Do Martyrs Matter in Martyrdom? Charlie Kirk as a Case Study

This essay was part of a panel at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature celebrating the work of Elizabeth Castelli. Read the full forum here. 

Introduction

Do martyrs matter in martyrdom? This may seem like a question with an obvious answer. How could they not? Surely martyrdom is all about the martyrs, and without martyrs, there would be no martyrdom? However, an academic paper title that asks a question with a seemingly obvious answer is a sure signal the author is going to argue the opposite! With the help of Elizabeth Castelli’s landmark work, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (2004), I am going to argue that martyrs generally do not really matter that much in martyrdom. Let me start by saying how honoured I am to be participating in this retrospective, marking the work of Elizabeth Castelli. Perhaps I should acknowledge from the outset that I am operating with a ‘constructed Castelli’ based on her 2004 book, and I am not necessarily claiming the ‘real’ Elizabeth Castelli would go as far as I am arguing. I very much look forward to her response and the discussion that follows.

This year also marks the 60th anniversary of William Frend’s monumental study, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church, and much has changed since 1965 in the scholarly study of martyrdom. In addition to the fact there are far more scholars working on martyrdom these days, over the last couple of decades there has been a cultural or literary turn away from ‘history’ (at least in terms of ‘what really happened’) to the rhetorical and sociological function of the martyr stories themselves. This is where Castelli’s Martyrdom and Memory entered the stage, interpreting martyrdom through the lens of collective memory. “Martyrdom”, she writes, “is not simply an action, but rather the product of interpretative retelling.” Importantly, even in the case of personal memories, ‘[t]heir meanings derive their intelligibility from context and collectively generated frameworks of significance.’ Thus, in order to become a martyr,

Suffering violence in and of itself is not enough. In order for martyrdom to emerge, both the violence and its suffering must be infused with particular meanings…Martyrdom always implies a broader narrative (p. 173).

Therefore, a martyr only becomes a martyr when others start narrating a death in a particular way. Narrating martyrdom thus becomes part of a meaning-making process, and is what makes a martyr stand out from any other corpse. For Castelli, ‘the language of martyrdom serves…as a way of ascribing a broader symbolic meaning to an event that might otherwise be interpreted as senseless and capricious violence” (p. 193).

In the last two months, America has witnessed the process of turning what might be interpreted as senseless violence into a martyrdom with near cosmic significance following the assassination of Charlie Kirk by lone gunman Tyler Robinson. Let me acknowledge the sensitivities that undoubtably surround these events, and the current political situation here in the US. As British scholar of ancient martyrdom, I come from this as an outsider, and indeed, I had not come across Charlie Kirk prior to his death. I am interested in both ancient and modern martyr-making processes, of which the aftermath of Kirk’s death is simply the latest example.

The ‘Martyrdom’ of Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk, was shot and killed on 10th September this year as he addressed at a campus event in Utah. Kirk was a prominent right-wing figure, and influential figure in the MAGA movement, whom David Smith of the Guardian dubbed the ‘“youth-whisperer” of the American right’ who was “a natural showman with a flair for patriotism, populism and Christian nationalism” (The Guardian, September 10, 2025).

The response to the assassination reflects America’s febrile and divided political culture as commentators debated the meaning of the death. What is of interest to me is the way in which martyr language was not only quickly adopted, but received the official White House imprimatur at the memorial service in a stadium in Arizona. The memorial included speeches from both the Vice-President and President of the United States. Although framed within a religious context, for Donald Trump, who likened the event to “an old-time revival,” Kirk was principally a “martyr…for American freedom;” he was “violently killed because he spoke for freedom and justice, for God and country, for reason and for common sense.” As Scott Hoffman reminds us, America has an established political martyr tradition, including the likes of Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, Martin Luther King.

However, while Trump proclaimed Kirk an “American martyr,” Vice-President J. D. Vance went much further. To be sure, Vance credited Kirk with defending the values of America, but whereas for Trump, Kirk’s death was political, for Vance it was clearly religious.

Charlie suffered a terrible fate, my friends. We all know it. We all saw it. But think, it is not the worst fate. It is better to face a gunman than to live your life afraid to speak the truth. It is better to be persecuted for your faith than to deny the kingship of Christ. It is better to die a young man in this world than to sell your soul for an easy life with no purpose, no risk, no love, and no truth.

