'Charlie Kirk, look what you did' - Church attendance surges in US
Emily Pollok
Since the assassination of political activist Charlie Kirk on 10 September, people in the United States and further afield are heading back to church in what has been termed “the Charlie Kirk effect.”
In the days immediately following his death, social media was swarming with videos of people sharing the impact that Kirk’s assassination was prompting in their lives; for many, that meant returning to church or attending a service for the first time.
The death of Charlie Kirk
Date posted: 1 Oct 2025
Dear Editor,
The news has been full of the shooting of Charlie Kirk. I must confess that the first I knew of him was when I heard he’d been shot, and that’s probably true for many people like me. However, those of us in middle age or our later years need to be aware that among many of a younger generation Charlie Kirk was massive.
letter from America
Christian Nationalism, OK?
Josh Moody
One of the hot topics of the moment is regarding so-called “Christian Nationalism”.
The very phrase strikes terror in some – the word nationalism sounds to them perilously close to nationalist if not fascist. For others, looking at the growing demographic trend of Islamic populations in the West, or the rise of the “Nones” with no religious commitment at all, reconstituting a specifically Christian approach to national government is a needed realpolitik response to what will otherwise be increasing persecution of Christians in time to come. All this has become even more heated with the recent tragic and appalling assassination of the Christian leader and political advocate for contemporary Republicanism, Charlie Kirk. What are we to think of it all?
Charlie Kirk, free speech and Godly speech
This time two weeks ago, Charlie Kirk was an unfamiliar name to me.
It was a bit like the morning of 9 December 1980, when John Lennon’s death was announced. I’d never heard of him, though I was familiar with Paul McCartney and knew that the Beatles had been a notable pop group in the 1960s. I suppose my defence was that I was only eleven at the time.