The new political theology

After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Bible-quoting, radical right-wing political organizer, on 10 September 2025, the US president and his top officials moved quickly. In conjunction with Kirk’s widow and Turning Point USA, the political recruiting and Christian proselytizing organization Kirk founded, they staged a memorial extravaganza that combined lachrymose emotional display with Christological imagery and bellicose political rhetoric.

The First Amendment to the US Constitution states: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.’ Strictly speaking, the Trump administration had not violated the letter of the Constitution. Congress had made no law.

But in making a martyr of Kirk, MAGA leaders exhibited a shrewd appreciation of one of the most profound insights of Alexis de Tocqueville, the nineteenth-century French historian and political theorist, who was the first and greatest student of American democracy: namely, that when it comes to guiding the evolution of democratic society, ‘mores are more important than laws’, where by ‘mores’ he meant not only ‘habits of the heart but also … the whole range of ideas that shape habits of mind … the whole moral and intellectual state of a people.’1 They instinctively recognized that a religious spectacle aimed directly at the hearts and minds of a susceptible audience would be far more effective than any conceivable legislative act.

Religion has of course always been a significant force in American politics. Churches shaped discourse on both sides of the slavery question. The temperance movement led to a constitutional amendment. Mainstream churches preached effectively against ‘godless communism’ during the Cold War. Influential evangelical movements like Billy Graham’s and Jerry Falwell’s mobilized voters and promoted the careers of political leaders such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. But never before the Kirk funeral had the US government so directly invoked divine sanction for its own repressive policies, effectively establishing ‘Kirkianity’, the cult of the slain political organizer, as the state religion.

A politicized ‘righteous fury’

In the words of the president’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, ‘the day that Charlie died, the angels wept, but those tears have been turned into fire in our hearts. And that fire burns with a righteous fury that our enemies cannot comprehend or understand.’ Miller’s ‘righteous fury’ made it clear that Kirkianity, though drawing on traditional Christian themes, was in essence a fundamentally different beast. Consider, for example, the Christian injunction to turn the other cheek: Erica Kirk, the martyr’s widow, attempted to make Christlike-forgiveness of her husband’s assassin the centerpiece of her eulogy: ‘I forgive, because it is what Christ did. The answer to hate is not hate.’ But President Trump, the Pope of Kirkianity, wanted no part of such a meek response. His was a church militant, not a church penitent: ‘I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them,’ he said, adding that his Justice Department would be ‘investigating networks of radical-left maniacs who fund, organize, fuel and perpetrate political violence’.

Clearly, Trump, Miller and other speakers at the Kirk funeral sought to accredit the idea of the new religion as an arm of their nascent authoritarian state. They thus ignored another of Tocqueville’s key insights: namely, that it is dangerous for a religion to rely on state support for its influence, because ‘when religion seeks the support of worldly interests, it becomes almost as fragile as any temporal power’.2 Indeed, MAGA’s culture warriors, currently in the ascendancy, seem blithely unconcerned with the potential fragility of temporal power. Their chief concern is rather with consolidating the gains of recent years in order to achieve what the Italian Marxist leader Antonio Gramsci called ‘cultural hegemony’.

It is no accident that Gramsci’s name appears in this context. His work has been conspicuously invoked by far-right writers such as Christopher Rufo. As scholar of European intellectual history Enzo Traverso writes, ‘The recent upsurge in right-wing invocations of Gramsci is an instance of that fear and imitation of radical theories that has long defined the right and its counter-revolutionary self-image.’

Ecumenical indifference

MAGA’s success in seeking cultural hegemony through religion would not have been possible had it not overcome the traditional obstacle to achieving a state religion in the US: namely, the extreme diversity of America’s religious sects. For Tocqueville, this diversity was a strength. Because religion remained doctrinally divided, it could never achieve the cohesive unity that would have been required to rival the state; it thus avoided blame for government’s failures and could offer consolation when social ills proved impervious to governmental remedies. A generalized respect for the religious spirit and the more capacious view of the general interest that it encouraged therefore survived the doctrinal differences that divided the country’s many sects. What one believed did not matter as much as the persistence of belief itself as a token of the democratic equality of all souls in the eyes of their Creator.

This ecumenical indifference to doctrine sustained a high level of religiosity in America even as the religious spirit waned in other modernizing Western societies. But discontent festered in two specific quarters of this generally placid socio-religious landscape. First, fundamentalist evangelicals had long opposed any compromise with modernity’s secularizing voices. Evangelicals defended traditional social hierarchies and taboos, especially white male supremacy, and hostility to homosexuality, premarital sex and abortion. These reactionary views were most prevalent in, though not limited to, lower social strata and certain regions of the country such as the Bible Belt of the Deep South. They long predate the advent of MAGA.

