Evangelical sportscaster Jon Root recognized the con. His faith was strong, but he’d seen stage magic before.
His disillusionment began in Baton Rouge in 2023, at a church packed for Christian nationalist Sean Feucht’s worship event, bankrolled by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA Faith. Before the service, Root watched staff circulate through the crowd with prayer request cards. Attendees wrote of problems like depression, job loss, or family issues on slips of paper. Then Feucht took the stage and started calling out those details. Audience members wept, convinced they were witnessing divine revelation.
Then came the ask for donations. Sow a seed of $120 for deliverance and liberty.
Root was working for TPUSA Faith at the time, and he was disgusted. “He’s getting paid by Turning Point USA to go to every single capital across the United States,” Root said on a 2025 podcast. “Everything is being paid for, and he is getting paid on top of that. Then he’s taking donations. This is not about legitimate ministry. This is about Sean Feucht.”
Within months, Root was speaking publicly about what he witnessed, grift and false preaching, which would cost him his position. But his public criticism of TPUSA’s ties to Christian nationalism would crack open something larger. “When people claim Christ, we’re all held to a biblical standard. And then I can’t stand compromise. You can’t partner with false teachers. You cannot platform disqualified pastors,” Root says.
He had witnessed the grift up close, and noted it ran deeper than one preacher’s con. Charlie Kirk’s campus organization has become an $85 million operation that fuses apocalyptic theology with politics. Kirk abandoned secularism and brought in disgraced pastors, prosperity preachers, and dominionist prophets who teach that capturing America’s institutions will hasten Christ’s return.
Kirk’s September 2025 assassination left behind an infrastructure too entrenched to die with him, and the young conservatives flowing through TPUSA’s 2,000 chapters are learning that democracy itself needs conquering.
How TPUSA Went From Secular Libertarianism to Religious Extremism
In 2019, Kirk was 26, touring college campuses with his libertarian pitch. Free markets. Limited government. Fiscal responsibility.
The organization that would become synonymous with religious nationalism hadn’t started that way. “Turning Point USA educates students about the importance of fiscal responsibility, free markets, and capitalism,” tax forms from back then read. “Through non-partisan debate, dialogue, and discussion, Turning Point USA believes that every young person can be enlightened to true free market values.”
Turning Point USA launched in 2012, focused on economic conservatism. Student chapters organized around policy debates, constitutional interpretation and limited government principles. Kirk also added complaining about “leftist propaganda,” illegal immigration, and supporting Second Amendment rights to the mix to draw in young followers. Religion was not a topic he discussed.
Author and professor Matthew Boedy has been researching TPUSA since 2016 when he was placed on their “Professor Watchlist,” which doxxes professors across the country who “promote leftist propaganda,” for his views that guns don’t belong on college campuses.
As he notes in his book The Seven Mountains Mandate, things changed at Turning Point USA around the time the pandemic hit. “Kirk has always identified himself as an evangelical Christian. But Turning Point’s messages early on were consistently secular, mainly focused on free market values and economic issues, and shying away from any culture war hot buttons like abortion,” although he relied on “donors who wanted to push those buttons.”
The separation was deliberate. Kirk kept God out of the equation for years. Then the pandemic changed everything.
During lockdown, Kirk could no longer embark on his college tours, which were TPUSA’s bread and butter. Rob McCoy, Kirk’s spiritual mentor and pastor at Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Thousand Oaks, California, saw an opportunity.
As Boedy notes, McCoy had convinced Kirk he could enter a new market, “the one market [Kirk] had criticized as wrong-headed not a year earlier: largely White evangelical churches embracing political partisanship like they had in the ’80s. Kirk began touring them in lieu of college campuses during the early years of the pandemic,” Boedy writes.
“I felt like I was going through my life with two left shoes, and you were wearing two right shoes,” McCoy later quipped to Kirk. “And then we met each other, and we said, ‘Wow, you can help me.’
Kirk launched TPUSA Faith in early 2021.
(2021 TPUSA Investor Prospectus)
That year TPUSA took in nearly $56 million in donations, and now described their activities to the IRS as to “empower informed civic and cultural engagement grounded in American exceptionalism and a positive spirit of action,” and help citizens “meaningfully engage in their communities to restore traditional American values like patriotism, respect for life, liberty, family, and fiscal responsibility.”
