Colleges Better Double Down On Defending Conservative Students

As faculty sponsor for the Turning Point USA chapter at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, I am deeply invested in both higher education and the legacy of Charlie Kirk. At college campuses nationwide, Democrats are welcomed, while conservatives are met with the hostility (this is true even of ostensibly Christian colleges). Turning Point USA wants this to change. America needs it to change.

The hegemonic dominance of unbelievers and Democrat-voting Christians in academia is well-known. Democrats tell us this is so because conservatism, whether political or Christian or both, breeds both stupidity and bigotry. Conservatives, they say, and Donald Trump supporters certainly, suffer no hankerings for the intelligence and open-minded curiosity supposedly coursing through the halls of academe.

Democrats dubbed Ronald Reagan the “amiable dunce” who only cared for rich white people. Since 1979, Democrats have hung some version of those mocking insults around the neck of every Republican nominee for president. Today, conservatives courageous enough to speak are castigated as the evil political progeny of Hitler, Nazis, and fascists. And no institutions cultivate subcultures more hostile to conservative speech than do America’s universities. 

But then Kirk showed up with no college degree championing Jesus Christ, traditional marriage, Christian nationalism, and Trump at, of all places, university campuses. Many, including Trump, believe Kirk’s recruitment of college students to MAGA ranks pushed the “orange man” over the top last November.

Totalitarianism at College

Kirk’s non-violent, free-speech invasion of the universities exposed and challenged the totalitarian suppression of speech that prevails there. The late British polymath Roger Scruton said identification of violence-prone political movements in the West is not well served by standard left-right distinctions. The better gauge turns upon a political movement’s totalitarian or non-totalitarian character that centers on the control of speech. The flag of free speech should fly highest at our institutions of higher learning, but instead, our universities teach and model totalitarian suppression of conservative views.

What Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Maduro, and Mussolini share pits them all alike against Kirk and every Christian conservative committed to the free exchange of ideas and to the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ. In 2025, political conversation and Christian preaching of the Kirkian sort do not deploy guns but do demand the guts to speak what the totalitarians won’t tolerate. Totalitarians’ intolerance reaches for weapons that silence through intimidation, threats, and killing. Christian conservatives reach for the weapons of the Word and Spirit (Ephesians 6:17; Hebrews 4:12).  

Kirk is not dead because he stoked fear or violence. He was not assassinated because he oppressed or hated anyone. He was taken out because he refused to shut up about what he loved that the Democrat Party hates. He loved Jesus Christ, the traditional family, America, and Donald Trump. These just won’t do when totalitarians are loose in the land and have settled most densely and fiercely on the college campuses of America.

Godless totalitarians lack a transcendent authoritative moral standard and hope of an afterlife. As such, they exhibit the impatience and lawlessness characteristic of utopians throughout history. Utopian lawlessness intolerant of all speech but its own rightly strikes fear in university presidents, who are responsible to stakeholders and for providing protection and the growth of the institutional assets they are called to steward. Kirk posed, and Turning Point still poses, a threat to the neo-Marxist, DEI struggle session and cancelation regimes Democrats continue to defend.

Peaceful Engagement

Conservatives, supposed racists and white supremacists, did not burn down their own neighborhoods, America’s once great cities, or police stations when Barack Obama was twice elected president. Nor are conservatives doing so now after the loss of their hero to an assassin’s bullet. They’ve established no “autonomous” zones akin to Portland’s CHAZ in the Summer of Love. Even on Jan. 6, it was one of Trump’s dutifully peaceful protesters who lost her life. The Tea Party won’t be remembered for achievement of political aims but for how clean and tidy they left their protest sites. Annual Right-to-Life marchers on Washington never riot. Like Kirk, they just talk.

College and university presidents treat Democrats as fearsome threats because they are. The result is that Democrats get to say pretty much whatever they want most of the time while conservatives must traverse a speech mine field that threatens their hiring, promotion, and tenure.

Yet somehow, Kirk’s voice gained a hearing — a large and growing hearing — on hostile college campuses. Following Jesus’ way, ready to turn the cheek rather than return violence with violence, Kirk ventured right into the belly of the beast that has brainwashed the nation’s undergrads to view him as a Nazi. Ventured into to teeth of fierce hostility to do what? Just to talk. Just to converse. University totalitarians hate that. But there he sat under his little tent holding his microphone and offering another one to anyone, especially anyone who disagreed with him, for a talk.

Given many Democrats’ willingness to use violence against political opponents, university presidents will need courage to cultivate free speech for conservatives on campus. Conservatives should help college presidents choose words for their public statements. It took courage for Beck Taylor, president of Samford University, where I teach, to identify Kirk not as a right-wing or far-right anything but as the conservative Christian he was. We can be sure that there are many Democrats in the state of Alabama and beyond who won’t like that. Good for President Taylor.

The Bible assures us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10). Jesus said, “do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul but rather fear Him who can destroy body and soul in hell” (Matthew 10:28). The whole world now knows where Kirk’s fears and loves laid. The sooner the fears and loves of Christian university presidents align better with his, the better for all concerned. 

Mark DeVine teaches historical theology at Beeson Divinity School, Samford University, in Birmingham, Alabama. He serves as teaching elder at Smoke Rise Baptist Church in Smoke Rise, Alabama, and as faculty sponsor for Samford’s Turning Point USA chapter. He formerly served as a missionary in Bangkok, Thailand. He is the author of “Bonhoeffer Speaks Today” and “Shalom Yesterday, Today, and Forever.”