This Is the Moment Christian Nationalists Have Been Waiting For

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“A century from now, when they write of the two or three pivotal moments that led to the saving of Western civilization, they will write that the sacrifice of Charles James Kirk was the turning point,” Jack Posobiec, the right-wing influencer, told the masses at Kirk’s memorial. “By returning the people to Almighty God.”

The religious right says that return is already underway, that Kirk’s killing has inspired something remarkable in America. Thousands of people, you’ve been told, are responding to Charlie Kirk’s death by pulling out dusty Bibles or wandering into their nearest churches. Pastors describe^[2] packed^[3] pews^[4]; priests report^[5] fielding questions about adult baptism. You can see the evidence yourself: On social media, people are making teary videos professing to have rediscovered Jesus; in the comments, former atheists share stories of finding peace and purpose in prayer.

But they’re not calling it a return, they’re calling it a “revival.” That was a term that kept popping up during Kirk’s memorial rally on Sept. 20. “Charlie started a political movement but unleashed a spiritual revival,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said. “After Charlie’s assassination, we didn’t see violence,” Kirk’s wife, Erika, said. “Instead, we saw what my husband always prayed he would see in this country. We saw revival.” The White House X account captioned^[6] a video from the event “A REVIVAL.”

A “revival,” in the Christian tradition, can mean a number of things to do with an outpouring of faith. Traditionally, among Protestant Christianity, where the term is most often used, revival is evoked for a kind of born-again moment, in which people experience a sudden and overpowering personal connection with God; it sometimes happens in mass movements, with hundreds or thousands overcome in the same wave. In more Pentecostal-style Christianity, it can mean an awakening to the power of the Holy Spirit and the “gifts” that come with that—speaking in tongues, for example, or faith healing. Some traditions consider revival necessary to create the kingdom of God on Earth, to pave the way for Jesus’ second coming. Regardless, revival has traditionally been spoken of as a profound divine blessing.

This is something different, something more directly and overtly political. Coming from political actors and MAGA evangelical leaders, the revival they’re describing is a kind of fulfillment of political prophecies, an awakening of the American public to the calls from God—to embrace a version of Christianity that conquers American society and leaves it transformed. The society that this group seeks to create scorns what it sees as degrading elements of the secular world, abortion and LGBTQ+ rights chief among them. It prioritizes traditional understandings of family life, with mass media that celebrate traditional gender roles. It elects into office faithful Christians, men and women who base their laws and policies and court rulings on their religious beliefs, with non-Christian candidates being pushed from office. It encourages schools and other public institutions to openly engage in Christian religious practices. To transform society, the public and their leaders will need to understand that, above all else, political matters are not about partisan differences but the side of the angels against the forces of evil.

There’s a catch here: We have no idea whether Kirk’s death is prompting a mass popular embrace of conservative Christianity. It’s being loudly asserted, but hard, measurable data—such as numbers on church attendance or reliable polling on public opinion—are not yet available. And if there is a surge in religious fervor, it’s too soon to know if it will last.

But for this particular revival, a mass shift in public sentiment may be ancillary. Given the political nature of this project, it may be far more important for the movement’s leaders to create the impression of mass embrace of the religious right—and then leverage that perception to claim more power. Because while Kirk’s killing is what the movement sees as the catalyst for their revival, it’s far from the beginning of their ambitions to radically transform American society. Christian nationalists have been waiting for this moment for years.

Modern Christian nationalism—the MAGA-aligned movement that sees the United States as a fundamentally Christian nation, with a government and society that should be explicitly ordered by Christian values—emerged in its current form from white evangelicals’ alliance with Donald Trump. This Christian nationalism is more diverse in its coalition than previous Christian right movements and is ordered around Trump’s cult of personality, rather than any political assertions from religious leaders. And it has seen moments of particular potency in the news cycles of the Trump era, with additional vibrancy during the wave of anti-“critical race theory” school board meetings, the celebration after the fall of Roe v. Wade, and the ongoing furor over anything that smacks of tolerance for transgender people. But before Kirk’s killing, there had not been a single moment of tragedy to rally around, a single dramatic moment to unite the movement in its grief and anger, to push it to grander ambitions—to the promise of a “revival.”

The last time the religious right experienced a moment of such potential was in the early George W. Bush years, after the modern culture wars had broken out. At the time, the Christian right was led by evangelical institutions and conservative Christian pastors, and the movement was smarting from the Clinton years. Bush seemed to promise a new and energized ally for their movement, and evangelicals were thrilled that this anti-intellectual Texan had campaigned on his faith and on his Christian morals, claiming that Jesus was his favorite political philosopher. Christian culture responded: The apocalyptic-thriller Left Behind series became bestsellers, and Christian rock surged in popularity. “There was a hope and excitement and sense that perhaps we were on the verge of revival,” said Matthew Sutton, a history professor at Washington State University who researches Christian politics.

