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At Turning Point USA’s AmFest, Charlie Kirk Takes Victory Lap for Trump Election

By Katherine Stewart
trump kirk turning point
President-elect Donald Trump walks on stage at AmericaFest, Dec. 22, 2024, in Phoenix, Arizona. (AP Photo/Rick Scuteri)

At this year’s AmericaFest, a conservative conference held in Phoenix, Arizona, and 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 Punto de inflexión EE. UU. 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.”

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charlie kirk
Turning Point USA president Charlie Kirk speaks at AmericaFest, Dec. 20, 2024, in Phoenix. (Photo: Facebook)

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.

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Promotional image for Turning Point USA Faith. (Screengrab)

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.”

turning point faith
Attendees engage in worship during “Faith Night” at AmericaFest in Phoenix on Dec. 21, 2024. (Photo: Facebook)

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.”

donald trump americafest
President-elect Donald Trump speaks at AmericaFest, Dec. 22, 2024, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Rick Scuteri)

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.”

Katherine Stewart is an American journalist and contributor to Religion News Service. 

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27 Respuestas

  1. There are SO many things about this that are very dangerous; at the root it is little more than a twisted gospel.
    Let it drive us to pray for the church and this nation.

    1. Yes, Marin. Today they gloat. But I wonder if they care what damage this has done to the cause of Christ in this nation… for decades to come. Seems like Jesus and the Bible are means to an end, instead of Jesus being the be all and end all of our existence and destiny. Oh well, time will tell.

      1. It’s because everyone they know is homogenous in opinion. 80+% vote for a grossly unqualified man. They’ve absolutely have no contact with anyone in the world who would be part of the groups they hate (lqbtq, immigrants, brown people). They have no grace. They don’t see the US as empire. They think voting republican is the beginning and end of their participation in society. They give 2.8% of their salary to charity. They sit in pews while the pastors ask for volunteers for nursery and never think they should do it. They don’t see the decline of the church as something to stimulate profound change in how we practice Christianity. They jump from church to church depending on whether they were “being fed”. 2/3 of them believe the 2020 election was stolen. I had a Christian woman today tell me the California fires were Gods judgement on that “heathen state”. My sister in Christ, what then is every hurricane that hits the most religious part of America, the south?

  2. “We were inches away from a civil war,” he said.

    In other words, if Trump had not won, you would have seen something that made Jan 6, 2021 look like a Sunday School picnic.

    1. No fan of Charlie Kirk here, but I wonder if he was referring to the near death of Donald Trump in PA. If that bullet had found its mark, there’s no telling what might have happened in the country. IMO, MAGA is a full blown cult, nationwide in its scope. Which is sobering to think about.

  3. Apparently retribution is something Gods people are supposed to accomplish ourselves? Is that the message I should get from this event?

    1. You are right, Bob. But now we know who the true disciples of Jesus are, and who the “tax collectors” are. :))

      This does not mean that we should not stand against injustice. But revenge? “Vengeance is mine” says the Lord.

      “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’..
      “For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same. And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so?” ~Jesus

  4. “Allows (churches) to endorse candidates, hold events to support those candidates” and “hold door-knocking events in support of those candidates.” I would luv to hear a biblical argument in support of that

  5. I see nothing patriotic, constitutional. OR Christian that happened at this event. We are in deep trouble when Christians don’t know right from wrong.

    1. 1 million percent this
      It’s like they’ve never read a history book OR the Bible – or worse, they have read a history book and are just repeating the *wrong* things…

  6. Charlie Kirk’s “Victory Lap” over “…God Almighty for saving this country”, may be a bit premature. What kind of America will we live in after the next 4 years and specifically, how will Christianity be debased through its obsequious embrace of Donald Trump? We’ll see after 4 more years, but the preliminary evidence doesn’t look promising for Christianity to be the impetus of our nation’s spiritual transformation.

