Many TPUSA Christian college chapters have hosted debate watch parties and have plans for election night gatherings. At Liberty, local and federal politicians are expected to attend the chapter’s formal election night gala.
JJ Glaneman, a sophomore at Duquesne University, a Catholic university in Pittsburgh, told RNS he’d also recently been doorknocking for Trump and GOP Senate candidate David McCormick.
Duquesne’s TPUSA chapter is unofficial. After attending TPUSA’s multi-day AmFest event in Arizona in December 2023, Glaneman filed to start a formal chapter in January but was denied by student government, who, Glaneman said, cited TPUSA’s values. Instead, Glaneman has co-founded a chapter of the 132-year-old College Republicans that they use as a “shield,” he said, to host conservative events on campus.
According to Matt Boedy, a professor of religious rhetoric at the University of North Georgia, TPUSA’s “star-studded” conferences, big-name speakers and viral political debates make TPUSA a more attractive option than a College Republicans chapter.
There’s also TPUSA’s funding. Tax filings from June 2023 showed that TPUSA took in $81.7 million, up from $2.05 million in 2015. Stock said that while her group could apply for “like $50 a year” from Vanguard, “we just get everything from Turning Point.”
Claire Bettag, a senior at St. Mary’s Notre Dame, said the Indiana Catholic school denied her attempt to found a chapter in 2022 due to TPUSA’s messaging on LGBTQ+ issues. Despite the rejection, Bettag has maintained an unofficial TPUSA chapter and a College Republicans club at the school and said TPUSA encouraged her to speak out when St. Mary’s decided to offer open enrollment to applicants “who consistently live and identify as women,” which included transgender students.
“We had met with the school board, the president, the vice president of the college, and we started multiple protests and did a lot of activism to get this policy reversed,” said Bettag. “I have confidence now to speak out about my conservative values that I never thought that I could ever have, and it’s because Turning Point really backed me up along the entire process.”
Saint Mary’s reversed its decision a month later, by which time, Bettag said, her unofficial TPUSA chapter had grown to 75 members.
Catholic University of America has also been hesitant to welcome TPUSA to its campus, as have some Protestant colleges. In 2021, Point Loma Nazarene University, a Church of the Nazarene school in San Diego, and Taylor University, an evangelical school in Upland, Indiana, said the national group conflicts with their mission statements.
The Grand Canyon University event shows that TPUSA’s efforts to enroll Christian students aren’t slowing down, and while Spencer said it’s still a question whether the campaign will translate to votes, Stutzman, at Liberty, said not all gains are political.
“Ultimately, at the end of the day, it’s not just political warfare,” he said. “It’s spiritual warfare that we’re fighting as well.”
This article originally appeared here.
