The Christian norms that once underwrote America’s liberal democracy have eroded. This “great unraveling,” to borrow James Davison Hunter’s term, inverts e pluribus unum; “from many, one” gives way to fragmentation. Hunter observes that culture wars precede shooting wars, and many Americans sense that the shooting has finally begun in earnest, targeting not just conservative values but liberal democracy itself. The assassination of Charlie Kirk on a public debate stage seems to confirm we are destined for Balkanization.
When Ezra Klein mourned Charlie Kirk’s death as an attack on liberal democracy, he was met with vitriol by his erstwhile fellow-travelers. For many on the left, Kirk is an enemy of mankind who deserves no sympathy. His public words were “harmful,” so he deserved to be harmed. The moral incoherence and epistemic anarchy of our culture make it possible to believe such things. Too many souls have been mutilated by the logic of ressentiment.
This logic was rejected at Kirk’s memorial service. Rather than rage against the system and rhetoric that caused his murder, the service was a ritual of collective mourning and unity that channeled the tradition of American revivalism.
Revivalism is integral to American history. It is the evangelical adoption of belief in what Jackson Lears calls “animal spirits”: The whole world pulsates with life and its description exceeds the merely rational and predictable. Early revivalists preached in nature so that the faithful could feel the presence of God in the natural world. Weeping, trembling, and agonies of the body characterized revivalistic meetings. A common metaphor is that of electricity pulsing through the collective body, channeling the emotional intensity into spiritual formation and vitality. While mainstream Protestantism viewed the emotional excess with suspicion, those rekindled by revivalism channeled their charismatic interest into personal renewal and respectable conduct. The democratic nature of American revivalism even became fuel for nation building. Lyman Beecher notes in a sermon delivered in 1827: “The revivals of religion which prevail in our land among Christians of all denominations . . . are without a parallel in the history of the world and are constituting an era of moral power entirely new.” These revivals “declare the purpose of God to employ this nation in the glorious work of renovating the earth.”
Charlie Kirk was a revivalist in the nineteenth century mold. Today, revival has been formalized in (mostly Pentecostal) churches across the country in high-production cathartic experiences. But these serve more to help people cope with the anxieties of modern life than to transform how they live. By contrast, Charlie held what amounted to old-fashioned tent-meetings to encourage the moral renovation of society. Although he initially followed convention by preaching economic responsibility (socialism sucks), he eventually began preaching the gospel. His evangelical preaching taught young men to break free from liberal conformity and embrace their vitality—their masculine ambitions, abilities, and strength—as good and necessary for the country. In the words of Bishop Haven, “The evangel of Christ . . . is the vital force of everything in earth and in heaven.” Or, as one poem in the Massachusetts missionary magazine puts it: Christ is the “Enkindler of the vital flame, Which animates the human frame.”
If we grant that Charlie Kirk’s events were tent revivals, his memorial service was the tent revival to end all the tent revivals. It was the largest invoking of American evangelical vitalism in history. Top Christian contemporary musicians—Chris Tomlin, Phil Wickham, Tiffany Hudson, Brandon Lake, Kari Jobe, and Cody Carnes—sang their worship to facilitate not only catharsis but collective healing. They followed speeches that channeled fraught emotions to fuel the spiritual and moral renovation of the American people, raising Charlie Kirk as an exemplar of confidence in the liberal democratic order.
Finally, and most importantly, Erika Kirk’s forgiveness of the killer directed the crowd’s focus away from wrath against leftists to Christ, who breaks the cycle of agonistic politics and makes possible justice without vengeance. The grace that led Erika Kirk to forgive the killer is real, powerful, and undeniable in its goodness. Even nonbelievers were moved. Her forgiveness points the way toward a better politics, one capable of revitalizing the republic.
Most of the time, vitalism is relegated to the margins of American society. But it has a tendency to assert itself when people grow tired of the desiccating forces of rationalism and the straightjacket of respectability. We are fortunate it has just asserted itself on the political stage. Far from expressing effeminacy or slave morality, responding to political violence with worship and forgiveness is an expression of Christian vitalism. We’ve been given a window for renewing the nation’s soul. May we not waste it.
Image by Gage Skidmore, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