    1. The sad thing is that many of those who claim to be “Christians” won’t recognise any further debasement because they don’t recognise it now.
      And apart from possible cultural window dressing here and there to appease the base. Sadly, there will be no improvement for US citizens in essential quaility of life areas such as, health care, education, aged & child care, infrastructure, public/community services and living wages.

  7. It leaves me feeling aghast at what I hear and read about this pseudo-Christian bravado seeking to enact revenge on political enemies and use the law of God and the law of the land to accomplish this. What has happened to the church of America? I am Canadian and think it is our country – not yours, who may soon have to erect a wall along our southern border. That is, if we can do it before Trumpworld takes us over.

  8. Psalm 33:12:

    Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord…..

    It is astonishing to me that the comments here reflect such a lack of faith. As believers, we know God is always in control, even in our country right now. He has a plan and He has ALWAYS had a plan. Worrying about the next four years reflects a kind of blindness about the LAST four years.

    The last four years have been nothing short of horrible, yet we have survived and God has given us a chance to recover. Let’s hope we find a way forward together without the constant infighting and griping about our differences.

    If you do not live here in this incredible nation, it is perhaps best not to speculate about our future. With God’s help, we will continue on. Our quality of life is already superior to that of many, Ian. And, Larry Gill, Canada is in serious trouble. You might want to examine your own house before commenting on ours.

    1. “Our quality of life is already superior to that of many, Ian” (by what measures?)
      But… you said earlier that it has “been nothing short of horrible”?? It feels like you’re moving the goalposts around… convenient for someone accusing some of us with a “lack of faith”…

    2. When did calling out evil become “a lack of faith”?
      This – “We’re going to fix bayonets,” Bannon said. “I want good, old-fashioned Old Testament retribution.” – is evil. This is anti-Christ. (Just the tip of the iceberg of an event filled with chest-thumping pride, violence-threatening, idol-worshipping paganism)

      But Charlie Kirk et al are happy to associate with it, condone it, platform it, even participate? and/or excuse it. I’m grateful I don’t have to put my faith in them, but in the true King and Lord of lords (even over these wannabe ‘lords’)

    3. My concerns are rooted in the spread of a perverted gospel that is Christian nationalism, Charlie Kirk’s public ties to white nationalism (via his words and his alliances), and the recommendations for the church to cunningly find ways to fund political stances and activities.
      I am also concerned that there are responses like Cynthia’s – believers expressing ZERO concern for this perverted gospel that ties the church to political parties (our God is not a Republican or Democrat) and nationalistic stances (the US has no national religion, nor does our God “prefer” Americans), and twists its purpose (the main focus of the church is to win souls, not votes). I know she’s not alone in lacking concern, which means what we read above will go unchecked among many believers.
      Speaking to my “lack of faith”: I lack faith in Christian nationalism. I lack faith in TurningPoint USA. I lack faith in any political party. I lack faith in any man-made nation or government.
      My faith is in Christ alone. I am praying for this nation and the church (and that no other believers will get caught up in this perverted gospel) – and I am praying to God through Jesus Christ, not through TurningPoint USA or the GOP. I am praying not as “an American” but as a believer.
      Yes, God has ALWAYS been in control and still is. Yet part of moving forward together as the body of Christ is respecting that others have concerns without accusing them of having a lack of faith in that. Hear them out. Walk alongside them. Pray with them and for them. And remember that no one accused you of lacking faith when “God is in control” was NOT the first thing you were saying over the last four years.

      1. We all have clay feet. And it seems there are some who fail to recognise that there are others who are just trying to stand with Christ ALONE – in all matters – with their clay feet. 🤔

      2. Marin Heiskell:

        Since time began, God has been in control, as you well know. Often, He has allowed countries, leaders, kings, nations, people to fall because of their sinful and unrepentant hearts. You know this, too.

        You would do well to examine your own heart before disparaging the motives, hearts and minds of others. My faith is in Christ alone as well. Because of that faith, I can clearly see the difference between the positions of many Democrats and the positions of many Republicans. Night and day, sin and righteousness. I can tell the difference. Can you?

