On September 10, 2025, the news broke of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. The announcement rocked our culture, and the week that followed was full of grief, political blame-shifting, and theological soul-searching. Through the fog of the aftermath, one word was repeated, again and again, by friends and followers of Kirk: martyr. The martyrdom narrative advanced widely in the broader Christian community. Nevertheless, the designation, with all its weighty implications, must be given careful scrutiny by the Church.

To a secular audience, the whole martyrdom claim may seem absurd. “Kirk was killed for political reasons. There is no controversy.” But as Christians our questions run deeper. Who is a martyr? What separates a martyr from a victim of political assassination? To answer these questions we must look backward in time before the clouds of the present obscure our vision.

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Gmail
• Amazon

Two Ways of Knowing

To begin with, we must understand the difference between general and special revelation. Both general and special revelation come from the same source. Christ, the divine Logos or “Word,” is the source of all revealed truth, both general and special revelation. Augustine argued that Christians should confidently appropriate knowledge from all sources: “let every good and true Christian understand that wherever truth may be found, it belongs to his Master.” Put simply: The ultimate source of every truth, whether that is a truth of science or morality or art, is God. God has ordained that certain truths would be evident to all through the witness of what is called general revelation. This is the created order, universally accessible through nature, reason, and our innate moral conscience. The laws of physics, or even the inherent knowledge that murder is wrong, can be known by general revelation.

However, Christian theology teaches that general revelation, while true, is insufficient for salvation and is obscured by the effects of sin, the corruption of the human mind that leads us to suppress or misinterpret the truth of God in creation. For this reason, there is a second, primary way God has revealed Himself and His will: special revelation. This is the very reason the Church exists: to be the witness of God’s direct, redemptive self-disclosure in the person of Jesus Christ, as revealed in Holy Scripture. All doctrines peculiar to Christianity from the Trinity and the Incarnation to the Resurrection and the Last Judgment are truths of special revelation.

The Definition

So how does this relate to martyrdom? The word “martyr” comes from the Greek mártys, which originally meant “witness,” a legal term for one who gives testimony. In the early Church, as believers faced persecution, the term evolved to signify one who gives the ultimate witness: death for one’s faith in Christ. 

A person can die nobly for a truth of general revelation. Socrates dying for his philosophical principles is a classic example. But a Christian martyr dies in witness to the truths that are uniquely bound to Scripture and Christ.

The essential criterion for martyrdom, as defined by centuries of theology, is that the persecutor is motivated by odium fidei, a Latin phrase meaning “in hatred of the faith”. This distinguishes a martyr from a victim of a purely political or personal conflict.

The Precedent

This framework provides a lens through which we can view the death of John the Baptist. Herod, at the behest of his incestuous wife, Herodias, sought to silence John for a prophetic warning against their unlawful marriage. John refused to be silent, and so he was beheaded. It is also clear that Herod’s animus was not against Christ, whose coming John foretold, but against the plain truth about King Herod’s own conduct, which was a violation of God’s revealed law.

So, the question arises: if John was killed for a moral truth, how could the early Church describe him in terms of martyrdom? Clement of Alexandria, writing in the late second century, already placed John among the martyrs, holding him up as one who, though called the greatest among those born of women, nevertheless sealed his witness with blood (Stromata IV.9). Origen likewise described Herod’s slaying of John as silencing a “herald of the truth,” noting that the Baptist boldly rebuked sin without fear of death (Commentary on Matthew 10.23). Tertullian, though reserving the title “Protomartyr” for Stephen, nevertheless paralleled John’s execution with Paul’s, remarking that Paul “won his crown in a death like John’s” (Prescription Against Heretics 36), and elsewhere explained that John was put to death for upholding God’s law against Herod’s adulterous marriage (Against Marcion 4.34). Thus, from the second century onward, Christian writers consistently remembered John not only as prophet and forerunner, but also as a martyr for truth.

