The horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk is being invested with all sorts of meaning, well beyond the personal tragedy it is for his family.

There is a push — evident even in much Australian Christian social media — to name him a Christian martyr.

By many measures, this is very puzzling.

Absent more information about the assassin’s motives, it is not even clear that Kirk was killed because of his faith.

Of course, for his supporters, and no doubt for Kirk himself, his faith and political views were so entwined that to die for one was to die for the other.

But this is not just any mix of faith and politics. Kirk and his supporters belong to a very particular mix of Christian Nationalism and American Exceptionalism. Secular Australians may not be aware of how contested this particular version is within American Christianity itself.

Many American Christians themselves regard it as idolatry and are bravely exposing and resisting it. Its measure of martyrdom does not universally commend itself.

But the specifics, and the extremes, of the American context aside, those promoting a link between Christianity and a wider exceptionalism of the West are also investing meaning in Kirk’s death.

This includes federal Liberal politician, Andrew Hastie, himself something of a Christian culture warrior. Hastie seeks Kirk’s death as symptomatic of the decline of the West which, he ways, “we need to fight".

In a social media post, Hastie juxtaposes Kirk’s death with Raphael’s depiction of the apostle Paul preaching at Athens: the painting, according to Hastie, crystallises the foundation of the West’s values of “faith, reason, inquiry, debate and persuasion” in Christianity. For Hastie, Kirk stood in that tradition.

Therefore, Kirk’s murder was “an attack on Western civilisation".

As a Christian myself, I am as unpersuaded — and troubled — by Hastie’s analysis as I am by attempts to designate Kirk a martyr.

With this interpretation of Kirk’s murder, Hastie turns the assassin into an intentional cultural warrior, consciously and intentionally at war with the West. Hastie thus sidesteps the possible and likely complex mix of psychological and personal factors that filled the assassin with his murderous hatred of the individual, Kirk.

He also sidesteps the possible formative influence on the assassin of those features of the US’ cultural fabric which have consistently produced political assassins, enabled, ironically, by its deformation of the Western concept of freedom which sustains its death-dealing culture of pervasive gun violence.

As he charts this decline of the West, however, Hastie divides the world into the “radical left” which is “evil”, and everyone else – the unspecified, and undefined “we” who need to grow “our movement”.

There is an implied conflation between Western values and the Christian tradition (and made explicit in an interview he did with Sky News). Both have been lost, says Hastie: the former rejected by the “intellectual class” and the latter now unknown to contemporary students.

Of course, it is prudent to critically analyse cultural shifts. It is right to acknowledge the Christian roots of many aspects of Western cultures, especially when ideological prejudice drives their denial. It is also obligatory, especially for those of us who are Christian, to acknowledge the damage done or enabled by Christians to the West and other cultures.

Notwithstanding the emotionally-charged and tragic event which has elicited Hastie’s reflections, there are reasons to tread much more carefully than he does. I mention two.

Firstly, dividing the world so sharply, and locating evil on just one side of the divide, is socially dangerous (and, I would add, really bad theology). It is ripe for the picking by Christian populists.

In a chapter on Christian populism in his book, _The Evolution of the West_, Nick Spencer points out that with its commitment to the idea of a homogenous “people”, populism favours “rhetoric and policies that ignore or reject the plural realities of most societies and instead locates political legitimacy in the idea of a coherent, cohesive demos".

Spencer also draws on the work of Nadia Mazouki, Duncan McDonell and Oliver Roy, in Saving the People: How Populists Hijack Religion. They point out that when populism attaches itself to a religion and conflates it with a civilisation, it is almost always exclusionary.

In Spencer’s summary: “Christian imagery and commitments are deployed primarily to show who is out and why, the reason being some variation of the attachment they have (or don’t have) to ‘our’ Christian culture.”

Secondly, the conflation of “Christian” and “Western” renders Christians forgetful of their primary identity. This point was well made in the early 20th century by the Swiss Reformed theologian, Karl Barth.

In one of his very earliest writings, in 1916 when Europe was tearing itself apart in war, Barth referred to the “idol” — the ‘God’ of human morality and self-justification — worshipped by “all the excellent European and American people of culture and pilgrimage and progress, all the valiantly assiduous citizens and pious Christians [who were] falling upon one another with fire and sword".

This is just one example where the mix of “civilisation”, piety, and power manufactured an idol at the heart of the “Christian West”.

Out of the blue, here and elsewhere, the murder of Kirk has provoked some highly-charged discussions about Christian Nationalism, American Exceptionalism, Western Exceptionalism, and the very nature of Christian identity.

Just as Kirk’s Christian Nationalism was hotly contested by many Christians, so too should Hastie’s reading of the “Christian West” be contested for explicitly Christian reasons.

Some of us will be asking: Who is included in the “we” of his Western culture? and: What idols are lurking within his conflation of Christianity and the West?

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.