How Charlie Kirk turned to religion to level up his racism

Charlie Kirk initially made his name by being the most obnoxious of the “debate me” bros. As far as titles go, it’s like winning “Most Stinky” at the Litter Box Olympics, but Republicans love men who are the worst, so it turned him into an overnight MAGA star. Kirk, who wanted to seem like a young and “hip” Republican when he started out, claimed in 2016 to have a “secular worldview.” Two years later, he criticized older Republicans for ignoring the “separation of church and state.” His organization, Turning Point USA, cited their values as “fiscal responsibility, free markets, and limited government.”

More recently, however, Kirk and TPUSA have undergone a dramatic Christian right makeover. As NBC News reported, he has “become one of the nation’s most prominent voices calling on Christians to view conservative political activism as central to Jesus’ calling for their lives.” By 2022, he was falsely claiming the separation of church and state is “a fabrication” made up by “secular humanists.” (In fact, it was “made up” by Thomas Jefferson.)

Kirk’s commitment to theocracy isn’t half-baked. He believes in the Christian nationalist concept of the Seven Mountains Mandate, which calls on far-right Christians to control not just all government, but media, business and education. This idea drove many of the rioters to the Capitol on Jan. 6, where some displayed Appeal to Heaven flags to demonstrate their belief in total Christian right domination.

There are many reasons that Kirk underwent this change. Religious fanaticism is central to Donald Trump’s base of support; the Capitol insurrection was evidence of this. And while the religious right has steered Republicans for decades, the situation grew worse during Joe Biden’s presidency, as right-wing media churned out ever-more-radical content denouncing LGBTQ rights and women’s equality. By starting Turning Point Faith in 2021, Kirk was hopping on the “trad” trend. He denounced the “LGBTQ agenda,” and equated homosexuality with “grooming” children for sexual abuse. (He said this while partnering with a pastor who did time in federal prison for attempted “coercion and enticement” of a minor for sex.) He has called on women to forgo education and careers so they can instead focus on being submissive housewives.

But another reason is deeply rooted in the history of white evangelicalism: Racism. Kirk, like decades of Christian right leaders before him, has found that loudly proclaiming your faith is an effective way to whitewash overt bigotry against people of color. And he has much to answer for when it comes to race-baiting. As Ali Breland of Mother Jones reported in 2024, Kirk has “hosted far-right and white supremacist figures on his podcast and has tweeted in support of whiteness, earning praise from white supremacists.”

This isn’t by accident, either. Kirk routinely expresses his own racist views. He suggested Black pilots are unqualified. He blamed a Black fire chief in Austin, Texas, for flooding deaths that occurred a three-hour drive away from the city. He denounced the passage of the 1965 Civil Rights Act and tried to discredit the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as “awful” and “not a good person.”

Last month, Kirk devoted a chunk of his podcast to honoring the influential evangelical pastor John MacArthur, who passed away on July 14 at the age of 86. Kirk called him “one of the most influential Protestant minds since the Reformation,” and a “legend” who “never bowed to the gods of this age” and “never apologized for Scripture.” Soaring language — but it’s a euphemism. One of MacArthur’s most famous old-fashioned beliefs was that slavery was godly.

In 2001, MacArthur delivered an infamous sermon at his California megachurch. He argued that Black people are cursed by God to be “servile people” who are “doomed to perpetual slavery.” There have been twisted efforts to rationalize what he said here, but the context of his entire sermon made his meaning quite clear. He’s invoking an argument that white Southerners used in the 19th century, claiming Black people were descended from the biblical figure of Canaan, who is cursed by God in the Book of Genesis to be a “servant of servants.” MacArthur claimed the descendants of Canaan populated Africa and carried this curse with them.

Eleven years later, he had not changed his mind. In an interview, MacArthur said, “It is a little strange that we have such an aversion to slavery.” He agreed that some slaveowners committed “abuses,” but then he noted our society hasn’t outlawed marriage or parenthood, institutions that have also had abuses. MacArthur argued that “working for a gentle, caring, loving master was the best of all possible worlds” for slaves who “had no other opportunity.” Then he equated being enslaved to a white man to being an obedient servant of Jesus.

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MacArthur was no outlier in his views, which is why he’s received such an outpouring of praise from the Christian right since his death. As historian Randall Balmer detailed in an influential POLITICO Magazine article published in 2014, the modern religious right was formed for “protecting segregated schools.”

Jerry Falwell, who founded the Moral Majority, the preeminent Christian right organization of the 1980s, got his start as an outspoken segregationist. Like Kirk, Falwell was a staunch opponent of King, preaching against him and other civil rights leaders as “communists” who were “exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed.”

Early in his career, Falwell gave a sermon in which he declared that integration “will destroy our race eventually,” warning that after school desegregation, legalized interracial marriage would be next. “A pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife,” he declared, horrified.

Falwell was wrong on the morals, but right on the facts. After Richard Loving, a white man in Virginia, was arrested for marrying Mildred Jeter, a Black woman, the couple sued the Commonwealth. Virginia, of course, is where Falwell lived and pastored the Thomas Road Baptist Church. In 1967, the Supreme Court declared interracial marriage legal nationwide. In the early ’70s, he opposed the federal government’s efforts to integrate private religious schools, saying, “In some states it’s easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school.”

As historian Anthea Butler has argued, “racism inflected almost every point of evangelicalism along the way.”

That’s the tradition Kirk is plugging into as he embraces both Christian nationalism and racist politics, which have always been deeply intertwined. In 2020, he and his favorite far-right pastor, Rob McCoy, released a podcast in which they denounced Black Lives Matter as “malevolent,” “anti-American” and “anti-Christian.” He has argued that the proper Christian view on immigration is not to “welcome the stranger” because “foreigners can become your masters.” When New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani ate biryani with his fingers — which is a normal practice in India, where his parents are from — Kirk used it to imply that the Muslim politician cannot be a real American because “we have utensils.”

Using religion as a cover for racism has long held this appeal for a simple reason: It puts an ennobling gloss on ugly feelings. It dresses up bigotry as if it were about faith and philosophy, instead of cruelty. It’s also about escaping responsibility. Since the racist cannot justify their views rationally, instead they blame God, who is conveniently never around to answer questions. It’s a pathetic excuse for small-minded people. No wonder Charlie Kirk embraced it so wholeheartedly.

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