Minneapolis, MN — Spotlights cascading from the ceiling blanketed the stage of Northrup Auditorium, illuminating the elaborately carved arch framing the stage of the Carlson Family Theater. Applause and cheering greeted the entrance of Pastor Dale Witherington of Restore Minnesota, a political organization that promotes a concept known as “biblical citizenship” while claiming to preserve “our Judeo-Christian heritage.”

Witherington leaned into the podium center stage and gazed over the sea of MAGA hats filling the theater’s main floor and three wrap-around balconies above. The event sold out in only a couple days after a last-minute rebranding. The entire space accommodates 2,687 people, though the university said only 1,673 tickets were scanned at the door.

“Would you please join me in praying to our father of the U.S.A.,” Witherington said, closing his eyes and turning his head toward the stage’s glossy, black floor.

As Witherington led the prayer, members of the audience felt the holy spirit enrapturing them.

“Amen!” Audience members shouted in unison.

One woman, with her head down and eyes closed, held her hands up and responded to every line with an “Mhm.”

“We believe Charlie’s life, death and move into his new life in Heaven with you marks an end and the beginning to perhaps the greatest spiritual revival the world has ever known,” Witherington said. “And may that revival begin right here, right now, in Minnesota, the revival state.”

“Yeah!” Multiple people shouted out from the audience. “Amen!”

This was the beginning of Turning Point USA’s nation-wide The Turning Point Tour, a stop at the University of Minnesota that was originally slated as the third stop in the American Comeback Tour. The tour rebranded following the assassination of the group’s founder, Charlie Kirk, only 12 days prior to the stop in Minnesota.

A line of people began forming four hours in advance of the 6:30 p.m. start time for the event;  and as the beginning approached the line sprawled for blocks across the campus. 

A young man with a GoPro strapped to his chest and a megaphone preached to the captured audience in line about how “Christ is King” and handed out evangelical literature from Ray Comfort’s Living Waters publication.

“Give it up for Jesus!” The young man shouted into the megaphone while pacing back-and-forth in the grassy knoll alongside the sidewalk. Nearly everyone in the line cheered and clapped.

He went in for a bro hug with another young man in line wearing a black MAGA hat. “Heck yeah, it’s all about Jesus,” the proselytizer said while the other young man grinned from ear to ear. “Conservatism with Jesus. That’s the only way, right?”

The prominence of Christianity at such a political event is not surprising. As religiousness increases, so does the tendency to identify as Republican or lean Republican, according to a report published by Pew Research Center in February. Among white adults who identified with a high level of religiousness, 77% also identified as Republican.

“It’s been a long, unbroken line that being an American Christian means you don’t like gay people, you’re against abortion, you don’t think the Civil Rights Act should’ve happened,” said Reverend Angela Denker, a journalist and author of “Red State Christians.”

“Right-wing culture wars have become indistinguishable from Christian beliefs held by the majority of white Christians. Sadly, as a pastor, I say this.”

Reverend Angela Denker

An old man soaked in sweat ran past the line on the other side waving a red MAGA hat with a TPUSA logo on it in the air. “We need help with security,” he shouted to anyone listening. “Any patriots willing to help with security?”

Following the assassination of Kirk on Sept. 10, security at the event was intensified. Roughly a dozen Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office vehicles were parked just around the corner from where the line of attendees began, along the northern side of Morrill Hall, where Sheriff’s deputies perched themselves on the roof with rifles.

Down below, David M. Lilly Plaza was closed off to pedestrians and used by law enforcement officers to watch over the line. University of Minnesota Police Department officers were stationed all around Northrup Hall and drones buzzed in the sky above, surveying the masses of people who showed up to attend or protest the event.

“Charlie Kirk fucked around and found out!” A protester on a megaphone chanted into a megaphone while a marching band kept the rhythm. “Charlie Kirk fucked around and found out!”

“Christ is king!” The young man with the GoPro on his chest shouted into his own megaphone, dueling with the protesters. Most of what he said was inaudible beneath the throng of brass and drums.

