The Teen Believers in a Christian America
Wild Cargo Pets, situated just south of the intersection of Gun Club Road and Military Trail, in West Palm Beach, is a renowned local institution. During the past seventy-five years, the family-owned store has taken exotic animals to visit children at the homes of the Kennedys and, more recently, Donald Trump, Jr. One early-spring morning, a sign above the parking lot read “THE SON OF MAN WILL RETURN JUST LIKE THE DAYS OF NOAH.” Inside the shop, Gracie Bell Joyce, who is sixteen, with deep dimples and hazel eyes, reached into a glass terrarium to stroke Big Bertha, the Colombian red-tailed boa that acts as Wild Cargo’s ambassador.
“She’s super, super sweet,” Joyce said. “She will bite, but she hasn’t bit anyone.” Joyce, whose parents are second-generation owners of the store, is an “unschooler,” meaning she has directed her own education: she learned to read by filling orders at the store, and to add and subtract by working the register. She also raised a baby kangaroo named Bunny, who slept in a pouch at the end of her bed. But Joyce’s job at the pet store served a higher purpose. While advising customers on care for an albino python or a bearded dragon, she evangelized them. Joyce told me, “The best way to do it when you’re explaining how to take care of an animal, you always say, ‘Copy God’s natural design.’ ”
Joyce’s hero is Charlie Kirk, the late conservative influencer, who called upon young people to extoll the Gospel wherever they went. In April, 2025, he told an audience of eighteen hundred college students at the University of Wyoming that even if they became electricians they could still evangelize. “You’re probably gonna walk into ten thousand to fifteen thousand homes,” he said. “That is a mission field.”
In 2024, when Joyce was fourteen, she founded a Palm Beach County chapter of Kirk’s youth organization, Turning Point USA. Kirk and his group were vital to turnout efforts for all three of Donald Trump’s campaigns, and leading a Turning Point chapter in Trump’s home county put Joyce in startling proximity to power. In 2025, she attended the Celebrate American Exceptionalism gala at Mar-a-Lago, where she was one of the youngest people in the room. “I was talking to people who were my parents’ and grandparents’ age and with some of the richest people in the world,” she said. “It was insane.” Through Turning Point, she became friendly with the owner of an aviation company; she said that she occasionally ran into Kimberly Guilfoyle, Trump’s Ambassador to Greece and Trump, Jr.,’s ex-fiancée.
For Joyce, however, Kirk’s political positions were much less important than his faith. “He was huge on pro-life,” she explained. “He was huge on a Christian stance on everything. He was really big on bringing back our base values in America that we were founded on.” Her activism with Turning Point was about promoting Christianity in schools and homes. “I’m not encouraging kids to start a chapter or start their own podcast. I’m encouraging kids to go to church or to read their Bible more,” she said.
Joyce was young for a Turning Point leader: there were some high-school chapters, but most were run by college students. Her age didn’t faze her. Kirk, after all, had started his right-wing youth movement shortly after graduating from high school, with the aim of opposing left-wing efforts such as Occupy Wall Street and MoveOn. He quickly became a darling of older Republicans. At the 2012 Republican National Convention, he secured a ten-thousand-dollar donation to his organization from the prominent evangelical investment manager Foster Friess. Soon, Kirk, who was from the suburbs of Chicago, began courting donors in Palm Beach. His previous garb of nerdy suits gave way to sports coats and sneakers.
Kirk, who dropped out of community college, made universities the testing ground for his movement. Not long after he founded Turning Point, Kirk began staging tours of American colleges, taking on liberal students in rapid-fire encounters that came to be called “Prove Me Wrong” debates. The topics—“Abortion is murder,” “College is a scam”—were designed to provoke his challengers, and as the events grew more popular, drawing hundreds or thousands of onlookers, Kirk developed his iconic approach to ideological opponents. He became annoyingly calm, unspooling practiced arguments about crime in Black communities or the dangers of illegal immigration. He was a talented debater, though he sometimes leaned on misleading statistics and memorable one-liners. “Kids are way more important than being a data scientist at Dropbox,” he told one young woman, who argued for starting a career before having children. “We have seen a spike where half of women in their thirties that are unmarried are on antidepressants.” (This is inaccurate.) Although Kirk would occasionally concede a point or confess that he didn’t have a ready response to a question, the aim of these debates wasn’t mutual understanding; it was reducing his opponents to a state of outrage or dismay.
