Two weeks ago, few South Africans could have picked Charlie Kirk out of a lineup. He was not ours. His face did not beam from our pulpits, nor did it dominate most of our social media algorithms. To most South Africans, he was an unfamiliar name stitched to a tired lie about “white genocide,” one of those imported paranoias that make the rounds on US cable news. And yet, when Kirk was shot down in Utah, our timelines trembled with recognition. The concentrated conversations about Kirk were because of the US’s ability to consume the world with its own domestic affairs. Strikingly, many locals who were unfamiliar with Kirk himself were nevertheless fluent in the worldview he championed.

This paradox, an obscure man sparking outsized debate, speaks to the global cultural reach of American evangelical media and ideology. Even without knowing Kirk, South Africans recognized the contours of his message, because elements of it were already entrenched in local religious and political discourse. The blend of Christian nationalism, conservative “family values,” and combative culture war rhetoric he espoused has long had resonance here, in part because South Africa has grappled with its own versions of that ideology for decades. Christian nationalism has deep roots in South African history, dating back to the Afrikaner nationalists’ use of Calvinist theology to justify apartheid. More recently, local evangelical and Pentecostal churches have absorbed many of the same teachings and political talking points that energize the American religious right. By the time of Kirk’s sudden demise, the ideological groundwork that made his stances familiar had been laid by years of transnational evangelical exchange. South Africans didn’t need to know Kirk as a personality to find his ideas recognizable; they had already heard similar themes in Sunday sermons, social media feeds, and WhatsApp prayer groups.

The surprise is not that South Africans mourned a stranger; it is how natural it felt to some to drape his memory in reverence. A man barely known to us became a topic of mourning and debate. And yet, what we were really grappling with was not Kirk the man but Kirk the symbol. The immediate reactions to Kirk’s death from some South African public figures illustrate this dynamic. Television personality Rorisang Thandekiso took to Instagram to praise Kirk’s “boldness to stand for [his] convictions” and lament that “you [Kirk] died because someone didn’t like your view or opinion. No one should have to die.” Talk radio host Clement Manyathela devoted airtime to commend his “bravery” for his passion for God, and he “loved Jesus, and he didn’t compromise on that.” They both acknowledged that they didn’t share all his views, except those that were related to his religious fervor. Former radio DJs Gareth Cliff and Euphonik joined in, and the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP), a small but vocal conservative political party, issued a formal statement mourning Kirk as “a fearless advocate for Christian values and free speech.”

This outpouring of grief suggests that Kirk was a household name in South Africa. He wasn’t. What it reveals instead is how deeply the ideology he championed, a blend of Christian nationalism, patriarchal gender essentialism, and anti-LBGTQ+ rhetoric thinly veiled in religious conviction and devotion, has permeated South African religious and political discourse through American evangelical influence. In their eulogies, we see how US Christian nationalist ideas can circulate abroad in disaggregated form: detached from their original context, distilled into universal-sounding values that ring familiar to Christian believers across the globe.

How did Euro-American evangelical culture penetrate so deeply that a person in South Africa, or Kenya, might weep for an American racist provocateur they’d barely heard of a year ago? The answer lies in decades of indoctrination and cultural exchange that have made the concerns of the American Christian right into a global evangelical preoccupation. To understand why Kirk’s message rang so familiar in South Africa, we must trace the deep roots of evangelical exchange between the US and this country. The story begins in the twilight of apartheid, when the regime searched desperately for allies as the world condemned it. Segments of the American religious right found in South Africa a frontier for their own battles. Prominent televangelists, such as Pat Robertson, aired a series of reports on his Christian Broadcasting Network lauding the Afrikaner government’s “struggle” against the African National Congress. His 700 Club broadcasts defended the apartheid regime at a time when even mainstream churches worldwide were condemning apartheid. American evangelical broadcasters didn’t just cheer from afar; they actively set up shop in South Africa. In 1985, Paul Crouch, founder of the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), struck deals with the apartheid government to beam Christian TV across the country. The TBN was granted licenses to broadcast on apartheid’s terms, even building stations in “bantustans” such as Ciskei to skirt international sanctions and embed American-style televangelism into South African living rooms.

