Charlie Kirk’s memorial was a religious ceremony, state funeral and political rally in one

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It was the biggest mega church in America, maybe in American history.

Part religious ceremony, part state funeral, part political rally, part revival meeting, part call to action, the memorial to slain Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk was a moment of a great awakening in American life.

It was a spiritual reawakening for the millions of MAGA followers and a startling awakening for their opponents, who in an event stretching more than four hours were introduced to, if not reminded of, the power of the new conservatism.

A bagpipe version of Amazing Grace opened an amazing juncture of religious faith and political force, an astonishing juncture in the American story: a celebration of a private figure who occupied an offstage presence in American culture for the early stirrings of the 13-year life of his organization only to come into prominence with the Trump movement, especially in the past several years, especially on the country’s college campuses.

It was the culmination of a moment when a movement that became a ministry – and that Secretary of State Marco Rubio called a “mission” – met its martyr.

Some of the tributes were personal (“We loved Charlie as a friend,” said Vice-President JD Vance). Some were spiritual (“He looked to politics as an on-ramp to Jesus,” said his pastor, Rob McCoy). Some expressed heartache (“at a level I didn’t know existed,” said his widow, Erika Kirk, who in an affecting moment said she would “forgive” his killer).

Some were pugilistic (White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller spoke of what he called the “righteous fury our enemies cannot see or understand”).

Some issued comparisons between Mr. Kirk, who died at 31, and Jesus Christ, who died at 33 (Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son and nephew of victims of assassination, said both Christ and Charlie Kirk “changed the trajectory of history”).

Charlie Kirk memorial service draws thousands

One of the eulogists was Donald Trump, who stood throughout much of the proceedings, swayed to the devotional music, and offered applause and presidential fist pumps and spoke of “a giant of his generation” who was cut down by a “radicalized cold-blooded monster.” He acknowledged Mr. Kirk’s pleas to love his opponents, but the President said of himself that he hated his opponents.

But the greatest impact didn’t come from the polished production values evocative of an American political convention, nor from the boldface names on the stage that served as a pulpit.

Those whose presence may be the most significant in their tribute to a political figure who never held political office were the nameless who, because they were part of a crowd of an estimated 200,000 – half in State Farm Stadium, half in overflow lots – were rendered faceless, though not powerless.

It was those in what Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth called “Charlie’s church” who dressed in red, white, and blue and donned “I Am Charlie Kirk” T-shirts. It was the youth who Democrats thought they owned because of their commitment to diversity, and the non-voters political experts doubted would participate in elections, and the new activists energized by Mr. Kirk’s life and, now, rededicated by his death to their movement.

That’s because the Kirk assassination – and the funeral of the leader of Turning Point USA, which White House chief of staff Susie Wiles called “the most powerful youth movement of our time” – has had a transformative effect on the American scene.

Together they provided a unifying moment for an otherwise fractured GOP, divided by style (old guard versus MAGA ascendancy), issues (the clamour for further disclosures involving convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein), potential new rifts (over vaccine mandates), and concerns about the future (with speculation about the 2028 presidential race).

They sent a wave of grief across university campuses where Mr. Kirk tested his often-provocative conservative creed even as he spoke out for the free exchange of ideas; created new tests of the country’s freedom of expression, codified 234 years ago in the First Amendment; demonized those who didn’t display sufficient grief or were perceived to be disrespectful only to have the same individuals become celebrated by others as sentinels of liberty; and spawned efforts like the one undertaken by New Hampshire state Representative Mike Belcher. Last week, he drafted a “Countering Hate And Revolutionary Leftist Indoctrination in Education (CHARLIE)” bill to fight “woke activists” he said were disseminating “Marxist ideology” to schoolchildren at taxpayer expense.

And they also promoted a surge of interest in Mr. Kirk’s Turning Point USA movement, which reported that in the first six days since his slaying, more than 54,000 high-school and college students contacted the organization to join a chapter or to start one.

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Mr. Kirk’s funeral has few if any precedents in American history – perhaps the throngs who stood in silent mourning and devout prayer as the funeral trains of Abraham Lincoln (1865) and Robert F. Kennedy (1968) passed, perhaps the procession from Atlanta’s Ebeneezer Baptist Church to Morehouse College after the 1968 assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., perhaps the crowd that watched the 1963 Washington procession of John F. Kennedy’s coffin as it moved about the capital on a horse-drawn caisson.

The only Canadian analogue may be the 115,000 who passed the open coffin of Montreal Canadiens star Maurice Richard in 2000.

It was an outpouring of grief that Lysiane Gagnon noted in an account in The Globe was possessed of a subtle “political context” for a symbol of francophone pride and a hockey star whose 1955 suspension prompted an uprising known as the Richard Riot and often regarded as a spur to Quebec nationalism.

In the Kirk funeral observance, which the Department of Homeland Security gave the same security rating as the three Super Bowls that were held in the same site, there were glancing but clearly implicit references to political violence fomented by left-wing activists.

The day’s proceedings were evocative of the sentiment Taylor Swift expressed about her grandmother in her song marjorie:

If I didn’t know better

I’d think you were still around

What died didn’t stay dead