Caleb Campbell is a pastor at Desert Springs Bible Church in Phoenix, and he says that something he witnesses at a supposedly “Christian” pro-Trump event he recently attended left him disgusted by how scriptures were being misquoted and even used to justify some of of the most hateful things imaginable.
Speaking with Nathan Vandeklippe of The Toronto Globe and Mail, Campbell notes that he was at a revival event sponsored by Turning Point, a conservative group based in Phoenix that is associated with conservative broadcaster Charlie Kirk.
“I was absolutely terrified and horrified,” Mr. Campbell recalled. He was in a familiar environment: people gathered inside a church singing Christian worship music, with a prayer and a collection of money.
But the person delivering the homily was not a minister. It was Charlie Kirk, a college dropout who has become a prominent conservative broadcaster and pivotal figure in spreading and sustaining the new U.S. wave of populist conservatism. He talks “like a pastor would talk,” Mr. Campbell recalled.
That includes bringing the Bible to the pulpit. Mr. Kirk regularly refers to the Book of Jeremiah, where the 29th verse says, “seek the peace and prosperity of the city.” Mr. Kirk, however, replaces “seek” with “demand,” a notion that becomes the basis for him to argue, Mr. Campbell said, for a proclamation of “why we’ve got to demand our gun rights and demand school choice.”
God and guns, what an odd mashup of completely disparate concepts. But some in the right-wing religious community seem convinced that Jesus would be toting an AR-15 if he was walking among us in this day and time. So much for that whole “prince of peace” thing, huh?
Kirk has gone even further, telling followers that the Founding Fathers didn’t actually want separation of church and state, remarking that “the church founded this country,” which would certainly be news to Thomas Jefferson, who created his own version of The Bible and didn’t think religion had any place in the workings of government. As a matter of fact, the deliberate mixing of religion and government was one of the main reasons the Jefferson and others like him left England and declared their independence from a tyrannical king who was cloaked in the blessings of the church.
Campbell adds that even more troubling than what Kirk said at the revival was the way his message was so rapturously received by attendees:
“What was shocking to me was the people in the room raising their hands and saying, ‘Amen. Hallelujah.’ They were having a religious experience.”
And that’s not all that was being spouted at the event, Campbell notes. There was also plenty of fearmongering about how ethnic minorities and others were attacking white Christians:
“They’re afraid the outsider is going to take over and eliminate their life. It’s the erasure part that is the greatest threat,” he said. He came to understand Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” as “an appeal to ethnic preservation,” in the guise of defending a Christian nation.
Campbell now sees his mission as one of trying to counter the hateful messages being spewed by Kirk and others.
Campbell says he is driven to counteract what he sees as a false doctrine of power, one that conflates political and religious kingdom-building. Such an idea is not new to Christendom, he said, pointing to Rome under Constantine and Charlemagne.
“It’s a perpetual heresy,” he said. “This one just is sprinkled with red, white and blue. This one tastes like apple pie.”