Among Gen Z-ers, clips from Kirk’s debates went viral, circulating on social media and YouTube with headlines such as “Charlie Kirk DESTROYS Liberal Logic.” He modelled arguments for young conservatives to follow. Beginning in her early teens, Joyce loved watching Kirk’s debates on Instagram, seeing in them not carefully honed rhetorical tactics but authentic civility. “He could completely win the argument and debate—no matter how rude, disgusting, and nasty these people would get toward him,” she told me. “He was not fake. He was not stuck up. He was kind. He was caring. He listened.”
Last year, on September 10th, Kirk was assassinated in the midst of a debate, in front of some three thousand people at Utah Valley University. Afterward, Joyce was inundated with D.M.s, phone calls, and visits to the pet store by kids who wanted to get involved in Turning Point or start their own chapters. Joyce knew that her state was growing redder. Still, she said, “I didn’t realize how fast Florida was going until I got a million different requests.” This spring, even as teens launched chapters of Turning Point across Palm Beach County, they grappled with dissension within the organization over Kirk’s legacy and Trump’s wars. Some began to move away from it. Joyce remained. She told me, “There are some kids like myself who have put their faith in their trust and courage in God and continue to walk forward.”
At the time of Kirk’s assassination, he was arguably the most powerful political organizer in America. Beginning in 2016, when Kirk was twenty-two, he spoke at each Republican National Convention. He harnessed his charisma, his organizing power, and his closeness to the Trump family to build the largest and wealthiest right-wing youth organization in the country, with revenue of eighty-five million dollars in 2024. That fall, Kirk visited twenty-four college campuses and travelled with a new Christian arm of his organization, TPUSA Faith, to cast the Presidential election as a fight against evil. Democrats “stand for everything God hates,” Kirk said, calling the Trump campaign “a spiritual battle.”
Kirk had been animated first by traditional Republican topics, such as school vouchers and lower taxes, and he still sometimes spoke about those issues. But, after defending the separation of church and state early in his career, he’d embraced the Christian vision of America that drew Joyce to his movement. The pandemic played a pivotal role in this transformation. As campuses shut down, his college tours were cancelled. Many states and local governments limited in-person worship, deeming large gatherings unsafe; Kirk began speaking to congregations that defied COVID regulations. “Charlie thought that the church was going to push back, and they didn’t,” Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point and the producer of Kirk’s daily broadcast, “The Charlie Kirk Show,” told me. “And so he realized that there was a huge void in the space for churches to get on board and to be a part of this liberty movement.”
In the pandemic years, Kirk found common cause with Rob McCoy, an influential pastor from Godspeak Calvary Chapel, in Southern California, and a proponent of a once little-known movement called the Seven Mountains Mandate. Seven Mountains has brought the language of spiritual warfare and demon-fighting into the mainstream of evangelicalism, through a network of pastors who view themselves as prophets and apostles engaged in a battle against evil secular forces. The movement “is both political and religious,” Matthew Boedy, a professor of English at the University of North Georgia and the author of a book about Seven Mountains, explained. Its leaders, who include the televangelists Lance Wallnau and Paula White, urge believers to take control of seven spheres of influence in the United States—education, entertainment, media, religion, family, business, and government. “Seven Mountains isn’t just charismatic theology,” Kristin Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University who studies the current Christian right, told me. “This is a vision for a total takeover of society.”
