I was of course appalled by the assassination of Charlie Kirk, just as I’m opposed to the assassination of any innocent person and nearly all “non-innocent’ people. And no, I didn’t agree with most of what Kirk said or stood for, but we can disagree with people without suggesting that they be killed, or celebrating when they are killed. I did agree with Kirk’s view, which some thing was phony, to promote discourse and exchange of views with one’s opponents.
But when people like Kirk push religious behaviors or values, I can still criticize their proselytizing. For Charlie Kirk was a Christian, and pushing Christianity was an important part of his message. Yesterday he was helped along by the Free Press, which, along with other “mainstream” sites like the NY Times, is increasingly trying to tell us how religion is good for us—it fills the “God-shaped hole” in our being. Notice that Kirk’s recommended Sabbath rest is part of the book’s message, and we’re supposed to kick back on the weekends, not to rest from the travails of the world, or because it recharges us, but because God tells us so. (Granted, Kirk does point out research showing the benefits of resting, but to Kirk, religion is central to this rest.) And Kirk’s new book from which the piece was taken is called Stop in the Name of God (an alteration of a Supremes song). From the book’s website:
In a world that never slows down, where busyness is worn as a badge of honor and screens dictate our every move, Stop in the Name of God offers a radical yet profoundly simple invitation: pause, rest, and reconnect. Through the transformative practice of honoring the Sabbath, bestselling author Charlie Kirk guides readers to reclaim a sacred rhythm that restores balance, nurtures the soul, and strengthens relationships. This book is not about escaping modern life-it’s about living it more fully, intentionally, and meaningfully.
Yesterday’s article, touting “Charlie Kirk’s final message to America,” is telling us to keep the Sabbath, and keep it in a way that the Bible recommends in Genesis and Exodus. (Presumably Kirk didn’t agree with the Old Testament’s approbation of genocide, though.)
The whole article, consisting of a bit by Kirk’s wife Erika followed by an excerpt from Kirk’s book, is introduced with approbation by the FP editors, who link to his book on a site where the FP may make a profit. The intro (bold and italics are from the original).
In the final years of his life, Charlie Kirk wrote a book. It’s about the importance of observing the Sabbath in our increasingly frenetic age; of resisting, for one day a week, your smartphone, your work, the distractions of modern life—and dedicating yourself to what’s truly important.
Stop, In the Name of God will be published posthumously on December 9. We’re honored to share an exclusive excerpt with you today. But first, there is no one better to introduce Charlie’s final message to America than his widow, Erika Kirk. —The Editors
Many people think their work is truly important, though. I know of many writers who didn’t take a stipulated day off to rest. Yes, they took time off, but not because God said so.
Click to read the article:
There’s an intro from Kirk’s widow Erika, and I do feel horrible for her, seeing her husband killed in front of her along with their two children. Kirk was only 31, and their kids will grow up without their dad. Erika gives an introduction, and I do admire her for continuing one important part of her husband’s message: to have free discourse with your political opponents:
This, I think, is what saved him from burnout. Charlie didn’t write a book about the Sabbath because he wanted to learn the impact that it would have on his life. He did it because he knew it worked. The Sabbath saved him.
Writing it wasn’t easy. In every page, you can see the depth of theological and scientific research that went into it. There’s an area in our home with lots of plants in it; that was his secret garden. After work, very late at night when the kids were asleep, he would go there. And even if it was 30 minutes, 10 minutes, five minutes a day, he would write.
. . . There is a reason this book isn’t political. Charlie wanted to heal the country, and he saw his conversations with students on campus as a piece of the puzzle. But when he was on campus, if someone was screaming at him, he knew they weren’t actually listening. When you’re constantly combative and fighting, you have no time to treat other people like human beings. Charlie genuinely felt that if the world had a weekly day of rest, just one, it would be the ultimate game changer.
