Tag: charliekirk

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Forgiveness or Control? How Evangelical Culture Weaponizes Grief

Hey hey, welcome back to Taste of Truth Tuesdays.

Today we’re unpacking several interwoven topics I’ve explored in my writing before why people get drawn into high-control environments and how forgiveness in Christian culture is often weaponized, not as a path to healing, but as a tool to silence victims and protect institutions. This isn’t just a personal issue; it’s an institutional one.

This came into sharp focus after Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow, said she forgives her husband’s killer. I’m not here to critique her grief, that’s her own process. What I want to explore is the cultural framework that makes this kind of forgiveness expected, celebrated, and even demanded in evangelical spaces. I have a MUCH MUCH longer blog linked here if you want to go much deeper than I plan to cover today.

Weaponized Forgiveness, Institutional Abuse, and Evangelical Justifications for Harm

Why Grief Is Ripe for Recruitment

Before even touching forgiveness, let’s pause on why this moment is so primed for revivalist recruiting. Sociologists and psychologists have long noted that people are most vulnerable to high-control groups (whether churches or MLMs) during times of disruption and emotional chaos.

Laura Dodsworth, in her book Free Your Mind, calls this a “blip.” A blip is any disruption that cracks our normal defenses: loss, illness, exhaustion, grief. Even smaller stressors (Think HALT) Hunger, anger/anxiety, loneliness or being tired can chip away at our resistance. Push long enough, and the conscious mind collapses into a state of openness, hungry for belonging and ready to absorb new narratives.

That’s exactly what makes funerals, memorials, and major crises fertile ground for recruitment. Orwell nailed it in 1984:

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in shapes of your own choosing.”

Jehovah’s Witnesses even admit to targeting what they call “ripe fruit”-the recently bereaved. In Brazil, recruiters have driven cars with loudspeakers through cemeteries on All Souls’ Day, broadcasting sermons to tens of thousands of mourners. That isn’t compassion; it’s strategic exploitation. Naomi Klein would call it the Shock Doctrine: trauma as an entry point for control.

We’re seeing the same tactics play out online right now. Someone posts about “returning to church” after years away, and within hours their feed fills with love-bombing-likes, comments, and digital hugs. It feels affirming, but it’s also classic manipulation: vulnerability plus attention equals a wide-open door into manipulation.

And so it’s no surprise that revivalist energy is surging in the wake of Kirk’s death.

Situational vulnerability + orchestrated belonging = fertile ground for expansion.

The Myth of “Christlike” Forgiveness

This brings us back to forgiveness. I want to be CLEAR HERE, obviously Erika Kirk wasn’t coerced into forgiving, but in evangelical culture forgiveness is never entirely personal, it’s baked into the ethos. The more you forgive, the more “Christlike” you appear.

Matthew 6:14–15 “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”

That expectation is dangerous. Forgiveness is sacred when it grows out of genuine healing. But when demanded prematurely, it becomes a weapon. Survivors are told to “forgive as you’ve been forgiven” before they’re ready, before their pain is acknowledged, and typically long before their abuser is held accountable.

Pete Walker, in The Tao of Fully Feeling, argues that forgiveness is not a one-time act but a continual choice and that choice only works after grief, rage, and hurt are fully processed. Skip that, and forgiveness turns into compliance, a way to silence anger and keep victims stuck.

In other words: real forgiveness empowers the survivor. Weaponized forgiveness protects the institution.

How Churches Use Forgiveness to Protect Themselves

We’ve seen this pattern across evangelical institutions:

  • The Guidepost Report (2022) exposed that SBC leadership maintained a secret list of over 700 abusive pastors, shielding them from consequences while survivors were ignored, discredited, or retaliated against.
  • Jennifer Lyell, an SBC abuse survivor, was vilified by church leadership when she came forward. Instead of support, she was publicly shamed, and her abuser faced no consequences.
  • Christa Brown, another survivor, spent years advocating for reform after being assaulted by her youth pastor. The SBC’s response? Stonewalling, gaslighting, and further silencing.
  • Jehovah’s Witnesses have a longstanding pattern of protecting sexual predators under their “two-witness rule,” which requires at least two people to witness abuse for it to be considered valid. This impossible standard allows abusers to go unpunished while victims are shunned for speaking out.