Kirk helped popularize some of the principles of Seven Mountains, introducing the idea of the seven spheres to his millions of followers. His broader notion of returning America to its supposed theological origins is often known as Christian nationalism. (Kolvet rejected the term, calling it “a pejorative used to smear and categorize conservative Christians.”) Kirk often spoke about the Founders, arguing that the country had been envisioned by and for Protestants. “One of the reasons we’re living through a constitutional crisis is that we no longer have a Christian nation, but we have a Christian form of government, and they’re incompatible,” he said in 2024. His later posts online interspersed paeans to Scripture with warnings about American decline and support for President Trump’s immigration policies. “No civilization has ever collapsed because it prays too much,” he wrote on X a week before his death. “But a civilization that abandons God will deteriorate and ultimately collapse from the inside out, or because it loses the will to repel a malicious, external force.” For Kirk and millions of other believers, those forces were terrifyingly real. Speaking at Illinois State University in 2025, he warned of “an unknown, unseen demonic realm.”
Two days after Kirk was killed, his widow, Erika Kirk, declared him “a martyr.” She exhorted his young followers, “If you aren’t a member of a church, I beg you to join one, a Bible-believing church. Our battle is not simply a political one above all. It is spiritual. The spiritual warfare is palpable.” Kirk’s memorial, which took place in Arizona, where he had lived, was attended by nearly a hundred thousand people. Held at State Farm Stadium, in Glendale, the event featured remarks by President Trump and Vice-President J. D. Vance, who had flown to Utah on Air Force Two to bring Kirk’s body home. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, declared Kirk “a warrior for Christ,” who “started a political movement but unleashed a spiritual revival.” The conservative talk-show host Tucker Carlson, who counted Kirk as a spiritual adviser, struck a prophetic note, comparing Kirk’s death to the Crucifixion. “He was bringing the Gospel to the country,” Carlson said. “He was doing the thing that the people in charge hate most, which is calling for them to repent.”
In the final months of his life, Kirk rebranded Turning Point’s high-school chapters, casting them as part of his new vision of the United States. He called the program Club America. “We realized that the indoctrination of young kids to hate their country and to think that we’re just a bunch of systemically oppressive colonialists that hate Indigenous people was happening earlier and earlier,” Kolvet told me. “We wanted to have a presence in high schools, so that conservative kids, Christian kids, more liberty-minded kids, kids who were curious or who just had a penchant for loving their country, had a place to meet and gather.”
According to Kolvet, the name, which was first suggested by Turning Point field organizers, delighted Kirk. “Charlie loved calling it Club America,” Kolvet said. “How can you not love a club that celebrates America?” Club America would focus more on patriotism than on partisanship, encouraging students to put up flags and stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. “Let’s keep it simple,” Kolvet said, recalling Kirk’s thinking. “We love the greatness of America. We believe in the exceptionalism of this country and in the Providence of God having his hand on this country.” Faith, he added, was integrated into every aspect of Turning Point. “It doesn’t mean that you have to be a Christian to be part of Club America, but, listen, there’s so many kids that were inspired by Charlie’s faith,” he said. “So it’s there, and it’s a huge part of it.”
Kirk’s ambition was to seed a Club America chapter in every high school in the country. Kolvet told me that, after Kirk’s death, he “realized that Charlie’s vision was within reach.” Officials in eight states—Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas—encouraged students to establish Club America chapters in their public schools, often describing the group as devoted to free speech and civil discourse. Turning Point says there are now thirty-six hundred Club America chapters nationwide. (Not all are officially recognized as student organizations.)
After Kirk’s death, Club America chapters proliferated in Palm Beach County’s private schools, including the Benjamin School, which is among the most academically rigorous. The school was founded in 1960, when the town of Palm Beach was mostly a seasonal community. Now, following the pandemic, Palm Beach has become a leading destination for families relocating from New Jersey, New York, and California. High-school tuition at Benjamin is roughly forty thousand dollars per year. Tiger Woods’s son, Charlie, recently finished his junior year, and Trump, Jr.,’s daughter Kai just graduated.