        Further, “Christian Nationalism” is not a “perverted gospel” simply because it is not a “gospel” at all. There is only one Gospel, proclaimed in the New Testament and recognized by those who know Christ. “Christian Nationalism” is an ideology that perverts both Nationalism and Christianity. It does not represent either very well, and its enactment is impossible here in the United States because it would violate our Constitution.

        Fear of such an ideology gives it way too much power. It is toothless here.

        1. cinthia-
          your FIRST response was to accuse those of us expressing VALID, Biblical concerns with the blatant sins (of Christian Nationalism, et. al) on display as having a “lack of faith”. That is literally in your first sentence.
          Why did you go after us first, rather than the sins on that stage – sins that we seem to agree on?
          THAT is proof of my concern. And it has ZERO to do with either political party. My fear is not of the Christian Nationalist ideology itself. It is if believers can identify and discern the sins being promoted on that stage; it is the division that will come from believers whose first response is to attack other believers who see and call out the sins being promoted rather than going after the promoters themselves.
          You did the latter.

          I want to see us united in knowing and calling out the sins and falsehoods on display. We are more powerful united then divided (by political party or whatever).
          That is one of many things I pray for among the body of Christ. That we come together and realize it’s not about Republican or Democrat, but falsehoods versus truth. What was in that stage was falsehoods on display. We need to attack that, not each other.

      3. This 💯

        I do not fear Trump (or any government power). My concern is for the witness of the church. That Jesus and faithful Christianity is being misrepresented by those who align with political agendas and speak condemnation rather than the living out the true Gospel message of love, grace and truth and inviting others into the kingdom of God.

        1. tricia russell,

          I can understand your concerns about the “witness of the church,” but it sounds like you are forgetting or underestimating the power of God. No “Christian Nationalism” message can replace the message of salvation, nor can its power be thwarted by anyone or anything. It will get through REGARDLESS of those who misrepresent it or attempt to connect it to some kind of political agenda.

          You are only responsible for your own behavior as a believer, in my opinion, so make sure YOU are representing Jesus and living out the true Gospel message. Those Christians who seek personal power will inevitably fail. We are told to seek the Kingdom of God and HIS righteousness, so let’s stay on that pathway until we are finally home.

          1. Cynthia – I understand your perspective, and agree that our God is powerful. However, we each have an individual responsibility to protect the witness of the church through the way we live our lives and the ideologies we support (or allow to go unchecked). The epistles are full of admonishments to past and present believers, not out of underestimating the power of God, but to warn us that we can tarnish our witness – and the collective witness of the church – when that witness is mixed with sinful ideologies or lifestyles. We read about this when Paul is calling out the churches at Ephesus, Corinth and Philippi for sins that were impacting the body and reputation of the church (he was hearing about them from MILES away). We also see and hear this today in the stories of those who have been hurt, abused, and/or turned off by the church due to the sins committed, promoted, and permitted by its people. Likewise, we also know of stories where people were drawn into the church by the love and Godly lifestyle of its people.
            So we cannot be too extreme when saying we are ONLY responsible for our own behavior as believers. We are, in fact, our brother’s keeper. There are scriptures that call us to confront and call out sins among believers (and give us examples on how to do so; we read of Paul confronting Peter) as part of not only spurring one another on in our faith journeys but protecting the witness of the church.
            This is a yes/and, not an either/or. Both you and Tricia raise valid points.

  9. Thank you, Charlie Kirk!

    You changed America.

    You brought young people into the American tradition and gave them a sense of hope. By doing so, you caused these young people – (and old!) – to abandon the intellectual positions that the left (aka: ALL Democrats – especially college professors) instilled within them that are demonic.

    We have a LOT of work to do but as the successor to Rush Limbaugh, it is wonderful to know you are there for our future.

    “Lord, please bless Mr. Kirk’s safety, health and family. Amen.”

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