Don Lemon calls Kirk memorial a political rally dressed as church

Don Lemon calls ceremony a ‘political rally dressed as church’ By Ian M. Giatti, Christian Post Reporter Tuesday, September 23, 2025CNN anchor Don Lemon tears up talking about how Bishop T.D. Jakes changed his life. | Screengrab/CNNFormer CNN host Don Lemon says a memorial service held in honor of slain Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was, in fact, a thinly-veiled “political rally dressed as church.”Lemon, 59, who is best known for hosting “Don Lemon Tonight” and later co-hosting “CNN This Morning” before he was fired in 2023, made the comments in a Sept. 22 livestream in which he took aim at Sunday’s memorial for Kirk held in Glendale, Arizona. Kirk was assassinated Sept. 10 at the hands of an alleged 22-year-old shooter at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.Speakers who were on hand to recognize Kirk’s legacy included political leaders, White House cabinet officials, Turning Point USA and TPUSA Faith employees and conservative media influencers, as well as musical performances by prominent Christian artists.Lemon said he began questioning the true intent of the service — which featured appearances by President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Kirk’s widow, Erika — after he was prompted by a friend’s text about Kirk being a “person of faith.”“How does a person of faith act? How does a person who really believes and what God and the scriptures say the true meaning of it, not the distorted meaning, how would they treat the least of these?” he said. “So what I say now is that what happened in Arizona this weekend was not just a memorial. It was something else entirely. People will tell you that it is about grief. It was about grief, about honoring a man’s life, about faith. And on the surface, you know, maybe it looked like that.”Lemon, a self-identified Christian who is married to another man, said the event “wasn’t just about a man who died. This was about a movement claiming divine permission to rule.”Pointing to his Southern Baptist and Catholic experiences, Lemon continued, “It was a revival meeting wrapped in a memorial, a political rally dressed as church. And by the end of the night, it was clear this was not only about Charlie Kirk’s death. It was about his afterlife in politics.”He also called out the president, whom he said “stood on the stage like a man at the center of a prophecy,” and took exception to the service’s pep rally-style atmosphere. “The crowd cheered as if the passing of the man had lit some sort of sacred fire,” he said. “To me, this was not mourning. This was a mobilization …“What we saw in that arena was not simply faith finding public expression. It was religious nationalism on full display,” added Lemon.The host then attacked familiar phrases used nearly every Sunday in Evangelical churches across the nation.“The language was unmistakable. ‘Take the nation back for God.’ ‘Restore America’s covenant.’ ‘This is a holy calling,’” he said. “That’s what it sounded like. This is not the language of democracy. This is the language of domination.”He warned that government officials speaking so openly about matters of the Christian faith could fuel a new form of politics that “divides a country into the saved and the damned.”“When faith fuses with power, it begins to ask for something else. It asks for obedience. It divides a country into the saved and the damned, the chosen, and the condemned,” he said. “The moment religion becomes a tool of politics, dissent starts to sound like blasphemy.”Lemon reserved his most complimentary language for Erika Kirk’s declaration of forgiveness toward her husband’s killer, who told the crowd, “Our Savior said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ That young man … I forgive him. I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and it’s what Charlie would do.”“There was one voice on that stage that did not follow that script at least [that day], and that is Charlie Kirk’s widow,” Lemon said. “She spoke of forgiveness. She spoke of grace, of love that transcends politics.”Lemon, who once credited megachurch pastor Bishop T.D. Jakes of The Potter’s House in Dallas as the inspiration for his career, was accused of blasphemy in 2020 after he said Jesus Christ “was not perfect when he was here on this Earth.”While claiming to be a Christian, Lemon wrote in a now-deleted 2011 CNN religion blog that he doesn’t believe “religious teachings happened word for word as they were written in Scripture,” a practice he called “naive, even dangerous.”“That type of thinking — or non-thinking — keeps many religious people enslaved to beliefs that they haven’t truly stepped back from and examined,” he added.