Charlie Kirk was 18 in the summer of 2012 when he walked into a Starbucks in the suburbs of Chicago and plopped his backpack on the floor.
He had recently graduated from high school and was sorting out his future after being rejected from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He had come to meet a local Illinois group, Patriots United, focused on issues like lower taxes and choice in school education during the Tea Party era.
Maida Korte, 71, a leader of the group, recalled that the conversation turned to their shared foundational Christian values, as it often did with him.
“He never thought of it as, ‘I’m going to go into the spiritual arena and talk about political things,’” she said. “He was, ‘I want to talk about spiritual things, and in order to do that, I have to enter the political arena.’”
That fusion of Christianity and politics reached a level on Sunday in Arizona that Mr. Kirk could only have imagined that summer day years ago. He did not live to see it, after his recent assassination at age 31. But in a stadium full of mourners, including President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, House Speaker Mike Johnson and tens of thousands of others, the success of his ideals of a politically active, conservative Christianity was omnipresent.
In death, Mr. Kirk’s faith and its implication for America is becoming more central than even in his life. His memorial service canonized him as the hero and motivational force of the new Christian right, a movement that Mr. Kirk himself both created and reflected.
Cabinet members and activists onstage Sunday repeatedly shared the Christian gospel message of salvation. Mr. Vance called him a “martyr for the Christian faith.” Mr. Trump said “he’s a martyr now for American freedom.” Those two, it appeared, were one and the same.
The event put on vivid display how Mr. Kirk’s personal spiritual story dovetailed with the broader story of American evangelicalism over the past decade, as Mr. Trump’s rise to power energized and empowered its followers while erasing walls between politics and religion.
“What Charlie understood and infused into his movement is, we also needed a lot more God,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said from the stage.
So on this Sunday, he said, “I’d like to think we’re all in Charlie’s church.”
As a child, Mr. Kirk went to a Presbyterian congregation. After the meeting at Starbucks, Mrs. Korte invited him to visit her church, Harvest Bible Chapel in nearby Rolling Meadows, Ill., a large nondenominational evangelical congregation 15 minutes from his high school. James MacDonald, then a popular evangelical teacher, was the pastor.
One Sunday, Mr. Kirk showed up with a friend, Mrs. Korte said.
“Someone had come up to me and said, ‘There’s a kid out here looking for a small group,’” said Landon MacDonald, the pastor’s son who led student ministries. “It was Charlie standing there.”
Mr. Kirk came to his discussion group for young men, where they would study the Bible and confess their sin. But he soon called to say he could not continue coming.
“He said, ‘Well, I’m starting this thing, it’s called Turning Point. And it’s going to be for conservatives on college campuses,’” Landon MacDonald said. “I was like, that’s amazing.”
Still, Mr. Kirk attended church regularly, soaking up James MacDonald’s sermons. He had prayed to accept Jesus as his personal savior around the fifth grade while a student at Heritage Christian Academy, started by Wayne Grudem, a conservative evangelical theologian. But like many evangelical teenagers entering young adulthood, he was figuring out his faith, during a time when President Obama highlighted a more progressive Christianity.
He developed his interest in apologetics, or making arguments to defend the Bible and religious beliefs. His method of biblical interpretation was often quite literal. “We have these answers, because our book, the holy word of God, is the same as today as it was 2,000 years ago,” he said once, seeing specific instruction on gender, immigration and marriage.
“You blessed me so much when I was young in finding the lord,” Mr. Kirk wrote in a text to James MacDonald last month, according to screenshots of the messages that the pastor shared on social media last week.
At the time, Harvest was known as a Bible-teaching church, with a strong emphasis on preaching and discipleship, not politics. That approach was common in many evangelical churches before 2016, when congregations and the very fabric of American evangelicalism ripped in two over Mr. Trump’s rise to power.
James MacDonald was initially part of Mr. Trump’s evangelical advisory board but resigned after the “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced on which Mr. Trump could be heard speaking in vulgar terms about women. Mr. MacDonald called Mr. Trump “lecherous and worthless.” (Harvest fired Mr. MacDonald in 2019 for making what elders described as “highly inappropriate recorded comments.”)
