Charlie Kirk believed that America’s myths were both truths and facts worth cherishing. The story of America, he insisted, was not original sin without redemption, but sin and redemption together—the kind of story that could inspire loyalty, sacrifice, and renewal. Eventually, he would sacrifice himself for it.
England could have been thrown into the cauldron of civil war and bloody revolution, like that of France, if not for the Evangelical Revival, led by George Whitefield and John Wesley. We call it the “Great Awakening” in the USA, and it prepared us for our much more civil revolution, birthing the Constitution, liberty with order. As I have previously shown in these pages in “The Regrettable Rise of “Right-Wing Wokeism,” the poisoning of China’s cultural heritage set the stage for Mao’s triumph and bloodletting. The Marxists’ cultural revulsion in China prepared the way for its bloody Cultural Revolution. Similar forces have been afoot in the USA over the last generation, festering, especially, in our universities. Charlie Kirk battled them head-on. He regularly went into the belly of the beast, confronting the propaganda. He wooed the youth away from the siren song of cultural Marxism. For that, they killed him.
Step one to take over a country is to sully its founding myths. To demoralize a people, you must first convince them to despise their heritage.
That was China’s tragedy. Few civilizations had more to boast of: paper, printing, gunpowder, silk, and a meritocratic culture of scholarship. Confucianism’s wisdom tradition rivaled Solomon’s Proverbs, and the imperial examination system gave poor peasants a path to power. Zhang Jian, born destitute in the Qing dynasty, rose to ministerial rank by merit alone. But Mao’s useful idiots denounced Confucianism as bourgeois oppression, cast filial piety as stifling, and convinced a generation that the old ways were the “four olds,” dead weight to be thrown overboard. Hence, they unleashed a “Cultural Revolution,” destroying centuries of wisdom and killing tens of millions. If the Marxists could do that to China, with such a glorious inheritance, it could happen anywhere. It almost happened here. And then, Charlie Kirk came on campus.
America’s Own Cultural Revolution
In America, we’ve lived through something eerily similar. The 1619 Project tried to redefine the nation’s birth as slavery, not liberty. Left-wing activists toppled statues, smeared Washington as a hypocrite, and labeled Lincoln a tyrant. Our past was recast not as a story of freedom and redemption but as one of oppression and original sin.
Then Charlie Kirk launched his counter-revolution. According to Isaac Stanley-Becker, writing in The Atlantic, Kirk “wasn’t trying to win the next election so much as an entire generation.” He understood that the real battle was cultural, not electoral. Campaigns are moments in time. Civilizations endure—or collapse—based on whether their people remain faithful to their founding story.
Whitefield and Kirk
The parallel is striking. Historians have argued that John Wesley and George Whitefield, leaders of the 18th-century Great Awakening, saved England from the kind of blood-soaked revolution that engulfed France. By renewing faith, they prevented a generation from turning their anger into nihilistic rage.
Kirk sought something similar in America. He built Turning Point USA not just to churn out voters but to form “biblical citizens.” By 2025, it was approaching 1,000 high-school chapters—a network he called “a very big educational monolith.” He launched TPUSA Faith to restore America’s Christian foundations, warning that just as Maoist cadres poisoned Chinese youth against Confucius, leftist activists were poisoning American students against their history. His antidote was unapologetically theological: family, Bible, and civic virtue.
On The Charlie Kirk Show, he laid out what Stanley-Becker called his “catechism”: Where do rights come from? What kind of government is best? Was America’s founding a secular accident or the fruit of Christian conviction? Kirk answered with long, reasoned reflections, citing Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas—and above all, the revival preachers of the Great Awakening. “Politics is always an outgrowth,” he said. “If you’re able to get people to believe philosophy, anything’s possible.”
That is Whitefield’s logic reborn for the 21st century: change hearts, and the culture will follow.
Countering the Revolution
Kirk’s rhetoric was direct but not combative, hostile to bad ideas but not to people, not even bad people. He railed against Islam, racial essentialism, and transsexuality, calling the last “a throbbing middle finger to God.” But his core mission was not simply to gin up a reaction. It was a revival. “What fires me up the most,” he said, according to Stanley-Becker, “is persuading young people to adopt a coherent worldview rooted in the Bible.”
That’s why he launched Turning Point Academy in 2023: schools “where all areas of study are rooted in God’s truth.” Education, he believed, was “the greatest growth opportunity in the next 50 years.” Like Whitefield crisscrossing England’s fields and then the Atlantic to America, Kirk made America’s campuses his pulpit.
Meanwhile, radicals on the left and the right pressed their revolution by demolishing history. The 1619 Project smeared America’s birth as slavery. Lost Cause apologists excused slavery as benign and painted Lincoln as a tyrant. Their modern incarnation, Nick-Fuentes-style “groypers” opposed Kirk as a “fake conservative.” Kirk, a coalition-builder, drew the line with them, excluding them from his movement.
Kirk believed that America’s myths were both truths and facts worth cherishing. The story of America, he insisted, was not original sin without redemption, but sin and redemption together—the kind of story that could inspire loyalty, sacrifice, and renewal. Eventually, he would sacrifice himself for it.
Revival vs. Revolution
The lesson of Confucian China is that once a people lose faith in their founding, the door is open to tyranny. Mao replaced the wisdom of Confucius with the whim of the dictator. America risks the same if we let leftist ideologues or pseudo-conservative revisionists convince us our nation is built on lies.
Kirk’s work, as Stanley-Becker observed, was not just political organizing but a bid to win the future of the American soul—like a modern Whitefield, a revivalist who kept the disillusionment of a generation from curdling into cultural revolution. Was it cut too short to stop that revolution, or did he plant sufficient seeds for a new Awakening? Will Americans remember that the myths of America are not false idols but living truths, capable of renewal? The revivalistic memorial service, complete with the president of the USA and a tearful, poised, and poignant address from the widowed Mrs. Kirk left us with hope.
“We’re here to win,” Kirk said. Not merely votes. But a nation.
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The featured image combines a painting of George Whitefield and a photograph of Charlie Kirk, uploaded by Gage Skidmore. Both files are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, and appear courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.