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Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk: Religious Right’s Enforcer of Christian Nationalism & Trumpism [1]
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Date: 2025-01-13
At AmericaFest 2024, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk told the more than 20,000 people gathered at the Phoenix Convention Center that, “The person, or more importantly, who deserves credit is God Almighty for saving this country. We were inches away from a civil war. 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.”
While Kirk liberally spread kudos to churches, pastors and religious leaders, he made a point of noting that his organization had “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.”
Once upon a time, there was a stable of religious right leaders aligned with the Republican Party. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Dr. James Dobson, Ralph Reed, and Franklin Graham were all invaluable contributors to getting conservatives elected not only to the presidency, and the right-wing takeover of state legislatures across the country.
From the roots of the religious right has emerged a new set of even more muscular, combative and social media savvy religious right leaders, who spout dominionism, Christian nationalism and the righteousness of Donald Trump. In the span of a little over a decade, Charlie Kirk has become a major player among them.
“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,” Kathryn Stewart reported for Religion News Service (
https://religionnews.com/2025/01/07/at-turning-point-usas-amfest-charlie-kirk-takes-a-victory-lap-for-trump-election/). “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.’”
Out of the chaos that was the 2016 Republican primaries, Kirk emerged, and he would go on to become an important player in Donald Trump’s broader movement and one of its most fervent backers. In 2012, Kirk co-founded Turning Point USA (TPUSA), a nonprofit that champions conservative values on college campuses. But Kirk's role was never limited to merely pushing a traditional conservative agenda. Instead, as an Anti-Defamation League backgrounder notes (
https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/turning-point-usa?psafe_param=1&gad_source=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI2cy6t53pigMVTx6tBh3nihmSEAAYASAAEgKpBfD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds), he became a promoter of numerous conspiracy theories, Christian nationalism and has become a key enforcer of Trumpism. Kirk a zealot who champions the cult of personality surrounding Trump and works tirelessly to align the religious right with Trump.
Religion News Service’s Jack Jenkins recently wrote: “… since the election, Kirk, a 31-year-old mainline-Presbyterian-turned-evangelical … 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,” Jenkins noted “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.”
And Kirk has not been shy about pointing out those politicians he feels are not sufficiently Trump-devoted. Jenkins pointed out that Kirk “told (
https://www.dailywire.com/news/charlie-kirk-has-thoughts-on-which-republicans-need-a-primary-challenge) 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.”
Kirk has managed to carve out a reputation as one of the most influential figures in the conservative youth movement. His rise to prominence occurred with the launch of TPUSA (
https://www.tpusa.com/). [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 it’s Kirk’s embrace of Trumpism, particularly his vociferous support for the president's radical brand of politics, that has cemented his place in the American political firmament.
From the moment Trump entered the 2016 race, it was clear that the evangelical and religious right would be a critical part of his coalition. Despite the many scandals that plagued Trump—his history of infidelity, his treatment of women, his coarse language—the religious right seemed willing to overlook these moral failings in exchange for the policy victories he offered, particularly on issues like abortion, judicial appointments, and religious freedom. Kirk, for his part, was one of the first to connect with the evangelical base and provide a political outlet for their grievances.
Matthew Boedy, an associate professor at the University of North Georgia who studies the rise of Kirk and TPUSA, told Religion News Service’s Jenkins that 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.”
In November 2019, Kirk pivoted to faith, and quite a pivot it was. After a rather messy partnership at Liberty University with Jerry Falwell Jr., who was soon to be mired in an incredible sexual scandal, Kirk “went on to forge a relationship with Pastor Rob McCoy, head of Godspeak Calvary Chapel of Thousand Oaks, in California, (and a spreader of lies about the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol), and together they founded Turning Point Faith,” RNS’s Jenkins reported. “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.”
There has been talk that Kirk might be setting his sights on the governorship of Arizona. But, given his national profile, that might be a “step down” Matthew Boedy opined. Kirk’s profile continues to be elevated as he successfully “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,” Jenkins noted. “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. “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.”
To Kirk, Trump isn’t just a man in office—he is a savior, the lone figure capable of battling the forces of "globalism," political correctness, and "deep state" machinations that threatens the nation. This is a vision he is propagating relentlessly, particularly in religious right circles. And now, after a little over a decade, Kirk has become an indispensable leader in Trump’s Christian Nationalist machine.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/story/2025/1/13/2296721/-Turning-Point-USA-s-Charlie-Kirk-Religious-Right-s-Enforcer-of-Christian-Nationalism-Trumpism
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