Building an Empire on Seven Mountains
The New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) operates as Christian nationalism’s apocalyptic tributary. Besides the common Christian nationalist beliefs that reject religious and racial pluralism, LGBTQ+ and women’s rights, NAR adherents are also convinced they are living in the End Times with a goal that isn’t just political victory — it’s spiritual warfare aimed at hastening the apocalypse and Christ’s return.
Their operating doctrine, the Seven Mountain Mandate, seeks to dominate seven spheres of society: government, education, media, arts, religion, family, and business. This is dominionism, the conviction that certain Christians are divinely mandated to rule society, repackaged for the Trump era.
Between 2021 and his assassination, Kirk built infrastructure that directly mapped onto NAR’s conquest blueprint. Turning Point Action flooded swing-state elections with boots on the ground, claiming the political sphere and proved to be a crucial factor in Trump’s presidential win. Turning Point Faith embedded in churches nationwide, leveraging McCoy’s pastoral networks and Feucht’s worship tours to reach congregations around the country. Turning Point Academy worked to reshape education policy while campus chapters recruited students. The media operation — Frontlines, TPUSA Live (where Jon Root appeared), and TPUSA’s expanding digital apparatus — distributed Seven Mountain messaging across platforms. Local chapters trained Christians for business leadership using “biblical” financial principles.
Seven mountains, seven organizational divisions of TPUSA executing NAR doctrine.
This wasn’t NAR taking over TPUSA, but rather Kirk appropriating their congregations, their networks, and their prophets. He gave NAR believers something they’d never had: a political machine with youth appeal, campus infrastructure, and serious money. A secular libertarian college organizing operation got retrofitted for spiritual warfare, and campus debates about fiscal responsibility became recruitment pipelines for believers convinced they were hastening Christ’s return by capturing American institutions.
The Mentor: Mark Driscoll’s “Ungodly” Past
While McCoy reshaped TPUSA’s theology, Kirk formed another friendship. Mark Driscoll became his spiritual mentor. Kirk called him “one of the greatest Bible teachers in the country — in the world, actually,” featured him repeatedly on his show, and promoted his books. They texted regularly. Driscoll described them as dear friends, even though the record on Driscoll was public and extensive long before Kirk embraced him.
Forty-one former elders at Mars Hill Church in Seattle signed a letter in 2016 declaring Driscoll unfit for ministry. They called for him to step down from his role as pastor at Trinity Church in Scottsdale, which he founded two years after The Acts 29 Network — a church-planting organization he helped found — expelled him due to “ungodly behavior.” His 14,000-member church dissolved within months of his 2014 resignation.
The resignation came after investigations into spiritual abuse and a $250,000 scheme to manipulate his book, Real Marriage, onto bestseller lists by having the church buy thousands of copies through strategic retailers.
The money scheme paled next to what Driscoll said from the pulpit. Driscoll called women “penis houses.” Kirk’s mentor had a secret online life, too — raging as ‘William Wallace II’ about a “pussified nation” controlled by “bitter penis-envying burned feministed single mothers.”
At Trinity Church in Scottsdale, Arizona, where Driscoll rebuilt after Seattle, former members reported 24/7 surveillance of families who left. Staff maintained a “loyalty scale” ranking members from one to 10 based on their commitment.
Root, who worked in media at TPUSA, including hosting a faith-based sports show, began pushing back on interviewing figures from the NAR and those with ties to prosperity gospel and asking uncomfortable questions of his employer and the organization’s associations on his social media.
Andrew Korvet, a TPUSA executive, delivered a message from Driscoll’s camp: delete the posts or Driscoll won’t appear on the show. Root refused and was fired, he says.
“That’s the tough thing we see within the conservative movement. There’s a lot of compromise,” Root said about his time with TPUSA. “A lot of people talk about Christ, they don’t actually live for Christ, or they’re happy to partner with false teachers or problematic teachers for the sake of political expediency, for the sake of mooching off their platform, for the sake of selling tickets.”
Root was describing the very infrastructure Kirk had constructed. With Kirk gone, the extremists he’d elevated rushed to claim his legacy.
Kirk’s September 2025 assassination — shot by a gunman at a Utah “Prove Me Wrong” rally — left a power vacuum with enormous financial stakes. TPUSA’s $85 million budget funded through a network of 500,000 donors represents one of the conservative movement’s most valuable assets.
Within days, Driscoll was working the grief circuit, telling everyone he’d been Kirk’s spiritual guide.
