From Jeff Childers ( re Charlie Kirk and his Conservative Youth Group… Turning Point )

Yesterday, Rolling Stone ran a wild-eyed scare story on Charlie Kirk, headlined “Charlie Kirk’s ‘Turning Point’ Pivots to Christian Nationalism.” The terrifying peril was revealed in the wonky sub-headline: “The organization founded to promote the free market sure is spending a lot of time promoting attacks on the separation of church and state.”

Not that! Not attacking the separation of church and state!*

(*separation sold separately, not included with Constitution)

Charlie Kirk founded Turning Point a little over ten years ago as a youth movement, aimed at teaching college and high-school kids about conservative fiscal values. TPUSA organizes campus events, conferences, and conservative speakers; it advocates for free speech on campus and has filed several legal challenges against left-leaning academic biases.

TPUSA has been remarkably successful, and many folks consider Charlie’s work essential at helping to slow leftwing indoctrination of young Americans as much as possible. But for some reason, only now is Rolling Stone paying any attention to Charlie Kirk, and trying to assassinate his character.

The article’s unstated mission, revealed in the first sentence, is to sick the IRS on Mr. Kirk for political persecution, while cloaking itself in virtue and righteousness. Rolling Stone suggested one way to get Charlie might be to compare how much time he is spending on spreading Christianity as opposed to spreading “fiscal responsibility and the virtues of free markets,” which was Turning Point’s original mission, as described in its federal tax-free registration back in 2012.

Here’s how Rolling Stone described what it sees as an unforgivable breach in Charlie Kirk’s methods:

In recent months, TPUSA has adopted a cause that’s very different from foisting Milton Friedman on frat boys. The group is putting its cash, and its political cachet, behind Christian nationalism, promising to “restore America’s biblical values.” Indeed, TPUSA has embraced a new crusade to “empower Christians to change the trajectory of our nation.”
One can hope.

Anyway, the magazine’s unstated, highly technical argument is something like TPUSA’s non-profit donor funds aren’t being used for their “approved” purposes, instead, they’re just talking about Jesus all the time. But the joke’s on Rolling Stone, because if the magazine is right and not just wildly exaggerating, TPUSA would be a tax-exempt church.

As Charlie Kirk has physically matured, he has also spiritually matured. In recent years, he’s been increasingly public about his faith, and using his experience organizing nationwide college events, is now helping organize nationwide Christian events, like helping put on revivals at all 50 state capitols, organizing a national “Pastor’s Summit” (that, not coincidentally, opens today) featuring Eric Metaxas. Charlie’s also appeared on countless Christian-based podcasts and YouTubes, and he usually invokes Biblical principles and concepts as proposed answers to the Nation’s problems.

You might be thinking, so what? Let Charlie go play with all those kooky Christians, and good luck to him. But Rolling Stone REALLY doesn’t like it. Not one bit. To Rolling Stone, somebody should DO something. In fact, the magazine pretty much accused Charlie of being a straight-up Domestic Terrorist:

[Kirk’s] focus on fundamentalism represents a clear-and-present danger to democracy. Targeting a younger generation to raise up champions of lower taxes and fewer regulations is one thing. It’s quite another to seek to organize end-times zealots, with the aim of achieving a religious takeover of the secular United States.
A religious takeover! Oh no, Rolling Stone has figured out what Charlie Kirk is really up to! And he must be stopped, at all costs, because he’s really going to do it! Take over the United States! Religiously!

And if Christians take over the government, Rolling Stone reporters might have to stop attending leather festivals and stuff. And if that happened, what would they have to live for?

But the article’s real problem, beyond even Charlie Kirk, who is on the brink of fomenting a religious takeover of the country, is actually with the left’s latest made-up bogeyman-under-the-bed: “Christian Nationalism.” Wokesters believe “Christian Nationalists” are religious nutjobs who want to put an American Pope in the Oval Office and force women — real ones, perish the thought — to wear dresses and headscarves, and even worse, force men to NOT wear dresses.

In reality, leftist propagandists are slapping the scary “Christian Nationalist” label on any Christian who advocates for applying Biblical values anywhere in the political realm. It’s the inevitable endpoint of the made-up doctrine of separation of church and state: discrediting anyone who wants to apply their deeply-held religious beliefs to their politics.

