Conservatives have praised Sunday’s memorial for slain Christian conservative Charlie Kirk for its open proclamations of faith from high profile government officials such as Vice President JD Vance and President Donald Trump. For liberals and left-leaning individuals, however, the memorial service served as an omen of incoming Christian nationalism and an erosion of the separation between church and state.

Former CNN host, Don Lemon, criticized the memorial during a livestream, calling it “a political rally dressed as church.” “What we saw in that arena was not simply faith finding public expression, it was religious nationalism on full display,” he said during his “Hot Topics” segment. Lemon accused the service of ulterior motives. “How does a person of faith act?” he asked. “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? 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.”

He accused the administration of taking Kirk’s death as an opportunity to assert religious control. “The language was unmistakable. ‘Take the nation back for God.’ ‘Restore America’s covenant.’ ‘This is a holy calling.’ That’s what it sounded like. This is not the language of democracy. This is the language of domination… 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.”

Kirk’s supporters were quick to slam Lemon. “Don Lemon is upset over the Christianity displayed at Charlie Kirk’s Memorial. Thanks for saying the quiet part out loud. The left HATES Christianity,” wrote Derrick Evans on X. “No, fool, you know that demon in you?” Brandon Tatum said in a reaction video to Lemon’s stream. “That’s the Holy Spirit. But you running from it, Don? You’re running… You can’t handle it. Because you’re a devil.” He stated that Lemon would go to Hell if he did not repent. “You going to Hell playing around.” He called Lemon “too stupid” to see that Kirk was a “Christian martyr.”