At the door, attendees had to match the name on their ticket with a government or student identification card and then pass through a metal detector. Security did not allow bags into the building.

The auditorium pulsed from the outside to the rhythm of “Sweet Child o’ Mine.” Organizers from the campus chapter of Turning Point cheered and clapped for each person who entered the room. Behind them colored lights shifted back and forth, revealing a thin layer of smoke from smoke machines.

A 20-minute timer at the front of the room would frequently disappear and reappear reset, as the starting time was pushed further and further back. Unprompted “U.S.A.” chants would occasionally break out through the audience during this time.

Before the timer could reach zero, a promotional video for Turning Point and its annual conference played over the screen at the back of the stage. Charlie Kirk was prominent throughout the advertisements. A woman in the audience began crying when Kirk’s image first appeared.

The first speaker of the evening was Laine Schoneberger, the Chief Information Officer of a company that refinances student loan debt. His company’s logo appeared alongside TPUSA’s on the theater’s branded backdrop.

Schoneberger said he was at Utah Valley University when Kirk was assassinated and helped carry Kirk’s body away.

“Fast forward, here we are now. We’re celebrating Charlie,” Schoeneberger said. “This is the turning point. Do it for Charlie. Do it for God. Family. Country.”

Schoneberger asked parents and grandparents in the audience to invest in his company.

Then came the national anthem. There is no flag in the Carlson Family Theater, so a looped video of an American flag waving in the wind was projected on the screen in the back of the stage. Immediately after that, the singer transitioned into Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.,” a patriotic anthem popular at Donald Trump’s rallies. The lyrics to the song are included in Trump’s “God Bless the U.S.A. Bible,” which also includes a copy of the Constitution without any of the constitutional amendments after the Tenth.

After a quick presentation, Michael Knowles finally walked out on stage to a thundering trap beat as searchlights passed back and forth over the audience members, who were standing up to clap their hands and cheer on the Daily Wire talk show host. It was 7:30 p.m., an hour after the event was scheduled to begin.

Knowles opened up his part of the evening by making the sign of the cross.

A woman in the audience leaned over to another and whispered in her ear, “I didn’t know he was Catholic.”

“Charlie had a great affinity for Saint Michael, the archangel,” Knowles said. “And I think the Saint Michael prayer speaks especially to our moment.”

Kirk was a protestant evangelical who belonged to the Godspeak Cavalry Chapel in Newbury Park, California.

Donald Trump posted the Saint Michael prayer on his Truth Social account on Sept. 29, 2024, along with a painting of Saint Michael.

Nearly as many people in the audience joined Knowles in reciting this prayer as did sing along with “God Bless the U.S.A..”

Conversion to Catholicism has been surging in the United States, according to the National Catholic Register. Some dioceses saw the amount of converts increase up to 72% during their Easter vigils.

Catholic converts also tend to be more conservative and more likely to identify as Republican than people who were raised Catholic, according to a report published by Pew Research Center in June.

Candace Owens, a far-right political commentator who formerly worked for Kirk’s TPUSA, claimed after his assassination that Kirk “was attending Mass… praying the Rosary…” and she allegedly told him to “take the next step. You’re too smart to be a Protestant.”

One of the most prominent Catholic converts on the right is Vice President JD Vance, whose belief in a strong, centralized government bolstered by organized religion puts him among the Catholic intellectuals who refer to themselves as “postliberal,” a term Vance has applied to himself in the past.

“Is it more Catholic or is it more crusader?” Reverend Angela Denker asked after the event..

The marrying of crusader aesthetics with evangelicalism is most obvious in Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s tattoos: a large Jerusalem Cross on his chest and the Latin phrase “Deus Vult” along his bicep.

“If we look at the Crusades where you had white Europeans going to kill Arab Christians because they didn’t look like them and they weren’t Europeans, so therefore they weren’t Christians,” Denker said. “Ordinary people’s lives were horrible, and the Crusades, as a holy war, were a distraction from the plague, from Black Death, much in the same way that this holy war is a distraction from the real economic and inequality issues facing everyday Americans.”

