bullet casings in Charlie Kirk shooting.

New York Post. (2025, December 11). Erika Kirk tearfully rebukes people who celebrated her husband’s death: “You’re sick.” New York Post

New York Post. (2025, December 11). Erika Kirk’s one-word response to Candace Owens’ nonstop attacks and conspiracy theories. New York Post

New York Post. (2025, December 11). Erika Kirk claps back at jewelry conspiracies as Tyler Robinson appears in court. New York Post

New York Post. (2025, December 11). Candace Owens strangely accuses Erika Kirk of using BLM tactics. New York Post

PBS NewsHour. (2025, September 14). Utah Gov. Cox shares more details from investigation into motive of Kirk shooting suspect. PBS

ABC News. (2025, October). Tyler Robinson said he killed Charlie Kirk because he ‘spreads too much hate’: Officials. ABC News

Disclaimer
The views expressed in this post are opinions of the author for educational and commentary purposes only. They are not statements of fact about any individual or organization, and should not be construed as legal, medical, or financial advice. References to public figures and institutions are based on publicly available sources cited in the article. Any resemblance beyond these references is coincidental.