In the news

Charlie Kirk: a separation of realities

Posted by Bekah Legg on 15 September 2025

And then he was shot, and my social media feeds lit up with messages of grief and loss for a ‘hero of the faith’. People I know and love, with whom I thought I shared values, were mourning not just the state of affairs, but a man I had intentionally distanced myself from. 

I didn’t understand. 

I spent my week wrestling with whether I wanted to say anything myself, and what I would say if I did. This week, of all weeks, I am aware of the horror of watching your husband die. Tomorrow it will be one year since I held my husband’s hand as he took his last breath. A victim of cancer, not gun crime, but no less devastating. I can only begin to imagine the overwhelming emotions and loss Erika Kirk and her children are experiencing. To have to do that in the public eye, with so many expectations on you, with people calling out your loved one’s worst moments? Well, I didn’t want to pile into that. 

But I felt isolated seeing friends post positively about him. I started reassessing who was safe to have certain conversations with and who I would have to be on my guard around. I wondered if Restored had lost some allies.

What was happening in my head, I realised, was massively magnified for those more directly impacted by some of Kirk’s messaging. On my church Facebook group, I saw a post beatifying him, followed by worried posts from people with Asian, African or Middle Eastern heritage worrying whether they were safe in a church which supported Kirk’s views. 

This is not a side issue. 

The reality is that two realities are running in parallel, facilitated by the algorithms of social media. Algorithms that most of us don’t understand but which silently control our lives through the content we consume. Some of us in the Christian world have been fed news about Charlie Kirk that revealed his darker side: misogyny, white supremacy, nationalism and homophobia. Others had a heartier meal of gospel preaching, smiles and reaching young people in debate, not violence. We literally have two different versions of Charlie Kirk. Both are based in reality, but neither give the whole picture. 

What we need to learn 

It helps to understand the different perspectives, but the lesson doesn’t lie in quietly respecting or tolerating those differences without ever bringing challenge. There are some crucial things to note:

Big news headlines have an impact on our personal lives

This week, as I’ve reflected on how I feel less safe than I did a week ago, I’ve made an effort to see my friends from other cultures and hear how much less secure they feel. I’ve also taken time to think about this through a survivor lens. Weeks like this are triggering for many of us. We know we don’t feel safe, but we can’t quite put a finger on why. In our little bubbles, nothing has really changed. We probably are safe, yet we can’t get it out of our heads, our senses are heightened; we’re hyper-vigilant. 

It’s because weeks like this remind us that there was a time when we saw a reality that no one else did about someone. We were hurt, controlled by, and/or devalued by someone that everyone else loved, celebrated and wanted to be friends with. Maybe we weren’t believed when we sought help. We felt isolated, afraid, and desperate. Our world was not safe, and this week feels like that again. Our bodies are responding to the perceived threat in order to protect us. 

People aren’t always what we think

At Restored, we see this twin reality world playing out in survivors’ lives again and again. Domestic abuse, by its very nature, happens in secret, and abusers present themselves very differently in public, at work and in church. The separation of realities is a tactic to control the victim. It means that when those who have been subjected to abuse seek help, they are often not believed. If we are to follow the call of God in Isaiah 58 to let the oppressed go free, then we have to be prepared to look further and to believe what seems impossible. We must choose to listen to those who are telling us their reality and not minimise it, try to contextualise it or say that the good things they do outweigh the harm. When we do that, we collude with the abuser, and we leave the one who has been harmed alone without support. 

Silence favours the oppressor

In a world where challenge is so often seen as a dramatic take-down or the creation of a culture war, many of us don’t want to join in. But when no one challenges the glorifying of person whose words have rallied people to hatred, prejudice and even violence, those who were othered and labelled as less than feel isolated and afraid. 

Those members of my church who only saw the post venerating Charlie Kirk and were afraid that the whole church agreed with his views on race. 

My Colombian friend, who, for the first time, received a text from an organisation supporting Latin American women in the UK, warning her not to go into central London this weekend because it wasn’t safe. 

It matters that we don’t silently disagree with hatred. It matters that we speak up with love, with welcome, and that we challenge a toxic culture. 

How we talk matters

Kirk is heralded as a hero of free speech who debated those he disagreed with, but his death has unleashed a level of violent speech that betrays that. It matters that we take time to recognise our heightened emotions and consider what needs expressing and what doesn’t, and how we do that with wisdom and grace. Most of us, and indeed I count myself in this group, are not at our best in the heat of the moment; wisdom comes with reflection. 

We have been purposefully divided

It suits those on the extremes to polarise the centre, not to mention the Church. These twin realities are not new; they’re as old as the Daily Mail/Mirror split or Telegraph/Guardian readership, but at least then you chose what to read, and the other headlines grabbed your eye on the newsstand. With the hidden world of social media, we are being herded into ghettos where we only hear what the powers that write the algorithms want us to see. Often, we’re oblivious to the other chapters in the story. If we are to faithfully follow Jesus, we must intentionally choose to find and read all the chapters.