Charlie Kirk’s massive memorial service in Phoenix, Arizona, felt like an evangelical revival to many. Its religious messages deeply resonated with some members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who watched it from Provo.
Even though the feeling may be different from what Latter-day Saints are used to, Utah GOP Chair Robert Axson told KUER, “it still is just a reminder to look to Jesus.”
Axson’s word choice was “quite interesting” to Matthew Bowman, chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University. That’s because the two religious traditions have strong theological differences. “Jesus” is a common way of referring to Jesus Christ in the evangelical movement, he said, but much less so in the LDS Church.
“It's, I think, a signifier of the ways in which, over the past 50 years or so, these two traditions have drawn closer together,” Bowman said. “Driven largely, I think, by political affinity.”
Despite the connection between the two at this moment, Bowman doesn’t think there will be any permanent change in the relationship between evangelicals and Latter-day Saints.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Ciara Hulet: Why don’t you think there will be permanent change?
Matthew Bowman: There has been this kind of uneasy relationship going back for a long, long time, really, since the 1970s, when many leaders of the religious right movement to emerge out of the evangelical world, people like Jerry Falwell, saw Latter-day Saints as a useful ally there. And because, of course, they believe very similar things on issues of abortion, gender and sexuality and so forth, and so they forge, kind of a working relationship.
But at the same time, there are many other evangelicals in the 70s and 80s who were very angry with these leaders of the religious right for forging that relationship because they said, “These people aren't Christian, they're cultists. We can't trust them.”
Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee were allies as Republicans, right? But at the same time, Huckabee did not believe that Romney was really a Christian and was quite vocal about that. So this same kind of double-mindedness, I think, is not going away anytime soon. It's lasted for 50 years already.
CH: Why do some evangelicals say Latter-day Saints aren’t Christian?
MB: They mean by that two things. First, they mean the LDS folks do not subscribe to the traditional Christian Trinity, which for them means, then, that they do not believe that Jesus Christ is fully God. And so evangelicals may say that LDS folks worship a different Jesus.
The other thing they will mean is that in many aspects of the evangelical world, if you call yourself a Christian, it means that you have been born again — you have received this special experience by which Jesus Christ has revealed to you that you are saved. And of course, that's not generally part of a Latter-day Saint practice. LDS folks don't talk about salvation in that way.
CH: Latter-day Saints would dispute that they aren’t Christian. A memorial viewer in Provo told KUER he didn't like how the speakers likened Charlie Kirk to Moses or other biblical figures.
What might sit strangely about the Kirk memorial’s messages for Latter-day Saints?
MB: Yes, this is an interesting question, right? And I think it gets to the charismatic movement, which Charlie Kirk was a part of, which was quite dominant at the memorial service. The Holy Spirit will manifest at various events. People will begin speaking in tongues, people will practice faith healing as they feel inspired. And I think it's all a little bit too unbuttoned for a lot of LDS folks, who are more accustomed to a regular system of authority and a real sense of what LDS folks call “reverence,” which has become very popular in the LDS Church in the last 60 or 70 years, emphasizing that worship services should be solemn and somber. That's very, very unfamiliar to charismatic Christians.
CH: Latter-day Saint apostle Ronald A. Rasband gave a Brigham Young University devotional speech about the importance of family this week, which was also one of the messages at Kirk's memorial. Rasband condemned the assassination and said the church’s controversial Family Proclamation should be a guide for governments.
What does that say, if anything, about how the church is positioning itself politically right now?
MB: In some ways, this is not all that much different than the LDS Church has been doing for 30 years, right, since the proclamation was released. In fact, the proclamation itself states that governments would be well advised to follow this. But what exactly? What does that mean? What are pro-family policies? And there's a lot of dispute about that, but for, I think, people who are part of the religious right, this means generally policies about culture, not policies about economics. Which is to say we should have laws making it harder to get divorced, right? We should have laws that specifically promote and elevate heterosexual families. But these kind of ideas about what these policies are are one reason why many evangelicals, especially politically active evangelicals, have been willing to work with Latter-day Saints, because they tend to believe the same sorts of policies are important.
CH: From 2023 to 2024, Pew Research Center found the decline of U.S. Christianity may have leveled off. Another person in Provo told KUER he went back to church for the first time in years after the shooting.
It’s just one example, but do you think this moment could further change the trajectory of American Christianity?
MB: Probably not. It's, I think, too early to say whether this is a temporary breather or whether this is the new normal. There may be signs, I think, that it's a temporary breather. One being that all of these surveys are of the American population in total. But if you look at the youngest people in the United States, 18 to 29 year olds in the surveys, they continue, I think, to gravitate more toward the “nones” — people who say they have no religion generally speaking — than older generations do.
That said, I do think there are interesting things happening with religion among the youngest generations. Perhaps, although I think this is very, very too early to tell, we might see among that younger generation the idea of organized religion becoming cool and counter-cultural.
