Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk on America: ‘Freedom Is Not Sustainable If You Remove Christianity’
By Movieguide® Staff
Kirk Cameron recently sat down with the founder and president of Turning Point USA. This nonprofit organization helps teach students about their rights and freedom in America.
“Since its founding, Turning Point USA has embarked on a mission to build the most organized, active, and powerful conservative grassroots activist network on high school and college campuses across the country. With a presence on over 3,000 campuses, Turning Point USA is the largest and fastest-growing youth organization in America,” their website reads.
However, Kirk explained that faith is the foundation on which he takes actions to protect the American values of our Founding Fathers.
Kirk said that the fight for religious freedom is central to maintaining morality and liberty.
“First and foremost, it’s the freedom to worship your own creator, the reason why you exist,” Kirk told Cameron on the TBN show TAKEAWAYS. “The founding fathers designed this system of self-government believing that only with moral and religious people this was possible.”
“It’s John Adams’ quote where he said, ‘The constitution was written solely for a moral and religious people, it’s wholly inadequate for the people of any other.’ So limited government is only possible when people are able to regulate their own decisions and conduct, particularly in religious communities or having at least the church or the worship of God as a centerpiece of your life,” Kirk explained.
While the word “liberty” has taken on a different meaning today, Kirk said it originally referred to American citizens’ ability to pursue God.
“This idea of liberty, the way that the founding fathers understood liberty, is not the traditional libertarian view of liberty that we’ve come to realize in America,” he said. “It’s the ability to pursue virtue without somebody getting in the way.”
“The necessity of virtue was fundamental to the American founding fathers,” he added. “55 out of 56 of the signers of the declaration of independence were christians who regularly attended church. At least a dozen were pastors and maybe even more right and more than that had religious degrees.”
Kirk noted that nowhere else on the planet do citizens have the freedom to worship God.
“Religious freedom in the United States constitution is unlike anything else,” he said. “The government has no right to get in the way of your religious conscience, your ability to gather to assemble and to be able to worship your creator. This is a unique attribute and characteristic of the American system and as soon as you lose religious freedom state control then begins to set in.”
Kirk recognized that freedom without God is not true freedom.
“Freedom is not sustainable if you remove religion,” Kirk said. “I’ll be even more specific, freedom is not sustainable if you remove Christianity. Eventually, it will implode. Eventually you will be ruled simply by your senses, you’ll be ruled simply by your consciousness.”
“I’m a big lover of reason,” he continued. “I think reason is a gift from the Lord. It says in Isaiah 1, ‘let us reason together.’ But reason without revelation, reason without the belief in a transcendent order will go to where Jon Stewart Mill or where Darwin articulated, which is the survival of the fittest; a eugenicist type experiment and we as Christians should reject.”
Despite the American government’s recent push to separate church and state, Kirk and Cameron point out that the doctrine is nowhere to be found in America’s influential documents.
“It’s in a single letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptist Convention,” Kirk explained. “It’s not in the constitution, it’s not the declaration, it’s not in the bill of rights, it’s not in the federalist papers, it’s not in any of those foundational documents that formed this
republic that we have.”
“It was adopted by the Warren Burger court in the 1960s and 70s as a reason to get prayer out of schools but let’s pretend they were right… why don’t they keep the state out of the church?” he added. “Why don’t they keep the public health officials from going into churches and
locking them down? I thought they want separation of church and state, they can’t even be consistent with their own lies.”
Even as Turning Point USA mobilizes young conservatives to take action, Kirk said that “prudence” is essential in pursuing truth.
“The founding fathers always believed that Christians deserved to be counselors to the king, not deserved, they needed to be counselors to the king,” he said. “The people whispering in the ear of the leaders, counseling them do this and don’t do that. The church has abdicated its moral place to be counseling the king or counseling the political leaders in our country and we see the result of that.”
“Courage is only moral when it’s rooted in truth,” he added. “If we have the truth we have to act on it and that’s when things are going to start to change… If you remove the church, you remove faith, all of a sudden all this other freedom we enjoy goes away.”
Watch the full interview below:
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Now more than ever we’re bombarded by darkness in media, movies, and TV. Movieguide® has fought back for almost 40 years, working within Hollywood to propel uplifting and positive content. We’re proud to say we’ve collaborated with some of the top industry players to influence and redeem entertainment for Jesus. Still, the most influential person in Hollywood is you. The viewer.
What you listen to, watch, and read has power. Movieguide® wants to give you the resources to empower the good and the beautiful. But we can’t do it alone. We need your support.
You can make a difference with as little as $7. It takes only a moment. If you can, consider supporting our ministry with a monthly gift. Thank you.
Movieguide® is a 501c3 and all donations are tax deductible.
