How Charlie Kirk is being memorialized — with many conservatives and white Christians, particularly evangelicals, emphasizing his faith and labeling him a martyr — has sparked debate among Black clergy, who are trying to square a heroic view of the 31-year-old with insulting statements about people of color that were key to his political activism.
“How you die does not redeem how you lived,” the Rev. Howard-John Wesley, of Alexandria, Virginia, said in a sermon in the aftermath of Kirk's killing that has amassed tens of thousands of views online.