Forgiveness was her most shocking message, but it wasn’t the only countercultural idea Erika Kirk advanced in her memorial oration for her murdered husband, Charlie.
It’s utterly biblical and in many ways radical in our current culture.
First, she posited marriage as something not merely for the mutual benefit of the spouses but for the greater good.
Marriage, in our transactional, individualistic age, is increasingly seen as a bilateral contract. Kirk was presenting marriage as something outward-facing. The benefit of your marriage also goes to the rest of the world. Set aside the theological part of her claim, which will obviously be rejected by the secular. It’s odd today to state that a marriage gets its meaning from the couple’s relationship with the rest of the world. “I’m not married to society,” modern man will say.
Kirk also included of the Bible talk that could make a feminist wince: Four times, she mentioned the husband’s role in leading his wife. She implored men to be “the spiritual head” of their homes.
But equality within marriage and respect for women got more emphasis from Kirk.
“Be a leader worth following,” she told young men. “Your wife is not your servant. Your wife is not your employee. Your wife is not your slave. She is your helper. You are not rivals.”
This may have sounded odd to some ears. Why did it need to be said? Who thinks a wife is a servant, employee, or slave? What sort of man sees a romantic partner as a rival?
If you know the American Right, or the state of young men the way Charlie and Erika surely did, you wouldn’t be confused. “The lost boys of the West,” she called them.
“Charlie passionately wanted to reach and save the lost boys of the West — the young men who feel like they have no direction, no purpose, no faith, and no reason to live.”
She went on: “The men wasting their lives on distractions, the men consumed with resentment, anger, and hate: Charlie wanted to help them. He wanted them to have a home with Turning Point USA. When he went onto campus, he was looking to show them a better path — a better life that was right there for the taking.”
She’s talking largely about young boys on the Right, who see the world, especially their schools, rigged against men. They see a male job market deteriorating. They see an elite culture that denigrates husbands and fathers and castigates masculinity and physical courage as toxic.
She worries that, in reaction to the excesses of modern feminism, young men are tacking to misogyny, or imaginary ideas of a RETVRN to some world of male domination. Showing young men a vision of the good life could steer them away from these darker corners of the Right.
Finally, Kirk’s most countercultural message was her invocation of Genesis, the same words Christ invoked to the Pharisees: “A man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”
Our world worships autonomy, which is why marriage and family formation are becoming rarer and rarer. Even within marriage, our elite media encourage us to guard “boundaries” desperately.
“You entered a relationship as an autonomous human being,” the most famous personal-finance celebrity warns married people. “Do not give up that autonomy.”
Kirk’s message is the opposite: For the entirety of your marriage, from I Do till Death Do You Part, you are, in fact, a unit. Where you end and she begins is no longer clear. There is no mine and hers.
That’s truly a radical message these days.
