Charlie Kirk

Charles ("Charlie") James Kirk (October 14, 1993 – September 10, 2025) was an American conservative political activist and the co-founder (2012) and CEO of Turning Point USA (TPUSA), a 501(c)(3) student-organizing network. Raised in Wheeling, Illinois, Kirk attended Christian school in his upbringing and made a faith profession in adolescence; he attended Calvary Chapel-affiliated congregations and identified publicly as evangelical Christian. He founded Turning Point Faith (later TPUSA Faith, 2021) with Pentecostal pastor Rob McCoy as a faith-and-politics initiative for pastors and church leaders. Kirk authored multiple books on conservative politics and his theological-political integration. After 2020 his framework evolved markedly from earlier secular-conservative articulation toward what he himself and many critics characterized as Christian nationalist — including explicit rejection of strict separation of church and state, and the framing of America as "set up by and for not just Christians, but specifically Protestant Christians." He was assassinated September 10, 2025; the assassination was widely reported and remains a substantial recent moment in American public-religious-political life.