(RNS) — Just eight days shy of Election Day, 31-year-old political activist Charlie Kirk addressed a sea of college students in glaring-red MAGA hats at Grand Canyon University, near downtown Phoenix.
Sporting a black T-shirt emblazoned with “xy = man” — a confirmation of where he stands on the GOP’s 2024 litmus test issue — Kirk, who founded Turning Point USA as a college student in 2012, was interrupted as his audience erupted into a rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.” Afterward, students grabbed up TPUSA swag that said “Republicans are hotter” and “dump your socialist boyfriend.”
“Gen Z is waking up … and voting,” Kirk posted on X later that day. “WATCH.”
Kirk’s fall 2024 “You’re Being Brainwashed” tour is an effort advertised as a way to help students “challenge left-wing indoctrination on college campuses.” TPUSA has already signed up nearly 800 college chapters, but the event at GCU, established by Baptists but now calling itself interdenominational, is part of Kirk’s recent push to populate evangelical Christian campuses with TPUSA chapters.
Since 2020, TPUSA chapters have appeared at more than 45 Christian colleges or universities, at least 35 of them affiliated with the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, the largest association of Christian schools. Only 21 chapters at Christian universities appear currently active, however, with even fewer officially recognized by the universities themselves.
Expanding to Christian colleges, some scholars warn, may divide their campuses. The group, whose website says it plays “offense with a sense of urgency to win America’s culture war,” gained notoriety in 2016 for its professor watchlist, which prompted harassment of faculty at secular as well as Christian colleges, who, TPUSA said, “advance leftist propaganda.”
Kirk has disputed the results of the 2020 election, questioned the qualifications of Black pilots, called George Floyd a “scumbag” and said a Bible verse about stoning gay people to death is “God’s perfect law.”
“The Democrat Party supports everything that God hates,” Kirk said at a recent campaign event he organized for Donald Trump. TPUSA did not respond to requests for comment.
Students at Christian colleges who have launched or joined TPUSA chapters said in interviews this fall that the group helps build community and gives them a place to discuss conservative values.
“They say that we are racist and homophobic,” said Payton Stutzman, president of the TPUSA chapter at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, without specifying who “they” referred to. “We’re really not. We really just want to get together and have a good time. The main things we support is a secure border, a good economy, and the freedom to raise our family the way we think is right. We are not here to push anybody’s beliefs down their throats.”
Sarah Stock, a junior political science major at Vanguard University, a Christian university in Orange County, California, started a TPUSA chapter last fall as an outlet, she said, for political dialogue in what she described as an otherwise apolitical campus.
Last year at a screening of Matt Walsh’s “What Is a Woman,” a film in which Walsh, a controversial podcast host, talks about transgender issues, approximately 100 students attended. Among them was a group of friends who came up to debate the TPUSA members during a Q&A session.