First, note that Charlie’s way of healing the country is not a way that many of us would follow: he was pushing the Christian Right. Further, although his message isn’t political, it is based on Christianity, and that’s the part I oppose. In the part of Kirk’s book excerpted below, he deals with six objections to taking a Sabbath rest. Again, perhaps most people already do benefit from a weekend rest, but they are having it anyway! There’s no need to do it because God thinks it’s good when you’re doing it.. Just leave out the God part, since there’s no evidence for Him anyway. (I hate capitalizing “Him”, as it implies God exists).
Here’s how Kirk answers people who say they feel guilty taking a day or two off (the rest are excerpt from his book, and all bolding is mine):
If taking one day off makes you anxious or ashamed, then you must ask, What am I really worshipping? No idol condemns rest like the idol of productivity. This is the golden calf of the modern age. We bow to output, chase metrics, and sacrifice our joy on the altar of efficiency.
But our identity must be anchored in something far greater than toil. Work is good—it reflects God’s creative nature. But rest is holy—it reflects His sufficiency. The same God who calls us to labor for six days also commands us to rest for one. That’s not weakness; that’s worship.
Here’s part of his answer to people who say “I’m too busy to take a Sabbath”. The bold part is mine:
About five weekends out of the year—sometimes more—it becomes genuinely difficult for me to take a Sabbath. Occasionally, I’m asked to speak at conferences, churches, or public forums that fall squarely on weekends. And in those moments, I face the same tension many of you do: How do I honor God when life won’t slow down?
Here’s my answer: I do everything in my power to plan around it. But when that’s not possible, I get creative and deliberate. If I have to work on Saturday, I take Sunday as my Sabbath. If both days are booked and filled with travel or obligations, I plan ahead to block off the following weekend for extended rest—phone off, no emails, no output.
The goal isn’t a rigid formula—it’s a reordered life. The Sabbath is not meant to shame you into rest, but to awaken you to how much you’ve been missing.
You are also teaching your family something profound. Every time you pause your productivity and make room for stillness, you are discipling your children. You are showing them that faith isn’t confined to church pews but is woven into time itself.
And from the finale:
Don’t be afraid to turn off your phone. You’re not falling behind—you’re catching up to what matters most. The people in front of you. The presence of God. The peace you’ve been craving.
Now don’t get me wrong: it may be useful for some people to abstain from work or take phone calls on the weekend. (Kirk also reads scripture, sleeps, plays with his kids, and abstains from alcohol.) But for others, and those include me, I enjoy working (mostly writing and reading now), and I don’t spend that much time on the phone. Remember, many, many people don’t like their jobs and would appreciate time off, regardless of why one gets it. But I think you can see that this article’s publication is of a piece of what seems to be a new movement: cure the perceived malaise of people today by imbuing them with religious (often Christian) values.
In fact, Kirk’s message is pretty much the same as Jon Haidt’s, who’s long recommended that people abstain from devices, particularly kids. And that is to make us more social, more connected with each other. But you don’t need God to do that: Haidt is an atheist. So you can get the benefits of rest, if you need it, without doing it in the name of God. Religion may make people do some things that they need but wouldn’t do without it, but is that a reason to embrace Christianity. Humanists can certainly run their lives in a way not centered on a fictitious being and his fictitious book. You can also find a secular reason for the Sabbath in Jesus’s words (Mark 2:27): “And he said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.”
Here’s the central placement of Kirk’s message on the Free Press site yesterday. I’m wondering if Bari Weiss and Nellie take a Sabbath, and I’m worried about what happens when Weiss becomes a big macher in the CBS News.
Remember, if Kirk transformed the country in the way he wanted to heal it, we would be living in a Christian theocracy and following the dictates of MAGA, but with strong religious overtones. That would not “heal” us.
Kirk did not give any indication he wanted theocracy. Yes, he wanted everyone to convert to evangelical Christianity, but by choice. Theocracy means political dictatorship of a pope, forced worship, and morality policing.
Meanwhile, the Deocratic left makes no secret they wish their neo-Marxist scheme to rule by law. They’ve succeeded in implementation of it far into the March Through the Institutions. Coercive collectivism by law has been normalized.
