ybvdadminuser(RNS) — On Nov. 5, a visibly anxious Charlie Kirk fidgeted with his red MAGA hat and T-shirt, which was emblazoned with the word “Pray.” Surrounded by fellow young conservatives, he was livestreaming an election-night edition of “The Charlie Kirk Show,” his program on the conservative media outlet Real America’s Voice. Finally, as the hour grew late and Fox News declared Donald Trump the victor, Kirk burst into tears, eventually stammering out, “I am just humbled by God’s grace” and “This is God’s mercy on our country.”
But since the election, Kirk, a 31-year-old mainline-Presbyterian-turned-evangelical and founder of the conservative student organization Turning Point USA, has done his best to show he played no small part in what he insists was God’s plan to catapult Trump back into power.
Technically, TPUSA and its more overtly political arms, Turning Point Action and Turning Point PAC, were among several organizations tapped by the Trump campaign to operate as an outsourced field operation. But Kirk’s efforts have drawn particular praise as an effective driver of infrequent voters to the polls, bolstering what became Trump’s first popular-vote win.
Kirk has used that distinction to position himself as not only Trump’s fiercest backer among the modern-day religious right, but an enforcer of Trumpian dogma. After Trump announced his Cabinet nominees in December, Kirk took the stage at AmericaFest, TPUSA’s annual conference in Phoenix, and warned, “If you are a Republican from a deep-red state, and you voted for Joe Biden’s nominees and you’re giving Donald Trump a hard time about his nominees, we will primary you and remove you from office immediately.”
And Kirk has been willing to name names. He told the conservative news outlet The Daily Wire in late December that Louisiana’s Sen. Bill Cassidy has “got to go” because he voted to convict Trump at his second impeachment trial, and pointed to Sens. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, James Risch of Idaho and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia as potential targets if they question Trump’s Cabinet picks too harshly.
It’s a more overtly combative style than that of the religious right of old. While Christian conservatives have long organized voting turnout machines, working behind the scenes to place evangelicals and their allies in key government positions, Kirk’s public threats are more in line with Trump-era conservative politics.
Matthew Boedy, an associate professor at the University of North Georgia who studies the rise of Kirk and TPUSA, said the newly emboldened Kirk “is not just a whisperer to another group. He is not just a link to evangelicals. He is the center of power. He’s no longer a medium to other groups for Trump. He is an orbit unto himself within Trump world.”
Kirk founded Turning Point USA as a conservative student organization in 2012 after serving as a Senate campaign aide and dropping out of a junior college in his native Illinois. The organization now has 800 chapters on U.S. college campuses and claims to have more than a quarter million members, according to the TPUSA website.
But in November 2019, Kirk made a pivot to faith: He co-founded the “Falkirk Center” at Liberty University with the evangelical Christian school’s then-president, Jerry Falwell Jr. Kirk promoted the organization as a defender of “Judeo-Christian” beliefs until Falwell’s career became mired in scandal, prompting Kirk to leave the project in March 2021.
Undeterred, Kirk went on to forge a relationship with Pastor Rob McCoy, head of Godspeak Calvary Chapel of Thousand Oaks, in California, and together they founded Turning Point Faith. The effort reaches out to pastors nationwide to encourage them to embrace political messages as a church growth strategy, an initiative that has doubled as an engine for turning out the pastors’ congregations for conservative candidates.
The political messages Kirk and his allies espouse have also come to include constant defense of Trump as well as Christian nationalism. McCoy has spread falsehoods about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, for example, and has defended a member of his church sentenced to jail for his role in the insurrection. Kirk has also insisted at speaking events that America was founded as a Christian (and, he often notes, specifically Protestant) nation that has strayed from its godly founding and should return to its religious roots.
“One of the reasons we’re living through a constitutional crisis is that we no longer have a Christian nation, but we have a Christian form of government, and they’re incompatible,” Kirk said in a clip he posted to X. “You cannot have liberty if you do not have a Christian population.”
A constant presence on social media, Kirk can often be seen in videos on Instagram and TikTok debating other young adults on abortion access, LGBTQ rights or race. Kirk has disputed the results of the 2020 election, has questioned the qualifications of Black pilots, called the police brutality victim George Floyd a “scumbag” and said a Bible verse about stoning gay people to death is “God’s perfect law.”
Turning Point did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
Despite his fervor, Kirk’s political efforts have not always been successful. Attempts to influence elections in support of Republicans in Arizona, where he now makes his base, have repeatedly fallen short, even as some quietly speculate Kirk may run for governor.
But Boedy argued a governorship would be a “step down” for Kirk, given his growing national profile. Though he needs to continue to deliver results to remain relevant, he combines his grassroots political engagement with the kind of grandly produced events that the GOP’s right wing has relied on to sell its electorally potent mix of conspiracy theories and conservative morality. Along with pastors such as McCoy and electoral data specialists, last month’s AmFest featured speakers such as onetime Trump advisers Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka as well as conservative commentator Tucker Carlson.
“Ralph Reed holds a press conference: ‘Look at all we did. Look at all the data points we have here,’ and Charlie Kirk holds a pep rally,” Boedy said, referring to the founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, himself the wunderkind of the religious right in the 1990s. “It’s two different responses to the same events, but Charlie Kirk is willing to do and say more than the generation before him, and that’s what makes him who he is.”
