In the past decade or so, leaders in America’s newsrooms have tried to find journalists who can help them understand the language, the symbols and the beliefs of Americans with radically different cultural backgrounds.

An editor in Miami, let’s say, will want a large percentage of her or his reporting staff to speak Spanish or Creole and there may need to be experts in modern Hebrew and Arabic. But what about reporters who can speak conversational “evangelical” or what some people call “Christianese”? Hold that thought.

Listen To The 'Crossroads' Podcast Here

Let’s turn to some language issues in media coverage of the stunning speech Erika Kirk delivered soon after the assassination of her husband, Charlie Kirk — the focus of this week’s “Crossroads” podcast. Erika Kirk has since been declared the new leader of Turning Point USA, her husband’s growing network of young religious, cultural and political activists.

With good cause, much of the coverage focused on this dramatic passage, which Erika Kirk delivered with steely resolve (speech transcript here):

The evildoers responsible for my husband's assassination have no idea what they have done. They killed Charlie because he preached a message of patriotism, faith, and of God's merciful love. They should all know this: If you thought that my husband's mission was powerful before, you had no idea. You had no idea what you just have unleashed across this entire country, in this world. You have no idea. You have no idea the fire that you have ignited within this wife. The cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry. To everyone listening tonight across America, the movement my husband built will not die. It won't. I refuse to let that happen.

Yes, “evildoers” was plural. Then she linked the “battle cry” language to another important image in traditional and modern Christian discourse.

Our battle is not simply a political one. Above all, it is spiritual. It is spiritual. The spiritual warfare is palpable.

Thus, she is saying that (#HintHint) her concerns are much larger than politics.

“Spiritual warfare” is a complex term. At the very least, in a biblical context, it declares the reality of a spiritual realm of heavenly hosts and demonic forces, of principalities and powers in life, that transcend what people can see with their eyes.

Erika Kirk is an articulate, daily Mass Catholic who, because of her husband’s strong Protestant background, also knows how to use words and images that ring true with evangelical, charismatic and Pentecostal Christians. It helps to know that she has a juris master’s degree in the principles of law and is in the process of earning a doctorate in biblical studies, both from Liberty University.

This is how her speech was described in the key passages of a New York Times piece with this headline: “Grieving in Public, Erika Kirk Melds the Personal and Political.”

It’s interesting that the Gray Lady’s headline didn’t contain the term “Christian” or even “spiritual,” even though that kind of content dominated the speech. It’s almost like politics is “real,” while “religion” is not really “real.” America’s most influential newsroom offered this:

“You have no idea the fire that you have ignited within this wife,” Ms. Kirk said, standing in a white blazer at a lectern at Turning Point USA headquarters … in her first public speech since her husband, a right-wing force and key ally to President Trump, was killed at a college event in Utah. “The cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry.”
Ms. Kirk also shared images on Instagram, where she has more than four million followers, of her hands folded together with Mr. Kirk’s in his coffin and herself embracing Vice President JD Vance with his wife, Usha Vance — braiding the personal and the political, the vulnerable and the operational, as she finds herself a widow on a national stage.

Again, are we talking about the merely “personal,” as in one person’s beliefs? That is certainly different than the “political,” which for most journalists is the most important subject, the be-all and the-end all, in life.

Now, it’s time for the Times to describe the widow and link her to Charlie Kirk — the 31-year-old entrepreneur and even evangelist — using precisely the language that would be used by his critics (and he had many, including some conservatives) and his critics alone.

Mr. Kirk’s politics and worldview were inextricably wound together with his personal life, and his marriage was a core part of his public reputation. And Ms. Kirk, 36, a former Miss Arizona USA winner and entrepreneur who made biblical streetwear, played a critical role in projecting that image.
She left many political topics to her husband, who was known for views that were anti-immigrant, anti-civil rights and anti-Islam.
But she also boosted his inflammatory rhetoric on transgender people, gay marriage and other issues, and made her own condemning statements about the political left. “The spiritual battle — I know you guys feel it. It’s so deep in the soul. You can walk into a room and feel the enemy,” she told a Turning Point crowd recently.

“Spiritual warfare,” thus, is presented as a political term, as opposed to being a spiritual term. Yes, we do live in an age in which many political and cultural issues are, for millions of Americans, directly linked to religious traditions and centuries of doctrine.

It’s almost as if Erika Kirk was speaking a language that most mainstream journalists do not understand, except in political terms. Also, she is not being the kind of widow that they believe she should be.