This mattered. American evangelicals were laying ideological infrastructure that would outlive apartheid itself. When the regime finally fell in 1994, that infrastructure did not dissolve; rather, it blossomed in the fertile soil of a liberalized media environment. The late James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, one of the most powerful US evangelical ministries, established a division in South Africa that broadcast his teachings on parenting and marriage to a broad audience. On the surface, these lessons appeared wholesome to many, apolitical even. But embedded within them were the same culture war themes that animated US conservatives: mistreatment of children, opposition to abortion, hostility to feminism, and suspicion of LGBTQ+ people. The message was clear: family values were political values. The US religious right provided a template, and by the time South Africa transitioned into democracy, it had already seeped into the bloodstream of our religious culture. It also provided a template for political organizing. In 1993, on the cusp of democracy, South Africa saw the launch of the ACDP—a party explicitly modeled on Christian moral principles in politics. The ACDP’s platform of opposition to abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and “anti-family” laws closely mirrored that of US Christian conservatives. This was no coincidence. Figures such as Reverend Kenneth Meshoe, the political party’s founder, moved in transnational evangelical circles, and others followed.

If apartheid laid the groundwork, the democratic era gave the American-inspired evangelical project new oxygen. The fall of the system created an ironic opening: while political freedom expanded, so too did the reach of foreign ideological currents. Into that space stepped a generation of South African culture war entrepreneurs who studied, trained, and borrowed directly from the US religious right. Errol Naidoo is perhaps the most emblematic figure. A former ACDP communications director, Naidoo established the Family Policy Institute (FPI) in the 2000s. According to his own lore, he spent six months in Washington DC training with the Family Research Council, a flagship US religious right organization that has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center since 2010.

What Naidoo brought back was not simply rhetoric but an entire playbook: how to lobby against abortion, how to frame Comprehensive Sexuality Education as a threat to children, and how to cloak anti-LGBTQ+ advocacy in the language of parental rights. It was a politics of fear dressed in the garb of family protection. Yet in South Africa, Naidoo’s message carries the weight of moral authority for many believers. Additionally, Naidoo has close ties to the founder of Family Watch International’s which is also designated as a hate group. In Power and Faith: How evangelical churches are quietly shaping our democracy, I recall how, in September 2022, Naidoo and others convened the first Coalition to End Sexual Exploitation Africa Summit at the University of South Africa (UNISA). The event drew backing from Slater’s outfit, Family Policy Institute, the Film and Publication Board, and even the university’s own Bureau of Market Research. With institutional sponsorship from the country’s oldest university and formal recognition by its senior leadership, the agenda was granted a veneer of credibility and authority. Watching the summit recordings later, I was alarmed, not only by the ideas being platformed, but also by the promotion of such an event: were these institutions unaware of the stakes, or are they complicit in ushering anti-rights politics into the South African mainstream?

