In the years before he was murdered, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk had transitioned the group away from its libertarian leanings and toward a dominionist Christian nationalist ideology and agenda. It appears that the group’s current leadership is continuing that shift.
TPUSA Faith, the group’s religious organizing arm, is hosting a “pastor roundtable” featuring two Christian nationalists, Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers and author and former Trump administration official William Wolfe, according to a flyer Deevers posted on his X account Wednesday. Both men have connections to extreme Christian nationalist Doug Wilson, who has been in the news recently, both for his claim that women should not have the right to vote and for his efforts to strengthen his influence within the Trump administration.
Right Wing Watch noted recently, “Few elected officials can match Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers in their desire to see the United States turned into a Christian nationalist theocracy.” Deevers calls the separation of church and state “blasphemous.” In a sermon at Wilson’s Idaho church last year, Deevers declared that it is the duty of civil leaders to “submit” to the authority of Christ. He has called on Christian men to “make offensive war on the gates of hell” and “dominionize” the world.
Wolfe is an ardent Christian nationalist who declared in 2023 that "we are getting close" to a point where Christians will have to "heed the call to arms." Wolfe has charged that Democrats are Marxists and “violent revolutionaries” and claimed that “the Democrats hate God, they hate family, they hate marriage, they hate children, they hate our nation." At the far-right National Conservatism conference this year, he called for a “Protestant Christian Political Manhattan Project.”
Wolfe was a visiting fellow at OMB Director Russ Vought’s Center for Renewing America, which identified Christian nationalism as a priority for the Trump administration. Early in Trump’s second term, he celebrated that the administration was being filled with “people who are our guys.” After meeting with Trump in March, Wolfe declared, “This is our land and we've had it really sort of violently taken away from us by radical leftists who are fundamentally steeped in a Marxist worldview that is anti-God, anti-human, anti-family, all those things.” He has been a cheerleader for the Trump regime’s mass deportation agenda.
Deevers and Wolfe, along with theobro Joel Webbon, were among the drafters of a 2023 document called The Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel. It declared that the United States must formally “acknowledge the Lordship of Christ” in all its laws, “abolish abortion,” outlaw marriage equality, and “recapture our national sovereignty from godless, global entities who present a grave threat to civilization.” The statement affirms that “the Christian Nationalist project entails a national recognition of essential Christian orthodoxy” and supports laws against “public blasphemy.”
The TPUSA roundtable is being co-sponsored by the Center for Baptist Leadership and its parent organization American Reformer. The Center for Baptist Leadership, founded by Wolfe, thinks the Southern Baptist Convention is too liberal. The American Reformer is a group backed by venture capitalists that wants to bring the U.S. back into alignment with what they see as its explicitly Protestant Christian heritage. It’s connected to networks of theobros associated in various ways with Wilson; its advisory board is rich with people connected to the hard-right Claremont Institute.
