
Charlie Kirk and The Current Great Awakening
When I started thinking about writing my last book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward, the words awakening and Great Awakening were out there in the zeitgeist, which in German means the spirit of the age. It’s the cultural climate of the period in which we live, and in early 2022 because Biden had “won” the election, we were in the full flower of the Covid scam and Wokistan. It was a dark time, and it would have been easy to lose hope, but because of the excesses of the left in government and culture, people were waking up to the truth. The realization many people were coming to happened specifically because they were being exposed to lies on such a massive scale that it became glaringly obvious something was deeply wrong with America’s ruling class. Although only some of these people were waking up to Jesus, and it was more than a few, others were in a way waking up to Jesus without knowing it. There are metaphysical and spiritual implications to truth because of he who is The Truth. If a person is an atheist or agnostic, and their minds start opening to truth, they are getting dangerously close to the source of all truth. This dynamic is possible because we are at the end of the several hundred year experiment of the Enlightenment. All Enlightenment figures believed in truth, except in a version untethered from the source of truth. Now because secularism born of the Enlightenment failed, truth now point to Jesus rather than away from him.
I wrote a piece here in June ’22 arguing that the dividing line in Western culture is truth. The left, which took over the Democrat Party with Obama’s election, only believes in “the narrative,” or whatever it is that advances and sustains their ideological agenda. They will use the “will to power” to advance it by any means possible. The ends always justifies the means for them. On the other side are old fashioned liberals who believe there is such a thing as truth, and have rejected the leftist takeover of the party. Of course, this doesn’t mean all those who believe in truth will end up putting their trust in Christ, but it does mean they can be confronted with the claims of the ultimate source of truth, the one who claimed to be the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6). Those arguments today are more plausible, and have more persuasive power, at this end of the failed Enlightenment. The reason is that philosophically, you can’t get truth from dirt, from mere molecules. Without God truth can’t ultimately prevail because it is grounded in nothing, and so doesn’t even exist. But it does, and so it can.
Which brings us to the difference of this Great Awakening from the previous two: it comes in a secular culture where Christianity’s influence was minimal at best. The previous two Awakenings took place in thoroughly Christian cultures, so there really is no comparison to our current cultural moment. Rediscovering truth as a cultural touchstone is important because it is a rejection of the relativism and postmodernism that dominated the second half of the 20th century, and found its ultimate realization in the leftism of the 21st. Up until the re-election of Donald Trump in November 2024 it seemed the triumph of secularism, and the third class status of Christians, would go on for the foreseeable future. But things took a radical change that day, one for many of us that is still hard to believe. Unless it is really happening, and it is.
I’ve said this many times here, and argue it extensively in my book, that secularism is basically dead. It had a good, very long run, but has run its course and proved to be a colossal failure. I often use the Berlin Wall as a metaphor for secularism. It seemed as indestructible as the physical wall separating East from West Germany, and fell as ignominiously. The basic premise of secularism was that a society could function and flourish without God, and it is glaringly obvious that doesn’t work. I was born in 1960, and the remnant of Christendom was hanging by a thread, it’s foundations having been completely gutted by the nascent secularism driven by America’s cultural elites. When Kennedy was shot and the Beatles showed up on the Ed Sullivan show a little over two months later, everything changed. What we came to call “the 60s” ushered in a cultural revolution that is only now coming to its somber end in 2025.
Goodness, Beauty, and Truth: The Real
By this third decade of the 21st century the youngest among us were hungering for something real, something that works, that makes sense of reality, that brings real meaning, real fulfillment, real hope, real joy, real healing, real anything. Secularism brought only disappointment and dysfunction because it only deals with half of reality, the material half, and that half will never make a person whole. If the material is all there is, then goodness, beauty, and truth cannot exist. They are only concepts “in the eyes of the beholder.” What ends up happening as we’ve seen throughout history, is that without God rooted in Scripture, goodness turns bad, beauty turns ugly, and truth into lies. It is inevitable. But the fact of the matter is that goodness, beauty, and truth do exist, and these metaphysical realities are touching millions around the world today, especially young people in the West who’ve grown up on a consistent diet of lies.
What is so shocking to many, I dare say most of us, is the seeming rapidity of the change. We felt the same way with peak woke that grew during Trump’s first term, and then came to dominate culture and politics in Biden’s term. Then all of a sudden, Trump’s elected again, and Christians and Christianity went from being mocked and denigrated, to Christ being proclaimed from the rooftops, including by the highest government officials, and that boldly. In a way we have Charlie Kirk to thank for that, but his horrible death only popped the cork, and the spiritual bubbly sprayed over the entire culture, and indeed throughout the world. It was yet another massive red pill in this Great Awakening journey God is granting his creatures. We also have the Internet to thank as well. First, information can no longer be controlled by the secular, leftist gatekeepers who once determined what was important and was allowed to be disseminated. And now people, especially young people, are getting their news and information from social media and the Internet, unfiltered, and uncontrolled by the secular leftists.
