It has been almost a month since the assassination of Charlie Kirk. However, for anyone immersed in TikTok and Instagram Reels, he is still very much alive. The archive of years of recordings of debates and appearances today circulates more widely than ever.
Kirk’s heroism is suddenly obvious to many who did not pay close attention to him when he was alive. His project generally is now much clearer. Kirk was an evangelical, but he was a new type of evangelical whose faith was encoded into political activism. In a less immediately obvious way relative to the new wave of digitally driven religious conversions, but perhaps in a more consequential way, Kirk is the inventor of a new form of religious activity for the age of digital reproduction.
Rather than being frozen or sterile, Kirk’s memory and work are in fact profoundly alive and fecund.
It is notable that for all the calls to assemble new groups of men to engage in political work, Kirk actually did it and was able to put into action what so many could do only online. He did not abandon the digital for the material, instead synthesizing them into a powerful persuasion feedback loop.
Kirk’s clips — a more immediately engaging medium than the typical sermon — now mark a kind of living archive that will presumably continue to circulate for some years to come.
Understood within this new religious context, Kirk appears as an authentic representative of the Christian faith in a media market offering all kinds of gurus. The broad perception of his martyrdom lends a new poignancy to his work. It also highlights a fundamental shift in how modern societies experience death. With some time having passed since his slaying, Kirk’s omnipresence in the algorithm has replaced, for the average viewer, his absence.
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Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Baudrillard speaks in “Symbolic Exchange and Death” of the erasure of death in the contemporary world. This isn’t to suggest that Kirk’s killing has not shifted the political paradigm (although the full extent of this change remains to be seen), but rather that internet media has virtually eliminated absence for those without personal connection to the subject.
The proliferation of information and the suffusion of telepresence suggest an artificial intimacy, such that nobody ever really truly disappears. For many, their relationship to Charlie Kirk is the same as it ever was.
Baudrillard presented his theory in a typically hyperbolic manner, saying: “Our societies’ true necropolises are the computer banks or the foyers, blank spaces from which all human noise has been expunged, glass coffins where the world’s sterilized memories are frozen.” The dramatic expansion of engagement with Kirk’s digital media material in some sense disproves the pessimism articulated by Baudrillard. Rather than being frozen or sterile, Kirk’s memory and work are in fact profoundly alive and fecund. His continued presence on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok is still reshaping sympathetic viewers at this very moment, or bolstering the convictions of those already converted.
Such martyrdom in the Information Age oddly reflects what Christians know to be metaphysically true: that the faithful reposed only become more alive in their souls’ passing from this earth. The surge in appreciation of and encounter with Kirk’s work animates a new level of engagement, propelling it farther and faster across our algorithms, calling us to real action and new life ourselves. In his own words: “Good men must die, but death can’t kill their names.”
Today, not only can death not take the names of good men, it cannot take their presence in the daily lives of their followers. Whether flitting through clips on the bus commute or visiting Instagram one last time before bed, many Americans will meet again a Charlie Kirk who, on repeat, preaches the gospel forever.
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