Sainting Charlie Kirk serves the MAGA movement. It doesn’t serve the girls who believe it.

(RNS) — As I drove through Tennessee and Georgia on a recent summer road trip, I passed a billboard for a Trump Superstore with a cutout of Charlie Kirk haphazardly pasted onto it. Kirk’s photo was crooked, as if a fan glued it up in the dark. The peeling paper had weathered; lush kudzu draped over one corner.

A year after Kirk’s death, President Donald Trump has lost approval ratings and some of his shine, and a few miles later I passed a giant red sign announcing the Trump Superstore is going out of business. Everything is 50% off.

It was kind of sad as far as tributes go and nothing like the sleek signage with inspiring imagery memorializing Kirk as an “American Christian Patriot” that once popped up across the South. But then, a lot about Charlie Kirk — his origin story, legacy and usefulness to the evangelical patriarchy is just that — kind of sad.

Charlie Kirk was selected and groomed by Tea Party businessman Bill Montgomery as a role model for young men. “Inspired, Montgomery went up to him after his speech and told him, as only a man 50 years senior can say, that he needed to delay college to pursue a higher calling,” The Atlantic reported, adding that Montgomery…