Six years in the past, Charlie Kirk, a right-wing provocateur who based the conservative activist group Turning Point USA, strongly criticized the evangelical political motion he now helps lead.
Kirk, recognized then primarily for his work mobilizing college-age Republicans, described Jesus as welcoming and tolerant and denounced Christians’ “sanctimonious approach” to homosexuality and different points. He argued politics must be superior by means of a “secular worldview” and slammed makes an attempt by the evangelical proper, starting within the Nineteen Seventies, to “impose” their model of morality “through government policy.”
“We do have a separation of church and state,” Kirk informed the conservative commentator Dave Rubin in 2018, “and we should support that.”
Kirk, now 30, has since reversed his place. It’s a transformation that, in accordance to political and non secular students, embodies and reinforces a rising embrace of Christian nationalist considering inside the Republican Party within the period of Donald Trump.
“There is no separation of church and state,” Kirk said on his podcast in 2022. “It’s a fabrication. It’s a fiction. It’s not in the Constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.”
Today, Kirk and Turning Point are dominant forces within the Republican Party and MAGA motion, working straight with the Trump marketing campaign on voter outreach whereas reaching thousands and thousands of listeners by means of Kirk’s each day radio present and podcast. Along the best way, Kirk has turn out to be one of many nation’s most outstanding voices calling on Christians to view conservative political activism as central to Jesus’ calling for his or her lives.
Kirk routinely rails in opposition to what he calls the “LGBTQ agenda,” which he claims is harming kids. He has invoked the Seven Mountains Mandate, a philosophy increasingly popular amongst Trump supporters that calls on conservative Christians to declare positions of energy in seven key mountains of society, together with authorities, media, enterprise and training. And he promotes Trump as essential to restoring Christian morality in America.
“I worship a God that defeats evil,” Kirk mentioned final week whereas introducing the previous president at a rally hosted by Turning Point and the Trump marketing campaign at an Arizona megachurch. “And we worship a God that wins in the end.”
By interesting to conservative Christians’ fears of shifting cultural norms round LGBTQ acceptance, and by portraying the election as a part of a religious battle, Kirk and Turning Point are banking that they will drive evangelical turnout to safe Trump victories in key swing states. But extremism specialists warn that this framing — the concept Trump is on a mission from God to restore Christian righteousness in America — could lead on followers to take radical motion if he doesn’t prevail in November.
“There’s this growing sense that American politics are so broken,” mentioned Paul Matzko, a historian of American conservatism, “that there’s a decreasing willingness to imagine the other side being allowed to exercise power without doing it in apocalyptic terms, which fuels things like the insurrection on Jan. 6.”
Kirk, whose group bused supporters to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, to rally Congress to reject the presidential election final result, declined to be interviewed. Andrew Kolvet, a Turning Point USA spokesperson, mentioned Kirk has by no means advocated for violence.
“Charlie wants to save America with words, persuasion, courage and common sense,” Kolvet mentioned. “The left is desperate to conjure up some Christian boogeyman that simply doesn’t exist. We’re telling churches: Either get involved and have a say in the direction of your country or you’ll leave a void that someone else who doesn’t share your values will fill.”
Kirk grew up attending church within the Chicago suburbs and recognized as an evangelical when he based Turning Point on the age of 18 in 2012 to promote the libertarian values of “free markets and limited government.” Kirk referred to the Bible in his 2016 manifesto, “Time for a Turning Point,” however argued publicly that — very like a plumber or an electrician — it was not his job as a political activist to proselytize his religion.
“You don’t want to be too offsetting and off-putting,” he mentioned in 2018.
Kolvet mentioned Kirk began to turn out to be extra severe about his religion six years in the past, after touring to Israel to witness the U.S. embassy transfer to Jerusalem through the Trump administration. But Kirk’s views on the function of faith in politics actually started to shift in 2020, Kolvet mentioned, after church buildings had been pressured to shut to sluggish the unfold of Covid, which Kirk and others depicted as an try by a tyrannical authorities to management Christians.
