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It’s not the slightest exaggeration to say that one of the Church’s most beloved saints, Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orléans, the savior of France, would have loved the young American man who was assassinated recently, the incomparable Charlie Kirk.
Joan certainly knew something of the injustice and brutality of war that Charlie experienced in his final moment, but that was only one of the dynamics that united these heroes.
Remarkable Parallels
Off the top of my head I can think of numerous additional parallels between the French medieval maiden and the American activist:
These are only the parallels reflecting some basic facts of their short lives, but there are numerous more, which I’ll detail below.
Their differences are remarkably few, apart from the obvious dissimilarities of gender and nationality. Joan was a confirmed mystic, for example, but I doubt Charlie ever had a conversation with Michael the Archangel like Joan did. By all accounts, Joan hated the English of her day and reviled them to their faces. In our day, Charlie debated with and respected the English greatly. Let’s call that a positive development of history.
Spirited personalities as well as personal spiritualities defined those two young heroes and contributed to their impact on their respective cultures. But consider these other amazing similarities.
Post-Mortem Slander
They say the devil is not content just to kill. He must also defame, crush, and annihilate, after the fact, everyone he has killed.
Case in point: Who does not recoil in horror at the vitriol being poured out in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s awful death? I saw a quote by English commentator Douglas Murray that said, “Every now and then a flare goes up and illuminates where everyone really stands.” Charlie’s death is the flare that has lit up the entire cultural landscape and showed us where the cesspools are. There are no dark, anonymous places to hide in culture anymore.
That is even truer of Joan of Arc’s death. She endured five hundred years of reputational slander, and not just in the immediate wake of her death where her enemies destroyed both her body and every possible public mention of her. Shakespeare defamed her; Voltaire mocked her; the atheist George Bernard Shaw divested her mission of religious meaning. A German playwright even made Joan into a kind of Communist agitator in the 1930s, after her canonization. Imagine.
One wonders if Charlie’s reputation will suffer the same consequences over time, but it is unlikely. The truth has a remarkable ability to win out, and today we have both the means and the will to fight against slander in ways unknown to previous generations.
Religious Culture
While the two did not share the same religion overtly—Joan was staunchly Roman Catholic and Charlie a devout Evangelical Christian—they were religiously united in this sense: each was an iconic representation of their own religious cultures.
When Joan of Arc drove the prostitutes away from the army camp, forbade swearing, and exhorted her soldiers to go to Confession before battle, she was being true to her religious heritage and showing the best of it. She also lived what she believed to the depth of her soul. In fact, in every story of her encounters with irreligious soldiers, political leaders, and common folk, all were overwhelmed by her goodness and sincerity. In other words, her example converted them as well as her words.
Whenever Charlie Kirk exhorted his Gen Z followers to go to church, get married, have children, be prolife, and live their Christian convictions unafraid, and especially when he debated his ideological enemies with extreme charity, he was being true to his religious culture too. This in the face of his religion being incessantly defamed by the toxic culture at large and the anti-Christian brainwashing these same opponents received in the public schools. It is acknowledged by all who knew him that Charlie lived what he believed and modeled it for his young audience.
Should we not marvel at the immense persuasive power of young, articulate, religious personalities who never give in to the deforming, intimidating spirit of their ages?
Something to Live For
They say a leader doesn’t do the work of twenty men. He puts twenty men to work. In Charlie’s case, it was millions. He didn’t just start an organization. He inspired a movement.
Like Joan, he saw a desperate societal need but didn’t think it was someone else’s job to fix it. He had the mental clarity to zero in on the strategy that would produce the greatest possible results to meet that need, and he relentlessly pursued his goal. The results have been staggering, not just in helping to win the 2024 election but in the more important index of change: the inner one, namely, societal attitude shift and personal values conversion.
A million people took to the streets in London recently to pay tribute to the American Charlie Kirk. Such a thing has never happened before. His dying witness met the equally dire free speech needs of that culture.
I’m reading testimony after testimony on the Internet now of young people who, in light of the appalling murder of a man they respected, have woken up from their moral slumber with a clarity about the indoctrination they have been subject to since they were born. It’s as if they are detoxing from a cult and for the first time realizing that “normal” is something different from what they’ve been told.
A leader gives people a new normal, something to strive for, and something to live for. In Charlie’s case, it was an America true to its founding spirit. In Joan’s case it was a restored monarchy and an independent French nation.
The truth of leadership is often seen in the numbers. When Joan undertook her first mission to lift the English siege of the city of Orleans, the crown prince sent her 2000 reluctant troops. When she marched into the city of Reims two months later for her king’s coronation, 12,000 men marched with her. Her feisty letters to the English and her raw grit were the social media phenomenon of her day.
Kindred Spirits
Because of their amazing convergence of personalities, I’m sure that Joan would have joined Turning Point USA if she had lived in this century. Undoubtedly Charlie would have been Joan’s standard bearer in the Battle of Orléans if he had lived in 15th century France.
They were kindred spirits, precocious, larger-than-life, wiser than their years, forces of nature, and unrepeatable personalities that God raised up to bring needed change for the good in their respective societies in distress. The Lord has a way of pairing the noblest souls, even if they lived centuries apart.
And speaking of nobility, Joan of Arc, throughout her short time on this earth, often expressed great admiration for the Emperor Charlemagne (crowned in the year 800 AD). She called him a saint though he was hardly saintly in terms of character and not a canonized saint of the Church. But that did not matter. He was her inspiration for restoring her world.
I’m not canonizing him, but maybe a new Carolus Magnus has arisen in Charlie Kirk, who will inspire a new generation of Joans, Johns, and Charlies to carry the flag into battle and take our culture back. If there was ever a time the world needed righteous young leaders, it is now.
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Peter Darcy is the author of 15 books, including a short, popular book about Joan of Arc, entitled, The 7 Leadership Virtues of Joan of Arc, available on his website.
Peter Darcy is a writer and editor who spent thirty years in the non-profit sector and various business enterprises. His great passion is educating others about the power of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. In 2020 he launched the Sacred Windows website for this purpose.
He has written or ghostwritten a dozen books, of which Natures of Fire: God’s Magnificent Angels (2021) is his latest. In 2020, he published The Seven Leadership Virtues of Joan of Arc and No-Nonsense Non-Profit.
Visit Sacred Windows at www.sacredwindows.com and his author’s website at www.peterdarcywriting.com.
