Charlie Kirk’s death did not inspire the national spiritual awakening that was promised.
Quote:TPUSA’s “Make Heaven Crowded” revival tour is a disaster
As the name suggests, the tour’s stated goal is mass conversions to Christianity. And while Lucas Miles, the director of TPUSA Faith, insists this is about sharing the gospel over politics, videos from the event make clear that the hope is also to point voters toward the Republican Party. After all, right-wing politics was Kirk’s life’s work, despite revisionist efforts to paint him as a Christian prophet.
At the first stop of the tour in January, Erika Kirk declared “we will change this country” through a “revival” brought by an evangelical movement that “rises up and prays for this nation.”
These many months later, though, it seems that Charlie Kirk’s heaven isn’t going to be so crowded after all. The tour’s stops have been exclusively at evangelical churches and universities with crowds that don’t look especially different than what you’d get on any given Sunday at those locations. Despite TPUSA being marketed as a youth organization, and despite claims from the pulpit that there’s a youth revival in the works, the people spread out through semi-full auditoriums have tended to be gray-haired or balding. Even at Regent University, where one would expect a robust audience of young Christians, video of the event shows mostly older attendees — and plenty of empty seats.
The content of the programming suggests the organizers are well aware that they’re not trying to win souls to Christ as they claim. Sure, there’s the usual array of professional converts, with sometimes iffy stories about how they found Jesus after being lost in the wilderness. But strikingly, most of the speakers don’t even pretend at that, admitting that they grew up Christian and focusing on biological reproduction as their best bet for growing the church ranks, a message that meshes well with the increasingly white nationalist bent of Kirk’s beloved GOP.
Perhaps the funniest sign that Make Heaven Crowded isn’t doing so hot? The striking absence of Erika Kirk, who spoke at the kick-off event in Los Angeles but has otherwise been missing in action. She was reportedly scheduled to show up at the Orlando, Florida, stop in February, but that was canceled at the last minute. Kirk also bowed out of scheduled appearances in Plano, Texas, and at Iowa State University. But these absences haven’t received as much attention as her cancellation of a University of Georgia event in April, which left Vice President JD Vance speaking to an underwhelming crowd. While the excuses change — “family time,” “security concerns” and “scheduling conflicts” have been cited — the one constant is that Erika Kirk manages to not appear when the crowds aren’t looking robust.
The Make Heaven Crowded tour is sponsored by Preborn!, an anti-abortion group, and each stop features heavy-handed shaming of women of who have abortions. One speaker after another turns to politics, such as Blaze Media’s Allie Beth Stuckey, who lectures the crowd about how same-sex marriage and abortion supposedly offend God, or Christian commentator Millicent Sedra, who argues that this is an age of “sexual perversion” based on “young people dressed up as fairies, dressed up as dogs” and “kitty litters in the toilets” — a reference to a widespread and debunked conservative hoax.
It must be hard to feel morally superior when the leader of their political movement has started a foreign war for no good reason and keeps finding ways to block the full release of the Epstein files. Being told that everyone else is going to hell likely provides that boost of self-deluding self-esteem they need to stay the course. But as a message to bring new people in the fold, “the road to heaven is MAGA” will not work.
https://www.salon.com/2026/05/17/tpusas-...-disaster/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
