Charlie Kirk’s Evangelical Populism

Born at the end of the Millennial generation, Charlie Kirk rose to prominence in tandem with Donald Trump. Kirk seemed tailored for the Trump era. His tall frame projected a confident, aggressive, and relational persona that attracted many Gen Z youth looking for answers. Even though he did not finish college, he was an early adopter of online learning, driven by an evangelical thirst to learn about the faith. More than one scholar has recounted how Kirk reached out to discuss ideas and arguments. In many ways, Kirk reminded me of a young Ron Nash, the evangelical philosopher who loved Rush Limbaugh, had no problem writing or saying what others deemed offensive, and tackled almost every topic to work out what a Christian worldview should look like in late modernity. 

Kirk was in his prime when an assassin’s bullet took his life on September 10, 2025. Having entered his thirties, he had spent the past decade building a brand by relentlessly pursuing multiple strategies at once, from political advocacy to Christian apologetics to relationships with wealthy donors and influential people. Core to these strategies was his commitment to turning Gen Z back to God, family, and country. His approach combined older evangelical values with newer technologies and entrepreneurial skills to build what became an institutional juggernaut.

His assassination triggered a tsunami in the evangelical world. Many churches filled in the following weeks, and his memorial service drew an estimated 90,000 to 100,000 attendees and over 100 million livestreams. Multiple news outlets reported a 36 percent bump in Bibles sold in the U.S. for September. The number of congregations in the Turning Point USA (TPUSA) church network more than doubled, with current estimates approaching 10,000. TPUSA’s annual conference, AmericaFest, drew a record-breaking crowd of over 30,000 in December. These events fueled another round in the debate about whether a large-scale religious awakening was happening, especially among Gen Z.

The surge in religiosity immediately after Kirk’s death was part of a series of revival events going back to the outpouring of prayer at Asbury University in February 2023. The plateauing of the religiously unaffiliated as a percentage of the population, the rise in religiosity among young men, and the shift toward cultural Christianity are signs that a larger return to Christianity may be on the horizon. 

If this happens, it will be fueled by the new evangelical populism that emerged in the post-9/11 world. This populism is a broad coalition of Baptist, Bible Church, and Pentecostal-Charismatic congregations and ministers, many of them non-denominational. Kirk did not create this new coalition, but his networking over the five years before his death helped shape it. 

The rise of this new evangelical populism has many causes. Among them are the rapid growth of non-denominational network Protestantism, with its suspicion of institutions, and a pushback against both the New Atheism movement of the 2010s and the postmodern politics of globalism. By 2014, the religious nones had hit a new high of around 23 percent, according to Pew.  

In The Death of Religion? Thomas Kidd and Byron Johnson challenge the religious decline narrative by using the Congregational Census and local studies of three counties in Texas, Washington, and Virginia to show how Christians are being undercounted. All three counties showed significant growth in Baptist and Pentecostal-Charismatic non-denominational congregations from 2010 to 2020, precisely those congregations making up the new evangelical populism.

One could see this evangelical populism reflected on the stage at Kirk’s memorial. Alongside Trump, Vance, and various presidential cabinet members were worship leaders from the Pentecostal-Charismatic world, the evangelical apologist Frank Turek, and the Godspeak Calvary Chapel pastor Rob McCoy. These participants combined the old evangelical emphasis on developing a comprehensive worldview through a defense of the faith with the new worship music formed in worship collectives. 

Over the past year, TPUSA tapped into this combination of apologetics, worldview thinking, and Pentecostal-Charismatic spirituality. The director of TPUSA Faith, Lucas Miles, pastors Nfluence Church, a Charismatic non-denominational congregation in Indiana. Most of the congregations hosting the Make Heaven Crowded Tour for TPUSA are Baptist or non-denominational with a Pentecostal-Charismatic orientation. The emphasis on worship in TPUSA Faith is complemented by Turning Point Education, which seeks to advance a Christian vision in all areas of life through courses, training materials, and conferences. Through its various organizational arms, TPUSA has continued to shape evangelical populism.

Finally, Kirk’s death acted as a Rorschach test for evangelicalism. Those who had left the movement reacted differently than those who remained. Although former evangelicals decried the violence surrounding his death, they saw Kirk as a Christian nationalist who contributed to what Peter Wehner called “MAGA-fied Christianity.” 

Kirk’s death also highlighted an ongoing debate between older and younger Millennials who had grown up in evangelicalism. Most of the so-called “exvangelicals” like Blake Chastain (who coined the term in 2016) are older Millennials who left evangelicalism during the heyday of New Atheism. Exvangelicals were one stream in a larger group of former evangelicals who had deconstructed their faith.

Some exvangelicals rejected the purity culture that peaked in the 1990s, while others reacted against the political evangelicalism they saw in the George W. Bush administration. The former embraced the new gender studies that took over universities in the early 2000s—part of a postmodern mix that included critical race theory, cultural studies, and queer studies—while the latter took up the language of Christian nationalism used to describe the Bush administration. Like most former evangelicals, exvangelicals are as activist as Kirk was, but their activism resides in a constant stream of criticism against evangelicalism and support for the secular and progressive Christian left. 

The evangelical populism that Kirk represented has only strengthened in the wake of his death. The combination of Pentecostal-Charismatic spirituality and evangelical apologetics is creating a new theological framework that is politically and socially activist. Whether the new coalition will endure is another question, but its potency is already being felt, with Kirk serving as a symbol of this new populist expression of evangelical faith. 

Image by Gage Skidmore via Creative Commons. Image cropped.