After the Assassination: How the Algorithm Wars Gave Us Two Charlie Kirks + Nijay Gupta
Who is really winning here?
In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s very gruesome and very public assassination on September 10, the debate over his legacy has played out in real time and online. The responses to his death revealing just how fractured we’ve become. Some called him a martyr, a modern-day St. Paul. Others pointed to his history of racist and xenophobic rhetoric and wondered why Christians were valorizing someone who had said such things. Workers were fired for their social media posts. Jimmy Kimmel was suspended. Pastors faced backlash no matter what they said — or didn’t say — from the pulpit.
On this episode, Katelyn and Roxy grapple with how to hold space for both mourning political violence and reckoning with Kirk’s troubling platform. We are joined by New Testament scholar Nijay Gupta, whose viral substack post, “If You Are Elevating Charlie Kirk, Consider Who You Are Crushing Underfoot,” wrestled with what it means to remember controversial figures honestly — especially when half the church sees a saint and half sees a devil in disguise.
GUEST:
Nijay Gupta is a professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary. He is the author of several books, most recently, “Slow Theology: Eight Practices for Resilient Faith in a Turbulent World,” which he co-authored with A.J. Swoboda.
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