Most of the time, in discussions with conservative Evangelicals regarding the alignment of right wing political extremism with conservative, politicized Evangelicalism, I will get a reference to Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA, which seems to have become the religious apologist for the MAGA cult. The problem with that is that the late Kirk, along with the collection of speakers he used to draw crowds to his rallies, follows the same faulty interpretation and perspective of the Bible, making the same errors as the Evangelical branch of the American church does, falling victim to the same pseudo-Christian doctrine and theology.
Is Heresy Too Harsh a Word to Apply to Kirk and Turning Point?
Baptist News Global: Here's the Real Context for Understanding Charlie Kirk
Kirk was a Christian nationalist. And as the linked article above points out, his religious perspective was tailored to fit with Trumpism, and without Trump, there's no Charlie Kirk. It's hard to use the word heresy here, since what Kirk preached and debated was not really Christian faith, in any context of that being a means by which humans relate to God, but more of a means to align politics with a form of pseudo-Christian religious practice that elimnates Christian principles which are in diametric opposition to MAGA political positions to give those who care more about the political side of the religious right than the religious side of it the means to ignore the Christian gospel and still feel good about it.
Whew! That was a long sentence, but it makes the point. Turning Point USA is pseudo-Christian. It won't lead you to salvation by grace through faith in Christ, it will lead you to religious sounding justification for right wing Trump politics that are not consistent in any way with real Christian faith.
In his recent book, The Bible According to Christian Nationalists, Baptist minister Brian Kaylor points out the errors of Christian nationalists, including Kirk, who cherry-pick Bible verses, leaving out both historical context and original meaning, and any other supporting scripture, to aim their message at those who are already steeped in Evangelical presuppositions. Kaylor eliminates the erroneous conservative Evangelical presuppositions as an interpretive basis by correctly referencing the "Jesus Criterion," as the starting point for interpreting scripture according to the Christian gospel.
For those not familiar with this Evangelical error, Evangelical Christians claim that the sixty-six books of the Protestant Bible are inerrant, and infallible in the original manuscripts. This leads to making a grave interpretive error of making all of its contents equal in both their inspiration and their authority. But that contradicts the nature and person of Jesus, who was, according to the Christian tradition, the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God. This is not only affirmed in the gospels themselves, but also by the apostolic authors of the New Testament's other works, including Paul and Peter. Paul, in fact, makes a dramatic affirmation of the supremacy of Christ in Colossians.
So if Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God, then his words, recorded in the gospels, are the climax of Christian revelation and are the standard by which all of the Bible is to be interpreted. And he makes several very clear claims when it comes to inspiration and interpretation, including the claim that the law and the prophets are fulfilled in him (Matthew 5:17-18) and that no one comes to God unless it is through him (John 14:6). So Jesus himself establishes his revelation as the interpretive standard for the rest of the Bible.
That's where most conservative Evangelicals get off the track. They interpret in a "verse by verse" kind of way, equating the whole text, which takes it out of context and ignores the original meaning in favor of a "dualist" approach that is not supported anywhere in the Bible. The Christian gospel begins with the Beatitudes, in Matthew 5, not the Ten Commandments. Christian practice isn't intellectual assent to a set of doctrinal standards discerned mostly from presuppositions, it is a lifestyle exhibiting the values which Jesus revealed as coming from the nature of God, in whose image humans are created.
None of those values can be found in MAGA Trumpism. Not one.
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