I can thumb my nose at god by working on Sunday, which I do, but I can’t opt out of the 74% of my taxation that gets transfered to others as social services. Yes, I’d like a nation where we help each other. By choice.
“74% of my taxation that gets transfered to others as social service”
Source ?
Baloney, John Donohue.
Kirk ended his life as a theocratic Christian nationalist.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/charlie-kirk-turning-point-donald-trump-christian-nationalism-rcna156565
Here is a quote from Charlie Kirk, from 2022:
“And, again, there is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication. It’s a fiction. It’s not in the Constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists. It’s derived from a single letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptist Convention. Of course, we should have church and state mixed together. Our Founding Fathers believed in that. We can go through the details of that. They established, literally, a church in Congress.”
Saying that we should have church and state mixed together sounds a lot more theocratic than simply wanting people to voluntarily convert to Christianity.
Theocracy means religious laws applying to everyone, with or without a formal state religion. Legislating Christian morality. Now that is something Evangelicals have long wanted, and I dare say there are legal arguments and historical precedents that support different interpretations of US law. But for an atheist, not attractive.
The Free Press is a right-leaning publication, so no one should be surprised by this.
Right Mr. Lyons? It certainly is.
They have some excellent reporting for sure, but it isn’t an atheist publication. I think I’m in a similar boat as PCC(E) here. When the FP came out against woke (very welcome, but many here…) they SEEMED at least to be almost atheist, silent on relgion.
Then gradually there seemed to be more religiously inclined articles. Which disappointed me a bit. And PCC(E) bristled also here at WEIT.
Hard to avoid though — with something like 80% of Americans/humans too I bet – having some form of “higher power” – atheists like us just have to skip over the religious stuff… in people, publications, etc. or we’d be living on a lonely ice flow…
D.A.
NYC
My interpretation is that they are only doing this out of fear of a far more aggressive, oppressive, theocratic alternative- Islam – which has been steadily gaining influence in the West through immigration and the weird Islamo-Leftist alliance. If not for Islam, I very much doubt Bari & Co. would be posting such articles.
I don’t buy that for a second. I don’t detect any fear in Bari Weiss.
OK, how about “concern” then, which she certainly has expressed.
Yeah I’ve found this irritating. I like that it’s supposed to be a balanced publication in some sense (calling BS on the right and left) but man their right-leaning articles are often intolerable and complete nonsense. Articles like this one on Kirk undermine the reputation of the entire publication.
I like TFP. They pretend to be different than MSM, and in some ways, they are. They do WAY too much god-bothering and their commentariat is mostly insane, as is true almost everywhere on the intertubes. I’m not sure about renewing, but I think the good at TFP outweighs the bad. For one thing, they have Coleman Hughes on a lot.
I agree that Coleman Hughes is probably their best writer.
Beside observing the sabbath, am I also instructed to keep kosher? It will be a
little inconvenient to heat up milkhig and fleishig dishes in separate microwaves.
Sure, good advice, but I tend to dismiss suggestions that it’s on me to fix the problems of modern tech society rather than look for collective solutions.
As an example, the Sec of Transportation’s suggestion that air travel would be more enjoyable if passengers dressed better. How about if airlines stop treating us as cattle?
I wouldn’t fret about capitalizing “Him”. To me it gives off imaginary friend vibes which I reckon is accurate. Is He in the room with us right now?
“He’s everywhere! He’s everywhere! So beware.”
(Aliens, Michael Biehn as Corporal D. Hicks).
(And also Chickenman, IIRC).
I’m from the UK and had never heard of Charlie Kirk until I had the unfortunate experience of seeing him killed on Twitter. It was a horrible event and after seeing it, I did a little research into Charlie so that I knew what he was about. I know America is very different in its religious attitudes but he doesn’t seem very religious to me. But then, even though I am an atheist, I can’t imagine Jesus inviting children to witness public executions, which apparently Kirk envisaged. It’s also not my picture of Jesus that he would support such blatant lying that Kirk did about the election result. I can’t imagine ‘the Lord’ forcing young girls to give birth to their rapist’s children or saying that civil rights for black people are a bad thing, or saying that non-white immigration is part of a “great replacement” theory. But, as I said, I don’t really understand American Christianity.
