Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin set out last Thursday to answer the million-dollar question on the American right: Who will be the next Charlie Kirk? “You,” Youngkin said. “All of you.”

The Republican politician was addressing a packed auditorium at Virginia Tech, the university where Charlie Kirk — the MAGA youth leader and a key ally in Donald Trump’s victory in the last U.S. elections thanks to his ability to attract young voters — had been scheduled to speak.

It should have been the third stop on a tour of various campuses that began on September 10 in Utah Valley, the day when a bullet ended his life while he was debating before a crowd of students.

“You will have a leader that’s extraordinary,” Youngkin added. “Erika Kirk has demonstrated that she not only has the courage of a lion, but she has the heart of a saint.”

The activist’s widow and mother of their two children has emerged as an influential figure in U.S. politics after her husband’s murder. But particularly since the memorial held last Sunday in honor of Kirk, who was killed at age 31.

The event was somewhere between a Republican rally and religious service, and drew 100,000 people, spread across two stadiums in Glendale, Arizona. At the memorial — an extraordinary collision of religion and politics — Charlie Kirk was celebrated as a “martyr” by Trump and much of his Cabinet.

Erika Kirk said she had forgiven her husband’s alleged killer, a 22-year-old man named Tyler Robinson, “because it’s what Christ did.” Raised in a Mormon and Republican household, Robinson, according to court documents and the testimony of his relatives, had lately embraced leftist positions and confessed to his partner that he was tired of the “hate” he believed Kirk was spreading through his ultraconservative rhetoric.

Her words, especially when contrasted with those spoken shortly afterward by Trump — “I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them. I am sorry Erika” — won praise from both sides of the political spectrum.

They even drew approval from Jimmy Kimmel, the comedian who had been briefly suspended from his show after a remark about Robinson — a move that sparked criticism of the government attacks on free expression.

“If you believe in the teachings of Jesus as I do,” Kimmel said, his voice breaking, during the monologue marking his return to the air, “there it was, that’s it. A selfless act of grace, forgiveness from a grieving widow.”

“Of course, the rhetoric of forgiveness is preferable to that of holy war, but we mustn’t forget that she has also used that rhetoric,” explains Jeff Sharlet, an expert on the relationship between religion and political power in the United States and author of The Family in a telephone interview.

Sharlet is referring to the speech Erika Kirk gave a couple of days after her husband’s murder, in which she said: “You have no idea the fire that you ignited within this wife, the cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry.”

“We also shouldn’t forget that her forgiveness came after other speakers [in particular Stephen Miller, deputy to the White House chief of staff] compared her to a ‘storm,’ a ‘sword,’ and a ‘dragon,’ and before Trump spoke openly of hatred, only to then embrace her in a hug — almost like a representation of the male and female archetypes of Christian nationalism,” says Sharlet, referring to one of the core tenets of a certain strand of the American right: the blind faith that American identity can only be Christian. READ MORE