A yr earlier, Kirk says he’d begun meeting with California megachurch pastor Rob McCoy, who helped convince him that America was a Christian nation whose founding paperwork had been derived from the Bible. (Although some Founding Fathers wrote of the significance of faith in sustaining a virtuous society, historians dispute the notion that America was established as an explicitly Christian nation.)
In 2021, Kirk and McCoy created TPUSA Faith, a division of Turning Point USA, to mobilize conservative Christians to advance their imaginative and prescient.
“Charlie was just like, ‘Listen, we’re going to rally the churches and tell them that it’s OK to have political opinions about transgender surgeries for minors, about keeping your churches open during Covid and registering voters,’” Kolvet mentioned.
Kirk’s political and religious metamorphosis was adopted by a surge in donations and media consideration that helped flip him into a main GOP power broker — credited in February with serving to push out Ronna McDaniel as Republican National Committee chairwoman, which additional tightened Trump’s grip on the occasion.
Matzko, a current fellow on the Cato Institute, a libertarian suppose tank, mentioned Kirk has aligned himself with a once-fringe strand of apocalyptic political theology popularized by a community of Pentecostal and charismatic Christian influencers in current a long time. With the Seven Mountains Mandate as a key organizing precept, ambassadors of this motion — generally referred to because the New Apostolic Reformation — current politics as a religious conflict between good and evil and Trump as a generational chief ordained by God to save America from the forces of darkness.
“He’s pitching his message to people who do believe that we’re in the end-times, and that if we don’t seize the Seven Mountains of cultural influence, then the other side, the satanic side, will,” Matzko mentioned. “That sense of threat, that sense of anxiety, it just drips from his comments.”
In 2021, quickly after launching TPUSA Faith, Kirk informed a church congregation in Washington state that it was time for Christians “to rise and stand.” He then quoted a Bible passage from the ebook of Luke usually cited by Seven Mountains adherents to make the case that Christians are meant to rule over society till Jesus returns: “The Bible says very clearly,” Kirk mentioned, “to ‘Occupy until I come.’”
After this text was printed, Turning Point issued a assertion to NBC News distancing Kirk from the worldview.
“Charlie probably couldn’t tell you what the seven mountains are,” Kolvet mentioned. “Charlie speaks at churches that are focused on those ideas, and others that wouldn’t even know what you are talking about. Charlie loves the Lord and scripture, and he wants to play a small role in saving America.”
Nevertheless, Kirk has carefully aligned himself with main figures selling the Seven Mountains worldview, together with Lance Wallnau, a self-identified prophet who coined and popularized the idea twenty years in the past. Kirk has appeared on “FlashPoint,” a nationwide TV program that’s received viewers with a mix of pro-Trump political commentary and prophetic messages about God’s divine plans for America. And he has partnered with Sean Feucht, a Christian musician who’s been internet hosting political worship rallies in any respect 50 state Capitols to promote the concept of a Christian America.
“We want God writing the laws of the land,” Feucht said at a TPUSA Faith-sponsored occasion outdoors the Wisconsin statehouse final yr. “Guilty as charged.”
This mindset, which might be traced to the Moral Majority movement of the Nineteen Seventies and ’80s that Kirk once condemned, has helped gasoline current GOP initiatives chipping away at church-state separation. That contains the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision imperiling ladies’s entry to in vitro fertilization, and a wave of state bills to show the Ten Commandments in school rooms, place spiritual chaplains in public faculties and require college students to study from the Bible. Trump has additionally sought to court docket pastors and voters who consider America was meant for Christian rule, promising if elected to restore evangelical power in authorities and to start screening immigrants based mostly on their religion and rejecting any who “don’t like our religion.”
With greater than 30 full-time workers members, in accordance to the group’s web site, TPUSA Faith has labored to create a nationwide community of church buildings to wage political and religious warfare in opposition to Democrats by mobilizing pastors and registering Christian conservative voters to restore “traditional biblical values in our nation.”
