Prove Me Wrong
Why Baylor University Should Not Welcome Turning Point USA
These are parlous times for American higher education. In addition to demographic trends, high costs, and other things that have pushed many colleges and universities to the brink, the Trump administration and their culture warrior minions have come after universities over issues of diversity, federal funding of research, welcoming international students, what is taught about racism, sex, and gender, and the very concept of university education.
In the midst of this maelstrom of danger and difficulty, Turning Point USA announced a US tour of universities where they will bring members and hangers on of the Trump administration to university campuses to talk—what?
And Baylor University, where I serve, is one of their first stops.
The late Charlie Kirk, who has proven to be one member of the MAGA alliance who cannot be replaced, was revered by some as a saint after his brutal murder, and Turning Point is considered by some to be a religious institution calling America back to true faith.
But the more I study Turning Point—and the more flack I take over their engagement with me and my work—it becomes clear that what we are talking about is not a religious or parachurch institution, and that this tour is not about a free exchange of viewpoints, but more about re-recruiting some of the young white men who voted for Trump in 2024, spreading a dangerous vision of Christian nationalism that promotes rule by straight white Christian men, and trying to justify the deeply unchristian actions of the Trump administration under the guise of a dangerous secular religion and allegiance to their orange Jesus.
In 2024, the Southern Poverty Law Center called Turning Point a hate group, and I am more and more inclined to agree.
A few details to ground you. Baylor University, where I have taught for 36 years, is a historically-Baptist university in Waco, Texas, located between the DFW metro area and Austin. Until Liberty University grew into a conservative monolith, Baylor was the largest Baptist university in the world, and it is still considered to be one of the crown jewels in American religious life. It is—with Notre Dame, Georgetown, and a handful of other universities—one of the only religious Research 1 institutions in America, and the major Protestant institution with that prestigious research designation.
Baylor is also the oldest university in Texas and one of the oldest west of the Mississippi, founded by three slaveholding Baptists during the time Texas was its own nation. It punches way above its weight in politics, the sciences, the church, education, law, culture, and other fields. Past students include Willie Nelson, Ann Richards, Chip and Joanna Gaines, Brittney Griner, and FBI Director William Sessions.
A question alumni, faculty, and others are asking is, Why did Turning Point USA, founded by Charlie Kirk, and maybe the most important element in Donald Trump’s election in 2024, want to come to Baylor?
I am, by nature a person who values free speech. I encourage my students to ask questions, to think critically, and to explore possibilities. I believe, with Jefferson, that bad ideas will get trampled by good ones and the truth will out.
I am also, as a devout Christian, a person who believes in welcoming the stranger.
But the more I study Turning Point and think about this issue, the clearer it becomes that we are welcoming a force onto our campus that doesn’t value free expression, doesn’t value the educational enterprise, and is simply and completely a purveyor of right-wing indoctrination.
What educational value does the wastrel son of the president, Donald Trump, Jr., bring to the Baylor campus?
What educational value does Tom Homan, the “border czar” and one of the architects of Donald Trump’s cruel, unjust, and unconstitutional kidnappings, detentions, and murders of immigrants, legal residents, and American citizens, bring to a Christian university tasked to love and respect all of God’s children, a university that serves and loves immigrants and international students?
If we are a university that values the human thriving of all of our students, what does Erika Kirk—who recently told students at a rally that white men should not be ashamed of who they are—bring to the many students, staff, and faculty who are not white men? To the women who want to be lawyers, preachers, or professors as well as mothers?
A while back I was contacted by my department chair, who told me that I’d been placed on the Turning Point USA Watchlist. According to the site, this identified me as a dangerous leftist who would indoctrinate students with my anti-Christian and anti-American beliefs. Baylor was put on notice, other faculty around the country who shared my belief that all God’s children deserve respect were put on notice, and I was offered threats to my life and my livelihood: your beliefs make you dangerous.
This last is the only true part of any of Turning Point’s engagement with me, my teaching, and my larger project as a theologian: they are afraid of my beliefs, and, more broadly speaking, afraid that students who interact with me and the texts we discuss will think for themselves, to recognize hatred and narrow mindedness, and possibly, to become broader and more expansive in their thinking about life, love, and faith.
