Striding on stage to thunderous music and strobing pyrotechnics, Charlie Kirk thanked God for Donald Trump’s victory in November’s presidential election during a speech that set the tone for a Jesus Christ-filled weekend at AmericaFest, Turning Point USA’s (TPUSA) annual gathering which drew 20,000 rightwing politicians, media figures and activists.
“We cannot take credit for what happened on November 5,” said Kirk, the firebrand director of TPUSA. “Who deserves credit is God Almighty.”
Kirk wrapped his speech on a similar note.
“Is God done with this country? Now I can say confidently, no, God is not done with America.”
The third annual AmericaFest was a victory lap for TPUSA, the group that took on the bulk of the Trump’s ground game during a 2024 campaign that secured him a second presidency. With its star-studded cast of Christian commentators, rightwing media superstars and a keynote address Sunday morning by Trump himself, AmericaFest showcased the Make America Great Again (Maga) movement’s vision for Christian power and its commitment to mobilizing more conservative evangelicals into the Republican party base.
That was evident from the first night on, when every speaker that followed Kirk on stage invoked Christian doctrine.
Ben Carson, the 2024 Trump campaign’s national faith chairperson, lamented the nation straying from Christianity and proclaimed that it is “time to come back to it”. Even Steve Bannon nodded to the idea that Trump’s presidency had been God-ordained – and suggested it could be prolonged to what would be an unconstitutional third term. He wrapped his comments by yelling “Trump 2028! MSNBC, fuck you”, and told the crowd: “Divine providence works through Donald Trump as its instrument.”
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And when an audience member asked Ben Shapiro how he would feel, as a Jewish person, about the Christian Bible being taught in public schools, the conservative commentator replied: “I think it’s great.” He called the Bible the “seminal document of western civilization”, and added that he believes “all of America is built on biblical values”.
Evangelicals have not always received Trump warmly. The divorced, serial philanderer who was found civilly liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E Jean Carroll outraged conservative Christians when he launched his first bid for the White House in 2015. But with the theological justification that he was an imperfect tool for God’s will on earth, many came around to the candidate – and evangelicals have formed a key segment of his base ever since.
The rest of the weekend focused largely on Christian power. Vendors promoted companies such as Patriot Mobile (“America’s ONLY Christian Conservative Wireless Provider”). Panelists led faith-focused breakout sessions and strategized the role of evangelicals in electoral politics. And there was Faith Night, the Saturday evening mainstage event, featuring a lineup of pastors and rightwing Christian influencers who decried secularism and prayed for an American revival spearheaded by Trump.
Although Christianity dominates religious belief in the US, with more than 65% of Americans identifying as Christian, according to 2023 survey data by the Public Religion Research Institute, presenters at the TPUSA event invoked longstanding, if unfounded, anxieties about systematic Christian persecution in the US to promote policies restricting LGBTQ+ rights and transferring political power to the church.
“For Christians in America, the race for freedom is more than a sprint – it is a marathon,” said the narrator of a promotional video for Pacific Justice Institute, an organization that the Southern Policy Law Center calls a hate group for its role in advocating against LGBTQ+ inclusion as well as promoting practices like conversion therapy. During the group’s 45-minute presentation, Pacific Justice Institute legislative counsel Janice Lorrah alleged the outgoing Joe Biden White House had “declared war on people of faith” and offered a note of optimism about Trump’s campaign promise to create a taskforce dedicated to rooting out anti-Christian bias.
During another strategy session, TPUSA field organizers focused on evangelical voter turnout and electoral strategy, chatting about what worked and what didn’t during the 2024 campaign season – and how the group could continue to mobilize churches into partisan politics. Registering voters in churches was an easy way to engage evangelicals and boost Republican turnout because “you’re going to a place that you know you will be registering conservatives,” said one Wisconsin panelist.
Some pastors that the group tried to engage, though, worried about risking their church’s tax-exempt status by participating in partisan electioneering – a practice that the IRS forbids churches and other 501c3 non-profits from engaging in.
During the session, David Rose, an Arizona pastor, offered a prayer and spoke about resistance from some churches to participate in electoral politics.
“I pray that you would raise up a remnant through Turning Point, God, as you have been doing through our faith coalitions,” Rose prayed. “And that around the nation, there would be pastors, Lord, who stand and say: ‘I can’t take this any more,’ and they begin to speak truth from their pulpit, and they do not walk in fear of the enemy, of losing their 501c3.”
Presenters on the Turning Point Faith panel highlighted an ongoing effort by the organization to help pastors establish political 501c4 organizations, parallel to their churches, to participate in partisan politics. On a big screen at the front of the conference room, attendees could scan a QR code, sending them to a registration page titled “501c4 application” and a form to fill out with their name, phone number, the name of the church and the church’s address – plus a section for interested participants to jot down notes.
The push parallels efforts by right-leaning Christian activists to do away with a law that prohibits churches and other 501c3 organizations from endorsing and donating to political candidates. Without such restrictions on electioneering, experts warn churches – which are not required to file 990 forms disclosing financial information to the IRS – could become conduits for large sums of untraceable money into political campaigns.
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Ending that law, known as the Johnson amendment – was top-of-mind for Gene Bailey, the host of the Christian television program FlashPoint, who recorded interviews live from the Phoenix Convention Center during AmericaFest.
“We’re looking to see [the Johnson amendment], once and for all, gotten rid of,” Bailey told the Guardian. “We need it to be resolved in the courts, versus another executive order.”
Bailey’s talkshow, which promotes the political ideology that biblical Christianity should rule over society and government, occupied a more marginal place in the conservative movement a decade ago.
But the old fringes of the evangelical world have moved squarely into the mainstream.
The weekend highlighted the common cause that Catholics, reformed Protestants and nondenominational charismatics – Christians who embrace prophetic visions, speaking in tongues and other direct experiences with the Holy Spirit – have found in the conservative movement.
“Historically, there’s a lot of infighting inside of the spaces,” said Tim Whitaker, host of the progressive Christian podcast The New Evangelicals and a prominent critic of Christian nationalism. Now, groups that “couldn’t be farther apart in terms of theology [are] speaking under the same organizational umbrella”.
One group of Christians were not welcome: progressives, and anyone whose theology strayed from the stringently anti-trans and pro-Trump messaging of Turning Point USA.
“I’ve made it my mission to eradicate wokeism from the American pulpit,” said Lucas Miles, TPUSA’s senior strategic faith director, during Faith Night on Saturday. Miles disavowed not only contemporary Christian progressives, but historical examples of Christian movements that advocated for social change.
“[Since] the late 1700s, that progressive thought has been creeping in,” said Miles. “ It came in with the social gospel, came in with a historical Jesus movement. Came in with liberation theology and Black liberation theology.”
Meanwhile, Christian nationalist ideas such as the “seven mountains mandate” – a call from rightwing figures in the charismatic movement for control over key “mountains” of society, including government and media – found a home at AmericaFest.
“I’ve been preaching for years – I’m saying there are seven mountains, seven key gates, that God wants you to be raised up locally and nationally, to have a strong nation,” said Lance Wallnau, a pro-Trump “prophet” who delivered a keynote speech on Saturday night.
“Watch how, in this year, God takes you through the two lead gates of Babylon, and you begin to plunder hell. Because we’re a movement that will not be stopped.”