There’s a difference between what he said and what people said he said.
For example, he did not say that civil rights for blacks are a bad things, he said that some of the interpretations that the courts have made of the 1964 Civil Rights Act are a bad thing. That centres around the Disparate Impact doctrine, under which, for example, if you have standards for maths teachers, and if black Americans fail to meet those standards at the same rate as white Americans, then that’s not allowed.
And it is indeed the case that, owing to mass immigration, European-origin white Americans are set to become a minority in coming decades. (The same is true of the UK!) One might approve of that or one might disapprove or think it doesn’t matter either way — but we seem to have got into the bizarre situation where all the data say that, yes, this “great replacement” is indeed happening, but anyone who says it is happening immediately gets denounced.
And the Eurocrats were quite open until recently about their plan to replace the aging European workforce via mass third world immigration, especially from the Islamic world. How has that been working out for them? (rhetorical question)
Thank you for your interpretation. As far as I understand it he said that the passing of the Civil Rights Act was a “huge mistake“. Presumably then from what you say he wasn’t against strengthening voter rights, banning discrimination, desegregation of public facilities and outlawing discrimination in employment. Did he make it clear that he wasn’t against these things but against the interpretations that have been made by the courts. If he was against those interpretations, why was he criticising the Act itself and not the courts?
On the other point you make I was not saying that it was untrue that blacks might outnumber whites in currently majority white countries. I was suggesting that to make a fuss about the number of blacks outnumbering the number of whites seems like a racist argument.
Was Kirk talking about “the numbers of blacks or whites”, or about importing people of any “race” from alien, incompatible cultures that won’t assimilate? I’ve only seen Kirk on Bill Maher’s podcast but I did not get the impression there was anything remotely racist about the guy, whatever his faults are concerning his religious dogmas.
Yes, he did make these things clear. He was against the wording of the Civil Rights Act and the later interpretations by the courts that effectively mandated equal outcomes not just equal opportunities (which he did not oppose). This, he said, had created a “permanent DEI bureaucracy” which he saw as government overreach and to which he was opposed to.
You are taking one snippet, not even a full sentence, making on attempt to understand the surrounding paragraphs of what he was saying, and then concluding that he meant that “civil rights for blacks were a bad thing”. No, that’s an utterly unfair spin.
As for immigration: we have lots of examples of the sorts of countries created by white Europeans, and we have lots of examples around the world of the sorts of countries created by the third-world migrants that are currently being admitted into the UK and Europe in multiple millions. If you don’t think that it matters if Britain and Europe gradually become much more like the latter countries on all the indicators that matter then that’s up to you, but there are strong arguments that it’s an utterly reckless social experiment.
Coel, in a way I accept this argument. But given the demographics in the UK what are we expected to do? It’s all very well for you and Mike above to make snarky comments about what we are supposedly doing to ourselves but stopping immigration in itself doesn’t solve the problem. Needing enough young people to pay taxes and look after the old and maintain services. The world is full of people who are against immigration but none of them are prepared to address this basic problem.
“Needing enough young people to pay taxes and look after the old and maintain services.” – Mal
Ponzi scheme that assumes infinite population growth is sustainable. What happens when those young immigrants get old? You’d have to bring in even more to support them, ad infinitum.
Mal: “… Needing enough young people to pay taxes …”
Government figures are that migrants cost us money!. That is, they cost more in welfare/benefits than they pay in taxes. To be precise, migrants from rich countries (EU, Japan, etc) do indeed benefit the economy. But migrants from poorer countries (Pakistan, Syria, Afghanistan, Africa, etc) cost the taxpayer money. OBR figures are that each third-world migrant costs us £150,000 by the time they reach pension age, and then vastly more as they age. (e.g. link)
Further, evidence (from Denmark etc) is that 2nd-generation migrants continue the pattern. That is, if their parents cost more in benefits/welfare than they contribute in taxes, then the suceeding generations also do that.