“This is primarily a white and wealthy school,” Nahla Bond, a junior and the president of the diversity council, told me when I visited the campus this spring. “The parents are Republicans, and so are the kids.” But events in students’ lifetimes also played a role in sharpening their opinions. Darren Lowe, a retired banker and the former chair of the board of the Benjamin School, told me, “The kids that are growing up here that are the COVID babies, who are ages fourteen to twenty, question other people telling them what to do.” During the pandemic, Lowe, the father of two boys, wrestled with establishing safety measures at Benjamin, and he was struck by the arbitrariness of many health protocols. “We found there were a lot of doctors that were wrong on the right. There were a lot of doctors that were wrong on the left,” he said. “And we also found that no doctor ever came back to us and said, ‘By the way, I was wrong.’ ” Kids in the community, including Lowe’s elder son and his friends, were subject to inconsistent rules, which made them quick to question authority. “They grew up faster,” Lowe said.
Unbeknownst to many parents, Charlie Kirk was reaching millions of adolescents online during the COVID lockdown, warning about government overreach and liberal shaming. After Kirk claimed that the drug hydroxychloroquine was “100 percent effective” in treating COVID-19, he was temporarily banned from Twitter. But kids weren’t following him on Twitter. They were watching videos of him on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, in which Kirk stoked resistance to vaccine mandates, arguing that they created “almost this apartheid-style, open-air hostage situation” and that they were particularly unfair to low-risk groups, such as people under thirty. “Children are so phone-based and YouTube-based that a lot of us as parents, if we were more middle of the road, were surprised at how the children were viewing it,” Lowe told me. By taking on established authority figures, Kirk became phenomenally consequential. “I would say that eighty per cent of the parents down here learned about Charlie Kirk and what he was presenting after he died, not before,” Lowe said. “And his death galvanized those children.”
About a week after Kirk’s killing, Benjamin observed a minute of silence in his honor at the end of an assembly, which was followed by an invitation to gather at a flagpole and pray. Students went on to found the Club America chapter, which quickly became one of the most popular groups at the school, amassing forty or fifty members. Ava Seested, a senior, had started watching Kirk’s debates in middle school. When he died, she said, “everyone who followed him felt the loss of a brother, because of how grounded he was in his faith, how much he led people to God.” Julian Koehler, a sophomore and a nationally ranked golfer, first encountered Kirk on Instagram and was drawn to his stance on abortion; Kirk opposed it, on the basis of his Christian faith, with virtually no exceptions. Koehler’s mother, Evelyn Burbano-Koehler, credited Kirk with kicking off a spiritual revival. “In this country, it became bad to have faith and say the word ‘God,’ but it’s changing,” she told me. (A recent Gallup poll suggests that young men, in particular, are experiencing a deepening connection to their faith, with forty-two per cent saying religion is “very important” to them.)
The praise for Charlie Kirk proved controversial among some Benjamin students. Bond said she was “shocked” that her classmates were honoring Kirk. Although she described her political leanings as “libertarian”—a term she landed on by doing an online quiz in her A.P. government class—she was turned off by Kirk’s statements about civil rights and gender identity, among other topics. He frequently maligned Black leaders, calling Martin Luther King, Jr., “a bad guy,” and described the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as “a huge mistake.” He said that “the transgender thing happening in America” was “a throbbing middle finger to God.” Kirk was also a proponent of the “great replacement” theory, which posits that a liberal élite—particularly Jews—is attempting to erase white America by flooding the country with immigrants. “They won’t stop until you and your children and your children’s children are eliminated,” he warned. Bond asked, “What Charlie Kirk said about women and people of color, how can you agree with that or think that’s normal?”
Liam Duffy, a sandy-haired senior who served as vice-president of the diversity council and president of the student body, vehemently opposed Kirk. Duffy, who is openly gay, was well liked and more outspoken than many of his classmates. One evening, he invited me over for a dinner of filet mignon and baked sweet potatoes with his parents and his sister, a sophomore at Benjamin. During dinner, as CNN played in the background, Duffy pointed out that a few weeks earlier the TV would’ve been tuned to Fox News. His parents, who had voted for Trump in the past three elections, were moving away from him because of his increasing engagement in foreign wars. Still, they didn’t share their son’s liberal politics or his disdain for Kirk. “He’s homophobic, so I’m not a fan,” Duffy said. “I also think he’s racist.”
