Charlie Kirk founded Turning Point USA when he was a teenager, connecting naturally with his core audience to build a youth organization. He has been credited with helping swing the Gen Z vote toward President Donald J. Trump last year.
“No one understood or had the heart of the youth in the United States of America better than Charlie,” Mr. Trump said last week, after Mr. Kirk was shot and killed on a college campus in Utah.
In death, however, Mr. Kirk is reaching new generations.
Sonya Buckhannon, 52, a sales rep who lives on a barrier island off Charleston, S.C., sent a message to Turning Point USA days after Mr. Kirk’s death asking how she could get involved with the group’s work, possibly by starting a chapter for parents and grandparents in her area.
“With his death, people are recognizing they weren’t the only ones who felt that way,” she said. “There are lots of people in my generation who are here to be advocates for him.”
Across the country this week, parents and grandparents said that watching young people’s intense grief over Mr. Kirk’s public assassination has prompted older conservatives like themselves to look seriously at his work for the first time.
A memorial service for Mr. Kirk will be held on Sunday morning at an N.F.L. stadium in Glendale, Ariz., a gathering expected to attract a wide range of Mr. Kirk’s devotees, young and old.
Pastors said the assassination of someone many saw as not just a political voice but a spiritual leader seemed to draw people of all ages to church this week.
Dean Inserra, the pastor of a Southern Baptist church in Tallahassee, Fla., said his church had its second-highest attendance numbers ever last week, outside of Easter Sundays. The service included baptisms, and invited participants to offer a short spiritual testimony in front of the congregation. Three of them mentioned Mr. Kirk’s role in their commitment or recommitment to Christianity.
“Charlie filled a vacuum,” Mr. Inserra said, echoing Mr. Kirk’s assertion that too many evangelical pastors shy away from addressing political and cultural topics with their congregations.
Mr. Inserra, 44, received a text this week from a church member in his 70s: “This time last week I didn’t know who Charlie Kirk was (my loss).” Since then, the man had watched many of Mr. Kirk’s debate videos and decided, “these students are the future.”
Turning Point USA has received more than 54,000 inquiries from people wanting to start new campus chapters, a spokesman said earlier this week.
Some of that interest appears to be coming from people well beyond the traditional campus demographics. On Facebook, posts about Mr. Kirk have attracted comments from people saying they want to start chapters for parents, grandparents, Gen X and other groups outside Mr. Kirk’s core audience.
“Charlie Kirk was not for olds like me,” the conservative American writer Rod Dreher, 58, said in an email. But conversations in Hungary, where Mr. Dreher lives, revealed Mr. Kirk to be a significant influence on young conservatives there. And one of his daughters attended a prayer service for Mr. Kirk on her college campus in Louisiana.
Caught unaware by the emotionally intense devotion among young conservatives, Mr. Dreher started watching Mr. Kirk’s videos and was impressed by Mr. Kirk’s charisma and his willingness to speak on progressive campuses.
“The killer could have had no idea what his evil deed would unleash in terms of energizing the young right,” he said. “Neither, it seems, did old conservatives like us.”
Mr. Kirk had taken his own steps in recent years to reach those “old conservatives.” In 2021, he founded TPUSA Faith, whose mission was in part to encourage pastors to speak to their congregations more directly on political and cultural topics.
As Mr. Kirk’s messages reach new audiences, his allies have made sometimes competing claims about his beliefs, confusing fans old and new. The commentator Candace Owens has claimed that Mr. Kirk, an evangelical Protestant, was privately undergoing a “spiritual transformation” and was on a path to converting to Catholicism, and was also shifting to become more critical of the state of Israel. Tucker Carlson said on his show on Tuesday that Mr. Kirk loved the state of Israel but “did not like” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, prompting Mr. Kirk’s pastor to reaffirm his commitment to Jews’ “ancestral right to the land.”
Joseph Larson, a worship singer at a large Pentecostal church in Baton Rouge, La., said the rumors had prompted him to read more about Mr. Kirk’s faith.
“We researched some of their Catholic background or tendencies,” he said about Mr. Kirk and his widow, Erika. He came away reassured of Mr. Kirk’s Protestant bona fides.
Before Mr. Kirk’s death, Mr. Larson, 32, had shared the activist’s videos with the oldest few of his six children, offering Mr. Kirk as an example of how to confront “dark” left-wing messages. The afternoon of the shooting, his wife and children prayed together in tears.
“We’re thankful for someone on a large stage saying, ‘We’re not idiots, we’re not crazy, we’re not full of hate,’” he said.
Some older conservatives are also grappling with characterizations of Mr. Kirk as someone whose provocative, offensive political rhetoric did not match his professions of belief in civility. They said such comments did not overshadow what they considered his good work.
In Fort Worth, Daniel Darling was teaching an undergraduate class on Christianity and culture at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary when he received a text about the shooting.
Mr. Darling, 47, is politically conservative, but described himself as someone likelier to read National Review than watch clips on TikTok of campus debates.
“I had assumed he was a sort of a Christian conservative provocateur,” he said of Mr. Kirk. Watching more extended videos in the days after Mr. Kirk’s death, he found something more appealing: a person he saw being kind in one-on-one interactions, and open to debate.
Mr. Darling is also coming to understand Mr. Kirk as a generational figure. His son, who is 17, and his peer group from his Christian school and his church, were deeply rattled by the killing. Mr. Darling wondered if the event would shape them in the same way that the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, influenced Mr. Darling and his peers.
Two days after Mr. Kirk’s assassination, Ms. Kirk delivered a speech at the Turning Point USA headquarters. After encouraging young people to visit the organization’s website and join or start their own campus chapters, she addressed older viewers.
“If you’re a parent, I highly recommend that you come to AmericaFest in December,” she said, referring to an annual all-ages conference at which Mr. Trump spoke last year. “I would love to see you,” she said, saying that Mr. Kirk will be “there in spirit.”
“Bring your kids,” she added. “Bring your family.”
Ruth Graham is a national reporter, based in Dallas, covering religion, faith and values for The Times.
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