Three lessons from Erika Kirk

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 23, 2025

Erika Kirk’s statement of forgiveness for her husband’s assassin has to be the most God-glorifying act by an American public figure in a long while. I pray that this will be the pleasing offering to God that helps to turn our country around.

Aside from Erika’s heroic example of forgiveness, which speaks for itself, there are two other things I think we can learn from her.

Interviewed by The New York Times, she said that she does not want to be involved in seeking the death penalty for her husband’s murderer: “I told our lawyer, I want the government to decide this. I do not want that man’s blood on my ledger. Because when I get to heaven, and Jesus is like: ‘Uh, eye for an eye? Is that how we do it?’ And that keeps me from being in heaven, from being with Charlie?”

Aside from her prudence in not wanting to risk her soul with a potentially vengeful act, what strikes me is that Erika, even as a victim of a crime, is taking moral responsibility. By contrast, progressive ideology (as a perversion of Christianity) worships victimhood as such, and says that being a victim justifies any reaction to one’s hurts. Yet Christians know that Christ alone is the pure and spotless victim, and that suffering does not necessarily improve us morally unless we unite it to His. It needs to be spiritualized, not romanticized.

Recently I read an article that attacked Triumph of the Heart, the excellent new film about St. Maximilian Kolbe. The writer (who clearly had not seen the film) was enraged by the very suggestion that there was anything special about St. Maximilian as compared with other Holocaust victims. She seemed to think that being a victim of the Holocaust is such an inherently sacred thing, that to suggest that not all victims were equally noble, good, or holy in their suffering is a kind of blasphemy. I can only imagine her response if someone were to tell her that some Holocaust victims probably didn’t go to heaven!

By contrast, even in her profound suffering, Erika Kirk has achieved the humble Christian recognition that her very victimhood, unregulated by the Gospel, could become something monstrous that leads to hell—which would be in a way to betray her own loss, by separating her from Charlie forever.

It is worth noting that in the above statement, Erika did not say that the killer should not receive the death penalty, but that she did not want to be involved in the decision, rather leaving it to the state. Some Catholics want her to go further and actually campaign against the death penalty for the man who killed her husband. But whatever general obligation Catholics may have to oppose the death penalty because of current Church policy, it is perhaps unfair and unrealistic to place that onus on a grieving widow who has many other responsibilities.

But there may also be another important witness, one very specific to our cultural moment, in Erika Kirk forgiving her killer while not asking that he receive either a light sentence in this world. Today Christian charity has been perverted into false compassion, such that punishment justly meted out by the state is denigrated by many as a mere pretext for vindictive personal hatred. Many people think that loving one’s enemies means not working to defeat them, and that forgiving criminals means letting them get off scot-free.

The same attitude is held toward God’s justice: people do not understand why purgatory would be necessary after our sins have been forgiven (and even many Catholics unwittingly contradict Church teaching when they deny that purgatory is punitive in nature). And it is generally forgotten that repentance is necessary in order to benefit from forgiveness that is offered.

Because pseudo-Christian compassion has been used as an excuse to let criminals run rampant in our society, some on the right have concluded that Christianity encourages weakness and is fundamentally incapable of defending our civilization against its enemies. Some online have even criticized Erika Kirk’s act of forgiveness for this reason.

In this context, publicly forgiving the murderer yet not calling for a lenient sentence is a witness not only to the falsely compassionate left but to the Nietzschean right, both that we must forgive our enemies, and that forgiveness does not mean that the state ceases to punish evildoers.

It would not be wrong for a victim’s family to petition that the killer not be executed, indeed it would often be praiseworthy. But it seems to me that since so many people are watching what happens here in order to draw an object lesson on this precise issue, there would be a potential scandal if forgiveness were to appear equated with opposition to just punishment. Whatever we may wish the state to decide given the Church’s current prudential position on the death penalty, it is arguably important for people to see Erika Kirk allowing justice to take its course as a real-life example of that distinction.

Indeed, this apparent duality is already provoking a discussion about the relationship between forgiveness and temporal punishment—a discussion that would remain necessary even if the death penalty were abolished.