In the past decade or so, leaders in America’s newsrooms have tried to find journalists who can help them understand the language, the symbols and the beliefs of Americans with radically different cultural backgrounds.

An editor in Miami, let’s say, will want a large percentage of her or his reporting staff to speak Spanish or Creole and there may need to be experts in modern Hebrew and Arabic. But what about reporters who can speak conversational “evangelical” or what some people call “Christianese”? Hold that thought.

Let’s turn to some language issues in media coverage of the stunning speech Erika Kirk delivered soon after the assassination of her husband, Charlie Kirk — the focus of this week’s “Crossroads” podcast. Erika Kirk has since been declared the new leader of Turning Point USA, her husband’s growing network of young religious, cultural and political activists.

With good cause, much of the coverage focused on this dramatic passage, which Erika Kirk delivered with steely resolve (speech transcript here):

The evildoers responsible for my husband's assassination have no idea what they have done. They killed Charlie because he preached a message of patriotism, faith, and of God's merciful love. They should all know this: If you thought that my husband's mission was powerful before, you had no idea. You had no idea what you just have unleashed across this entire country, in this world. You have no idea. You have no idea the fire that you have ignited within this wife. The cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry. To everyone listening tonight across America, the movement my husband built will not die. It won't. I refuse to let that happen.

Yes, “evildoers” was plural. Then she linked the “battle cry” language to another important image in traditional and modern Christian discourse.

Our battle is not simply a political one. Above all, it is spiritual. It is spiritual. The spiritual warfare is palpable.

Thus, she is saying that (#HintHint) her concerns are much larger than politics.

“Spiritual warfare” is a complex term. At the very least, in a biblical context, it declares the reality of a spiritual realm of heavenly hosts and demonic forces, of principalities and powers in life, that transcend what people can see with their eyes.

Erika Kirk is an articulate, daily Mass Catholic who, because of her husband’s strong Protestant background, also knows how to use words and images that ring true with evangelical, charismatic and Pentecostal Christians. It helps to know that she has a juris master’s degree in the principles of law and is in the process of earning a doctorate in biblical studies, both from Liberty University.

This is how her speech was described in the key passages of a New York Times piece with this headline: “Grieving in Public, Erika Kirk Melds the Personal and Political.”

It’s interesting that the Gray Lady’s headline didn’t contain the term “Christian” or even “spiritual,” even though that kind of content dominated the speech. It’s almost like politics is “real,” while “religion” is not really “real.” America’s most influential newsroom offered this:

“You have no idea the fire that you have ignited within this wife,” Ms. Kirk said, standing in a white blazer at a lectern at Turning Point USA headquarters … in her first public speech since her husband, a right-wing force and key ally to President Trump, was killed at a college event in Utah. “The cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry.”
Ms. Kirk also shared images on Instagram, where she has more than four million followers, of her hands folded together with Mr. Kirk’s in his coffin and herself embracing Vice President JD Vance with his wife, Usha Vance — braiding the personal and the political, the vulnerable and the operational, as she finds herself a widow on a national stage.

Again, are we talking about the merely “personal,” as in one person’s beliefs? That is certainly different than the “political,” which for most journalists is the most important subject, the be-all and the-end all, in life.

Now, it’s time for the Times to describe the widow and link her to Charlie Kirk — the 31-year-old entrepreneur and even evangelist — using precisely the language that would be used by his critics (and he had many, including some conservatives) and his critics alone.

Mr. Kirk’s politics and worldview were inextricably wound together with his personal life, and his marriage was a core part of his public reputation. And Ms. Kirk, 36, a former Miss Arizona USA winner and entrepreneur who made biblical streetwear, played a critical role in projecting that image.
She left many political topics to her husband, who was known for views that were anti-immigrant, anti-civil rights and anti-Islam.
But she also boosted his inflammatory rhetoric on transgender people, gay marriage and other issues, and made her own condemning statements about the political left. “The spiritual battle — I know you guys feel it. It’s so deep in the soul. You can walk into a room and feel the enemy,” she told a Turning Point crowd recently.

“Spiritual warfare,” thus, is presented as a political term, as opposed to being a spiritual term. Yes, we do live in an age in which many political and cultural issues are, for millions of Americans, directly linked to religious traditions and centuries of doctrine.

It’s almost as if Erika Kirk was speaking a language that most mainstream journalists do not understand, except in political terms. Also, she is not being the kind of widow that they believe she should be.

At The Free Press (#Surprise), novelist and culture writer Kat Rosenfield — “The Battle Cry of Erika Kirk” — got right down to business. In her feature, she noted that it will be crucial for illiberal progressives to tie Erika, perhaps by her apron strings, to the dangerous heretic that was her husband.

