“Jesus saved my life,” Charlie Kirk once proudly proclaimed. “I’m a sinner. Gave my life to Christ. Most important decision I ever made. I believe the Bible is true and real. … There’s never been an archaeological discovery that’s contradicted the truth of the Bible. And then of course there’s the wisdom: There’s not a truth of the Bible that if you apply it to your life, your life does not improve dramatically.” Because of statements like these, evangelical leaders have been mourning a brother slain for his biblical views. 

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But in the grief, a truth crystallized: Kirk wasn’t just a conservative agitator. He was a prophet for a generation adrift, a blazing torch reigniting faith in an America that had all but forgotten how to pray.

From campus rebel to faith warrior

How does one man, barely out of his teens when he started Turning Point USA, become the unlikely architect of a spiritual uprising? Kirk’s story isn’t one of seminary robes or altar-boy piety. Born in 1993 to a Chicago suburb family — dad a teacher, mom a homemaker — he was the student debating teachers in high school civics, quoting Locke and Madison like pop lyrics. Politics hooked him early: At 18, he skipped college to launch TPUSA in 2012, a scrappy outfit aimed at “reawakening” young conservatives on godless campuses. “We were losing the culture war,” he’d later say. “Kids were trading crosses for hashtags.”

But faith? That simmered beneath the surface, a quiet ember fanned by personal storms. Kirk married Erika Frantzve in 2021, a podcaster with a steel-spine devotion to Christ. Their home became a war room of prayer and podcasts, where Bible studies bled into strategy sessions. “Erika showed me grace isn’t weakness,” he once confessed on his show. By 2023, the shift was seismic. Kirk, once a secular firebrand, began weaving Judeo-Christian threads into every rant. “The West is the best because of Christianity,” he tweeted in August 2025, a post that racked up 35,000 likes. “We must seek Christ first, and our national and cultural resurgence will naturally follow.”

This evolution didn’t happen overnight. Kirk often shared stories of his “wilderness years,” post-2016 election highs when burnout hit hard. A late-night drive through the Mojave in 2020, Bible open on the dash, cracked him open. “I realized freedom without foundation is just chaos,” he told a rapt audience at a 2024 TPUSA event. From there, his messages sharpened: Politics as downstream from culture, and culture from faith. He started small — slipping Ephesians 6:12 into talks on spiritual warfare against “woke demons.” But it snowballed from there. By 2025, his rallies felt like revivals, with kids combining red hats with rosaries.

The spark of Turning Point Faith

It wasn’t abstract theology. Kirk weaponized scripture like a megaphone. On his daily podcast, the Charlie Kirk Show, he’d drop Proverbs 22:6 — “Train up a child in the way he should go” — before dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates. At TPUSA summits, he’d challenge crowds: “Borders are biblical. Defending your nation is biblical. Protecting your family? Biblical.” Critics sneered, calling it “Christian nationalism lite.” But to the young adults in the room, it was oxygen. Millennials like myself, scarred by the Great Recession of 2008 and by the fallout from former President Barack Obama’s rainbow revolution, had ditched pews for podcasts. Generation Z? They were the “nones,” religiously unaffiliated at record highs. Pew Research tracked the carnage: Christianity’s share of U.S. adults plummeted from 78% in 2007 to 62% in 2024, a freefall that left churches echoing and families fractured. By 2025, though, the bleed slowed — hovering at 62%, a fragile plateau. Pundits debated demographics, scandals, and TikTok atheism. Kirk, though, saw a vacuum begging to be filled.

Enter Turning Point Faith, Kirk’s masterstroke. Launched in 2021 as TPUSA’s “official faith division,” it wasn’t a side hustle — it was a declaration of war on secular drift. “We equip Christians to stand for liberty, the Kingdom, and biblical truth,” the mission read. Kirk poured millions into it, hosting pastor summits that drew 700 leaders in one weekend alone. No more tiptoeing around the “wall of separation” between church and state, which Kirk blasted as a myth created by activists. (As someone who has a law degree, I can affirm that Kirk was mostly correct about this. The Constitution does not mandate that there be a “wall” separating church and state, only that the state make no laws that establish or endorse a particular religion.) “America was founded on Christian principles,” Kirk thundered at a 2024 event, flanked by crosses and flags. He urged believers to flood the public square — to make their presence felt in school boards, city halls, and at ballot boxes. “For America to be great, we must remain majority Christian,” he posted.

Turning Point Faith wasn’t just talk. It birthed initiatives like the “Faith on Fire” campus tours, in which Kirk and guest pastors like Robert Jeffress hit 50 colleges in a year, sparking 2,000 conversions by mid-2025. A particular standout was a February rally at the University of California, Berkeley, where 300 skeptics, many of them tattooed agnostics, packed a lecture hall. Kirk quoted Psalm 82:3-4 on defending the weak, tying it to abortion fights. By night’s end, the room was pulsing with amens. “He didn’t preach at us,” a former atheist attendee recalled. “He invited us in.” These events fused MAGA energy with altar calls, turning “drain the swamp” into “draw from the well.” Kirk’s vision was of a youth army with Bibles in one hand and ballots in the other.

Scripture in the spotlight

The impact was electric. Gen-Z conservatives, once mocked as basement-dwelling edgelords, found cover in Kirk’s gospel of grit. Polls backed the surge: By 2025, Gen-Z church attendance was ticking back up. Young men had begun ditching booze for baptism. Kirk’s secret sauce was that he made religion cool again, managing to infuse dusty hymns with high-octane purpose. At TPUSA’s 2024 conference, 10,000 youth chanted “Jesus is King” amid pyrotechnics and patriotic anthems. One viral clip showed a tattooed kid from Portland confessing: “I was an atheist till Charlie quoted Romans 8:28. ‘All things work together for good.’ Hit me like a freight train.”