What is also amazing about this Great Awakening, is that while we’re breaking out of secularism like those awaking from a nightmare, we also seem to be breaking out of the Pietism that has dominated Evangelical Christianity for almost two hundred years. The lived Christian experience became a primarily personal version of spirituality. Another piece I’ve written here tells the story of Pietism and secularism being two sides of the same coin, each enabling the other. Charlie Kirk has been instrumental in bringing Christianity back to its world changing, culture transforming roots. While not being driven theologically, he realized through his talent and organizational skills at making things happen that it was Christianity that allowed society to function and flourish as God intended. As I recently heard a new British Christian, Louise Perry on Twitter say of Christianity, “If it were supernaturally true you would expect it to be sociologically true.” That is brilliant! Christianity lived out in obedience to God and his law, blesses wherever it goes, the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abram 4,000 years ago. Kirk understood better than most, it was Christianity that allowed true human flourishing in every area of life, including in politics.
More Christians than ever in my lifetime, especially politically and culturally influential Christians, are proclaiming Christ as King, and that our nation must be a Christian nation, rightly understood. And keep in mind, God used the most unlikely vessel to spark this spiritual wildfire, Donald Trump, with the Holy Spirit lighting that spark. It isn’t that Trump is our Moses leading us to the promised land, or a paragon of Christian virtue, but God enabled him to start something in hindsight no other public figure could: he drove the left certifiably insane. This was also enabled by the NeverTrumper right who revealed their true colors as the controlled opposition, and the result of this has been a revelation of God beyond anything that’s happened since the triumph of secularism in the 20th century. Initially, the title of my book was, Trump the Great Revealer, but my publisher suggested changing it because the book isn’t about Trump, but the Great Awakening coming in his wake, a great revealing.
The left revealing its true evil nature is God’s judgment in giving these people exactly what they wanted, and it just wasn’t good enough. They wanted more because at heart they are totalitarians. It reminds me of the passage in Romans 1 where Paul is speaking of God’s wrath against sinful humanity:
24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
Sexual debauchery is only one of the consequences of man’s rebellion against God, of his giving them over to their desires, because its ugly manifestations infect everything. Human nature being what it is, things often have to get very bad for people to eventually repent and find their way back to the Author of life that is truly life. Which is a good introduction to a change in my prayer habits that happened several years ago coinciding with my own eschatological awakening.
The Four R’s: Revival, Renewal, Restoration, and Reformation
For several hundred years in the Evangelical Church prayer for revival has been common. We’ve seen wide revivals like the Great Awakenings, and pockets of revival throughout Western history. I realized several years ago that revival in a secular society is no longer enough. In previous revivals, all Christians believed their faith should have societal consequences. Then as Pietism and secularism, two sides of the same coin, came to dominate Western culture in the 20th century, revivals became solely “spiritual.” For some my two sides claim seems odd. After all, isn’t Pietism deeply religious, and secularism not religious at all? The point is that one enables the other. Pietism is primarily about a privatized, personal religious faith, and secularism demands a privatized, personalized faith. In a secular Republic, like America is now, but slowly breaking out of, faith is allowed, but not in the public square. As long as religion stays within the four walls of the house or church, the secularist thinks it’s great, but when it starts sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong, like government or law or education, it must be silenced and forced back into the private and personal.
Because of this Pietistic-secular dynamic, several years ago I stopped praying for revival only, and began praying the four R’s, for revival, renewal, restoration, and reformation. The first R is for the spiritual rebirth of individuals by the power of the Holy Spirit. The next two Rs means those people bring that spiritual awakening into God’s creation to renew and restore it, and the fourth R into the church to transform it into the engine of renewal and restoration for God’s people so they go out into the world to extend Christ’s reign on earth.
What this means in practice is that I am now praying for the earthly reclamation project that is the gospel. For too long Christians have seen the gospel in narrow, truncated terms, as if it was only about our personal salvation from sin. The gospel means, in effect, saying the sinner’s prayer, the Four Spiritual Laws, the Romans Road. In fact, what makes the Great Commission great, is that going from spiritual death to life, from darkness to light, is only the beginning. We are then to take that life and light into all of life. What did Jesus say when he gave the disciples their commission? Teach “them to obey everything I have commanded you.” And then Jesus gave us the New Testament to let us know what everything meant, and then to take that everything into every area of life. All things are transformed by the gospel, which means God’s kingdom coming and his will being done on earth as it is in heaven.
