The murder of Charlie Kirk has sparked a religious revival in America. Many are saying they’ve felt a “spiritual shift.” People who knew little about him before he was killed started watching videos of his debates and engagements with other Americans about what is right and wrong. Many have purchased his recent book, Stop, In the Name of God, which challenges Christians regarding the Sabbath. Many people say they feel deeply moved, as if they knew Kirk, and are thinking about changing their lifestyles, going to church, and becoming more religious.

But is this wave of religion and spirituality real? Is it enough to save America?

Turning Point usa held America Fest in Phoenix, Arizona, last weekend. The nationwide conservative youth organization has hundreds of thousands of members, 30,000 of whom attended the event, and is led by Kirk’s widow. And on Sunday, the last day of the convention, Erika Kirk sat down with none other than hip-hop star Nicki Minaj.

Minaj has recently been speaking out against Islamic militants persecuting and committing violence against Nigerian Christians. So Turning Point usa gave her the chance to speak and to endorse President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance at a political rally. But Sunday morning’s Kirk-Minaj conversation actually exposes the hollowness and compromise at the heart of America’s religious revival.

For 20 years, Minaj has been churning out outrageously sexual, profanity-laden rap songs and videos. She is exactly the type of moral and sexual influence that American youth should be warned against. You would think it would be an easy decision for Turning Point usa not to ever feature anyone even remotely like her—let alone with Erika Kirk at the first America Fest since Charlie Kirk’s assassination and the resulting cultural phenomenon.

Minaj says she recently reignited her relationship with God, yet she has not stopped making profanity-laden music, nor has she stopped making obscenely sexual videos. Some conservatives have expressed criticism that an active rapper was featured so prominently, but others have argued, If you don’t want Nicki Minaj in this movement, you don’t want to win.

This sentiment reveals a dangerous flaw in American Christianity.

Nobody is saying they don’t want Minaj in the conservative movement. It would be wonderful if she cleaned up her life and stopped spreading filth. This has not happened. Minaj isn’t moving toward conservative principles so much as conservatism is compromising on Minaj principles.

Minaj has basically started talking more about Jesus while living and promoting the same sinful lifestyle she has lived for years! Minaj has not embraced a Christian lifestyle; Christianity has embraced a Minaj lifestyle.

During her interview with Erika Kirk, Minaj admitted that it is difficult to maintain a relationship with God in the rap music industry. Yet she has not left the rap industry. She simply said, “Wherever you are and whenever you need it, you have something that you can tap into immediately. It’s immediate. You don’t have to leave a message. He’s not going to call you back. He’s there immediately for you. Call on Him, and on the first ring, He’s going to answer.”

That is music to many young conservatives’ ears. After decades of anti-God, anti-Bible orthodoxy enforced by radical leftists, they have respect for someone at least saying that there is a God or that they believe in Jesus Christ.

This is a dangerous deception! Throughout the Bible, you find people mixing truth with error and even worship of the true God with aspects of worship of false gods. God warns throughout the Bible that mixing the truth with sin doesn’t purify the sin; it poisons the truth!

True religion, pure Christianity, means repenting—changing our words and deeds to obey God.

Promoting Nicki Minaj is just one example of a fatal flaw in American Christianity that has existed for generations: the “come as you are” theology.

God lays out two requirements of salvation in Acts 2:38: repentance and baptism. People like Minaj are not even claiming to repent of sinful lifestyles. But people who talk a lot about God and the Bible and even the evils of sexual sins are inviting people like her to come into their movement without changing. This is influencing millions of young Americans that they too can consume and even produce sexually obscene material and still be conservative and even Christian.

God is faithful to forgive our sins upon repentance (1 John 1:9). Minaj’s sins, like yours and mine, can indeed be blotted out. But we have to acknowledge that sin is hideous, that it is the breaking of God’s wonderful law (1 John 3:4), and that each of us is guilty of sin (Romans 5:12). Then we must expend every effort and call on God with every bit of our being to help us to repent of those sins, which means we stop breaking the commandments of God’s spiritual law of love and we start keeping it!

Until you repent, your sins hide God’s face from you so “that he will not hear” (Isaiah 59:2). So, what Minaj said about God answering the phone on the first ring is not true. God won’t even pick up the phone until we come to Him in a humble, repentant attitude, seeking His help and willing to do everything within our power to put our sins behind us.

In his 2011 article “The Bible and the Constitution,” my father, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry, wrote, “Christian leaders today teach that the law has been done away. That is almost the extreme opposite of what our forefathers believed! Our spiritual leaders, both from the right and the left, have led us into lawlessness and grave danger. Even the politicians who established our republic were more spiritual than most of our religious leaders today!”

What is it that conservatives want to conserve? If it’s not the principles that Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln and others instituted—let alone the higher moral and spiritual principles they aspired to— then it’s not much more than branding!

The leaders at Turning Point usa are accountable for their decisions. If you read the Bible, you realize that God is actually more angry with them than with Minaj, who knows almost nothing about God or the Bible. The religious leaders at Turning Point usa should have taught Minaj about repentance when she said she wanted a closer relationship with God. They did not. Instead, they compromised with evil. It’s a strategy that might temporarily spread and empower a movement but always corrupts it!

“We are all going to be judged by the law of liberty,” my father and I write in Character in Crisis. “It is not a law of bondage, as many religious leaders teach! These deceived leaders often teach that the law has been done away. Even our forefathers, who were not ministers, knew better! These ministers are going to be condemned more strictly than other people, because of the office they hold.”

This is a sobering warning! If you honor the principles Charlie Kirk honored, you realize that something is off in this regard at Turning Point usa. If you revere the founders of our nation, you realize that 2025 conservatism in America is deathly ill. If you revere what the founders revered, the Bible and God, you realize that this movement and this nation are face to face with literal destruction.

Many religious people think they are being loving and merciful by inviting people to “come as you are” into their movement. Charlie Kirk wasn’t perfect in this regard either, but people should remember that he often rightly emphasized that conservatism must make clear distinctions between right and wrong and conserve the right and oppose the wrong.

God says He is wrathful against sin and against lawless Christians who compromise with sin! Stop and think about what Jesus Christ said in Matthew 7:21: “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.”

God has empowered President Trump to lead a resurgence in America. God has saved America, but why? To give us one more opportunity to repent! If Americans do not dramatically forsake sin and embrace obedience, our nation, like the nations of the Bible, will be destroyed even as people cry out to God. We will learn the hard way that we worshiped our own idea of God, not the true God of the Bible. America Fest was a red-white-and-blue swirl of patriotism, excitement, emotion, patriotism, ideologies and faiths, and important truths mixed with deadly evils—a tragically accurate reflection of American conservatism today.

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