When Mr. Kirk spoke at a 30th anniversary celebration for Harvest in 2018, as his fame and organization took off, he said he wanted to learn from Jesus’ example of not seeking political power or leading big rallies.
“He didn’t run for Caesar, he resisted any sort of recognition in earthly or human terms,” Mr. Kirk said. “He said, ‘I’m going to go pray in the garden, I’m going to go hang out with beggars.”
But his political star rocketed as ’90s-style evangelicalism evolved into the more right-wing political Christianity of the Trump era.
In April 2019, Mr. Kirk approached Rob McCoy, a pastor who was on the City Council in Thousand Oaks, Calif. Mr. Kirk was curious about how Mr. McCoy entered politics while also in ministry. Mr. McCoy asked him if ever spoke in churches.
“Really, you’d have me? I’m not a preacher,” Mr. McCoy recalled Mr. Kirk saying.
The Sunday before his 26th birthday, Mr. Kirk took the stage at Mr. McCoy’s church, Godspeak Calvary Chapel. He preached against the spread of atheism, and warned that universities were dangerous places that teach women false promises.
“Every Christian needs to get more engaged than you currently are,” he urged. “We are primed for another revival in this country.”
It was the beginning of new phase of his mission. The pandemic, when pastors like Mr. McCoy defied church lockdowns, and Mr. Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election compelled Mr. Kirk to mobilize pastors to become involved in politics.
He founded TPUSA Faith, with Mr. McCoy as a co-chair, to influence Christians to “counter falsehoods and illuminate the inextricable link between faith and God-given liberty.” He hosted events at Dream City, a large evangelical megachurch in Arizona, and spoke out more vocally in personal terms about his own faith.
In a podcast conversation with Mr. McCoy, Mr. Kirk looked back at 2013, when a high school near his own was embroiled in a national fight over a trans student.
“The church was silent,” Mr. Kirk lamented. “Now the church in the local area did not participate in school board races, in the mayor election, the state rep races. Eventually through lawsuits and the capitulation of the school board, this man who thinks he was a woman is now allowed to go into the female locker room.”
Some of Mr. Kirk’s beliefs reached across Christian traditions, just as changing political dynamics created new religious communities. Conservative evangelicals and Catholics, for example, formed a political cohort with more in common than some of their fellow congregants.
Terry Schilling, a Roman Catholic who is the president of American Principles Project, a social conservative advocacy group, said he remembered Mr. Kirk saying on his show that evangelicals had done a bad job honoring the Virgin Mary.
“With Catholics and Protestants there’s always a debate about Mary, and whether or not you should honor her,” Mr. Schilling said. “I texted him that day, and said thank you so much. He goes, ‘Mary’s the answer to feminism.’”
“I don’t really believe she is queen of heaven or sinless,” Mr. Schilling recalled Mr. Kirk saying, adding that he noted, “That’s just mysticism.”
Turning Point itself became a kind of modern church, as the political community he started grew into a religious one. It was more than a debate society or political organization, Mr. Vance said last week — if you were a young conservative or Christian, “Charlie’s Turning Point USA gave you a home.”
Mr. Kirk’s role as political influencer made him a sort of pastor for a new generation.
“We called them campus tours. Now I know they were really tent revivals, complete with a tent,” Andrew Kolvet, his spokesman, said inside the stadium on Sunday.
Thousands raised hands in worship, waiting for Mr. Trump to arrive with a full White House delegation to honor the man they vow to continue to follow.
In a recent sermon, Mr. McCoy preached about how God had used Moses to bring the Israelites out of Egypt, and “to absolutely redefine their entire identity, like he’s done with this generation of young people.” Moses died, but God raised up Joshua to pick up the mantle for the next generation, he told them.
“You’ve lost a leader, but you’ve gained a movement,” Mr. McCoy said.
Elizabeth Dias is The Times’s national religion correspondent, covering faith, politics and values.
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