Christianity has always factored heavily into TPUSA, according to Denker, because “they view engagement with politics as a holy war.”

But the rising prominence of Catholicism among conservative Christians serves its own purpose, according to Denker.

“Many people who were raised in Southern Baptist or non-denominational evangelical churches have become Catholic, especially young men who are looking for a return to gender roles,” Denker said. “Gender is a huge part of this discussion because Charlie Kirk was targeting young men specifically. They’re attracted to hierarchy. So what’s attractive to them about the Roman Catholic Church is its strict insistence on hierarchy.”

One of the first topics Knowles broached in his speech was the memorial service held on Sunday, Sept. 21, just the day before. Knowles had flown directly from that event in Glendale, Arizona, where he was joined by President Trump, Elon Musk, and nearly 100,000 others.

According to Knowles, the most striking part about the memorial was the speech given by Erica Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow.

“The second most striking part of the memorial was that the leadership of our federal government spent four hours proclaiming the gospel to the entire world,” Knowles said. “That should not have been surprising, but it was because we had not seen it in a very, very long time. Many of us had not seen it in our entire lives.”

Knowles lauded praise on Erica Kirk for announcing at the memorial service that she had forgiven her husband’s killer, but went on to qualify what exactly Christian forgiveness meant.

“Christian forgiveness does not demand that we allow the cruel to ravage the whole Earth,” Knowles said. “It demands that we love our enemies, and sometimes love is tough. In our personal lives, love means praying for those who persecute us. In politics, love usually means punishing the guilty.”

“In the wake of Charlie’s assassination, many are inclined merely to redouble our devotion to the free marketplace of ideas,” Knowles said. “This instinct, I think, misses a crucial step. We had a marketplace of ideas. The left shot it up.”

People in the audience all around shook their heads in approval.

Knowles’s answer to restoring the “healthy exchange of ideas” is to instill order and discipline through the insistence on “natural law.” To get to this “ordered society,” Knowles says we need to “foreclose” on certain ways of thinking through social stigmatization and getting people fired from their jobs.

The remainder of the evening was filled by a question and answers segment, where most of the questions either began with accounts of religious experiences or were in some way related to the Bible.

One questioner, wearing a black t-shirt reading “Repeal the 19th Amendment” and a red, TPUSA MAGA hat, gave a long account of how “evil in the world comes through women.” He then asked what Knowles thought about repealing the 19th Amendment.

“The really hardcore trad conservatives would say that the decay did not begin when women got the right to vote,” Knowles said. “It’s when anyone got the right to vote.”

Members of the audience cheered and clapped.

“But I have a compromise, because I agree, if you look at single women, they vote for Democrats overwhelmingly,” Knowles said. “We can take the vote away from single women who vote for Democrats, and then we can give two votes for married women who vote for Republicans.”

The auditorium was loud with cheering and clapping.

At the end of the night, patrons of the event crammed themselves through the exits of the theater. A young couple was approached by two older women as they filed toward the stairwell.

“It was nice getting to know you tonight,” the older woman with motor oil black hair and a spray tanned face said to them. They returned the gesture.

The other older woman, who was wearing a white “freedom shirt” and had short blonde hair, wished them well before they parted ways. “Have lots of babies!” She said, grinning and waving at them. The couple laughed.

The following Wednesday, Sept. 24, the university’s Turning Point chapter met in a classroom on the first floor of Folwell Hall. Even after the meeting started, attendees continued to trickle in, amounting to 31 total. According to one member, this was a large increase from their previous meeting, which was held only a week prior.

From the 2020 Presidential Election to 2024, voting on campus has swung increasingly toward Republicans, even though Democrats still maintain a strong majority, according to data from the Minnesota Secretary of State’s office. In the 4th Precinct of Ward 4, which encompasses the east bank of the Twin Cities campus, there was a 54% increase in voting, regardless of party affiliation. Broken down, however, Democrats received a 49% increase while Republicans saw a 78% increase.

Earlier this month, before the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the chapter had less than 400 followers on Instagram. That number surpassed 1,100 as of Thursday, Oct. 2.

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