Tucker Carlson delivered a Christ-centered speech at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service in Arizona on Sunday, receiving thunderous applause after encouraging the crowd to listen to the assassinated Turning Point USA founder’s message of faith.
The conservative commentator took to the stage at State Farm Stadium in Glendale in front of tens of thousands of people to shift their focus to Kirk’s “Christian Evangelist” beliefs:
“This is the most unbelievable thing I think I’ve ever seen,” Carlson began, referring to the enormous, lively audience. “Whatever happens next in America — I hope it’s in this direction, because God is here, and you can feel it. And Charlie would have loved this, not just because he loved large groups of people, but because ultimately, he was a Christian evangelist.”
Carlson then brought up how people conspired against Jesus in the Bible:
It actually reminds me of my favorite story ever. So it’s about 2000 years ago in Jerusalem, and Jesus shows up, and he starts talking about the people in power and he starts doing the worst thing that you can do, which is telling the truth about people — and they hate it, and they just go bonkers. They hate it, and they become obsessed with making him stop. ‘This guy’s got to stop talking. We’ve got to shut this guy up.’ And I can just sort of picture the scene in a lamp-lit room with a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus, thinking about, ‘What do we do about this guy telling the truth about us? We must make him stop talking.’ And there’s always one guy with the bright idea, and I can just hear him say, ‘I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we just kill him? That’ll shut him up, that’ll fix the problem.’
It doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t work that way. Everything is inverted, and the Beatitudes tell it, I think, the most crisply, that everything is sort of the opposite of what you think it’s going to be.
He continued on to call Kirk a “wonderful” man who was obviously political but had his eyes set on bringing people to Jesus as the “only real solution”:
Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted. That is true, and you can feel it here. The thing about Charlie’s message, I’ve thought a lot about it, and I’m trying not to be emotional, because in addition to everything else, he was a wonderful man and a decent man, and one of those rare people you meet who you just groove with in conversation and have these very intense conversations that you don’t stop thinking about, which is my experience with him. But the main thing about Charlie and his message, he was bringing the Gospel to the country, he was doing the thing that the people in charge hate most, which is calling for them to repent.
So how is Charlie’s message different? And Charlie was a political person who was deeply interested in coalition-building and getting the right people in office because he knew that vast improvements are possible politically, but he also knew that politics is not the final answer. It can’t answer the deepest questions, actually, that the only real solution is Jesus. And the reason – it’s really simple. Politics, at its core, is a process of critiquing other people and getting them to change. Christianity, the gospel message, the message of Jesus, begins with repentance.
Christianity calls upon you to change. Our core prayer given to us by Jesus, the Lord’s Prayer, demands that we forgive other people, but preceding that is a request for our forgiveness. In other words, forgive us our sins. Meditate on what we’ve done wrong, how we’ve fallen short, and then it becomes possible to forgive other people. That is a call to change our hearts from Jesus, and that is the only way forward in this country. That is the only solution to where we all know we’re going, and Charlie knew where we were going without that.
Carlson added that his speech “is not a call for being politically passive.”
“Of course not,” he said. “I stood on many stages with Charlie calling for various people to be elected, particularly Donald Trump, and I’m proud of that. It’s only an acknowledgement that what Charlie was really saying is that change begins –- the only change that matters — when we repent of our sins.”
Reflecting on his personal, private conversations with Kirk, Carlson shared how his younger friend had the wisdom to refrain from hating anyone:
And that was the reason that Charlie was fearless at all times, truly fearless to his last moment. He was unafraid, he was not defensive, and there was no hate in his heart. I know that because I’ve got a little hate compartment in my heart, and I would often express that to Charlie about various people, and he would always say, ‘That’s a sad person, that’s a broken person, that’s a person who needs help, that’s a person who needs Jesus.’ He said that in private, because he meant it.
Carlson concluded his speech by reminding listeners that the Christian faith proves that “any attempt to extinguish the light causes it to burn brighter every single time.”
“So as we proceed into whatever comes next — and clearly something is coming next — remember this moment. Remember being in a room with the Holy Spirit humming like a tuning fork. This is the way, right here. This is the way, and that is what Charlie Kirk was saying underneath it all. Thank you, and God bless you.”
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
