Tony Baughman 
Organizers Focus On Faith Amid Political Tenderbox
Kayce Calliham wiped away tears as she stood beside a granite monument on the Town Square in Edgefield engraved with the names of “patriot leaders” who have called Edgefield their home.
Framed by the obelisk, a few feet from a statue honoring political icon Strom Thurmond, the grieving young woman read a tribute to Christian conservative leader Charlie Kirk. She spoke both of personal sadness and her deepening faith.
“My faith has only gotten stronger since Charlie’s death,” Calliham said to the dozens who gathered Wednesday night for a prayer vigil honoring Kirk. “Do y’all feel that? Y’all all feel that, right? That’s the Lord working in your heart. Listen to it.”
Charlie Kirk was known to millions around the world as a fiery political provocateur, a confidante of President Donald Trump, and a media personality who peppered his speeches and online videos with equal parts conservative talking points and Scripture references lifted straight from the Bible. Only 31 years old when he was killed by an assassin September 10 while speaking in Utah, Kirk was at once revered and reviled by millions.
Calliham and her friend Amber Lee Bledsoe, both mothers of young children like Kirk’s widow Erika, mobilized last weekend to invite their friends, neighbors and the Edgefield community to join the chorus of tributes to Kirk unfolding in big cities and small towns all across America. They posted a flyer on their social media platforms, announcing the date, time and place with clip art of hands folded in prayer, a heart and a cross.
The Edgefield County Republican Party shared the flyer Sunday night on its Facebook page. Calliham and Bledsoe said at the beginning of Wednesday’s event that they wanted theirs to be a spiritual gathering, focused on prayer, not a political rally.
Indeed, the Christian faith was a common thread that ran through almost every moment of the gathering. “I’m seeing more and more people finding and repairing their relationship with Jesus since last Wednesday,” Calliham said of Kirk’s murder. “His death was not in vain.”
Grieving Mothers Offer Tearful Tributes
A hand-lettered sign with the words “Charlie’s Light Lives” stood next to a photograph of Kirk thrusting his fist into the air at a public rally. A single red rose with white baby’s breath lay beside the photo on a lip of the Edgefield heroes monument.
Other signs propped against the stone marker read “Faith Over Fear,” “Pray for the Kirk’s (sic) and our Country” and “God is Love.”
Calliham told the audience that she had followed Kirk’s online platforms faithfully and had looked to his words for “wisdom and guidance because of all that has transpired in the world.” Kirk connected with her and others of her generation, she said, because “he really had a way of helping young people understand what was going in our world, spiritually and politically.”
Remembering the moment she learned of Kirk’s death, Calliham said she gasped. When her young son Levi asked her what was wrong, she wrestled with the question, “How do I explain to a young child that I am upset over the death of someone I don’t even know?”
Since the assassination, Calliham confessed to feeling guilt about enjoying her own life as a wife and mother because of her grief for Kirk’s widow Erika and their two children. Inspired by those feelings and by Erika Kirk’s public address two days after her husband’s murder, she and Bledsoe decided to act.
“After I watched Erika’s address, a fire was lit underneath me,” she said.
Devastated though she was by the killing of a leader she revered, Calliham urged the audience to tap into their own faith as she has been comforted by hers this week.
“Charlie wanted to be remembered for his courage and his faith. Well, he definitely will be,” she said. “He was bold not because he was perfect but because he believed in our perfect Savior. So as we mourn, let’s remember what Charlie told us: ‘Love Jesus. Love your family fiercely, and stand in truth with courage.’ And that is how we can honor him.”
After Calliham spoke, her profession of faith was joined by that of a young woman from Grovetown, Ga., who drove to Edgefield with her family to take part in the vigil. Bledsoe’s young daughter, who had toddled around the Square before the event handing out tiny American flags, sang a poignant rendition of “Jesus Loves Me.”
Pastor Urges ‘Humility’ As Others Reject Unity
Dr. Matthew Clark, pastor at Cornerstone Presbyterian Church in Edgefield, stepped to the microphone and delivered a 12-minute message that was as much sermon on repentance as eulogy for a cultural icon. He called Charlie Kirk a “martyr” for the Christian cause, a model for those listening to boldly speak the truth of the Gospel as they believe it.
“Charlie wasn’t primarily ‘anti-.’ People are saying he was a hater,” Dr. Clark said. “I will agree with them in one area: he was a hater. He hated sin. He hated the destruction of lives that he was watching through the lies that these young people were being told, and he wanted them to be delivered from these destructive lies that came from the pit of hell. What Charlie was, he was for Christ.”
Dr. Clark praised the slain activist’s ministry to share the Gospel, “especially to young people being so terribly misled by the corrupted educational institutions of our day,” he said.
Though issuing his indictment of educational institutions and calling on audience members to boldly proclaim Christianity, the pastor also urged them to temper their anger over Kirk’s killing with grace. He called the biblical response a “combination of boldness and humility.”
“My first response was I had to repent of my urge for vengeance. That’s sinful and it’s wrong,” Dr. Clark said. “I had to repent of it. I had to go to the Word: ‘Beloved, do not avenge yourselves but rather give place to wrath. For it is written, vengeance is mine. I will repay, says the Lord.’” (Quoting Romans 12:19)
There were no vocal or visible signs of anti-Kirk sentiment along the vigil’s periphery. If there were protestors in attendance, they were not conspicuous.
Still, not everyone in attendance at Wednesday’s vigil shared Dr. Clark’s conciliatory vision for life after Charlie Kirk. Rick Bernardi, who identified himself as president of the Merriwether GOP, said before the prayer vigil that “everything evil, everything that the left stands for, is everything that God was against.”
Bernardi rejected the idea that conservatives and liberals can ever meet in a place of unity and understanding. “No, they’ll never come to that because they’ll have to admit they’re wrong,” he said.
During the vigil, Bernardi stepped up to comment as another pastor, Ray Waide of Lighthouse Fellowship Church, was speaking. Bernardi recounted his military experience as a sniper and spoke of the need for justice.
For his message to the audience, Pastor Waide pointed the gathered faithful back to the Bible. “Get in your Word. Amen? Get in the Bible,” he said. “Like Charlie used to say all the time, get in a Bible-believing, preaching church. Amen? We can’t go by what we feel all the time, right? Because if we go by what we feel, we’ll be out in left field somewhere.”
As the sun began to set behind the Courthouse and the Edgefield Town Square slipped into the gloaming, Kayce Calliham and Amber Bledsoe stood with their friends and family, and people whom they had never met before the night. They accepted loving embraces and words of gratitude for organizing the vigil.
The mournful voice of Vince Gill echoed across the Square, singing “Go Rest High On That Mountain.” One man, a father, stood next to his adult son. He held an American flag at his shoulder as they both looked upon the towering monument at the center of the Square, raised long ago as a tribute from the women of Edgefield to their fallen Confederate soldiers.
And tears fell all around for another who died fighting for his cause, however controversial the message and its messenger.
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