A few days later, Duffy hosted my visit to Benjamin. Duffy, who’d been handing out Dunkin’ Donuts to classmates, led me through an airy compound of blue-and-white buildings surrounding a turf-covered knoll dotted with Adirondack chairs. Outside an English classroom, a bulletin board featured an image of a smiling pig and the last line of “Animal Farm”: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Inside the classroom, Duffy introduced me to Seested, who wore a Parke mock-turtleneck sweatshirt. (“Hoodies overstimulate me,” she said.) A transplant from the North, like so many kids at Benjamin, she grew up in Maryland as a nondenominational Christian, attending Catholic school until she was nine. “I would go to school and do Hail Marys,” she said. “I knew deep down that my belief was that we only pray to God.”
In 2017, Seested’s family threw out their snow scrapers and moved to Florida, where she found herself among like-minded Christians and a welcoming conservative culture. Seested soon began watching Kirk on YouTube at night before bed. “I wanted to be informed about why I was believing what I believed, and I wanted to have the facts,” she said. Seested was especially compelled by Kirk’s strong stance on illegal immigration. Her mother, Biani Xavier, had emigrated legally from Brazil, and the family felt that, as Xavier told me later, “if someone gets deported, they’re breaking a law.” Seested said that watching Kirk had taught her “to be very proud of what you believe in but also be respectful and do it in a way that you love everyone.”
Seested attended Club America’s lunchtime debates, which took place in a calculus classroom decorated with University of Florida pennants. Inspired by a format often used on Jubilee, a popular YouTube channel, one conservative student took a seat in the center of a ring of chairs, and liberal audience members jostled to sit across from him and debate him. They argued over hot-button topics—health care, gun rights—in three-minute rounds. Seested didn’t volunteer to debate, but she listened closely and was impressed by the eloquence of speakers on both sides. “I think he had good facts, good evidence,” she said of a liberal classmate. “Although I don’t agree.”
Later, Duffy told me that, despite the high rates of attendance, he was one of only about ten kids willing to participate at the debates. At the first one, in November, he’d argued in favor of abortion and gun control. At another, in February, he’d contested the legality of ICE raids in Minneapolis. But, when one student made a provocative claim that noncitizens aren’t entitled to equal protection, the debate devolved. Boys on the sidelines began to clap and whoop. “A lot of people like the spectacle,” Duffy said. “It’s like watching a YouTube video.”
Club America had a moment at Benjamin, but it may have more lasting appeal among teens who see themselves as being outside the conservative establishment. Kirk was fixated on the economic woes of young people. “You don’t have to stay poor,” he said in his speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention. “You don’t have to accept being worse off than your parents. . . . You don’t have to support leaders who lied to you and took advantage of you for your vote.” Many kids joined Club America in part because Kirk’s conservative principles appealed to them and in part because rubbing elbows with wealthy donors who frequented Mar-a-Lago did, too.
One afternoon, Gracie Bell Joyce met three current and former officers of Club America at a Starbucks a couple of miles from the pet store. The four were friends, and Joyce called the others her “team.” Jayden Antropov, a floppy-haired recent high-school graduate, had taken the day off from working two part-time jobs, at Publix and at a burger joint. He was the only one who’d met Kirk, he told me proudly; Antropov had encountered him at two Turning Point events in 2023, and Kirk had called on him to start a chapter at his high school, in Palm Beach County. Nick Perisse, wearing a suit and a red tie, was a fervent young Catholic whose family had arrived from Brazil in 2017. He’d founded a chapter at his public high school, in neighboring Martin County, in 2025. Juan Suarez Escobar, who was born in Venezuela, had emigrated from Colombia with his family in 2016. He was a student at a private Christian school, the King’s Academy, and ran a regional chapter of Club America. He also worked as a cater waiter and pulled espresso shots at a nearby BMW dealership on weekends.