Kirk usually paints political opponents as evil. The “woke” left, he informed an estimated 1,100 church leaders gathered last year for the TPUSA Faith Pastors’ Summit in Nashville, Tennessee, has tried to silence conservative Christians.
“They want a passive church,” Kirk warned, earlier than alluding to the passivity of church buildings in Nazi Germany. “They want an obedient church.”
Matthew Boedy, a rhetoric professor on the University of North Georgia and a Turning Point USA critic who’s writing a ebook about Kirk’s adoption of the Seven Mountains Mandate, mentioned he views Kirk’s political and non secular transformation as extra of a symptom, fairly than a trigger, of the Republican Party’s embrace of those concepts.
“What Charlie’s doing is not new,” Boedy mentioned. “He’s repeating phrases and lines and themes that have been around for a long time, but he’s telling it to groups of people that either have not heard it before or are not as familiar with it, and he’s translating it into more populistic language that a new generation can understand.”
Kirk’s message is resonating with voters who consider Christian values are underneath assault and that Trump will defend them.
Dana Morrison-Miller, 62, a two-time Trump voter from Phoenix, was within the viewers on the Trump rally hosted by Kirk and Turning Point final week in Arizona. She informed NBC News she believes unsubstantiated claims the 2020 election was stolen. Among her sources of data, Morrison-Miller mentioned, are Kirk’s podcast and Elijah Streams, an internet program the place self-identified prophets and apostles preach in regards to the Seven Mountains and the religious battle to put Trump back within the White House.
Asked if she has confidence within the 2024 vote, Morrison-Miller mentioned: “The only confidence I have is in God and then all of these people that are rising up and just saying enough.”
“It’s in God’s hands,” she added, “and America, if we will humble ourselves and pray and seek God’s face and turn from our selfish, wicked ways, I believe God will hear and heal this land.”
Miles Smith IV, a historical past professor on the conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan, described the undercurrent of Kirk’s effort as an try to attain “folk Christians” — those that might not be deeply spiritual, however establish as Christian culturally and really feel underneath assault in a secular society. These voters, Smith mentioned, are extra motivated by right-wing populism’s nationalist and anti-elitist framing than strict adherence to spiritual doctrine.
“I think that maybe someone like Charlie Kirk has kind of decided that Christianity is the best way” to advance a populist agenda, Smith mentioned. “I don’t think that people wake up and say, ‘Oh, well, [I’m] Christian now, that’s why I’m going to be populist.’ I think they are populist, and maybe they use Christianity as a buttress for it.”
Unlike Trump, nevertheless, who has promised to empower evangelicals however isn’t notably steeped of their tradition — having famously mispronounced a ebook of the Bible as “Two Corinthians” — Matzko mentioned Kirk speaks the language. When Kirk talks about the necessity for Christians to view the presidential election as a part of a religious battle to save “Western civilization,” he usually cites scripture to assist his argument.
“He really understands these things,” Matzko mentioned. “His rhetoric reminds me of someone who buys it.”
In a February interview with Wallnau, the Seven Mountains evangelist, Kirk introduced what he referred to as “Project 81,” an initiative to rally church leaders in swing states to push evangelical assist for Trump above 81% — the important thing, Kirk mentioned, to GOP victory in November.
Speaking at an Arizona megachurch in March, Kirk primed his followers for the likelihood their efforts may fall brief. If that occurs, Kirk told them they wanted to be prepared to proceed the combat, which he described later in his remarks as “a spiritual war first and foremost.”
“There are demons that are at work,” Kirk mentioned. “The mantra for all of us should be … ‘Lord use me. How can you use me for your purpose to advance the kingdom of God here on Earth.’ And so it’s a full-court press now until November.”
During his dialog with Rubin again in 2018, Kirk warned that the method to politics and faith he now embraces elevated the chances of Republican defeat.
Regular voters, Kirk mentioned, “don’t want to have to live the way some Christian in Alabama” needs them to dwell.
“When we start to say we should support this law because it’s the Christian thing to do,” he mentioned, “that has turned people off for the last 30 years.”
