Charlie Kirk has been turned into the first martyr of the MAGA faith. And this matters because it is martyr veneration that helped both Christianity and Islam transform from small local movements centered on charismatic preachers into global religions. In launching its own martyrs, MAGA may be moving from a movement focused on one beguiling leader in the person of Donald Trump to a broader faith that could outlast him.

Since the assassination, a variety of MAGA-foe pundits have compared the MAGA response to Kirk’s murder — including Stephen Miller’s convenient claim that Kirk’s last message to him was a call to “dismantle the radical Left” — to the response to the killing of Horst Wessel, a German Nazi murdered by two members of Communist Party of Germany in 1930. In the hands of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, Wessel’s death became a rallying cry, and Wessel himself a heroic martyr whose death symbolized the Nazi struggle against Communism. Goebbels had Wessel mythologized through songs, rallies, and public ceremonies, creating a cult around him that galvanized support for the Nazi movement.

The comparisons to Horst Wessel are not without merit. His death was a major boon for Nazi propaganda, just as Kirk’s death has given MAGA and the Trump administration proximate cause to escalate attacks on their political adversaries. But those comparisons miss something crucial. Goebbels himself was consciously drawing on an earlier model, and it is that model, the Late Antique cult of the martyrs, that the MAGA faithful are now, consciously or not, also invoking.

Until now, the evangelical Christianity that Kirk embraced — and still the default mode of worship for American Christian nationalists — has had only a tenuous relationship with martyrdom. There have been powerful stories, to be sure: Cassie Bernall, the teenager at Columbine who supposedly declared her faith before being shot, or John Allen Chau, the young missionary killed on North Sentinel Island. But these episodes are remembered as isolated moments of witness-inspiring stories of faith, rather than built into an ongoing culture of veneration as evidenced by the official support for the efforts to celebrate Kirk’s memory, including from the president of the United States. Evangelicals have often been suspicious of martyr-saints in part because this brand of martyr veneration smacks of “works” and Catholic hagiography rather than the Evangelical emphasis on personal salvation.

That reluctance has been a weakness, because martyrs inspire the faithful, galvanize movements, and spread a message far more effectively than any sermon. After all, what better evidence of truth than that there were hundreds, nay thousands, prepared to die in witness to that truth?

As MAGA’s first martyr, the myth being crafted around Kirk both mirrors that of earlier religions’ martyrs while still bearing the unique marks of the MAGA faith.

In fact, while it is now common to claim that Christians were relentlessly persecuted........

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