Alluding to stories of early Christians facing interrogators with the clear choice of denying Christ or being executed (cf. Mark 8.34–38), Vance conjures an image of Kirk directly facing his gunman, actively choosing to die. In reality, he was shot from around 130m away. For Vance, American patriotism and Christian truth are inextricably intertwined. Like all martyrs, Charlie Kirk offers a model of how ‘true believers’ should live (and die). Vance concluded his speech:

For Charlie, we will speak the truth every single day. For Charlie, we will rebuild this United States of America to greatness. For Charlie, we will never shrink, we will never cower, and we will never falter even when staring down the barrel of a gun.

For Charlie, we will remember that it is better to stand on our feet defending the United States of America and defending the truth than it is to die on our knees. My friends, for Charlie, we must remember that he is a hero to the United States of America, and he is a martyr for the Christian faith.

Other contributions continued the martyr trope, even if the word was not used. There were further appeals to themes such as the persecution of the righteous, choosing life, or death, and even the presentation of Kirk as an alter Christus figure.[1]

As I have described the real-time martyr-making process that took place at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, you could be forgiven for wondering if this does not directly counter my claim that martyrs do not matter in martyrdom. However, we’ve already seen the slightly loose way in which appeals to early Christian martyr experience were made to frame Kirk’s death. Already in the speeches less than a fortnight after his death we see appeals to a shared cultural memory of what it means to be American that, while obvious to the audience in the stadium, is far less obvious, I would imagine, to other Americans. This is a time in which American identity is highly contested. In these early responses to Kirk’s assassination, we see appeals to ancient Christian stories as—what Castelli calls—‘an authorizing trope’ to reinforce a contested identity of the community which claims Kirk as their martyr.

This raises two further important themes in recent martyrdom scholarship: the role of martyr narratives in creating and sustaining identity and group boundaries, and second, the contested nature of martyrdom itself.

Martyrdom and Contested Identities

We have noted the way in which significant and powerful figures in American politics cast Charlie Kirk in the role of a martyr, even to the point of invoking, or at least alluding to the trials early Christian martyrs underwent before their more powerful Roman persecutors or prosecutors. Other speeches likened his “suffering” and death to that of Jesus. It was in the background of his widow, Erika Kirk’s eulogy, but front and center of Tucker Carlson’s address. He says the scene reminds him of Jesus, who

shows up and he starts talking about the people in power, and he starts doing the worst thing that you can do, which is telling the truth about people, and they hate it. … And they become obsessed with making him stop. ‘This guy’s got to stop talking. We’ve got to shut this guy up.’

He then imagines a conversation among those powerful people against whom Jesus is “telling the truth”:

“We must make him stop talking.” And there’s always one guy with a bright idea, and I can just hear him say, “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we just kill him? That’ll shut him up. That’ll fix the problem.”

I will return to the significance of what Carlson’s constructed conversation says about the shooter, but for the moment, two things stand out. First, Kirk explicitly stands in the imitatio Christi tradition, not uncommon in martyr stories. Second, the movement Kirk represents, with which everyone in the stadium identified, is cast as the persecuted group speaking truth to a more powerful and oppressive (and crucially hegemonic) enemy.

Scholars interested in martyrdom stories have long noted the ways in which early Christians promoted themselves not simply as a group from which individuals were liable to face arrest and martyrdom, but as a corporate suffering body.[2] Paradoxically, in this presentation of a suffering body, death becomes a “happy ending,” the victory the martyr enjoys over the persecutor and Satan. Also important is work that emphasises the ways in which that projected experience (real or imagined) helps to create and reinforce Christian identity. These stories of early Christian martyrs are deployed as an authorising narrative, a ‘useable past’ to interpret and validate a particular religio-political identity. Foxe’s ever-expanding Book of Martyrs is an excellent example of this. Sticking contemporary stories of death in a book recounting early Christian martyr narratives interprets and authorises these new “martyrs.” What is somewhat incongruous is that a political movement so obviously in the ascendancy can so convincingly appropriate this corporate image of a suffering body. Candida Moss, in the introduction to her Myth of Persecution,[3] pointed to the ways in which the American right—at the time of writing, Rick Santorum in particular—deploy persecution narratives to reinforce their belief that Christianity was under attack (mainly at the time from the LGBTI community).