Second, of more recent vintage and originating among ‘elite’ Catholic thinkers, including Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen and Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule, is what the latter calls ‘common good conservatism’. These critics share the evangelicals’ belief that social order has broken down in America, largely owing to the interventions of the liberal state (in its various guises as the New Deal, Great Society and Clinton-Obama neoliberalism). Unlike politically minded evangelicals, however, these elite Catholic thinkers – whom Laura Field, in a recent book,3

calls ‘post-liberals’ but who might equally well be termed neo-Thomists – remain wary of a Christo-populist movement like Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point. Kirk was a ‘small-d’ democrat: an exclusionary democrat to be sure, but a democrat, a man of the – or, rather, of his –people.

In contrast to Kirkianity, elitist Catholic thinkers such as Deneen and Vermeule see ‘We the People’ as steeped in the original sin from which no flesh can escape.4 For them, the remedy is not based on indulgence and an easy path to redemption but the iron strictures of the Law, understood as a binding doctrine laid down in the pre-modern past, prior to the upheavals occasioned by democratization, industrialization and liberalization. Their thought has achieved substantial influence at the level of the Supreme Court, where conservative Catholic jurists, carefully curated by the Federalist Society, a conservative organization that advocates for legal originalism, under the influence of chairman Leonard Leo, and the reactionary organization Opus Dei, have left an indelible imprint.

There is yet another strand to the new political theology, which appeals chiefly to the technological plutocrats of Silicon Valley. Its chief proponent is Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies and Founders Fund, inspired both by his discovery as a student at Stanford of French thinker René Girard and his idiosyncratic readings of Catholic theology, who recently unburdened himself of anxieties about Armageddon and the Antichrist in a series of four lectures costing attendees US$200 for the privilege. Thiel’s pseudo-philosophical ramblings would be of little moment, however, were it not for his personal association with JD Vance, whose Senate campaign he financed and whose conversion to Catholicism may have been initiated by conversations with the billionaire. Thiel apparently fears that ‘the Antichrist’ will somehow halt scientific innovation by using the power of the state to regulate artificial intelligence, the energy industries and nuclear technology.

MAGA’s fake evangelical zeal

Despite the social and intellectual distance that separates Kirkians from neo-Thomists and neo-Thielians, common enemies have made for a pragmatic political convergence, of which Donald Trump – perhaps the least religious person ever to accede to the presidency – has been able to take full advantage. Evangelical zeal provided the emotional fuel that propelled the MAGA movement forward and brought it new recruits. Post-liberal intellectuals provided the legal and philosophical expertise to reshape the appellate bench and thus pave the way to the legal victories essential to fulfilling the movement’s key demands: to end abortion, limit voting rights, enhance executive authority for cracking down on immigration, and restrict the assertion of non-traditional ideas of gender and sexuality. The neo-Thielian technological accelerationists have encouraged the Trump regime’s deep investment in AI and opposition to alternative energy sources while filling Trump’s campaign coffers with Silicon Valley money.

This de facto alliance of the evangelical, neo-Thomist and techno-accelerationist wings of conservative religiosity is proving to be remarkably effective in recruiting and sustaining Trump’s MAGA movement. Until the Kirk memorial service, however, the full extent of this alliance’s ambitions remained obscure. Political leaders such as Donald Trump and JD Vance could accept the endorsement of religious leaders without trying to pass themselves off as religious leaders themselves. Although Trump has never been shy about claiming the status of divine instrument, especially after the attempt on his life during the 2024 campaign, he knows full well that his command of biblical chapter and verse is non-existent; he had therefore been content to lend his talents to those willing to believe in him rather than to invest himself in their beliefs, for which he has little feeling and no understanding. But Kirk’s assassination provided an opportunity that proved too good to pass up: political violence had been deployed against a regime accused of employing the state’s monopoly of legitimate violence for its own illegitimate ends. The state’s adversaries found themselves momentarily disarmed, forced to concede that Kirk, a man whose views on many issues they rightly detested, had nevertheless been the victim of a heinous crime they could not but condemn. In this sense he was indeed a martyr, and one could not deny him the fervent outpouring of grief on the part of many who had previously been at best dimly aware of his activities and who remained unfamiliar with his paleo-Christian views: for example, that the role of a woman is ‘to submit to a godly man’.

The Kirk funeral transformed the political beneficiaries of his evangelizing from passive recipients of the Lord’s bounty to active proselytizers. JD Vance’s speech exemplifies the transmogrification of political rhetoric into the Good News of the revival tent: ‘The evil murderer who took Charlie from us expected us to have a funeral today, and instead, my friends, we have had a revival in celebration of Charlie Kirk and of his Lord, Jesus Christ.’ The assassin, it followed, was no mere ‘leftwing lunatic’ or ‘antifa warrior’ but evil personified, and the memorial service itself was no mere funeral but a redemptive celebration of the dead man’s ‘Lord, Jesus Christ’ and the prelude to a state-led assault on the enemies of the faith.

