by Jonathon Van Maren, The European Conservative
(photo credit: Gage Skidmore, Wikemedia Commons)
At the memorial service for her husband Charlie Kirk in Phoenix, Arizona, Erika Kirk faced a crowd of 73,000 at State Farm Stadium and forgave her husband’s assassin.
“My husband, Charlie, he wanted to save young men just like the one who took his life,” she said through tears. “On the cross, our Savior said: ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ That young man—that young man—I forgive him. I forgive him because it’s what Christ did. And it’s what Charlie would do.”
“The answer to hate is not hate,” the widow told those watching in the stadium, in the overflow location across the street, and, according to Turning Point USA, the over 100 million people who streamed the service. “The answer—we know from the Gospel—is love. Always love. Love for our enemies. Love for those who persecute us.”
Only 11 days before, on September 10, her husband was shot and killed by Tyler Robinson, a porn-addicted, twisted young man ensnared by LGBT ideology (he had a ‘transgender’ partner). Charlie was already dead when Erika made it to the hospital, where, despite being warned by the sheriff that his neck had been destroyed by the bullet, she insisted on seeing his body and kissing him goodbye. Robinson told his partner in a text: “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”
But it was not hate, but the most extraordinary form of Christian love on display at the memorial service. In Erika’s words were echoes of Corrie ten Boom forgiving the Nazi concentration guard who tormented her dead sister; of Immaculée Ilibagiza forgiving the man who murdered her family in the Rwandan genocide; of the widowed Elisabeth Elliot serving as a missionary to the tribe that martyred her husband. It was, in fact, the most radical rejection of hate possible.