In a blog post a couple of weeks after the Kirk shooting, Lilie Chouliaraki, Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, argued the recent events should be seen as “reverse victimisation,” in which

Kirk turned from the propagandist he had been in life to a fallen hero, a conservative martyr whose death was recast as proof of the “cancel culture” and “woke persecution” that, many on his side claim, silences conservative voices.

Chouliaraki’s thesis, outlined in her 2024 book, Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood, is that reverse victimisation “transforms figures of authority into symbols of injury and rewrites the story of who holds power and who suffers from it.” Kirk, Chouliaraki argues, enjoyed a significant and influential public platform and was hardly a marginal figure, using that “huge influence to vilify those already on the margins.” She argues the memorial service created or reinforced a “mythology that casts the far Right as both victim and victor,” which “frames his assassination within a broader narrative: that conservatives are the ‘real victims’ of an intolerant left. In this story, his death is not a warning about the risks of political radicalisation but proof that free speech itself is under siege.” She concludes:

The service became less an act of mourning than a political rally: a moment to weaponize grief in order to advance a menacing narrative of conservative victimhood. In the logic of reverse victimisation, those who enjoy domination become martyrs, while those who are marginalised are cast as perpetrators.

The reverse victimization can be seen quite explicitly in a post by Joshua Treviño, a Senior Advisor to the President and Senior Fellow at the America First Policy Institute. Writing in The American Mind the day after the shooting, Treviño likens Kirk to another ancient “martyr”:

Charlie Kirk was perhaps the closest thing to Socrates in the American public square. The leftist intellectuals who sneered at him…would guffaw at the parallel, but it is no less true. He argued—amiably, fairly, relentlessly—until they couldn’t stand it any longer. And like Socrates, they had him killed.

Note where Treviño lays the blame for Kirk’s shooting. Not Tyler Robinson, who acted alone, but ‘they’ – the leftist intellectuals, like the Athenians, who conspired to have Socrates killed; the same kind of rhetoric as Tucker Carlson. Both Treviño and Carlson frame the shooting as a martyrdom organized en masse by those they see as their political, we may even say cosmic, opponents. I will return to this wider conflict, but first I want to turn to a more fundamental question that also been a subject of the commentary. Is Charlie Kirk a martyr and if so, what kind of martyr is he? This, of course, is a question of how one defines martyrdom.

Defining and Contesting Martyrdom

Two further articles on Kirk’s death have expressed uneasiness about the way in which Kirk has been proclaimed a martyr, or more precisely, a Christian martyr. Theo Hobson (British Theologian and journalist) and Jonathan Zecher (early Church Historian at the Australian Catholic University) both question if Kirk can be legitimately claimed as a Christian martyr. Both explore this in relation to questions of definition. Hobson, writing in The Spectator (a British right-leaning magazine) notes the complexity of martyr-making, arguing that even if one dies for their Christian beliefs, the motivation of the executioner surely cannot be discounted. Hobson, therefore, urges caution in the case of Kirk and his killer:

Yes, Charlie Kirk was killed for his beliefs, for spreading them so powerfully. But his beliefs were a mix of religion and politics, and it seems that his killer may have seen his politics as more offensive than his religion. He saw Kirk as a spreader of hate, not primarily as a follower of Christ.

For Hobson, Kirk was not killed primarily in odium fidei, the traditional bar that must be crossed before the Roman Catholic Church proclaims a saint to be a martyr. Therefore, Kirk does not fit the definition of a martyr, or at least, a ‘Christian’ martyr.

Jonathan Zecher is more nuanced in his piece “Can Charlie Kirk really be considered a ‘martyr’?” for The Conversation (September 16, 2025). Zecher takes as his starting point the underlying meaning behind martus (witness), and while Romans executed Christians as criminals, Christians interpreted these executions as witnesses to truth. Zecher then agues there are two key questions that need to be asked to understand what makes someone a martyr:

1. what are they a witness to? As in, what ideal or cause led to their death and how did their death testify to it?

2. who are they a witness for? Who tells their story and who calls them a martyr?

Zecher notes that in Christian history, ‘martyr’ is a contested term, and like Hobson, he notes there will be conflicting views of what Kirk was a witness do in his death. Supporters would claim he died for “free speech,” “Judeo-Christian values,” even “Western civilisation,” while those he attacked—Zecher lists “queer and trans people, immigrants, Muslims and feminists”—”he died for white nationalism, hatred and exclusion.” In answer to his second question, there is little doubt that he is a MAGA martyr. As we have already noted, this ‘American martyr’ creates an ‘American identity’ that is (to use British understatement) ‘contested.’

