American Right-Wing provocateur Charlie Kirk, was shot dead during a debate on a college campus in Utah, he was 31.
Kirk’s views were a cornucopia of American right-wing talking points— he was pro-life, pro-gun, anti- LGBTQIA+, anti-immigration, the list goes on. He broadcasted these views on his eponymous podcast, which reached millions around the world and cemented him in the zeitgeist as a leading conservative voice. He was founder and president of Turning Point USA, a conservative think-tank with widespread cultural and political influence.
Kirk is as polarizing in death as he was in life, his untimely passing bringing with it mixed reactions from people across the political spectrum. To some on the far-left, he was a reprehensible racist who got what he deserved, to the centrists he was a far-right nuisance but he didn’t deserve to die, and to conservatives, his core base, he has become something of a folk hero.
Kirk is also being lionized in the Nigerian Christian evangelical community, with many venerating him as a representative of true Christian values. Upon his death, popular Nigerian gospel singer Nathaniel Bassey, posted a tribute to him on his Instagram account with 4.4 million followers, with the caption “Rest in the Lord Charlie Kirk”
Despite purporting to be Christian, Kirk was a white supremacist who spewed several specious claims. He believed Black women were intellectually inferior, that Black gangs were the biggest perpetrators of gun violence despite several studies proving otherwise, and, most ironically, that loss of lives was a logical price to pay for preserving American Second Amendment rights.
Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump and his ilk, have a large following in Nigerian Christian circles, particularly within the evangelical/ Pentecostal community. In these spaces, Trump is heralded as a man of God, despite being embroiled in numerous sexual assault scandals and most recently, having close ties to the late child sex offender, Jeffery Epstein.
Religion is an integral part of what it means to be Nigerian. It bleeds into every facet of private and public life. According to research conducted by the Harvard Divinity School, there are approximately 70 million Christians in Nigeria, about a third of whom identify as Evangelical or Pentecostal, making Nigeria the 4th largest evangelical community in the world. This quote from Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria, aptly summarises the Nigerian Pentecostal phenomenon: “Nigeria has been the site of Pentecostalism’s greatest explosion on the African continent, and the movement’s extraordinary growth shows no signs of slowing.”
In West Africa, Christianity first made inroads through Portuguese catholic missionaries in the 15th Century, with not much success. It gained a foothold in the 19th century through British missionaries, the spiritual apparatus of the British colonial engine. With this came a flattening of culture and an erosion of identity through proselytizing, propaganda and in some instances, penal codes. These missionaries sowed the seeds of conservatism in the region. For example, British colonialism was especially brutal towards homosexuality and the effects of this reverberate till the present day, as 66% of former British colonies in Africa criminalize homosexuality compared to just 33% of former French African colonies.
By the tail end of the 20th century, Christianity had become the second largest religion in the country, losing out to Islam by less than 5%. The Nigerian Pentecostal movement reached a fever pitch in the late 80s and early 90s enjoying something of a golden age largely due to the rise of televangelism. Nigerian Pentecostal churches sprung up everywhere, with pastors pantomiming charismatic American televangelists, adopting everything from their tonal cadence to their ostentatious lifestyles. In Nigeria today, the evangelical clergy class holds a lot of sway culturally and politically. E.O Adeboye, General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, appeared on Newsweek’s 2009 list of the world’s 50 most powerful people, Pope Benedict was the only other religious leader on that list. More recently, at Donald Trump’s second inauguration ceremony, the Nigerian political class was eschewed, no African heads of state were on the guest list, but two prominent members of the Nigerian clergy were invited; W.F Kumuyi, Founder and General Overseer of Deeper Life Ministries and Nathaniel Bassey. Reflecting on his visit, Pastor Kumuyi posted on X that he’d met with senior members of Kirk’s Turning Point USA, to discuss how they can “partner together for global evangelism.”. Kumuyi sees Trump’s return to the White House as a “return to religious freedom in America and support for other nations in combating religious persecution.”.
Underpinning Nigeria’s right-wing evangelical fervor , is the belief that Christian values are being eroded. Nigerian Christianity, particularly that of the Pentecostal persuasion, believes itself to be experiencing an existential crisis, with sporadic bouts of violent killings. Protestant NGO, Open Doors, recently published a report on Christian persecution, ranking Nigeria the 7th most difficult place in the world to practice the religion. Against this backdrop of violence and bloodshed, a perceived loss of conservative cultural cachet compounds evangelical existential dread. The clamor for conservatism traces its origins to the United States, emerging as a tidal wave of backlash to the political gains made in favor of sexual minorities during the Obama years. It is exported through far-right conspiracy theories, like the claim by some Pentecostal Christians that Obama is the Antichrist.
What people like Kirk represent to the Nigerian evangelical community, is the return of Christian ascendency. What they see is America reclaiming its place as the greatest frontier of the faith- “God’s own Country”.
An underpinning ideology of the modern evangelical movement is dominion theology, the belief that Christians are called by God to have dominion over the earth. It is not uncommon to hear words like “dominate” or “overtake” used interchangeably during sermons at your average Nigerian Pentecostal church. Domination and control are also key features of capitalism. When capitalism is laundered through Christianity, it becomes the Prosperity Gospel, a close relative of dominion theology. Kirk, Trump and the Republican Party by extension, worship at the altar of money and power- those are their true Gods. The Nigerian evangelical Christian body, blinded by their quest for power, relevance and financial prosperity, fail to see that they are nothing but pawns in a much larger scheme for world domination.
The Trump administration’s co-opting of evangelical beliefs is only one step towards their ultimate goal; the establishment of a utopia for billionaires, with the rest of the population serving as a permanent underclass. In this utopia, government intervention is as minimal as possible, and much of its power is ceded to Silicon Valley technocrats. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. is one way this transfer of power is already happening.
Trump and the late Charlie Kirk’s vision, is American capitalism brought to its logical conclusion. This is being achieved through the coalescence of theology and technology. Close ties with tech heavyweights like Palantir CEO Peter Theil and Christian evangelical stalwarts like John Hagee, is a key strategy of the Trump administration.
The American zeitgeist, refracted through the lens of Nigerian evangelism, is a world as their version of God intended, free of gay and trans people; economically progressive and culturally conservative. What seems to Nigerians to be a return of conservative Christian values, scholars and political pundits see as the start of something far more sinister; End Times Fascism.
To dance on Charlie Kirk’s grave or to mourn him is a personal choice, but one thing is not up for debate, his views were violent, racist, and antithetical to the teachings of Christianity’s most central character—Jesus Christ. Christ’s command to “love your neighbor as yourself” is a call to practice empathy, a word Kirk himself openly despised.
The intense reactions to Kirk’s death should prompt evangelical Christians to pause and reevaluate their current ethos. The Nigerian evangelical church should not allow its pursuit of relevance to push it into the welcoming embrace of strange bedfellows. Sacrificing truth on the altar of status and power does not, a good Christian make.
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