Brace yourself for the twist of the knife in this anecdotal lede:

The first time I saw a photo of Erika Kirk it was on the site formerly known as Twitter: a portrait of a woman with pale blond hair and eyes the color of ice, glaring straight into the camera like she’s daring it, and you, to come even one step closer. The post didn’t identify the woman in the image, but it didn’t need to. Even if she hadn’t been standing at a podium emblazoned with a sign that read, “May Charlie be received into the merciful arms of Jesus,” the caption would have left no doubt as to who I was looking at.
It read, “She’s as hateful as her husband.”
That post has since been deleted — although not before it racked up over 140,000 likes and more than 12,000 retweets. …

One of Rosenfield’s tasks, of course, was to dissect the speech. The key: She realized that the widow was not speaking in language that would be understood, or respected, by the occupants of, well, the Times newsroom.

She spoke for nearly 20 minutes, offering words of grief, words of thanks, words of faith. These last were especially striking: a glimpse into a devoutly Christian world rarely depicted in mainstream culture except to ridicule it, one with its own vocabulary and rituals, and a frank familiarity with the divine.
When Kirk’s 3-year-old daughter asked where her father was, Erika said, “I said, ‘Baby, don’t you worry. Daddy loves you so much, he’s on a work trip with Jesus so he can afford your blueberry budget.’ ”
But the comment about the blueberries wasn’t what prompted the post calling Erika Kirk hateful, or a later, now-also-deleted one calling her disgusting.

Ah, that would be the “battle cry” comment and everything that went with it.

The Times, of course, said Erika Kirk was boosting her husband’s “inflammatory rhetoric on transgender people, gay marriage, and other issues,” even though she did not mention those subjects in the speech. Also, there was no need to note that the Kirk family’s beliefs on sexual morality and marriage are consistent with the doctrines of traditional Catholics, evangelicals, Eastern Orthodox believers, most of global Anglicanism, Orthodox Jews and many others in ancient faiths.

Now, I do not have a Bluesky account, so I cannot tell you about that flock’s take on Erika Trump’s words of mourning and warning. However, Rosenfield noted:

The Guardian described Charlie Kirk as a conspiracy theorist and peddler of “divisive language” and “bigoted rhetoric,” before writing that “his wife used her speech to rally young people … to continue his cause.”
Taken all together, responses like these convey a lemon-faced, tsk-tsking sense that Erika Kirk has done something distasteful in vowing to continue her husband’s work — and that if she had any decency, she would have made a conciliatory statement about the need for unity before retreating into the shadows to grieve, maybe not forever, but at least for long enough to allow the whole organization her husband spent his short life building to fall into disrepair, rust over, and collapse into nothingness.

Erika Kirk is not, it appears, a widow who is behaving in a dignified manner.

In conclusion, let me explain one of the questions that I asked in the podcast. To be blunt: Should Erika Kirk have crafted her message in a way that reached her target audience, but avoided what she, and the Turning Point USA staff, surely knew would be dangerous lightning flashes of rhetoric to journalists?

In other words, should she have avoided “Christianese”? You know, the phrases — think “thoughts and prayers” — that trigger firefights. In 2017, I wrote an “On Religion” column on the complications that “Christianese” can cause in public discourse.

Basically, it’s a foreign language to occupants of blue America and, thus, to elite newsrooms.

… It's clear that the fighting over "thoughts and prayers" tweets is yet another sign that America is dividing into warring camps in which language and symbolic actions are causing pain and confusion, rather than unity, said Tim Stewart, a professional wordsmith who created the "Dictionary of Christianese" website.
It doesn't help that the vocabulary of many Christians, especially evangelicals, is packed with "insider jargon they use all the time, whether they know it or not. … This language is like a liturgy for them, but they don't understand that other people don't get it," said Stewart, who was raised Catholic, but attends a Southern Baptist church in Austin, Texas.
"It's like they're speaking another language and it makes other people feel like outsiders," he added. Non-believers may need to say: "Is there a booklet I can read so that I know what's going on and what you're talking about?"

Another evangelical linguist went so far as to create a website called "10 Christian Sayings that Need to Go." It included “I'll be praying for you," “Doing life together,” “Be Jesus to people” and the deadly “Bless her heart.” Why do so many Christians, when praying, use the word “just” in every other sentence. You know, as in “Lord, we just approach your throne of grace to seek. …”

Seek what? Maybe strength and courage for spiritual warfare?

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