An American-inspired evangelical ecosystem is alive in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent, propagating through media and politics the same blend of Christian nationalism and conservative social values championed by Kirk and his allies. The shape of our culture wars looks too familiar because it is, in many ways, imported wholesale. Campaigns to block Comprehensive Sexuality Education, roll back reproductive rights, and oppose LGBTQ+ equality bear the fingerprints of US and European conservative movements. CitizenGO, a Spain-based platform with links to the US, has run petitions in South Africa to “reject harmful sex education,” often recycling fear-based claims about children as young as nine being “sexualised” in classrooms. These petitions are marketed as grassroots African initiatives but are in fact part of a coordinated global strategy, with CitizenGO’s Africa office based in Nairobi. At the same time, groups such as Freedom of Religion South Africa (FOR SA) have taken their cues directly from US evangelical radicals. Their legal submissions and public campaigns reproduce almost verbatim the arguments of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), one of the most powerful anti-LGBTQ+ legal groups in the world. The ADF has fought high-profile US court cases defending bakers who refused gay couples and lobbying to curtail trans rights. Representatives of the ADF appeared before the South African Parliament in 2023 to testify against proposed hate crimes legislation, announcing their involvement as though our legislature was just another stop on their global tour. Earlier this year, FOR SA mounted a public campaign against a new Early Childhood Education gender toolkit, accusing the education department of smuggling “transgender ideology” into classrooms—borrowing directly from ADF’s arguments in American courtrooms. This is how Kirk’s message had already arrived before he did. By the time South Africans read his obituaries, the ideas he espoused had long since been translated, localized, and circulated under familiar banners: family, faith, tradition.

If there is one arena where the marriage of US and South African evangelical activism is most tangible, it is the fight over abortion. South Africa legalized abortion with the 1996 Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act, a law hailed as among the most liberal in the world. But as early as 1993, before the legislation was even passed, anti-abortion groups were already mobilizing. Across the country, dozens of so-called “crisis pregnancy centres”, which rebranded into “pregnancy help organizations,” operate in the shadows of our healthcare system. They present themselves as neutral non-profits, but their mission is singular: to discourage women from terminating pregnancies. Once inside, women are met with a barrage of misinformation and emotional manipulation. I saw this firsthand during an undercover visit to a Pretoria-based organization in 2018. Pamphlets in the waiting area warned, falsely, that abortions cause breast cancer and infertility. Behind closed doors, training manuals instruct staff to gently but firmly shame women, delay appointments long enough that the legal window might pass, and press adoption or continuing the pregnancy at all costs. Today, over 50 of these organizations exist across South Africa and are rapidly spreading to neighbouring countries. They are funded, in part, by US-based anti-abortion association Heartbeat International, whose messages are laden with Christian right-wing views.

This pattern extends beyond sexuality education and abortion into the unjustly contested terrain of gender identity. In mid-2025, former DA leader Helen Zille began amplifying British and American “gender-critical” talking points, warning that trans women threatened the rights of “real” women. Almost immediately, a small group calling itself First Do No Harm Southern Africa (FDNHSA) issued a statement thanking her for her “courage,” insisting that sex “cannot be changed.” FDNHSA presents itself as an evidence-based medical network, but its public statements lift extensively from the much-debunked Cass Review in the UK and a handful of Scandinavian studies, the same citations US and UK anti-trans activists deploy. Their rhetoric claims that Europe is abandoning trans healthcare and that South Africa should follow, which illustrates how foreign ideology launders itself into our national conversation under the guise of local expertise. The effect is subtle but devastating. What begins as a controversy elsewhere migrates into South African discourse as if it were native to our political soil. By the time it reaches the masses, it has been stripped of its foreignness. The strategy works because it appeals to pre-existing anxieties: the sanctity of the nuclear family, the baseless fear of cultural erosion, the suspicion that liberal and progressive democracy is a foreign imposition.

The story of Charlie Kirk in South Africa is, in truth, not a story about Charlie Kirk at all. It is about how the world’s most powerful empire can take the death of a man who barely mattered here and turn it into a mirror in which we see ourselves. It is about how grief, admiration, and outrage can be stirred not by familiarity with the man but by fluency in the language he spoke, because that language has been whispered to us for decades. What stands out is not that some South Africans joined the chorus but how seamlessly they did so. To speak Kirk’s gospel was not to adopt something foreign but to affirm something already stitched into the seams of our own fabric. He became a cipher, an empty vessel into which people poured their own faith and conviction.

So, we return to Kirk. Not as a man whose name we should have known, but as a figure who reminds us of the architecture already standing in our midst. Charlie Kirk was never ours. And yet, in the silence of pulpits and the echoes of prayer groups, he somehow always was.