It came back around again last week. September 10 marked a year since Charlie Kirk was shot dead at Utah Valley University, and the Nigerian internet did what it does: reposted the same tribute graphics, the same "gone too soon, soldier of Christ" captions, the same sermon clips edited over piano music.

What's interesting isn't that Nigerian evangelicals mourned him. Mourning a young man shot in front of a crowd is just human decency. What's interesting is the speed at which mourning became canonisation, and how little of it was ours.

Most Nigerians who now describe Charlie Kirk as a martyr had never heard his name before the video went viral. They didn't follow Turning Point USA. They couldn't name a single campus debate he'd done. What they received was a fully assembled narrative, imported wholesale from American conservative media, in which a Christian was murdered for saying Christian things, and the world was too wicked to admit it. The framing arrived pre-packaged and our pulpits unwrapped it without inspecting the contents.

There's a reason it fit so well. Nigerian evangelicalism has spent decades borrowing its politics from American televangelism. Anti-gender ideology talking points, culture war vocabulary, the entire prosperity apparatus, the language of "the enemy" and "the agenda". So when an American culture warrior died, our churches already had the emotional grammar to mourn him as one of their own. He spoke their borrowed dialect.

The uncomfortable part is what got skipped. Black American pastors spent that same period wrestling publicly with the gap between his faith and his rhetoric on race. Jamal Bryant said he was unnerved by Christian praise that glossed over racially divisive rhetoric. Dwight McKissic, a conservative himself, said he agreed with Kirk's theology but not his views on race, and called it a mystery how evangelicals could hear the quotes and be fine with them. Black churches in America were tearing themselves in half over this. Nigerian churches, made up of Black people, mostly did not notice that argument was happening.

That's the thing worth sitting with. We adopted the grief of white American evangelicals without pausing to hear what Black American Christians were saying about the same man. We joined a family quarrel on the side that never asked us to be there.