In the two weeks since Charlie Kirk’s killing, Trump-administration officials and allies have not only promised a sweeping crackdown on liberal groups. They have marshaled the language of a rising charismatic Christian movement to describe their political agenda as a cosmic battle against the forces of evil.
At Kirk’s memorial service on Sunday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described the moment at hand as “not a political war” and “not even a cultural war—it’s a spiritual war.” The right-wing influencer Benny Johnson called out the heads of the Justice Department, the State Department, and the newly rebranded “Department of War”: “God has instituted them. God has given them power over our nation and our land,” he told the crowd of roughly 70,000 people at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. “May we pray that our rulers here—rightfully instituted and given power by our God—wield the sword for the terror of evil men in our nation.” Holding up a rosary, the far-right activist Jack Posobiec asked the crowd: “Are you ready to put on the full armor of God and face the evil in high places and the spiritual warfare before us? Then put on the full armor of God. Do it now. Now is the time. This is the place.”
The exception was Kirk’s widow, Erika, who said that she forgave Kirk’s killer because “it is what Christ did, and is what Charlie would do,” and that “the answer to hate is not hate.” Two days after Kirk had been shot and killed on a Utah college campus, though, she, too, had said that “the spiritual warfare is palpable.”
[From the February 2025 issue: The army of God comes out of the shadows]
The proliferation of this kind of language is a sign of the growing momentum of a movement often known as the New Apostolic Reformation, which has become the vanguard of the broader Christian right, and whose ideas Kirk had begun to embrace before his death. Followers believe that a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit is under way, a third “Great Awakening” that is raising up new apostles and prophets and an army of God; for them, spiritual warfare is a matter of combatting demonic forces and bringing all of government and society under God’s dominion. At this point, concepts popularized by the NAR have spread to churches in cities and towns across the country, supplying Donald Trump with millions of followers who believe that God anointed him to usher in a new Christendom.
The prophets and apostles of the NAR often speak of a time when spiritual warfare will break out “in the natural,” meaning real life, giving rise to a “warrior generation,” as one prominent prophet, Rick Joyner, has put it. He has written about a “new breed of Christians” and described how “churches will start being thought of more as military bases than congregations.” Many NAR leaders who rallied their followers to the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, saw the insurrection as a form of spiritual warfare. And although they have not called for actual warfare in response to Kirk’s killing, leaders have framed the assassination as the work of demonic forces rising against God’s kingdom.
On his podcast, Lance Wallnau, an influential NAR leader who described Kirk as a friend, called Kirk “the first martyr of the third Great Awakening.” He and others compared Kirk to the biblical figure Stephen, who was stoned to death by a Jewish council for preaching the gospel. They said that Kirk was killed by satanic forces. They described leftist radicalization as a “demonic evil spreading across America like a cancer,” in the words of Sean Feucht, a popular singer in the movement. They cast Kirk’s political opponents as “enemies of the true cross,” as Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts put it.
“Christians must learn to hate again,” a Texas pastor posted on X, citing a Psalm that reads, “Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord?”
[Read: The Christian radicals are coming]
“The preacher in Ecclesiastes tells us that there is a time for love and a time for hate, a time for war and a time for peace,” Doug Wilson, a theologian who leads a network of churches, including one that Hegseth attends, posted on social media. “This is not the time for love and peace.”
Similar messages could be found in churches across the country after Kirk’s killing, including a square-angled beige-brick building called Church on the Rock that I visited in Oklahoma City on the Sunday after his death. The pastor there that day, Judith Benefiel, told the congregation of a few hundred people that “it was evil that took him out—and the Bible says that we don’t wrestle with flesh and blood but against principalities and powers. Amen?”
Benefiel said that evil was “trying to consume our nation,” that Kirk was martyred for fighting against it. “I don’t want to live in a country where Christians are martyred.”
“God told us: Go and possess the earth,” she said. “Who will rise up? Who will rise up? How far are you willing to go for the Lord?”
Although Kirk was best known for his organization Turning Point USA, which swept droves of college students into the MAGA movement, in more recent years he’d founded TPUSA Faith, which tapped into and mobilized the energy gathering in this realm of charismatic Christianity. At the time of his death, Kirk had embraced a concept popularized by NAR leaders called the “Seven Mountains Mandate,” the idea that Christians are called to dominate seven spheres of society, from government to education to business; Turning Point Faith had an arm devoted to each sphere, according to Matthew Boedy, the author of a forthcoming book that describes how Kirk turned the mandate into a “central organizing element of the Trump era.” Kirk spoke often of creating “biblical citizens.” He argued that the separation of Church and state is a “fabrication” that was “made up by secular humanists.” He spoke of God’s design for humanity—traditional marriage, two genders, biblical education—as “beautiful” and “true.” He described Democratic leaders as “maggots, vermin, and swine” and said that the Democratic Party “supports everything that God hates.”
[Read: What Charlie Kirk told me about his legacy]
The question remains how grassroots believers will understand and respond to the calls for spiritual battle that have only ratcheted up in recent weeks. Within days of Kirk’s death, followers of his had already taken up the cause in one form or another. In Oklahoma City, a man named Devin Shipman had set up his own protest on a grassy corner in front of a suburban veterinary clinic whose owner had reportedly written that Kirk was a “right wing stupid fuck MAGA activist” and asked, “Could we actually be getting smart and culling the sick ones!!!” The veterinarian’s name was on a growing list of people accused of saying critical things of Kirk, which was circulating on social media and would eventually gather millions of views. Shipman told me that he had seen the vet’s post on Facebook, gotten angry, and prayed to God, asking if he should print the veterinarian’s words on a four-by-eight-foot banner and post it in front of the clinic to expose a person he considered to be “a symptom of pure, unchecked evil.”
“I didn’t get told no,” Shipman said, and so he’d been sitting in a lawn chair in front of the banner every day since the Friday after Kirk’s killing, and now it was Monday.
He said that he definitely believed that a spiritual battle was under way, and that Jesus Christ could show up at any moment. A Newsmax personality broadcast Shipman’s vigil live to his 800,000 social-media followers. After that, at least a dozen people had stopped by to support Shipman’s effort, staking American flags in the grass. At this point, two men were sitting with Shipman, all three of them armed with guns. Shipman’s was under his sun hat in the grass. They waved at drivers who passed by honking their horns or pulled into the parking lot.
“Thank you for what you’re doing,” said a woman who had walked over with her son. “I’ve been getting the word out.”
“Thank you, sir,” said the son, a skinny teenager wearing a large cross necklace. He shook Shipman’s hand.
More cars passed and honked. The men talked about Kirk’s killing and what it meant. “Tucker said we are seeing spiritual war spilling over into the natural,” said the man sitting to Shipman’s right, Paul Ainsworth, referring to Tucker Carlson. “The evil side of things has had their way for a long time. They haven’t gotten pushback. They crossed a line here.”
By 5 p.m., the men had decided that they’d accomplished their mission. The veterinary clinic had been shut down all day; a sign said closed for business. They folded up the banner. “I guess he was successful,” Ainsworth said, referring to Shipman’s idea. “This guy’s gone.”
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