However, Elizabeth Castelli reminds us “the designation ‘martyr’ is not an ontological category but a post-event interpretive one,” and as I start to bring these threads together into some form of argument, I turn to some of my own work on martyrdom. As my PhD dissertation, Radical Martyrdom and Cosmic Conflict in Early Christianity, was submitted and examined in 2004,[4] I was unable to benefit from Martyrdom and Memory at the time, yet it reflects the same development of the literary turn, although in my case, expressed through the rejection of attempts to define martyrdom: “My point is that the enterprise of seeking a universal definition of martyrdom, as if one can proclaim a bone fide martyrdom if a set of criteria is satisfied, is misguided. Martyrs are not defined; martyrs are made” (p. 11).

Of course, work on martyrdom at the beginning of the twentieth century was carried out in the aftermath of 9/11, and there was a concern to make a distinction between martyrdom and terrorism. The same year as my Radical Martyrdom was published, Brian Wicker edited a collection of essays, writing in the preface, “Part of the purpose of this book is to counteract a false ideology of martyrdom wherever it rears its head” (p. vi).[5] While I explicitly reject the attempt to distinguish between true and false martyrdom through definition in a 2014 article “What is Martyrdom?,” I anticipated my objection to this enterprise in my earlier work: “In contemporary political (and religious) discourse it would seem that to call someone a martyr is simply to say that it is a death of which the speaker/writer approves—and very little else” (p. 12).

This is where my contention that martyrs ultimately do not matter in martyrdom begins to emerge. Whether a death is a martyrdom, I contend, is entirely dependent on a narrator. As I put it elsewhere, “To become a martyr a particular death needs to be recounted in a certain way; it requires a martyr narrative.”[6] This puts the entire martyr-making production on the community, such that “A martyrdom is created when a narrative about a death is told in a particular way. The central character is not the most important element in the creation of martyrdom; it is the narrator.”[7]

Questions over what happened, how did the martyr die? What did she say? Are “beside the point” historically, although not narratologically. One need only read competing Catholic and Protestant accounts over whether or not a martyr screamed in agony while they were being burned to understand the importance of narrative. I should here note the recent work of Matt Recla, who observes how the martyr is ‘effectively erased’ with this focus on identity formation, and insists that because martyrdom is unlike any other form of death more focus should be put on what makes the martyr different.[8] For now, I note that while he sees it as a problem, he agrees that martyrs have been downgraded in martyrdom.

This is perhaps more obvious in early Christian martyr accounts where we really cannot be certain of much historical detail, but it is also true of martyrs in the modern age. As Castelli’s discussion of Columbine shows, there is an authorized martyr narrative: Cassie Bernall was confronted by a gunman, asked whether she was a Christian, and after answering yes, she was martyred. However, there are two further competing accounts, and it is unlikely that the authorized narrative, where to quote the title of her mother’s book, She said Yes, is what actually happened.[9] But it matters little, for that official martyr narrative has had real effects.

There is a similar inattentiveness to “what actually happened” in the martyr-making process of gay Wyoming student, Matthew Shepard, brutally murdered in October 1998. Like Kirk, Sheppard’s death was framed in the context of American Culture Wars, but most extraordinary of all was the way in which crucifixion imagery entered the popular imagination almost immediately, with Time Magazine, the New York Times, and the Washington Post shortly after his death all alluding to “the crucifixion of Matthew Sheppard,” based on the initial police report that tied to a fence, he reminded her of a scarecrow. Now again, the details of the death, the motivation of the killer, aspects of Shepard’s life were all invoked to discredit the martyr narrative—even on the floor of the Senate—but again, those details were beside the point. Shepard entered American public consciousness as a martyr.[10]

Interestingly, the mothers of both Cassie Bernall and Matthew Shepard published books. Misty Bernall leaned into her daughter’s martyrology, with reservations, whereas Judy Shepard was concerned to counter the martyr-making process by seeking to put a face on the martyr by telling the real story.[11] However, as I have, perhaps insensitively put it elsewhere, ‘the Matt Shepard’ his parents buried is not the Matthew Shepard of the martyr narrative.