Kirk’s Bible fluency was his superpower. He’d lace rants with verses like a DJ dropping beats — Isaiah 5:20 on cultural inversion one day, and 2 Timothy 1:7 on fearless witness the next. In a June 2025 episode dissecting campus censorship, he pivoted to Matthew 5:14: “You are the light of the world.” “Don’t hide it under Big Tech’s bushel,” he urged. Listeners ate it up. Downloads spiked 40%. For millennials nursing gig-economy grudges, Kirk reframed resentment as redemptive suffering, echoing Job’s trials. “Faith isn’t escapism,” he’d boom. “It’s the forge that tempers freedom fighters.”

Kirk’s own faith evolution mirrored the messiness. Raised vaguely Protestant, he flirted with evangelical firebrands like Franklin Graham but warmed to Catholicism’s ancient roots without crossing the Tiber. Never baptized Catholic — he stayed Protestant to the end — Kirk defended the church like a brother. In a 2024 podcast with Dr. Taylor Marshall, he gushed: “The liturgy? It’s poetry for the soul. And the good it’s done? Hospitals, universities, art that outshines the stars.” He sparred with critics who called Catholics “idolaters,” siding with allies like Michael Knowles: “If they’re wrong, we’re all lost. But they’re not.” At debates, he’d bridge divides by invoking the Talmud alongside the Torah: “Jew hate has no place” in our world, he declared. “Period.” It irked purists on all sides, but that was Kirk: the bridge-builder who burned no boats. (As a Jew, I can also affirm that the posthumous attempt by some on the Left to paint Kirk as an antisemite is one of the uglier, and simply untrue, canards of the radical Left’s reaction to his murder.)

This ecumenism shone in Turning Point Faith’s “Unity Assemblies,” multidenominational gatherings in which evangelicals, Catholics, and Orthodox swapped stories over coffee and creeds. A 2025 event in Washington, D.C., drew 1,500, with Kirk moderating a panel on shared Judeo-Christian bulwarks against secularism. “We’re not denominations in a foxhole,” he quipped. “We’re brothers storming the gates.” Attendees left so inspired that many ended up launching joint prayer chains of their own.

A revival ignited

Flash back to 2016. A scrawny 23-year-old Kirk crashes the Republican National Committee, schmoozing delegates with a pitch: “Give me your campuses; I’ll give you your future.” Donald Trump wins, and TPUSA explodes — chapters open up on 3,000 campuses, and millions are mobilized. But victory soured fast. COVID lockdowns shuttered churches, and Big Tech shadowbanned religious content. Kirk pivoted hard. “Prayer isn’t enough? Tell that to Daniel in the lions’ den,” he fired back at Jen Psaki’s 2025 post mocking faith after a shooting. His response, criticizing her post as “insensitive to tens of millions who believe in prayer’s power,” was a viral smackdown.

By 2023, Turning Point Faith had become a dynamo. Kirk jetted to megachurches, rallying pastors: “The church cedes the square, catastrophe follows.” He platformed shepherds like John MacArthur, blending sermons with strategy. “Faith isn’t retreat,” he’d say. “It’s advance.” One summit in Nashville drew black-robed bishops and blue-collar believers, plotting voter drives laced with Luke 10:2 — “The harvest is plentiful, but laborers few.”

The fruits of Kirk’s plantings were the youth revival that he had prophesied months before his death. “There is revival in the Christian church,” he posted on Sept. 3, 2025. “Churches growing. Young people flocking to faith.” Data echoed his observations: Recent studies have shown that the number of Gen-Z evangelicals has been surging. Kirk’s hand in this growth is undeniable. He fed young people’s hunger for meaning amid fentanyl floods and iPhone isolation. “He tied family, stability, and sexuality to purpose,” one analyst noted. “Why are young men turning to Catholicism and Orthodoxy?” he’d argue at rallies. “Because truth endures.”

Critics howled. Leftists branded him a “shadow gospel” peddler, luring lost boys with dark enchantment. Kirk shrugged it off with Hebrews 12:1-2, his North Star: “Run with endurance … looking to Jesus.” “Reading the Bible is good for the soul,” he’d remind followers.

In his final months, he was under a frenzy of fire. Post-assassination investigations revealed that threats against him had been piling up. Some of his hate mail had scorned his “biblical views” on truth. Yet Kirk pressed on, defending Israel’s biblical claim and quoting Genesis in debates about the Gaza war. He mourned the Apollo 13 hero Jim Lovell as someone whose “Christian faith sustained him 200,000 miles from Earth.” And in quiet moments, he’d text friends: “Above all, remember me for my faith.”

Now, in the ashes of his murder, that plea echoes even louder. Turning Point USA’s statement captures it perfectly — a eulogy that doubles as a manifesto:

THE SUPREME COURT’S LEAP OF FAITH 

“Charlie loved America, its people, its Constitution, its freedom, and the limitless good all of them have done for the world. But above all, Charlie lived every day with an overflowing love of the Christ he knew he would one day get to see. When asked, Charlie said that above all he wished to be remembered for his faith. Far more than any political victory, Charlie wanted to see a spiritual revival among America’s youth. He wanted a nation of happy, thriving families who loved God and each other. At his final public speech, just days before his murder, Charlie witnessed to Christ to an audience of non-believers. Even in his very last moments, Charlie was professing the Gospel. He ran his race well all the way to the end. Now, he goes to his heavenly reward.”

The question for us now is, will we run ours the same? Kirk’s light didn’t flicker out — it kindled thousands, and perhaps even millions, of others. Charlie Kirk may have made his name as a political activist, but he’ll surely be remembered just as much, if not more so, for his faith. 

Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer, the author of three books, and the Allen and Joan Bildner Visiting Scholar at Rutgers University.