Leftists really do not want Christians organizing themselves into a political bloc. Recently the FBI whistleblowers exposed the agency’s latest efforts to organize a network of paid snitches inside Catholic Churches, presumably to start up another round of January 6th-style prosecutions against any Catholic believers who might be leaning toward “Christian Nationalism.”

Last year on March 18, 2022, the Director of Strategic Response for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Andrew L. Seidel, testified to the House January 6th Committee. He began his remarks like this:

Dear Chairperson Thompson and Members of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol:
“Christian Nationalism is the biggest threat to America today. An existential threat to a government of the people, for the people, and by the people.”
I delivered that warning to a room full of reporters at the Religion News Association conference in Las Vegas on September 19, 2019. And 475 days later, on January 6, 2021, Christian Nationalists proved me right. They attacked our Capitol, our democracy, our nation, and you. Christian Nationalism was the banner under which the seemingly disparate groups united that day. This ideology provided the moral and mental permission structure Americans needed to assail American democracy.
… Christian Nationalism was THE central driving force on January 6.
There you have it. The biggest threat to America today, an “existential threat” — in the Left’s view. And of course, it’s a thought crime, a “moral and mental permission structure.” So, in other words, the biggest threat facing today’s Left is Christianity in politics. But why? How? How is “Christian Nationalism” — translated politically-active Christianity — how is that the Left’s BIGGEST threat?

To understand the answer, we’ll consider one aspect of the current culture wars, the so-called “trans” revolution. The trans movement is fundamentally a movement that erases women and permanently mutilates and sterilizes children. And a surprisingly large proportion of American society is going right along with it; they think it’s TERRIFIC.

Ask yourself if you agree with this principle:

A culture that abandons the most basic human motivation to protect its own women and children is a culture on the brink of collapse, a culture ripe for occupation by its enemies, a culture that, honestly, does not deserve to survive.

You probably took the human urge to protect our most vulnerable members for granted. You probably thought that urge was genetic, an evolutionary survival characteristic, part of the genome now, a done deal. But what if you were wrong? What if the “built in” desire to protect vulnerable women and children isn’t actually built in? What if those morally praiseworthy protective impulses, taken for granted for so long, aren’t actually genetic, but are really just the scraped-up bottom of the well of the last remaining bits of collective Judeo-Christian values, the values that comprised the foundation of our American ethic?

This is why the Left hates Christians dabbling in politics: the Bible messes up the program. And — I realize this statement might be controversial — a renewed social agreement on Judeo-Christian values is our only path to survival as a nation. Sure, you can try pulling values out of Christianity to cobble together a secular, religion-free version, but it has never successfully been done before, and since nobody alive truly understands how all the interacting Biblical values work together, trying to pick and choose among them is a strategy fraught with potential disaster.

I hope my secular C&C friends will grant me this one indulgence, and forgive me if I overstep. Maybe when you were a kid your parents made you snuggle with cobras in some weird church. Maybe you’ve struggled trying to imagine Santa-In-The-Sky.

Neither is real Christianity.

It might be time to take a closer look at Christianity — REAL Christianity, the intellectually, logically, and emotionally satisfying basic version, not the various supercharged Hollywood versions — taking a closer look if not for your own salvation, then at least so that you can ally yourself better with us.

Real Christianity isn’t weird or strange (it’s sometimes mysterious); but if you’re studying the true type, it should be consistent with your concept of desirable social values.

At this point, we’re way beyond Christianity just being a lifestyle choice. A strong faith might better be considered a survival characteristic, an original source of moral values that are necessary to hold civilization together. If we want to survive as a Nation, we won’t need to set up a state religion, but we MUST agree on a universal set of social values — such as values protecting vulnerable women and children, for example. Then we’ll have to teach those values, enshrine them, and politically enforce them.

Moral balkanization only produces chaos, which is exactly what we’re seeing in real time in our Twitter feeds.

Anyway, so that’s how Rolling Stone relates to Charlie Kirk, who relates to the whistleblowers, who relate to the FBI, which relates to the Left’s grand plan to morally poison civilization, which finally relates to biggest threat to the Left: shared morality, the antidote.