For days, Charlie Kirk’s assassination and his extraordinary memorial service dominated news reports, social media, and personal conversations. Decision asked Hutz Hertzberg, who leads Turning Point Education, a division of Kirk’s organization Turning Point USA (TPUSA), to describe what Kirk was like in person and how God is moving in hearts since Kirk’s passing.
“His relationship with Jesus Christ was the most important thing in his life,” said Hertzberg, whose own ministry stretches back more than 45 years and includes roles with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Wheaton College, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, The Moody Church and Christian Heritage Academy.
Hertzberg said he was one among many who would regularly receive text messages with Scripture verses that Kirk would send on his way to work. He would reach out to people—even in the middle of an important event—to ask if there was anything he could do for them. And unlike many leaders with busy schedules and crushing workloads, Kirk carefully protected his family life.
“As busy as Charlie was—and he was as busy as any person that I’ve ever been close to or knew—he would turn his devices off and not take calls from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown. [It] was obviously a priority for him to love his wife, to love his children, and that’s certainly a mark of a man who takes Biblical priorities seriously.”
“It was his faith that motivated him to go to the public square and to use ‘little-t truth’ to be able to talk about ‘big-T Truth,’” Hertzberg said. “In the last two-plus years, there wasn’t a talk I heard Charlie give where he didn’t speak about his relationship and faith in Jesus Christ and challenge others to have that kind of relationship, or to consider it.”
Kirk once said that when he began to speak out on political issues, he had no money, no connections and no idea what he was doing. And for the first year-and-a-half of TPUSA’s existence, he was its only employee. But growth came quickly. By 2021, an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education called TPUSA “the dominant force in campus conservatism.”
Hertzberg points to several reasons why Kirk became so influential among young people. First, Kirk was a young person himself, just 18 when he began, so he was someone other young people could identify with.
“But I think more than that,” he said, “Charlie was not afraid to speak the truth. And as I saw him mature over the years, increasingly he spoke it with love. In his early years, it was more truth than love. But as he matured in his faith, it was truth with love. I think young people admired Charlie’s courage—that he was willing to come to the hardest places and be uncompromising in truth.
“He would never back off of the truth, even when speaking to people at the highest levels. And I think that’s part of the reason why political figures respected Charlie so much. He wasn’t saying the politically expedient thing or the thing that would get him accepted. Oftentimes it was just the opposite.”
And there was his determination to let nothing intimidate him. “Charlie received death threats every week, yet that did not keep him from going to those hard and dangerous places. He got ridiculed, he got death threats, he got opposition, but he still kept coming. I think young people really respected that.”
Since Kirk’s founding of TPUSA in 2012, he has been known to most as an advocate of conservative politics, but over the past few years—some point to a 2018 visit to the Holy Land as one key event in the maturing of his faith—Kirk became more passionate in speaking out for Jesus Christ.
And now, Kirk’s death seemingly has energized thousands to take up the causes he stood for.
“I’m seeing John 12:24 being lived out, ” Hertzberg said. “Jesus said, ‘I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.’ We are seeing that in so many ways.”
Hertzberg said that between Sept. 10 and early October, Turning Point Education had received more than 1.6 million orders for its curriculum, and its website had been viewed from 202 countries. The organization holds monthly webinars to teach interested groups how they can start Christian classical schools. In a good month, Hertzberg said, about 30 groups might sign up. But in advance of the October webinar, more than 1,300 groups had expressed interest.
How long this all might last is anyone’s guess. Hertzberg recalled that after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, many churches saw attendance rise steeply, and there was a widespread openness to the things of the Lord. But that fervor seemed to die out after just a few weeks.
This might be different.
“I sense there’s an extraordinary work of God’s Spirit at play here,” Hertzberg said. “This comes after 13 years of planting seeds of truth and life and hope in the hearts of young people. I think we can’t even begin to see and measure the impact and the effect of what God is doing. But I hope and pray that the impact will continue for a generation in the lives of these young people.”