This was precisely the message that the Kirkian faithful wished to hear, because their church has always been a church militant, out to make converts – or else. The concern that led to the enshrining of the Establishment Clause as the very first American right in the Bill of Rights, that a triumphant majority might attempt to impose religious conformity on the rest of the nation, was swept aside in the rush to capitalize on the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Here was an advantage too tempting not to seize. And seize it the MAGA faithful have done, with all the fervor of their perpetually fighting faith and all the contempt that their leader cannot refrain from expressing toward his enemies – even if doing so entails violating the customary decorousness and restraint of funereal speech with the snarling language of hatred unleashed.

Threats to the new theology

Difficulties have arisen, however. The transformation of Charlie Kirk from organizer to martyr has enhanced the influence of the evangelical wing of MAGA theology to the detriment of both the neo-Thomists and the neo-Thielians. The evangelicals were always the politically more potent force: ‘How many divisions has the Pope’, to borrow a line attributed to Stalin. In politics numbers count for more than the intellectual and financial resources that the neo-Thomists and neo-Thielians have brought to the table. Kirk’s assassination has multiplied numerical superiority by emotional force, further empowering the Kirkian faction.

This sudden ascendancy of Kirkianity has introduced new strains into what had always been a fragile pragmatic alliance. Utah Valley University, where Kirk was killed, could not have been more remote, culturally speaking, from Deneen’s Notre Dame or Vermeule’s Harvard Law. JD Vance may have embraced both Kirk and Thiel as brothers, while professing to have imbibed his anti-liberalism from the work of Deneen, thus partaking at once of all three godheads of the new theology, but his social roots and electoral base both lay with evangelicals like Kirk. By the same token, post-liberal intellectuals are only too aware that achieving the ‘common good’ they envision depends on arousing the enthusiasm of the masses, yet at bottom they remain as culturally alien from this base as the ‘liberal elites’ they despise. The viability of this coalition contre nature has always depended on the sleight of hand and smoke and mirrors of the magician-in-chief, Donald Trump. But as Tocqueville warned, there is no assurance that such temporal power will endure long enough to entrench the new theology.

Furthermore, the potential waning of Trump’s legerdemain is not the only threat to the new theology. The traditional denominations whose influence has suffered from the new theology’s rise have not disappeared. The threat that it will become entrenched as a state religion in the wake of Kirk’s assassination has sharpened their opposition to the MAGAfication of American religion. The neo-Thomists and neo-Thielians may wrap themselves in the mantle of Catholicism, but the Pope, an American, is not on their side. He has offered his strong backing to a statement by American bishops condemning the Trump administration’s treatment of immigrants as ‘extremely disrespectful’.

The Establishment Clause of the Constitution has always served, moreover, as a bulwark against the repressive powers of the state. Many Catholics and Jews, though long since admitted into the American elite, remember a time when its gates were barred to them. Despite the influence these denominations now enjoy, they have no desire to see the state aligned with a religious faction that, while not currently hostile to them, could become so at any moment.

In Kirk’s wake

Ominously, Kirk’s assassination has encouraged other MAGA-adjacent organizers and influencers to try to fill the vacuum left by his death. Nick Fuentes, who heads the America First Foundation, is openly antisemitic and appeals to the same demographic as Kirk. Despite previous overtures to Fuentes by Trump, the administration has until now kept him at arm’s length, seeing greater advantage in currying favor with right-wing, pro-Likud Jews by backing Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and attacking alleged (and greatly overstated) antisemitism on US college campuses. But this position, dictated by political calculation rather than principle, could easily change. And, if evangelical Christian nationalism becomes entrenched as the national religion, Catholics, Jews, and even Christians, associated with former mainstream churches that have refused to embrace the new theology, could find themselves in a vulnerable position. ‘Hate thy enemies’, the doctrine openly professed by the commander-in-chief, is not calculated to reassure anyone not embracing the official theology, whose novel tenets, not consecrated by time and shaped exclusively by political expediency, are subject to abrupt and unpredictable change.

This is a moment for fear and trembling. No good can come of this fusion of religion and politics in the metastasizing cult of a slain martyr. Our political passions had grown unruly enough, but now they are fueled by a raging religious passion for vengeance camouflaged as love and hatred transfigured as forgiveness.

Listen once again to the words of Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller: ‘The day that Charlie died, the angels wept, but those tears have been turned into fire in our hearts. And that fire burns with a righteous fury that our enemies cannot comprehend or understand.’ One shudders to think what form that ‘righteous fury’ may take when transcribed by Miller into executive orders adorned with the familiar Sharpie signature that for us infidels represents the Mark of the Beast. Kirkianity, the nascent state religion of the MAGA cult, is alien to pluralist America’s tradition of strictly separating church from state, and one can only hope that this latest awakening of dormant theocratic ambitions will quickly burn itself out, like the Great Awakenings of the past, of which this latest revival may yet prove to be but a fleeting shadow.

This article, commissioned by Eurozine, develops arguments that were first published in short form by Public Seminar on 24 September 2025.