There Were Two Charlie Kirks

Charlie Kirk’s last book, Stop, in the Name of God , was released on the morning of December 9. By afternoon, it had jumped to No. 1 on Amazon and then sold out. On one hand, this should surprise no one. Kirk had a huge following even before his assassination made him, for many, a martyred saint and drove an online surge of both mourning and recrimination over insufficient mourning. On the other hand, this is a book about the Sabbath . Living authors of books investigating the day of rest, a small but select sodality, are probably feeling dizzy right now. I know I am . (Kirk seems to have read my book, The Sabbath World , and mentions me once.) The Sabbath is generally regarded as a topic of specialized interest. I can’t think of any other work of Sabbatarian theology that has attained instant best-seller status. I should probably define my terms. Sabbatarianism is the doctrine of the Sabbath—the day of the week when, according to the Bible, humankind is commanded to rest, meaning, mostly, not to work. “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy,” says the Fourth Commandment. Kirk began keeping the Sabbath in 2021. His reasons, he explains in the book, had partly to do with mental hygiene and partly to do with God. Kirk obviously didn’t mean for a book about the Sabbath to comprise his last words. But his turn toward the Sabbath took him in an unexpected direction, and the book contains evidence of genuine spiritual struggle, which is the best testament a man of faith can leave. Americans knew Kirk as a political figure—the right-wing prodigy who had co-founded the conservative youth group Turning Point USA at the age of 18 and was a close adviser to President Donald Trump. But he was moving closer to Christianity when he died. Not that he wasn’t plenty Christian already: Growing up, he went to church, attended a Christian academy, and accepted Jesus as his personal savior in the fifth grade. But Kirk renewed his spiritual journey in 2019 when he gave a sermon at an evangelical church at the pastor’s request. When that pastor—who became Kirk’s pastor—and others resisted church lockdowns during the coronavirus pandemic, Kirk mobilized them for political action . TPUSA already had a spin-off, the political-advocacy group Turning Point Action; in 2021, Kirk created TPUSA Faith, which is meant to “unite the Church around primary doctrine and eliminate wokeism from the American pulpit,” in the words of its website. Stop, In The Name Of God - Why Honoring The Sabbath Will Transform Your Life By Charlie Kirk Buy Book All of this additional activity took a toll on Kirk. As he recalls in the book, he was supervising 300 employees and had to meet a fundraising goal of $50 million a year, even as he was spending three hours a day on his radio program, The Charlie Kirk Show . Pretty soon he was “fatigued, tired, and spiritually confused.”...

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