Last fall, I had a wondrously diverse class of nonmajors in an American lit survey class. Some of them were very conservative; some of them were broken up by Charlie Kirk’s murder.
So some of them were startled to learn early in the semester that I had been named a dangerous radical by Turning Point.
“What does that mean?” one of my more conservative students asked in week two. “Does that mean you’re going to tell us what to think?”
“You’re just going to have to watch and see,” I told him. “Let’s check in later in the semester and you can tell me what you think.”
We did. After we read Frederick Douglass and Huck Finn, after we’d talked about book banning and the free exchange of ideas, I remember him laughing as he told me some weeks later, “You’re doing a terrible job of indoctrinating us. Maybe stop asking us so often what we think!”
We all laughed, because the whole class knew by then that I would never stop asking them what they think. That our engaging in dialogue was essential to becoming who we were called to be. That I would never dictate an outcome, and had not come into class with a set understanding I was going to impose on them.
.Which is so unlike Charlie Kirk and the faux-exchanges he sponsored in his “debates” on college campuses.
His catchphrase was “Prove Me Wrong,” which is not even a debate thing. I was a really good high school debater, and I can tell you we never started from a predetermined conclusion. We were tasked with putting together a prima facie case worthy of debate and then defending it.
Charlie Kirk walked in with predetermined conclusions and a bunch of memorized stats and talking points, and then he engaged information-poor college students on their way to and from classes, and—surprise—he was often able to befuzzle them.
He then had his media team recut their exchanges into flash reels that made him look super smart and them look super dumb, and proved to the world that he, a college dropout, was smarter than all these current college students.
Factoid: Charlie Kirk’s 2022 book was called The College Scam: How America’s Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America’s Youth, and his thesis in that text was that everybody in higher education, students, parents, faculty, alumni, know it’s a scam.
I do not believe this work to which I’ve given my life is a scam, and I don’t know any other person in higher education who would agree with Mr. Kirk.
I am more and more convinced that this signature college debating initiative of Charlie Kirk’s—and the larger enterprise that became Turning Point USA—is not and maybe never was about spreading faith and conservative democratic values on college campuses.
I am more and more convinced that this was the lifework of a fearful little boy who was afraid of unfamiliar ideas and resentful of folks who were learning and growing beyond his tiny set of beliefs.
And I am more and more convinced that one of the most genius moves of Matt Stone and Trey Parker in their season-long takedown of MAGA on South Park last year was casting Eric Cartman as the Master Debater with a Charlie Kirk haircut asking college kids to prove him wrong.
As a longtime viewer of South Park, I know (as many of you do), that Eric Cartman is the most hate filled and insecure character on the show, with the possible exception of the current version of Donald Trump. (Charlie Kirk, to his credit, loved it being included.)
There will be, I’m confident, demonstrations and a counter rally to this Turning Point rally at Baylor on April 22, speakers who exhibit love of God and neighbor, speakers who speak out against hate, cruelty, war, and corruption.
But it seems essential to me at this moment that we don’t pretend that welcoming Turning Point and the Trump administration onto the campus of a major religious university is just business as usual, a simple exchange of viewpoints.
It seems essential to me that we tell the truth about their agenda and their aims.
These are parlous times for American higher education, and I know from conversations with Baylor’s administration that the last thing they want is the piercing Eye of Sauron directed our way.
But telling the truth means recognizing that the job we do in universities is not a hoax, a scam, or a fraud.
It is about the formation and flourishing of human beings.
As St. Irenaeus put it, the glory of God is a human being who is completely alive.
If there is a college hoax, it is this: Great universities do a terrible job of indoctrination. And Turning Point and the Trump administration seem to want nothing but indoctrination, a replication of their beliefs, prejudices, and lust for power, and that is why they attack real educational institutions and want to control them and their discourse.
So here is my prayer: May the messages of this unholy tour fall upon deaf ears, and may the truth set us free.
Let’s go start good trouble.