The Kirks’ Marriage Was a Model Beyond Evangelical Teachings

The Kirks’ marriage blended faith, attraction, and purpose, revealing the strengths and flaws of the complementarian theology Charlie endorsed.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk has been an occasion for people to reflect on his legacy.

One part of that is his championing of marriage and family to young people who’ve been turning away from it.

But he not only wanted people to get married, he wanted them to have healthy and successful marriages. In this, he seems to have essentially championed evangelical complementarian gender theology.

Someone sent me this video from last December that shines a light on some of his thinking on marriage. It’s a discussion between his wife Erika and him at AmericaFest 2024.

There are actually two visions of marriage in this video. One is the pattern of their own marriage. The other is Charlie’s complementarian vision of male headship.

The pattern they describe of their own marriage is very healthy and positive.

We see a few things. First, Erika was drawn to the tall, attractive, charismatic, and very successful and high status Charlie - and his mission.

As we’ll see, later in the video Kirk describes a man’s work in terms of earning money to provide for his family. While providing is important, and Kirk surely became wealthy while at TPUSA, clearly Charlie Kirk was more motivated by and passionate about his mission than money.

According to TPUSA spokesman Andrew Kolvet, “Charlie didn’t get a pay check for the first 5 years. He slept on couches. He traveled 330 days a year. His first salary was $20k and that was a huge achievement. Eventually he donated his entire salary (and then some) back to TPUSA.”

Charlie Kirk was the epitome of a mission-oriented man.

Erika Kirk says something critical in this video right at the beginning. She says, “I’m very proud of my husband.” And then she talks about the hard work and sacrifices Charlie made.

Having a woman’s respect and admiration is gold to a man. It’s critically important, but not often discussed or emphasized in evangelical gender teachings. One exception was in Tim and Kathy Keller’s marriage book, where Tim says that Kathy always makes him feel like Superman.

For his part, Charlie was drawn to someone who was attractive, but also very talented and dynamic in her own right. She was aligned with his mission, and indeed helped propel that mission to the point where she is stepping in to lead it after his death.

Thought it’s not in the video, it’s important to note that Erika is five years older than Charlie. The manosphere would say this is a dealbreaker in a relationship, and that only a beta simp would marry someone older than himself. It’s one of the many ways they actually try to discourage men from getting married. Charlie could no doubt easily have found someone five years younger than himself to marry, but when he found the right woman, and she was five years older, he married her. He didn’t let what people on the internet had to say determine his decisions.

So we see here drivers of actual attraction as well as the qualities that make someone a good candidate for marriage. We see them publicly honor each other, and notably here Erika talk about her husband making her proud. We see partnership on an outward-focused mission. And we see an intentionality towards faith and family. All positive things.

On a different topic, Charlie said he normally reads 100 books a year, which is amazing. Obviously he was a very smart guy in addition to being hard working and dynamic.

In terms of the complementarian teachings, there’s no reason to think that Charlie Kirk developed these ideas himself. He’s a political organizer, not a theologian. Like most of us, he probably was taught these ideas at church or through Christian media, and, as he should, decided to place himself under the authority of that teaching.

This gives us a double benefit. We get a small window not just into the teaching itself, but also how it is taken in and understood by people who hear it.