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks could have been the cultural moment to tip everything over into a kind of furious religious frenzy. But as Sutton noted, Bush himself chose not to infuse religion into the response. Instead of turning to an all-out religious crusade against Islam at home and abroad, Bush emphasized that the country was not at war with a religion. He chose instead to push a neoconservative militarism, ushering in a new kind of aggressively masculine but secular fanaticism. The politics shifted, and talk of a religious revival died down.

In the Obama era, some began to believe the time of the religious right was over. Gay marriage was legalized, laws were passed to protect against discrimination, and the religious right felt itself pummeled by a perceived war, waged by the government and a progressive popular culture, against Christianity.

“But every time we think the religious right is dead, it rears back even stronger,” Sutton said.

When Donald Trump was elected for his first term, some in the religious right hoped a revival of conservative Christian values was on the way. And there were certainly moments of euphoria for the movement, as when Trump moved the United States’ Israeli embassy to Jerusalem, which some evangelicals believed was necessary to set the conditions for Jesus’ return.

But the first Trump election was marked by a movement in turmoil, roiled with division from an old guard in leadership that saw white evangelicals as betraying their own values in supporting a crass and religiously illiterate philanderer. That doubting element was purged systematically over the first Trump administration, as evangelical institutions moved further to the right and individual evangelicals started listening to political pundits rather than these now-“woke” pastors and theologians. And once it was, the Christian right regrouped and presented itself as a single movement. When Trump was elected the second time, the Christian right was ready to assert its power.

By the time Kirk was shot, many Americans were already keyed to see signs of their long-awaited revival brewing. According to Matthew Taylor, a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore, many MAGA Christians had begun to look for such a revival once Trump won the 2024 election, believing Donald Trump would usher in a movement that would save America. “There’s been a lot of talk of revival since the inauguration,” Taylor said. “There was a sense there’s a third Great Awakening”—referring to the series of seismic religious revivals in U.S. history—“that’s bursting upon us.”

Since then, things have only seemed more promising. The long fight against Roe had been won. Major companies that once signed gay and transgender spokespeople dumped them after Trump’s election. Christian movies are churning out box-office hits^[7], and Christian musicians are landing on Billboard charts^[8]. Polling even shows that popular support for gay marriage is on the decline. The White House’s Religious Liberty Commission, which tends to meet at the Museum of the Bible, has focused almost exclusively on making sure Christians feel comfortable expressing their beliefs, even when those beliefs are discriminatory to LGBTQ+ Americans. The Trump administration has even expressed that Christianity is fundamental to the country’s very existence. As the White House posted^[9] on social media on Sept. 22: “Without borders, law and order, and religion, you don’t have a country.”

Even before Kirk was killed, Christian nationalists had gained a significant and growing foothold within the MAGA movement, including in the Trump administration. Russ Vought’s Project 2025, which lays out the blueprint for Trump’s second term, was an explicitly^[10] Christian nationalist document, citing as a goal replacing “civil rights” with “biblical principles.” Trump established a nearly fully Christian White House Faith Office with the orders to combat “anti-Christian bias”; its leader, the televangelist Paula White-Cain, has argued that the president was divinely selected to lead the country. And some of the most prominent members of the administration were deep in the movement: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who attends a church led by an extreme Christian nationalist and who sports Crusader tattoos, can certainly be described as a leader of the movement.

Kirk’s killing set the MAGA Christian nationalist movement up to abandon any anxieties it had about softening its message. Instead, they’re trumpeting a bold power grab.

“Leftists are enraged by the spectacle yesterday,” Matt Walsh, the conservative pundit, wrote^[11] on social media the day after the memorial. “They are calling us Christian nationalists. They say that we want to usher in a new era of Christian nationalism. They claim that we are more radicalized than we’ve ever been. And they’re 100 percent correct on all counts.”

Walsh wasn’t alone in seeing the potency of the moment. Stephen Wolfe, a self-avowed Christian nationalist, described^[12] Kirk’s killing as “Gen Z’s 9/11” on his podcast.

“This is a moment where you can communicate to your kind of normie evangelical friends that the left actually is an evil presence and that through the force of law and through the Constitution, these things can be suppressed,” he said. “And this is where you can say, ‘Look, justice, righteousness—we need to be a nation under God. We need to return to what we were at the founding and really a century and a half throughout this country, which was to be a Christian republic.’ ”

But what would such a “Christian republic” look like today? And how does the Christian right want to get there from here?