In addition to the pressures of work and school, there were challenges to being a visible member of Kirk’s movement. “There’s a million people out there who hate us,” Joyce said as she waited in line for a Mint Majesty tea with two pumps of honey—Kirk’s signature drink. When her tea was ready, Joyce cupped her hands around the warm drink and recounted a story she’d seen on Instagram of a woman who’d made the same order only to have “loser” written on her cup. “Anytime I post something in support of Trump, I get ‘MAGA maggot’ in my comment section,” Joyce said.
Perisse had recently represented Turning Point in a debate at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, and he’d been heckled by liberals while he was arguing against abortion. “I was booed and called a fascist,” he said. Perisse was an intellectual, and his family wasn’t rich; he was used to being an outsider, which was a large part of why he liked Kirk. “Charlie led a group of students who felt disenfranchised by the establishment, who for years were cast aside as if their opinions had no value,” he said.
Joyce posed the boys for a picture, calling them her “fellow-nerds.” Suarez Escobar ducked out of the frame. “Speak for yourself!” he said. He hoped to be a Marine pilot, and with aviators hanging from the neck of his quarter zip he epitomized the new “Top Gun” conservative aesthetic. Suarez Escobar said he had been drawn to Kirk’s movement mostly because of his own political leanings—he described himself as a fan of Marco Rubio—and also because he viewed it as “helpful for college.” In 2024, the same year he became a U.S. citizen, he tried to start a Turning Point chapter at the King’s Academy. But the school demurred, he told me, so he’d founded his regional chapter in Palm Beach Gardens, a city of some sixty thousand people just north of West Palm Beach.
Around a blond-wood table, the teens traded stories about how COVID-19 had informed their perspectives. As middle schoolers during the pandemic, they’d endured masking, Zoom school, and vaccine mandates. Joyce, as a homeschooler, was a step ahead: her family already opposed all vaccination. “I have never gotten a vaccine,” she said. She asked her friends about the COVID-19 vaccine. “Any of you guys got it?” All three said no and quickly pivoted to talking points. “It showed Charlie’s point that freedom is not free. Authoritarianism is always knocking at the door,” Perisse argued. Suarez Escobar said, “We’re all about ‘My body, my choice’ ”—the anti-vaccination movement has adopted the abortion-rights slogan. “But we didn’t have a choice back then.” As a seventh grader, he’d spoken out at school against the vaccine. “A girl slapped me,” he said.
The following afternoon, Suarez Escobar invited me to visit the King’s Academy. It was born out of a prayer circle, in 1969, in which a group of evangelical businessmen began to speak about the need for a major Christian school in Palm Beach County. Since then, the King’s Academy, which is dedicated to “the King of Kings and Lord of Lords,” has come to occupy a sprawling sixty-five-acre campus in West Palm Beach.
When school let out, at 3:05 P.M., a line of Mercedes S.U.V.s and Cadillac Escalades snaked around the lot, driven by women in hand-knit sweaters with tousled hair. Gone were the outmoded trappings of evangelical subculture (“The higher the hair, the closer to God”). Suarez Escobar was waiting for me in the school’s glassed-in entry, along with Alexandra Kravecz, the vice-president of his Club America chapter. She was also his girlfriend. Wearing a blue-and-red plaid uniform skort and carrying a Stanley tumbler bedazzled with the American flag, she led the way across campus, noting, with pride, that Mike Pence was going to be their graduation speaker. “That’s insane to me,” Kravecz said, gleefully.
High-school tuition at the academy is at least thirty thousand dollars, and Kravecz was on a partial scholarship from a Christian pre-law-studies program. She took me to a vast mock courtroom at the school, which was wood-panelled and windowless, with a judge’s bench, a witness stand, and a large gallery. Stencilled on one wall was the Preamble to the Constitution. Every year, she had to stand up in the courtroom before her donors and prove to them what she’d learned about the law. She also participated in law and debate competitions against other schools. These events were secular, Kravecz explained, but the King’s Academy kids argued their positions from “a Biblical perspective.”
