Christian and racist?

Everlong1

I started attending a Christian prayer group recently and was really enjoying it. However I was taken aback at a recent service when one of the pastors used her sermon to praise Charlie Kirk and warn about how his murder was an attack on Christianity.

Like most people I'd never heard of Kirk until his murder. From what I've read of his comments he sounds like a despicable individual who used his "faith" as a cloak to preach bigotry of the worst kind. As a Christian how am I supposed to deal with this? The kind of Christianity I believe in doesn't involve preaching that black people are inferior and should still be treated as second class citizens.

P.S. Mods please DO NOT merge this with the existing Charlie Kirk thread as it's a different topic as far as I'm concerned and intended to be a discussion about racist preachers in general.

Wanderer78

this must be a tough one for people such as yourself, kirk was indeed a despicable person, spreading hatred, although he did not deserve to be murdered, religious orders are doing no favours for themselves by supporting his hatred, just to note, im agnostic myself, i do think some americans have hijacked religion to just help spread their vile hatred, i do question their faith, as i cant imagine any god would promote such behavior and beliefs

SuperBowserWorld

This is an easy answer, if a person claims to be Christian.

Jesus stated that the second greatest commandment is, "Love your neighbor as yourself" (Matthew 22:39).

Wanderer78

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123849412#Comment_123849412

this is exactly what i was thinking, both kirk and his killer failed on this one, so you d have to be seriously questioning their faith

Dogsdodogsstuff

A person does not represent everything that they claim they represent. Whether president, pastor or parent. We are all human and have our own bias and defects.

As somebody who try’s to spend as much as I can on a fence about a lot of things, I can tell you that people will always let you down or dissapoint if you expect perfection and almost virginal actions from them. Expect everybody to have their faults and navigate them but don’t let the individual taint everything they claim to represent.

I will give you a different example. I had a therapist once who really helped me but they had some serious personal flaws and possibly over stepped professional/personal boundaries. But I still learned some really good stuff from them. I didn’t discard the entire CBT professor because of them.

I appreciate with religion, it may seem like priests should be above it but they are still human. I’m not religious (or against it) but didn’t Jesus die for our sins ? Which means we sin by default and need to learn to forgive ourselves.

I learned in AA (many years since I’ve been there) that learning to forgive (if possible) makes me more content then hating or being angry at somebody for their defects. Accepting their defects (possibly cursing them a bit) and learning to move beyond it is better then letting one person spoil what is generally a good experience.

Sounds great in principle, I know, and not easy to learn but when you get it; saves a lot of stress. As somebody said “if you have a problem, sometimes the best way is simply to walk around it”.

Everlong1

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123849500#Comment_123849500

A great post and well written. Lot to chew on there. I get the point about not expecting people to be perfect, I'm certainly not, but with Charlie Kirk I think it's well beyond that. The man professed to be a devout Christian but used his every waking minute to promote views that were the opposite of Christianity. Of course there's nothing new about this. History is full of murderers and genocidal maniacs claiming that God was on their side, I'm happy to ignore all that but I suppose my real shock was in finding that an Irish pastor would be so upset about his murder as if he shoould be a role model for Christians everywhere.

Dogsdodogsstuff

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123849733#Comment_123849733

I hope you dont think I’m implying that it’s ok to use a platform to push this sort of stuff, it’s rotten and morally reprehensible. I suppose I try to seperate the person from what connection I have with them (in your case religion). And then if they have more good traits then bad I navigate them (sometimes challenging them) and if they have more negative traits then good I isolate them emotionally and physically as much as I can from my life.

Kirk’s assassination is a cautionary tale of whatever it is , is going on in USA right now. He’s not some martyr to celebrate, it’s this sort of celebrity sycophantic obsession that’s partially responsible for the divide, which makes it unwise for people to “honor him” like some sort of great fella to celebrate.

homer911

Personally I never liked the guy, his so-called debates were just excuses to verbally batter people. And as for his racism..

Our Minister prayed for his family etc in our morning service the weekend after he died and it left a lot of us scratching our heads. (A topic, imo, which should have been left alone). It appears that perception of Kirk was highly determined by your social media feeds…
This is an interesting article which discusses the issue

https://wildernessdispatch.com/2025/09/15/we-are-remembering-two-different-charlie-kirks/