Here we reach my central contention: A real human being is transformed into a mythical literary and rhetorical character in the martyr-making process. A martyr, like a hero or a villain, is a social construction, and the martyr becomes a function or a cipher of a community’s larger struggle. Martyrdom is primarily conflict literature:

…the death [of the martyr] is normally interpreted within the framework of a far wider conflict, which may itself be external to the narrative or report. This conflict may be regional, global or even cosmic. The martyr becomes a symbol of the community’s desires and hopes, or for that matter, their terrors and fears, but in either case, the martyr is representative of a larger struggle. This struggle might be political, spiritual, or often both. Usually some final outcome is envisaged and the martyr contributes in some way to that larger end.[12]

Martyrs are community heroes, and their stories are told in ways which reinforce a particular view of the world. Whether it is stories of early martyrs inspiring other Christians to endure persecution bravely, or Matthew Shepard inspiring hate-crimes legislation bearing his name, teenage uptake in Christian youth camps after reading about Cassie Bernall, the cult of the martyrs is alive and well. But a martyr narrative also requires villains: the anti-Christian ‘Goths’ who shot Cassie Bernall, the ‘un-American White Trash’ who murdered Matthew Shepard, or the liberal, leftist intellectuals who conspired to martyr Charlie Kirk.

Joshua Treviño, who compared Kirk to Socrates, imagines the battle ahead that will be waged in the wake of Kirk’s death:

The armies of Charlie Kirk, martyr, will be much more vast: not a handful of Athenians but millions of Americans. …Millions of Kirk’s disciples may conclude that no politics is possible with an antagonist that reserves murder as its redoubt when argument fails. When those conclusions are reached, the movement that helped precipitate Charlie Kirk’s murder may realize its error. They may finally understand that Kirk, Trump, and everyone else whom they hate with a blinding, intense passion were the moderates, the ones they could live with, the ones who didn’t wish to eradicate them. They may tell tales to their children of a time when the ascendant Right was perfectly happy to have a debate. They may say they wish it had never happened, that they weren’t for killing the man, that a lone extremist with a rifle was in no way representative of the whole. When they do, we will remind them that on the day Charlie Kirk was assassinated, leftist members of the United States House of Representatives objected to a moment of prayer on his behalf.

It is not subtle. But notice how Kirk simply becomes a slogan, a rhetorical figure, a cipher for a much larger religio-political battle. The irony, and core of my argument, is that while Charlie Kirk is elevated to martyr status, he is at the same time reduced to a literary and rhetorical construct. Perhaps we may even say that Kirk, like all martyrs, is “collateral damage” in the service of a far wider social, political, theological, even cosmic conflict.

Paul Middleton is Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Chester. He is the author of many books and essays on martyrdom, and the editor of The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Christian Martyrdom (2020).

[1] The martyr as an alter Christi figure is found in the earliest expressions of martyrdom. See Candida Moss, The Other Christs: Imitating Jesus in Ancient Christian Ideologies of Martyrdom (Oxford University Press, 2010).

[2] See the influential study, Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (Routledge, 1995). 

[3] Candida R. Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (HarperCollins, 2013).

[4] Published as Paul Middleton, Radical Martyrdom and Cosmic Conflict in Early Christianity (T & T Clark, 2006).

[5] Brian Wicker (ed.), Witnesses to Faith? Martyrdom in Christianity and Islam (Routledge, 2006).

[6] Paul Middleton, Martyrdom: A Guide for the Perplexed (T & T Clark, 2011), 24.

[7] Middleton, “What is Martyrdom?” Mortality 19/2 (2014), 117–133, 130.

[8] Matthew Recla, Rethinking Martyrdom: The Blood or the Seed? (Bloomsbury, 2023).

[9] Misty Bernall, She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall (Pocket Books, 2000).

[10] See Scott W. Hoffman, ‘‘Last Night, I Prayed to Matthew’: Matthew Shepard, Homosexuality, and Popular Martyrdom in Contemporary America.” Religion and American Culture 21/1 (2011), 121–164; Paul Middleton, ‘The Scarecrow Christ: The Murder of Matthew Shepard and the Making of an American Culture Wars Martyr’ in Ihab Saloul and Jan Willem van Henten (eds), Martyrdom: Canonisation, Contestation, and Afterlives (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 181–202. 

[11] Judy Shephard, The Meaning of Matthew: My Son’s Murder in Laramie, and a World Transformed (Hudson Street Press, 2009).

[12] Middleton, Martyrdom: A Guide for the Perplexed, 15–16.