Leaving the building, Suarez Escobar and Kravecz settled in the sunshine at a round blue picnic table and talked about their Club America activities. Most of what they did was hand out merch—laptop stickers and tiny Constitutions sent to them by Turning Point. “Charlie Kirk stood up for what Jesus would believe in,” Kravecz said. Suarez Escobar was wearing a navy-blue polo that revealed a Latin phrase tattooed on his right biceps: “Aut viam inveniam aut faciam”—“I shall either find a way or make one,” a quote attributed to Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who, in the third century B.C.E., battled against the powerful Roman Republic. A few weeks ago, Suarez Escobar texted me to say that he’d decided to go to Florida State University, where Kravecz was also headed. Suarez Escobar was determined to become the president of F.S.U.’s Turning Point chapter. “I have a lot of vision, and I feel like I have the charisma to get it done,” he told me.
In his view, winning teens over to Club America wasn’t a matter of hammering home statistics. “I don’t force facts down their face, because you don’t really learn from facts at the end of the day,” he said. “You gotta appeal to people’s emotions.” Suarez Escobar described Kirk as a modern-day version of the Apostle Paul, who spread the Christian message throughout the ancient world in the years following Jesus’ death. He said, “Charlie Kirk reflected Christ in ways I could only imagine doing.”
In Kirk’s absence, the Trump Administration has attempted to anoint someone else to legitimatize its Christian bona fides. Pete Hegseth, a Christian nationalist, has served as one of Kirk’s stand-ins, but J. D. Vance’s messaging has carried more authority. In May, at a prayer rally on the National Mall, Vance, appearing by video, invoked George Washington, John Adams, and “my dear friend, the late, great Charlie Kirk.” Kirk believed that “all law reflects a morality” and that both law and morality “ultimately come from religion,” Vance said. “And the morality and religion that formed the American consciousness were decidedly Christian.”
These ideas continued to animate Kirk’s followers, but by the end of the spring semester Turning Point’s influence had waned. At Benjamin, Club America still held well-attended meetings, but the energy had “kind of died down,” Koehler told me. When the chapter first started, he had been so enthusiastic that he’d hoped to become an officer. Not anymore. He felt the same admiration for Kirk, but he’d lost interest in Turning Point. “I don’t see them on my social-media feed, any big campus events,” he said. “It’s less about free speech and more supporting Trump.” And young people were losing interest in Trump, as he saw it. No one wanted more “forever wars.”
Duffy offered more pointed observations. “With high schoolers, it’s more about what they see on their social media,” he said. Kirk had disappeared from their feeds, and Erika Kirk had gone viral for the wrong reasons—taking the stage at her husband’s memorial service amid pyrotechnics and attempting her own campus tour, undermining her image as a Christian trad wife whose priorities were her family and her home. “There’s been all kinds of attacks from the left but also from the right,” Du Mez, the historian of the Christian right, said of Erika. “She seems to lack any kind of authenticity.” Crowds had thinned at recent Turning Point events, and after Erika failed to appear at a University of Georgia rally, citing security concerns, the chapter president resigned. With the MAGA alliance strained and conspiracy theories emerging about Kirk’s death, it wasn’t clear who, if anyone, possessed the gravitas to hold Turning Point together. “Erika Kirk made it into a joke,” Duffy said. “It’s not a good look. People don’t want to be associated with it.” (In a text message, Kolvet wrote, “Erika Kirk has displayed incredible courage and strength, stepping into an unimaginable tragedy while shepherding Turning Point through the largest, most explosive growth period in its history.” He added that the organization is “100% behind Erika Kirk.”)
If Turning Point was to survive, it would likely need to continue moving, as Kirk had, toward a Christian politics. “Charlie Kirk was one of the most open-minded people,” Tucker Carlson told me. “Maybe because of his age, Charlie was absolutely delighted to change his views.” Carlson, who began reading the Bible four years ago and claims he has read no other book since, noted that Kirk took a radically progressive tone in an interview with him last summer. Kirk had fretted about the heavy debt loads of young people and what he described as an “economic nihilism that has set into a lot of this next generation.” He saw a solution in the Bible. “One of the more beautiful teachings is called the Year of Jubilee,” Kirk said. Every fifty years, all debt was abolished. “I know I sound like a left-wing, Elizabeth Warren person,” Kirk went on. “I don’t care.”