Centuries later, the English monk, Bede the Venerable (c. 673-735) articulated the theological logic the Church had internalized:

“His persecutor had demanded not that he should deny Christ, but only that he should keep silent about the truth. Nevertheless, he died for Christ. Does Christ not say: ‘I am the truth’? Therefore, because John shed his blood for the truth, he surely died for Christ.” — Bede, Homily 23 (Office of Readings for Aug. 29). 

To put it in the form of a syllogism:

1. Herod’s persecution sought not that John recant the faith in Christ, but that he “should keep silent about the truth.”
2. Christ, however, declared, “I am the truth” (John 14:6).
3. Consequently, Bede concluded, “because John shed his blood for the truth, he surely died for Christ.”

In this formulation, odium veritatis (in hatred of the truth) is rendered as odium fidei (in hatred of the faith). To hate a truth revealed by God is to hate the God who is Truth Incarnate.

The Argument 

The same logic, as just described, is what must be applied to the case of Charlie Kirk. Kirk’s killer was motivated by a worldly ideology. The animus was political, but the revealed truth that Kirk was defending was not just political: it was explicitly theological.

The Christian position on “gender,” for example, is revealed in both general revelation and special revelation. It is a fact known by general revelation that male and female are biologically complementary in nature. At the same time, Genesis 1:27 tells us that God “made them male and female.” The Christian holds to both the truth of general revelation and special revelation.

1. Kirk’s Witness Was Explicitly for Truths of Special Revelation

In his frequent arguments against transgender ideology, Kirk was defending the created order of “male and female” as ordained by the Creator in the book of Genesis. Kirk’s framing of this matter is telling: “Transgenderism is a throbbing middle finger to God.” This is not just an argument for policy or cultural order; it is an explicit theological defense rooted in special revelation. In these and other ways, Charlie Kirk was, by all appearances, publicly defending Christian truth.

Kirk was killed not for any particular truth of general revelation that would make him a political casualty rather than a martyr. Rather, his activism was focused on defending certain truths directly from special revelation (e.g, the created order of “male and female” as revealed in Genesis). His stated arguments were not political preferences but the explicit defense of the truths that flow from special revelation.

2. The Persecutor’s Motive Was an Implicit Odium Fidei

Charging documents reveal a note under the suspect’s keyboard: “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I’m going to take it.” Text messages also stated, “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” Media reporting, citing relatives of Robinson’s partner, described his hatred as aimed at conservatives and Christians. Kirk was killed for being, to the killer, an intolerable Christian witness to special revelation.

While the killer’s motive may have been political, this theological framework allows for a deeper interpretation. Applying the logic of Bede, it can be argued that the killer’s ideological hatred of Kirk’s biblical witness was odium fidei camouflaged as odium veritatis. Just as Herod’s hatred of the truth of marriage was an implicit hatred of Christ, this killer’s hatred of the truth of gender is an implicit odium fidei.

Our Unchanging Calling

The world will always try to see political significance in such deaths. But, having the benefit of Scripture and history, we, as Christians, have the clarity to look beneath the worldly veneer to the spiritual reality underneath. When a man is killed for his public witness of the truth of God’s Word against a corrosive and idolatrous political ideology, a case can be made that they die for the faith. The hatred, even if expressed in a political form, still has its origin in a deeper spiritual opposition to Christ, who is the Truth.

At the same time, we must proceed with caution. In a deeply polarized age, there is a danger of creating a “partisan martyrology,” where the sacred title of martyr is reflexively applied to any Christian who becomes a casualty of political violence. The primary reason we must have this conversation is to clarify our own calling. Martyr is the Greek word for witness. This is the universal calling of all Christians. It requires bravery in the mold of John the Baptist and Charlie Kirk to speak the truth of Christ in a world where doing so has become increasingly costly. Our witness must always be, first and foremost, to the transcendent and universal truth of the Gospel, not to a political party or temporal ideology. By carefully guarding this distinction, we preserve the unique and sacred power of true martyrdom.

---