Critiquing Charlie Kirk’s Creationist Crash Course

Conservatism and Christianity are, for many ring-wing pundits, inextricably linked. There is no way to separate them, we are told, for the values of Christianity undergird the conservative worldview through certain interpretations of the Bible on issues like property rights, the family unit, and the general comprehension of human nature. Fair enough, nothing overtly controversial about that. To each their own meaning, right?

But when it comes to issues like creationism and defences of a literal, historical resurrection of Christ, conservatives who aren't full-time apologists tend to find themselves either on the back foot or peddling misinformation to students who are curious about these topics (when certain apologists aren’t doing this anyways).

Founder of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, found himself in this situation recently during his ironically titled Brainwashed Tour of US campuses. At what I believe is the University of Wisconsin-Madison (don't quote me on that), Kirk had a conversation with a student over the issue of creation v.s. evolution as it relates to politics. Having seen Kirk go onto Cross Examined with pop-apologist Frank Turek as well as an extremely cringey conversation on the war in Gaza with a troll dressed up as Jesus, I foresaw what I was getting into with this video given his religious proclivities. Mercifully, nuance and respect reared their heads in this video, but there is a lot more to unpack.

This video features Charlie dialoguing with a student named Jayden who was raised Catholic and believes that the issue of evolution has much influence in modern politics (0:00-1:03). Right out of the gate, Kirk affirms that he has "strong opinions" on this topic and is a "strict creationist," yet also concedes that he is "not as literate as he should be" on the topic and its one he does "not know the best" (1:02-1:11). Yikes. Straight away we have a problem. No matter what Kirk's position is on this matter, for the guy who exhorts his audience to "read 100 books a year" to say this does not bode well for the conversation. Why would you risk making a fool of yourself on a subject you know you are not well versed in? It is precisely this problem that poses a grave potential for pushing away those who share TPUSA's legislative positions, but also recognise the folly of creationist mantras.

All that being said, Kirk notes that there is a spectrum of creationism and affirms that evolution shepherded by a divine hand is a nuanced position (1:15-22). From this he implies a creator in a typical apologetic fashion. Phew! At least we can get that. Nothing too unreasonable here. The cosmological argument has a long tradition of defenders and remains a somewhat strong argument for the existence of God. That being said, Kirk swings the conversation right back around to how (allegedly) evolution hinges on more faith than special creation (1:53-2:07) and that speciation rests on essentially guesswork from the fossil record (2:29-2:35). I suppose Kirk has been spending time familiarising the Creationist Handbook of Answers.

The old accusation of needing "faith" to believe in evolution is a dishonest adage that has no veracity outside of hardline traditionalist circles. Palaeontologists infer from what we can see in the fossil record the various elements of adaptation, speciation, and eventually evolution over millions of years. Any gaps that remain in evolutionary biology are to be viewed, like any other scientific theory, as a room for progress, not to be jumped on by political vultures seeking to exploit supposed errors in the theory for the sake of promoting niche and harmful agendas. As someone who seeks to understand the best of Kirk's conservative positions and listens to him regularly, this bugs the hell out of me, for a lack of better words.

The student Jayden had some fairly well-informed points to make in response, such as pointing out that evolution best accounts for sexual speciation (2:42-3:13) and that evolution gives off the look of design which is misinterpreted by creationists (3:21). Kirk's response? "We believe it was designed," with the smuggest of smirks on his face (3:19). I could go into detail about things like allopatric speciation, transitional forms, bad design—all things that people can read in Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True (2009) or other works such as Donald Prethero's Evolution (2007) and Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth (2009). But the foci of this post are the political implications of Kirk's headstrong stubbornness regarding creationism. It is stuff like this—scientific illiteracy and religious arrogance, as Ben Stanhope once put it—that has dragged untold numbers of people out of the doors of the church. For some, like me, they went kicking and screaming, not wanting this theological appendage to be the dividing line between religious truth and personal politics. Others, however, go willingly and, most importantly, they leave behind their political beliefs in the now-vacated pews.

So even when Charlie affirms that the "moral" importance of this debate is that God is the creator of the universe and that the age of the earth doesn't really matter to him (5:01-5:26), it still reveals that the link between his religious, scientific, and political convictions are intertwined in such a maddeningly parochial fashion; it runs the risk of isolating young people who are sympathetic to conservative values, yet lack any sort of metaphysical sympathy for the claims of traditional Christianity, especially the particular strand of Protestantism that Kirk promotes. The casual dismissal of deep time without providing any meaningful counter to things like Uranium-Lead dating is deeply concerning. Given the impromptu nature of these conversations, I don't want to judge Kirk on a topic he is not well-versed it, but I think I have to given the clearly unbeknownst implications for the positions he uncritically holds to. Like many creationists of a wide variety, Kirk has made this theological add-on to Christianity a hill to die on for his mishmash political evangelism.

Kirk's case then switches to standard resurrection apologetics, using Turek's script as if he's read I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be and Atheist a two dozen times (perhaps that's a quarter of his 100 books a year). Repeating Sean McDowell's claims regarding the apostle's deaths over their resurrection witnesses (6:50); claiming it is the "greatest, most documented miracle in human history" (6:34); and, sickeningly, the quip that if the resurrection is true then all of Christianity and the Old Testament gets proven with it (7:09). I cannot summarise in words how much I despise this approach, one he has clearly derived from Turek word-for-word. It is deceptive, illogical, and does a disservice to the great amount of scholarship produced on these topics. Kirk lacks any nuanced thinking regarding his own religion as well as any ability to present more nuanced positions that he clearly knows about (such as theistic evolution) in a theologically or scientifically compatible way with conservative values. It even ends up looking like a position that he maintains as a means to an end, arguing for it staunchly without giving any thought to the repercussions of it. This is the risk with merging Christianity with American politics that I find so alien in my native UK, but is an all too familiar experience in the US. As many commentators have pointed out, the UK is never too far behind the US in terms of cultural phenomena. 

Casual conservative opposition to evolutionary thought will pit the youth of the nation against them. Just as in my native UK, most right wing parties that are willing to raise important questions about British values and immigration share an enthusiastic rejection of environmental policies, to the point of promoting conspiracies about electric vehicles blowing up, when they were in fact diesel cars. The disturbing trend of movements taking these hardline positions when many are sympathetic to their other concerns will prevent these populist parties from making a dent in the political establishment.

In short, the looming spectre of creationism does not appear to have abated in American political dialogue. Even after being dismissed from potential school programs by a Republican judge in 2005, it clings on with a remarkable and annoying tenacity. To make matters worse, we currently have one of the most prominent young conservative activists in the US peddling its nonsensical dogmas and proliferating it to a younger audience. This generation, often claimed to be the most conservative since World War II, will be presented with these ideas and are likely to overwhelmingly reject them if they are presented in tandem with the fraudulent, conspiratorial irrationality that is creationism. As the November election approaches in the US, Kirk's general campaign to promote conservatism will suffer if his followers abandon their beliefs about human origins and think that the rest of their conservatism must go with it. He will only have himself to blame.