When Carlson and I spoke, he proposed that Kirk was feeling his way toward “a Christian economic system.” “I don’t know that there’s a prescription for it in the New Testament. However, I do know there’s a lot about money and the purpose of it, and it’s to serve other people,” Carlson said. “And so I know that whatever we have now is like the opposite of a Christian economic system.”
Since Kirk died, Carlson has continued to develop his thinking about Christianity as a blueprint for America. In February, he withdrew his support for Trump, calling Trump’s foreign interventions “not acceptable for Christians.” He asked, after Trump posted an image of himself as Jesus, “Could this be the Antichrist? Well, who knows?” Carlson told me that he’d never heard of the Seven Mountains Mandate, but he echoes many of the movement’s ideas, saying that Trump’s ability to bend others to his will may be “supernatural” and that the Iran war is driven by “demonic influence.” Carlson has spoken of his own brush with demonic forces, who left him bloodied and scratched in the night, while his wife and their four spaniels slept undisturbed. He has also used more secular language to describe his fear and disillusionment. “You vote for a guy who’s wholly outside the political system in order to change the political system, and he’s immediately captured by the political system and becomes its most effective tool,” he told me. “So what does that tell you? It tells you that politics is not the solution.”
In Carlson’s view, “politics has reached its terminus,” he said. “So your options at that point are violent revolution—which I think Palantir is going to make pretty difficult to pull off—or spiritual revival.” But though Carlson and many of Kirk’s young followers were moving away from Trump, there were few indications that right-wing Christians were abandoning him. When Trump posted the image of himself as Jesus, Franklin Graham, a son of Billy Graham and the leader of his father’s evangelical empire, defended him. “He is the most pro-Christian, pro-life president in my lifetime,” Graham wrote on X. Du Mez said she had “a hard time seeing a full parting of ways” between Christian nationalists and the Trump Administration. “What they have in common is the realization that majoritarian democracy will impede their goals. And they both need each other.”
As the summer began, Gracie Bell Joyce still missed Kirk profoundly. “The whole world misses Charlie,” she told me. Joyce, who didn’t like to criticize anyone, was reluctant to call out Erika Kirk, but she said that, as Erika’s credibility plummeted, friends and family members had called on her to leave Turning Point. “The first thing that came to my mind when everyone was telling me, ‘Quit, quit, quit,’ was Isaiah 41:10: ‘Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and uphold you with my righteous right hand,’ ” Joyce said. “And so I said, ‘Lord, if it is not for me, pull me out of it.’ ” But she had received no indication that God wanted her to leave Kirk’s movement.
Joyce was moving away from MAGA, which she’d never really embraced. “I got a hat and a sticker on Election Night, but I’ve never worn them,” she said. She also tired easily of the various voices vying for power in Kirk’s absence. “Everyone hates Nick Fuentes,” she said, of the popular white nationalist. “I don’t agree with Nick Fuentes, but I don’t agree with Taylor Swift, either.”
Recently, Joyce has taken to praying over Wild Cargo Pets. “Every single day before I open up, I put my AirPods in, I put on worship music,” she told me. “As I’m sweeping and vacuuming and mopping, I’m praying.” She lights a white timber Pet Odor Exterminator candle to mask the scent of fish scales and furry bodies. Then she checks on the three hundred baby chicks the store has for sale, to make sure “everyone’s alive and kicking.”
She asks for God’s guidance during her day, and for his protection. The store has received unnerving visitors in the past: one man, after being refused a rabbit, flashed a firearm, which turned out to be a toy. Now that Joyce was praying in the store, “I’ve noticed there’s less chaos,” she said. She was talking to Turning Point about starting an explicitly faith-based chapter. “I really, really, really, really want to do that,” she said. “But at the end of the day, no matter what happens with Turning Point, I’m still here, unless they take me out.” ♦