The beauty of this Great Awakening is that in large measure because of Charlie Kirk and all the work he did for the last 13 years, and then his assassination, more Christians are starting to understand that we can’t stop at the first R. His memorial is a great example of how renewal and restoration happen. Almost the entire executive branch of the United States Government was present, as were many from Congress. The boldness of government officials proclaiming Christ unashamedly was something I didn’t think I’d ever see in my lifetime. Sure, Christians have served in government, and boldly proclaimed their faith, but not in this way, not on such a grand scale. In addition to the people attending in two venues in Arizona, it is estimated that over a hundred million people saw it worldwide, and how many more will see clips and snippets into the foreseeable future is unknowable, but surely massive. Charlie Kirk in death is reaching far more than in life.
I recently heard Vice President J.D. Vance say in an interview that prior to Kirk’s murder, he hadn’t read the Bible much, and was uncomfortable being outspoken about his faith, but since he’s reading the Bible every day, and boldly proclaiming Jesus. He’s not the only one either. This is now widespread in the halls of power in the United States of America. And whatever anyone thinks about President Trump, he has really led the way in Making Christianity Great Again in America. Christianity has been welcome in his White House unlike any president in modern times, and given free reign to speak and be itself. That is an answer to my prayer for renewal and restoration. We add reformation when Christians realize the all-encompassing nature of the mission of the church, of God’s people taking the authority of King Jesus and Christian worldview into every nook and cranny of life because we understand again the theological richness of the first Reformation. The scope and extent of the gospel’s influence will then be unleased on the secularism that has decimated Christian Western civilization. But that means we will have to address the big lie of secularism.
The Secular Myth of Neutrality
Unfortunately, most Christians have never heard this phrase, and would likely not know what I was talking about. As I mentioned above, in a secular society religion is primarily a private affair. There is a long history of why this came to exist in Western societies, but religion is never just a private thing. Every nation and people has a view of reality that includes ultimate things, answers to the great questions of life that give our lives meaning, hope, and purpose, or at least attempt to. There has to be some ultimate source of authority in every society, and if it’s not God it will be the state. We saw this come to full fruition in the tyranny of Biben administration, and now on terrible display in the UK. The religion of secularism was on full display, man like God determining what is good and evil (Gen. 3). There has never been and will never be a neutral public space where ultimate questions don’t have to be answered, it’s a myth, one we’ve been mired in since at least the end of World War II.
Ever since we’ve lived in a secular republic informed by the liberal (read left-wing) post-World War II “consensus.” That word in quotes means, sadly, that conservatives (including Christians) have gone along with the “consensus.” Most conservatives still buy into this, thinking something like a “Christian nation” is an oxymoron, in the words of Larry Arnn which I wrote about last year. I hope he’s changed his mind on that contention. The reason he said it, and why conservatives believe it, is because they believe if a nation is Christian, the government will force all the people to believe Christian things. That’s ridiculous because Christianity doesn’t teach such a thing, in fact exactly the opposite. Just read the gospels and Acts. Jesus seemed to do everything he could to get people not to follow him. And the Apostles simply proclaimed a resurrected Jesus as the Messianic fulfillment of the Jewish religion. People were free to believe it, or not.
Somewhere along the way in Christian history, Christians forgot this, and started forcing Christian belief with the threat of persecution, and sometimes death. That was when church and state were truly mixed up in an unbiblical and unhealthy way. Even then, however, the church couldn’t execute those they deemed heretics. That was a job for the state, the institution wielding of the sword (Rom. 13) for justice. This brings up something like blasphemy laws. Certainly, such a thing has no place in a Christian nation, right? Wrong. As we’ve seen in our secular republic, blasphemy laws are alive and well. The only difference is the content considered blasphemous. We all know and lived through this in the Biden years. The lie of the myth of neutrality was on full display, which I now see is why God allowed him to “win” the 2020 election. We got leftism on steroids. Some liberals and conservatives (who are basically liberals as well), still contend that a neutral secular state is the ideal we should strive for, but such a thing can’t exist, and never will.
That means in this age of the four R’s, this Great Awakening, Christians need to think seriously what a Christian nation in the modern world looks like. That will take a lot of work and debate and discussion, but many are now undertaking that. Part of the subtitle of my book was the refounding of America. The founders got a lot of things right, but not everything. Much of the Christian foundation of the republic happened because America was formed in an overwhelmingly Protestant culture, which was assumed, not explicitly stated. That was because secularism was already a force even then. That needs to change, and it is, but none of this will be easy. God gave us, then took away from us much too soon, a Charlie Kirk to give us a good start. Let’s build on his legacy so we can bless the generations to come with what he gave his life for.
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