In each case, forgiveness isn’t about healing. It’s about compliance, silence, and institutional survival.

Nietzsche, Freud, and the Cycles of Guilt

This isn’t new. Nietzsche warned that Abrahamic religions hijacked older wisdom traditions, reframing them into systems of obedience rather than life-affirmation. Freud saw religion as a kind of collective neurosis, trapping people in loops of guilt and repression.

What is ironic, Freud’s own psychoanalytic model looks eerily similar to the religious structures he critiqued. As historian Bakan and others have suggested, Freud may have drawn (consciously or not) on Jewish mysticism, replacing priests with analysts, confession with therapy, sin with repressed desire. In trying to explain away religion, Freud ended up reproducing its patterns in secular form. In other words, the pattern of taking human vulnerability and channeling it into control runs deep.

And this is where Laura Dodsworth’s idea of the “blip” becomes so relevant. The blip is that moment of rupture…when you’re grieving, disoriented, exhausted, or otherwise cracked open. Your defenses are down, your critical mind isn’t firing at full strength, and the brain is searching for something to hold onto. In these liminal spaces, new ideologies rush in.

That’s why this moment is so ripe for revivalist energy. It’s not just about forgiveness…it’s about the total atmosphere of grief and disruption that can act as a blip. And high-control groups know it. It’s why political movements, religious revivals, and even MLMs wait for crisis points: job loss, divorce, a death in the family. The blip isn’t compassionately held-it’s exploited.

So when we watch something like Kirk’s memorial, we’re not just seeing personal mourning. We’re watching a social script unfold, one that revivalists know how to activate. In this script, forgiveness, obedience, and “turning your life over” aren’t neutral virtues—they become instruments of recruitment. Which means the real question isn’t should people forgive, but who benefits when forgiveness and emotional openness are demanded at the exact moment people are least able to resist?

Sources & Recommended Reading

  • Laura Dodsworth, Free Your Mind: The New World of Manipulation and How to Resist It (2023) – esp. Chapter 10, “Watch Out for the Blip.”
  • George Orwell, 1984 (1949) – “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces…”
  • Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007).
  • Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame (1996).
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887); The Antichrist (1895).
  • Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927).
  • David Bakan, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (1958).
  • Investigative reports on abuse cover-ups:
    • Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) scandal (Houston Chronicle, 2019).
    • Hillsong global abuse reports (various, 2020–2022).
    • Grace Community Church & John MacArthur counseling cases (Christianity Today, 2022).
  • Jehovah’s Witness recruitment practices

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When Morality Binds and Blinds: Lessons from Charlie Kirk’s Death

Hey hey my friends, welcome back to Taste of Truth Tuesdays. Today’s episode is going to be heavier than usual, because I want to process something that has been shaking me to my core over the past week, the brutal death of Charlie Kirk.

Now, I need to start here: I did not agree with Charlie on everything, especially not his theology. You know me, I don’t subscribe to the idea that morality begins and ends with the Abrahamic scriptures. That’s a hard pass. But I also can’t deny the impact Charlie had on me. I spent years watching him debate, learning from the way he sharpened his arguments and stayed composed with people he deeply disagreed with. He’s one of the people who actually inspired me to study the Constitution, socialism, and to pay more attention to what’s happening politically.

So when I heard he was brutally murdered, I cried. It was horrific. And then, when I looked online and saw people celebrating his death? Saying he deserved it because he was a white, conservative, Christian man? That was gutting. Not just emotionally but morally. 

In fact, let me show you a comment I received. This person told me she couldn’t believe I was mourning the death of a Trump supporter, that he had ‘spewed so much,’ and then announced she was unfollowing and blocking me.

That’s the climate we’re in. Not just disagreement, but outright dehumanization.

That kind of reaction, the dancing-on-the-grave energy, it’s not just tasteless. It’s a reflection of how far moral tribalism has gone. She is a perfect example of what I saw when I was navigating ex-Christian and ex-evangelical spaces. It is the same trend there: conservatives painted as villains, ridiculed, dismissed, treated as less-than. 

