The Reports Of The Religious Right’s Death Were Greatly Exaggerated

In 2016, Russell Moore, then head of the political lobbying arm of the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, wrote in The Washington Post that Donald Trump had “snuffed out” the “Religious Right.”

Support for Trump, Moore argued, had so discredited the old moral majority establishment that the next generation of evangelicals would throw off the misguided notion that they should engage in political activism to ensure that the nation’s laws and customs reflect Christian values. “They are not replicating themselves in the next generation,” Moore said with blithe assurance of the James Dobsons and Jerry Falwells of yesteryear. “The evangelical next generation rejects their way.”

Instead, Moore said, younger Christians would be so put off by the partisanship of their forebears that they would embrace the death of cultural Christianity and resign themselves to being a religious minority. Beautiful losers, so to speak.

Moore was joined in this view by a number of evangelical luminaries who insisted that in the future, the appeal of Christianity would lie in its refusal to identify with either the Left or Right, in its ability to offer a politically homeless “third way” between the two. This was perhaps best exemplified by the late theologian and close Moore associate, Tim Keller, who told Premier Christianity in 2018 that Donald Trump’s outsized support from evangelicals had made it harder for Christians to share their faith. Keller believed that revival was possible in the United States, but he argued that politically moderate believers would have to separate from Trump supporters in order to bring it about.

But a funny thing happened on the way to right-wing secularization. His name was Charlie Kirk.

As Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles put it at Kirk’s memorial on Sunday, “His life, his words, his courage to speak the truth about God, family, and country built the most powerful youth movement in our time.” That movement is not only unequivocally conservative, but also unequivocally Christian.

As even Kirk’s critics have been acknowledging since his death, his political mission became inseparable from his evangelistic one. His arguments for his right-wing positions on everything from gender ideology to abortion to affirmative action flowed from his view of Scripture, which he never hesitated to bring into a debate. This included his support for Donald Trump, whom Kirk called a “generational leader ordained by God to save America from the forces of darkness.” When asked by a young high school girl how best to navigate the opposing political views of her divorced parents, Kirk told her, “The most important thing is to bring Jesus into your life … it’s way more important than politics.” His second piece of advice was to honor her parents by avoiding debates over Trump and instead bringing the conversation back to Scripture.

Kirk never evinced even the slightest whisper of embarrassment for being simultaneously Christian and full-throated MAGA.

If Moore and Keller were correct in their predictions, this kind of red-hatted proselytizing for both faith and conservative politics should have repelled college students and helped ensure the permanent irrelevance of Christianity in the next generation. Or at least in the next generation of the GOP. Instead, the opposite occurred, and occurred in such neon, stadium-sized fashion that the impotence of the Moore/Keller third way in attracting young converts can no longer be denied.

The revival came. The revival is here. And it is a conservative revival.

What the whole world witnessed on Sunday was not just the Republican administration Kirk helped put in office, demonstrating that it was willing to make room for Christianity, but that it wholeheartedly endorses it. And not with the vague allusions to a generic God common to political leaders in the past. On the international stage, reaching hundreds of millions of viewers, Trump’s cabinet members collectively gave more glory to Jesus Christ than any federal officials have done since perhaps our nation’s founding.

After full gospel presentations from pastor Rob McCoy and apologist Frank Turek, Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered his own:

We were all created, every single one of us, before the beginning of time, by the hands of the God of the universe, an all-powerful God who loved us and created us for the purpose of living with him in eternity. But then sin entered the world and separated us from our Creator. And so God took on the form of a man and came down and lived among us, and he suffered like men, and he died like a man, but on the third day, he rose unlike any mortal man. And then to prove any doubters wrong, he ate with his disciples so they could see, and they touched his wounds. He didn’t rise as a ghost or as a spirit, but as flesh. And then he rose to the heaven[s]. But he promised he would return, and he will. And when he returns, because he took on that death, because he carried that cross, we were freed from the sin that separated us from him, and when he returns, there will be a new heaven and a new earth.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth honored Kirk as “a true believer that only Christ is King, our Lord and Savior.” Lest there be any confusion over the import of that statement, Hegseth added, “Our sins are washed away by the blood of Jesus.”

Vice President JD Vance revealed that he had “talked more about Jesus in the past two weeks” than he had at any previous time in his life and said that “It is better to be persecuted for your faith than to deny the kingship of Christ.”

The response to Kirk’s legacy, so deeply rooted in his faith, has been electric, culminating in an outpouring of interest in Christ from previously uninterested social media users (X was littered with posts on Sunday night expressing Christ-curiosity from atheists, Muslims, and the lapsed).

Kirk’s assassination has, as martyr deaths tend to do, energized this trend, but it began before September 10, as the social media posts mirrored in polls and statistics.

A recently released report shows that since 2019, the number of Gen Z men who say they’ve made a “personal commitment to Jesus” is up 15 points. For Millennial men, it’s up 19.

The State of the Bible report shows an increase in “Bible users” (defined as people reading Scripture at least three times a year outside of church) from 38% to 41% among American adults. Once again, the most significant increases came from Millennials and men, who are closing the gender gap in Bible reading. Church attendance among men aged 18 to 24 has risen from 4% to over 20% in only six years in the United Kingdom. As The New York Times has reported, for the first time in modern history, young men are more likely to identify as Christians than young women.

At the same time that young men are becoming more Christian, they are also becoming more conservative. According to The Hill, Democratic registration among young white men has fallen from 49% to 29%. In the 2024 election, young men, typically an apathetic voting bloc, turned out in droves for Trump.

That’s the Charlie Kirk effect. Even if it wasn’t Kirk’s work exclusively, they were responding to him; he was arguably the most significant single factor in creating the conversation and cultural landscape that has drawn young men to both church and the Right. His influence exploded the carefully constructed perception, often fueled by money going from secular left foundations to evangelical ministries, that the party of abortion on demand and boys in women’s bathrooms should be a legitimate political option for Christians. He refuted the notion that biblically debatable issues like border policies or climate change have equal moral weight to indisputable Christian imperatives like opposing the killing of the unborn or banning gender transition procedures on children.

Charlie Kirk unashamedly argued that Christians should choose a side. And they should choose the side most aligned with biblical morality. His courageous conviction resonated with millions of young people across the country, proving that it’s not the religious Right at risk of extinction, but rather the inoffensive, third-way compromise approach.