In a sermon four days after Kirk was shot, Driscoll labeled his murder the work of demons. Although a good portion of TPUSA’s staff are Latter Day Saints, a point Kirk made before he was shot, Driscoll claimed “Mormonism is a demonic cult,” adding that “on the top of Mormon buildings, I won’t call them churches, There is an angel named Moroni, and you won’t see that in our Bible because this is a demon.” He also explained that transgender people are actually demons. “In the Bible, angels are never sexually involved with human beings, but demons often are,” he proclaimed. “Demons are often involved in perversion, transgenderism, and sexuality that is perverse.”
On September 16, 2025, Driscoll launched his first-ever podcast. On September 29, he co-hosted The Charlie Kirk Show.
Sean Feucht: The Prosperity Gospel’s Perfect Showman
Sean Feucht brought different assets to TPUSA Faith. The preaching musician’s pandemic worship protests — outdoor services defying lockdown orders — created perfect optics for an organization positioning itself against government overreach. TPUSA Faith immediately funded his Kingdom to the Capitol tour in 2023. The tour included a worship session in the US Capitol Rotunda.
The Associated Press reported that former associates accused Feucht of mismanaging millions in ministry funds the Christian rockstar had raised in recent years, buoyed by TPUSA’s embrace. Multiple whistleblowers came forward denouncing a host of financial irregularities.
Christy Gafford served for eight years as national director and communications lead for Sean Feucht Ministries, and was fired after demanding accountability and questioning why volunteers had to pay for Feucht to come to their communities. Bookkeeper Richie Booth left the organization after experiencing verbal abuse and pressure to travel to events at his own expense. “I’ve seen so many people get taken advantage of, go through burnout, and how their health suffered because of how much they poured into these ministries,” Booth said. “They neglected their own finances and ended up decimated from how much they gave — thinking they were doing something good and beneficial.”
Property records show Sean Feucht Ministries purchased nearly $7 million in real estate since 2020. Two parsonages in Washington, D.C., and California. A 40-acre Montana hunting property. 458 acres in Texas. Feucht and his wife personally own $4.5 million in additional real estate: seven rental properties in Pennsylvania, homes in California, and Montana.
Feucht’s organization, Hold the Line, saw its revenue jump to $5.3 million in 2020 — the year of the pandemic protests. Then he restructured the organization in 2021 to dodge transparency requirements that would have made his tax documents public under IRS rules for larger nonprofits.
Ministry Watch gave Sean Feucht Ministries an F rating. The nonprofit that grades Christian ministries on transparency asked donors to “withhold giving.”
Feucht performed at the Charlie Kirk vigil at the Kennedy Center and embarked on a seven-city tour with TPUSA Faith co-chair Rob McCoy in Charlie Kirk’s honor in October.
The Heir Apparent
TPUSA absorbed NAR’s networks into the TPUSA universe, funded by $85 million in donations in 2024. TPUSA provides NAR with campus infrastructure from high school through college, where students can potentially be steeped in Christian nationalism for eight years, through one of TPUSA’s more than 2,000 chapters. Officials in Texas, Oklahoma, and Florida have vowed to establish TPUSA chapters in each and every high school in their states. For decades, NAR prophets preached about taking mountains. TPUSA is actually taking them. Therein lies the power.
Kirk’s assassination didn’t stop the machine. It’s too prominent and too well-funded to fade away, particularly now that Kirk is viewed as a martyr. TPUSA continues to operate as heir apparent to post-Trump MAGA, with campus chapters, theological framework, and institutional staying power that may well last beyond any single personality. Trump mobilized resentment through rallies. TPUSA is training young conservatives in a complete worldview that frames democracy as spiritual warfare and political compromise as sin.
Whether Erika Kirk, a widow, mother and baptized Catholic will lead TPUSA down the same path her husband was treading remains to be seen. Although she vowed two days after his death that “my husband’s mission will not end, not even for a moment,” and “you have no idea what you just have unleashed across this entire country, and this world,” she later stated at his memorial that she forgave the shooter, telling mourners “the answer to hate is not hate,” she said. “The answer we know from the gospel is love and always love – love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us.”
Thirteen years in, what began as a libertarian campus organizing project has become the most sophisticated Christian nationalist operation in American history — one teaching a generation that seven mountains need conquering and they’re the ones called to do it. How TPUSA chooses to interpret scripture and whether they choose to love their enemies, or crush them, remains to be seen.