Folks in my parasocial networks would send me podcasts or Instagram pages that were just openly disrespectful and overgeneralizing, like mocking anyone who leaned right was simply part of the healing process. And I remember sitting there thinking… how are you even friends with me if you despise people like me so much?

It’s like the hatred is so baked into the zeitgeist, people don’t even notice they’re doing it.

I’ve already done an episode on the radical left and why I left the left in 2020. Back then I saw the extremism ramping up with Black Lives Matter, with pandemic policies, and yes, with those shocking poll results in 2022, where a significant portion of Democrats said they believed unvaccinated people should have their kids taken away or even be put into camps. 

https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/partner_surveys/jan_2022/covid_19_democratic_voters_support_harsh_measures_against_unvaccinated?
Breaking down the Power Play:  Women’s Suffrage, Christian patriarchy, and Trad Wife Propaganda

That was the moment I realized this wasn’t just about public health.  It was about authoritarianism cloaked in moral righteousness.

And I want to tie that moment to this moment. Because what we’re seeing with Charlie Kirk’s death is the exact same kind of moral righteousness, just flipped.

This is where Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind comes in and yall know I bring this book up a lot, but today it’s essential. 

Haidt’s big idea is that morality isn’t one single thing. It’s made up of six different foundations, like taste buds of the moral sense. Let me walk you through them:

  1. Care vs. Harm – the instinct to protect others from suffering. Progressives tend to emphasize this one the most.
  2. Fairness vs. Cheating – concern for justice, reciprocity, equal treatment. Again, heavily weighted on the left.
  3. Loyalty vs. Betrayal – valuing group solidarity, patriotism, belonging. This resonates more on the right.
  4. Authority vs. Subversion – respect for tradition, leadership, order. Again, more prominent for conservatives.
  5. Sanctity vs. Degradation – ideas of purity, sacredness, things that must not be defiled. Religion is one form, but health and nature can trigger it too. Conservatives score higher here, but you see progressives activate it around food purity or environmentalism.
  6. Liberty vs. Oppression – the drive to resist domination and protect freedom. This one cuts across both sides but is framed differently, the right fears big government, the left fears corporate or systemic oppression.

Now, how does this help us explain what we’re seeing?

Progressives, whose moral taste buds are dominated by Care and Fairness, look at Charlie Kirk and say, ‘He caused harm to marginalized groups, he propped up unfair systems.’ So when he died, they felt justified in celebrating. Their moral taste buds told them: this is justice.

Conservatives, on the other hand, lean more heavily on Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity. Charlie embodied loyalty to the nation, respect for conservative traditions, and yes, defense of the sacred. So his death wasn’t just tragic, it was an attack on everything sacred to them. That’s why you’re seeing these martyrdom narratives, even AI videos of Charlie in heaven with other ‘heroes of the faith.’ It’s moral psychology in action.

👉 And this is also the perfect moment to point out the formula behind Psy-Ops. Because these martyrdom narratives aren’t just spontaneous. They follow a pattern of influence:

(Stimulus + Feeling) – Conscious Awareness × Repetition = Belief.

That’s the formula. You feed people a stimulus, in this case, AI imagery of Charlie Kirk as a martyr. You attach it to a strong feeling: grief, anger, hope. By doing so, conscious awareness is bypassed, people aren’t stopping to analyze, they’re in raw emotion. And then you repeat it over and over. Before long, it’s not just an image, it’s a belief. This is why these videos are so powerful, they’re not just content, they’re psychological conditioning.

In the book Free Your Mind, which we discussed in our previous podcast episode, Chapter 9 emphasizes the importance of getting ideas in writing—but it also highlights the unique power of images. As the book notes:

“An image tells a thousand words, and seeing is believing. You tend to be more easily persuaded by images than by words, and video is even more persuasive. On the other hand, reading leaves more breathing room for critical thinking.”

