ybvdadminuserPHOENIX (RNS) — At this year’s AmericaFest, a conservative conference sponsored by Turning Point USA, the organization’s founder, 31-year-old Charlie Kirk, was keen to give credit for President-elect Donald Trump’s November victory to God.
“The person, or more importantly, who deserves credit is God Almighty for saving this country,” he said in his opening address to the more than 20,000 people who gathered days before Christmas at the Phoenix Convention Center. “We were inches away from a civil war,” he said. “And by the grace of God that we did not earn and we did not deserve, (Trump’s) life was spared on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania.”
But Kirk was also eager to give credit to the churches, pastors and religious activists who helped return Trump to the White House. He was careful to highlight the work of his own organization. “Turning Point quietly built the grassroots army,” according to a promotional video for the organization that aired at the start of the conference. “We trained tens of thousands of pastors and church leaders to speak boldly and encourage their congregations to vote.”
The power of the religious right has always rested on its ability to deliver votes, and Turning Point USA has become one of the most powerful mobilizers of conservative Christians, particularly through Turning Point Action, its political advocacy arm. In a panel at the Phoenix conference titled “Faith in Action, Faith in America,” Brett Galaszewski, Turning Point Action’s national enterprise director, recounted “some talking points that we really crafted out at TPA as a way to break the ice with these churches and get them more politically motivated to take that leap into the political arena.”
At another panel, this one titled “How We Won: Deep Dive Into the 2024 Election Results,” a data cruncher for Turning Point Action boasted of turning out “disengaged” or “low-propensity voters,” adding that those who never or rarely got to the ballot box were often people of faith — and neglected citizens. “The less you vote, the more likely you are to support President Trump. He is truly a president of forgotten Americans,” said TPA Data Manager Ben Larrabee. “And this is exactly where our path to victory lies.”
According to Galaszewski, Turning Point Action and like-minded organizations increased the rate of participation of certain sectors of Trump-supporting faith voters from 50% to close to 95%.
To reach these voters, Galaszewski said in his panel, Turning Point had to overcome church leaders’ fear of the IRS rule known as the Johnson Amendment, widely thought to limit partisan politicking by nonprofit organizations with 501(c)(3) status, as many churches are. “At TPA, we want to help even pastors like that realize that’s not an excuse!” he said.
Galaszewski urged pastors and church leaders to “start a complementary 501(c)(4)” arm that falls under a different part of the tax code. This maneuver, he claimed, “allows (churches) to endorse candidates, hold events to support those candidates” and “hold door-knocking events in support of those candidates.”
In another presentation, this one on the main stage, Corey Scott, founder of The 508 Co., argued that organizations, including homeschool ministries, should register under the 508(c)(1)(A) section of the tax code, which he claimed allowed religious organizations to engage in political activity without putting their nontaxable status at risk.
Brad Dacus, an attorney formerly with the Rutherford Institute, an early, influential religious right legal advocacy group, and later a founder of the Pacific Justice Institute, has lately lent support to the campaign for Louisiana’s new law requiring all public schools in that state to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom, as well as Texas Senate Bill 763, which allows chaplains in public schools and that state’s movement to expand school vouchers to allow them to be used to funnel taxpayer funds to religious schools and organizations.
Dacus led a breakout session on “Faith, Law and Policy: Legal Impact Under the Trump Administration,” describing his work with 1,800 pastors on voter registration in election cycles in over 900 churches.
The talk at AmericaFest went beyond contemporary election strategy and individual candidates; it also seemed to advocate for fundamental change in the American system of government. The new generation of religious right activists are more explicitly committed to Christian nationalism than ever, openly rejecting the separation of church and state.
Besides favoring a highly politicized version of conservative Christianity, the speakers at AmericaFest are profoundly hostile to what they call variously “progressive” or “woke” Christianity. They emphasized that not all who call themselves Christians are worthy of political salvation. “I’ve made it my mission to eradicate woke-ism from the American pulpit,” said Lucas Miles, the head of Turning Point USA Faith, the organization’s church outreach arm and the author of “Woke Jesus: The False Messiah Destroying Christianity,” on Saturday, which was “Faith Night” at the conference.
Miles traced “woke” Christianity back to the 1700s and tracked the supposed corruption of the faith through American history. “It came in with the social gospel,” he said. “It came in with the ‘historical Jesus’ movement. It came in with liberation theology and Black liberation theology.”
He told the crowd at the breakout session: “Unfortunately, we have a generation of pastors who have, many of them, have been indoctrinated by progressive seminaries.”
The solution to what Miles called the “heretical idea called ‘progressive Christianity’” is “a kind of a digital Nicene Creed and Council we’re putting together,” he said, referring to the fourth-century synod called by Roman Emperor Constantine that settled key doctrines of Christianity. Miles claimed to be working with a network of 3,500 churches whose goal is “to eradicate woke-ism from the American pulpit.”
“Is Jesus this woke, great social justice warrior? Or is he the savior of all the world?” he asked, clearly intending to deprecate even avowedly evangelical Christian charity campaigns. “We’ve elevated his humanity, that ‘He gets us’ Jesus, over his divinity,” he said, concluding, “We have to decide which Jesus we believe in.”
Shane Winnings, a pastor who heads a resurrected version of Promise Keepers, a Christian men’s organization, agreed. “Promise Keepers needs to speak to issues of the day, and if we’re in an election season we need to tell people what’s demonic and what’s godly and how they should be voting,” he said to loud applause.
Needless to say, “how they should be voting” means voting Republican. Eric Hayes, a Turning Point Action field representative, told the audience at one panel, “There is absolutely no biblical justification to vote Democrat.”
The principles that define Republicans and make Democrats repellent would be unfamiliar to the religious political strategists of an earlier time. Nearly every speaker invoked the threat of transgender women playing on women’s sports teams and using women’s bathrooms and appeared to suggest that promoting gender-change surgery is the Democratic Party’s primary policy goal.
When the president-elect himself appeared at the main stage podium on Sunday afternoon to close the conference, he too got his biggest applause when he promised to “stop the transgender lunacy” with executive orders “to end child mutilation, get out of our elementary schools and middle schools and high schools. And we will keep men out of women’s sports.”
And while the religious right has long synced with Republican preference for small government, the anti-Washington sentiments in Phoenix had a vengeful fervor. Many of the speakers expressed a concrete desire to use the power of government to bring serious harm on Trump’s political enemies. In an interview with conservative operator James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, Mike Yoder, an attorney known for fighting the vaccine mandates, said, “We’re going to prosecute the government officials,” prompting O’Keefe to ask, “For the people watching inside the federal agencies or corporations that are afraid, what’s your message to them?”
“Tread lightly because we’re coming,” Yoder answered, adding, “Our rights come from God.”
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, an opening night speaker, reinforced the intention to punish enemies in the “Imperial Capital,” by which he meant Washington, D.C. Condemning the “cancer of bipartisanship,” he listed House Speaker Mike Johnson as among those who need to be ousted, along with the members of “the J6 Committee,” a congressional panel that investigated the riot at the U.S. Capitol after Biden’s election in 2020.
“We’re going to fix bayonets,” Bannon said. “I want good, old-fashioned Old Testament retribution.”
This story was reported with support from the Stiefel Freethought Foundation.