The first step, according to many of the MAGA movement’s leading figures, is a crackdown on the movement’s political opponents, particularly those opponents who’ve criticized Kirk or, especially, those who celebrated his killing. But there’s debate within the movement over what form that crackdown should take. Some, including Vice President J.D. Vance^[13], have emphasized social campaigns, such as pressuring employers to fire people who celebrated the death—or, in some cases, who simply questioned whether Kirk was a praiseworthy figure. Others have called for the Trump administration to use state power to investigate organizations or individuals for “incendiary” speech that Kirk’s supporters say inspired his murder.

Within the Christian right, there are similar calls for retribution, to the point where some have criticized Erika Kirk for, at Kirk’s memorial, saying she forgave Kirk’s killer. Several pundits have come to her defense, largely by reassuring their audiences that God has endowed the civil authority with a right to “bear the sword.” The commentator Michael Knowles, speaking at the first Turning Point USA campus event, assured the college students there that “Christian forgiveness does not demand we allow the cruel to ravage the whole Earth,” but instead that “we love our enemies” by “punishing the guilty.”

But punishing the left is only the first step, not the endgame. The ultimate goal, in short, is to take the country back.

This may seem confusing for those who don’t operate in evangelical circles. The MAGA movement, which the religious right overwhelmingly supports, already has control of the executive and legislative branches of the federal government. The conservative Supreme Court has consistently given them more power. It’s hard to see how they could feel disempowered. What’s left to be taken?

Among white evangelicals, a genuine feeling of oppression is widespread; polling^[14] has shown that a solid majority of white evangelicals believe discrimination against Christians is an urgent social issue; polls have also found^[15] they consider it more prevalent than anti-Black racism. The reason for this is a sense of loss, a fixation on what Sutton called an “imagined vision of what the world used to be two or three generations ago,” when there were Bible readings in schools and overt expressions of Christianity surrounding them. In that regard, the Christian right is correct in its anxieties, as church attendance has been plummeting for decades.

To regain the imagined righteous America, there are concrete goals. Some in the movement have decided that after the fall of Roe v. Wade, Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized gay marriage nationwide, is next. Some support laws that would make divorces more difficult to obtain^[16] or that would make it harder for gay parents to adopt. Overwhelmingly, this group wants vouchers to help parents send their children to religious schools, while also supporting efforts to encourage prayer and religious education in public schools. Similarly, it aims to promote civics and history teachings that emphasize the country as being founded on Christian faith and values.

But their ambitions stretch beyond government and public institutions. Charlie Kirk was a promoter of the idea of the “Seven Mountains mandate,” a concept that emerged from independent Pentecostal-style Christianity to describe ambitions of taking society over for Christ. Those mountains—most commonly family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government—can’t be won only through good policy. Laws can ban same-sex adoptions or incentivize having more children, but they cannot make popular culture less socially progressive. Federal agencies can threaten broadcasters who say things they don’t like, but they can’t force filmmakers to make Christian content. State legislators can make laws banning broadly defined “pornography” in order to limit books with expressions of different sexual identities, but they can’t ban people from celebrating Pride Month. To conquer the mountains of culture, media, and arts, the fighting can’t stop until there’s a more fundamental change in society—until sex is banished from TVs, secular artists no longer feel safe to push boundaries, traditional family and prefeminist gender dynamics become the model for young people, and prayer infuses all parts of day-to-day life.

These mountains are tough. But the Christian right has been fighting the culture wars for decades. And if the leading religious right activists have their way, Kirk’s killing will turbocharge those fights, with many thousands of new fighters on their side.

So are we on the cusp of a new, MAGA-inflused Christian nationalist revival?

There are reasons for skepticism. Turning a moment into long-standing change and lasting political power is difficult. Back in 2020, it seemed that the country, galvanized by the death of George Floyd and the protest movement that followed, was veering hard to the left. Five years later, that premise looks laughable—and the American body politic continues to prove itself deeply fickle.

And yet, there are reasons to believe the Christian nationalists could succeed. They have more political power than they have had in a long, long time. And unlike during the first Trump era, there aren’t significant internal voices of moderation or opposition—be it inside the movement or inside the administration. The demographic decline of churchgoing in America remains a major point of concern for the movement; for years, studies have indicated that young people have been driven from churches after feeling alienated by conservative culture-war issues. But in what may be a temporary blip or a real, substantial trend, that decline has suddenly^[22] leveled off^[23], and there are signs^[24] that young people have higher levels of religious enthusiasm^[25].

Regardless of whether Christian nationalists succeed, they’re going to try, and they’re going to try right now. If the religious right wants to claw back its power in society, this, their activists argue, is the ideal moment—the time for the rise of a conservative Christian coalition more lasting and powerful than the ones that have seesawed out of power in recent years. We’re all going to find out if they’re right.

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