Images can define ideas and stick in our minds in ways words alone often cannot. A single powerful metaphor or visual statement can leave a lasting impression. Take Donald Trump’s political career, for example: it wasn’t only shaped by complex and abstract immigration policies, but also by concrete, visual symbols—a border wall, or the image of him standing with his fist raised, signaling defiance after the attempted assassination. Mental images grab our attention and viscerally anchor themselves in our minds. They’re persuasive tools that can move political movements forward.

Psychologists agree. This phenomenon is known as the picture superiority effect: images are far more memorable than words. In one study, participants were shown a mix of 612 images and words for six seconds each. When asked later which they recognized, 98% of the pictures were remembered, compared to just 90% of the words. Another study of news broadcasts found that only 16% of stories were remembered when heard over the radio, versus 34% when watched on television.

The takeaway? Images are not just memorable-they shape perception.

Seeing really is believing.

And here’s Haidt’s main takeaway: morality binds and blinds. Both sides feel righteous, but both sides are blinded. The left is blinded to the humanity of someone they disagreed with, so they cheer for his death. The right is blinded to pluralism and nuance, so they sanctify him and risk sliding into Christian authoritarianism.

And let’s pause here…because this rise in religious fervor is deeply concerning to me. I used to push back when people warned about Christian nationalism. I thought it was overblown. But watching Gen Z churn out martyr videos of Charlie Kirk, watching this wave of revivalist passion roll in, I can’t deny the potential for backlash anymore.

It’s not just reverence – it’s symbolism, its revivalism, its identity politics wrapped in scripture. And that’s where my alarm starts.

Take the Noahide Laws movement. People often describe it as returning to a universal moral code. On its face, sure, that sounds appealing. But when morality is rooted in a particular scripture or identity, it often becomes a tool to say: ‘these norms are non-negotiable, and dissent or spiritual alternatives are forbidden’ That’s when spirituality crosses into political power-building.

Listen to this clip from Ben Shapero on the Daily Wire.

And we’re already seeing it creep into policy. 

The administration just passed an executive order on ‘Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias.’ Protecting religious freedom is vital, yes. But there’s a difference between protecting believers from discrimination and making laws where Christian sentiment is immune from critique or satire. 

The White House posted a video mourning Charlie Kirk concluding with:

“1 Corinthians 5 and 15 provide compelling evidence (not only intrabiblical but also extrabiblical) that Jesus Christ was a real historical figure. He lived a perfect life, was crucified, rose on the third day, and is Lord and God.”

If you still don’t see how Christianity and faith in Jesus, a figure who probably never existed—is both holding this country back and enabling Zionism, it’s time to wake up.

We’ve already seen new laws against so-called antisemitism that start to look a lot like blasphemy laws. How long before similar protections are extended to Christian sentiment?

This matters because young people might get swept into this revivalist Christian / Abrahamic framework without realizing it. 

It reduces room for spiritual alternatives, for pluralism, for traditions like panpsychism or animism, worldviews that see all of reality as alive, interconnected, and worthy of respect. That feels more universal to me. Less tied to tribal texts, less prone to turning spirituality into a weapon of the state.

History has shown us that religious revivalism mixed with nationalism and state power is a dangerous cocktail. It binds, but it also blinds. And that’s why I can’t jump on board with this new wave of Abrahamic revivalism being fueled by Charlie’s death. My skepticism sharpens right here.

So here’s where I land: I grieve. I grieve for a man who influenced me. I grieve the way his life was taken. But I also grieve the way his death is being used  by some to celebrate evil, by others to canonize him into sainthood. Both sides reveal how morality binds and blinds. And if we don’t wake up to that, we’ll keep swinging between authoritarian extremes.

And I want to close with a reminder from Jonathan Haidt himself. He wrote:

“Social scientists have identified at least 3 major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. We are now at the greatest level of political polarization since the 1860s. It’s more necessary than ever to return to these 3 forces in every way we can, individually and as a society.”

That’s where I want us to go. Beyond tribal stories of vengeance or martyrdom, back toward trust, strong institutions, and stories that unite rather than divide.

One of my new favorite YouTubers https://youtu.be/UQ02zhLmkTM?si=96o2gTReXl-nvClS

So, maintain your curiosity, embrace skepticism, and keep tuning in.

Further Reading & Sources