“We need migrants to pay pensions” is a lie! Migrants cost the UK taxpayer money! They make it far harder to pay future pensions! (Have you seen that explained in the BBC or The Guardian?, this is OBR figures I’m referrring to.)
“… and look after the old and maintain services”.
Large numbers of jobs will be lost to automation. Taxi driver and delivery driver are two jobs employing large numbers of people that will disappear in the next decade. Many other tasks are likely to be taken over by AI. So do we need as big a workforce in the future? Unclear.
Note that the above cost/benefit analysis does not include effects of mass migration on house prices. Adding 10 million people means that houses cost 7 times annual salary rather than (say) 3 or 4 times.
So, yes, immigration increases GDP (more people, more money changing hands), but it does not increase GDP-per-capita (which is surely more important), and if you need to spend far more of your income on housing then you are in practical effect far worse off.
So, yes, simply stopping mass immigration from poorer countries would indeed solve many problems and leave the country’s children with a more prosperous future.
These are not unalloyed goods. They all involve enlisting the state to curtail the freedom of individuals to deal with other people in ways they see fit. These measures may produce goods but they have costs that come with them, and may produce perverse outcomes.
What does “strengthening voter rights” mean exactly? Every citizen over 18 has the franchise. The goal is to increase black voter turnout because eligible black voters who vote vote predominantly Democrat. Is allowing people to vote without showing photo ID (to prove they are the citizen who is on the voter’s list) necessary to “strengthen” voter rights? Or does it undermine the integrity of elections? Does requiring photo ID discriminate against black people because black people are, owing to fecklessness, less likely to have photo ID, and therefore it must not be required else fewer of them will vote (Democrat)?
I could address the perversity of the other three desiderata but for space. I think you get the idea.
Finally,
Black people in the United States, both “legacy” and immigrants from Somalia, are less intelligent on average and more likely to be unemployed and criminal than other races. So having black people outnumber white people means America will be intellectually and financially handicapped and lumbered with social dysfunction in unlivable cities as it tries to compete with China, so even if that is a racist argument it is a perfectly good one.
I never heard Charlie Kirk speak so I don’t want to put opinions in his mind but if he said the things you heard him say, I wouldn’t find myself disagreeing with him.
He was a sappy idealist.
But he’d not want people to exploit him.
Re overwork:
“If you enjoy what you’re doing, you’ll never work a day in your life”
(Harvey MacKay, author and speaker, 1963).
(But, from personal experience, one can still hit burnout.)
And re curing the perceived malaise of people today by imbuing them with religious (often Christian) values — might as well be a miserable churchgoer instead of just miserable. It at least gives you something different to do, some new friends, and community singing.
Just want to clarify a common misconception regarding “seeing her husband killed in front of her along with their two children.” This appears to be a widespread yet false rumor that circulated immediately after Kirk’s shooting, apparently started by misreading an ambiguous Tweet by Senator Markwayne Mullin: “Pray for [Kirk], his wife Erika, their two children, and all who were present at Utah Valley University.” (the word ‘and’ is equivocal here). BBC initially reported this as confirming Erika was present, which was then widely (mis)reported and amplified by other outlets, social media users, and even AI bots, as Snopes investigated:
https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/09/18/charlie-kirk-family-shooting/
Per the New York Times, Erika Kirk was in Phoenix when her husband was shot, and was airborne in a plane when he was pronounced dead,
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/21/us/politics/erika-kirk.html
Cheers,
I appreciate that Jerry reads and writes about some of these articles even when they frustrate him. After all, what would we call a religious believer who brushed off every atheist piece unread as “nonsense”? (I am not suggesting we all must read EVERYTHING we see as nonsense!)
I suspect that The Free Press is simply mixing articles to match the market—and the religious market in America is still quite large.