Jesus Didn’t Preach the Second Amendment. The Cult of White Christian Nationalism Does.

I learned of the assassination of Charlie Kirk from a fellow priest who texted me. Shocked, I turned on the news and was immediately immersed in tributes: stories of his organizing skill, his fierce belief in free speech, even the President honoring him as a great man. Bishop Barron praised his Christian values. A well-known nun posted that he spoke the truth in a world bent on destroying Christianity. In other words, here was someone lifted up as a defender of the gospel.

But I was confused. As a Christian priest, I do my best to meditate on the gospel and the tradition that has carried it through the centuries, and I do not find in it the Second Amendment. I do not see Jesus teaching that everyone should carry a gun, even if it means innocent people will die. Yet that was part of Charlie’s vision for America.

I do not see Jesus teaching us to go after transgender youth. But Charlie made that one of his causes. Having spent 15 years with young people on the streets of New York, I know that a large number of them are homeless precisely because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, often cast out of their homes by parents convinced, by clergy or religious activists, that this was what God required. Looking at the whole of Jesus’ teachings, where over and over he reaches out to those the status quo of his day cast aside, it is hard to imagine that Jesus would do the same.

I do not see Jesus teaching us to cage children at the border, or to vilify migrants who risk everything to find refuge among us. We gladly accept their labor in our homes and restaurants, but we deny them protection and rights. And the policies Charlie supported have emboldened ICE to show up masked in neighborhoods, knocking on doors in the middle of the night, disappearing people who came here seeking safety, and leaving families shattered in fear. That is not the gospel.

I do not see Jesus opposing the Civil Rights Act. Yet Charlie denounced it as a “huge mistake,” dismissing one of the landmark laws that outlawed racial segregation and banned discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex, and national origin.

Before I say anything further, I must be clear. As a follower of Jesus, I am committed to nonviolence. Jesus taught that peacemakers are blessed, that we are to love our enemies, pray for those who persecute us, and turn the other cheek. Political violence is never the way of Christ. What happened to Charlie Kirk was a tragedy, and under no circumstances can it be justified.

I also hear accounts that he was a loving father, a devoted husband, and a man cherished by those who knew him. I do not doubt these are true, because each of us was created in the image and likeness of God, carrying the divine spark within. At our best, we live from that place and reveal something of God’s goodness. Yet we are also wounded and fractured; our traumas and misperceptions bury that spark, and we act out of the brokenness they leave behind. All of us live with this tension, and all of us are in need of God’s mercy and healing to be restored to wholeness.

But the reason I am responding to this moment is because the values being canonized in the public square as Christianity contradict the gospel. They are not the values of Jesus. They are the values of the cult of White Christian nationalism, which worships guns, power, and the nation instead of God. It has several prophets, including prominent people in our government and leaders of some of the largest churches in this country. They preach fear, exclusion, and control. They praise greed as virtue, treat empathy as sin, let millionaires and billionaires define morality, and sanctify violence as if it were holy. Jesus preached mercy, not cruelty; welcome, not exclusion; peace, not bloodshed.

White Christian nationalism betrays him. It is not the gospel. It is heresy. Jesus proclaimed the kin-dom of God where the hungry are fed, the prisoners freed, and the poor called blessed. He reached for the untouchables and showed them beloved. His kin-dom is not built on domination and fear, but on love as the true power of life. That is the gospel we are called to embody, not a gospel armed with guns to force others into our ways, but the gospel of mercy, justice, and peace.