TPUSA’s “Make Heaven Crowded” revival tour is a disaster
“I believe wholeheartedly that you can’t force revival,” Lucas Miles declares in his stump speech for the Make Heaven Crowded tour. Miles is the director of TPUSA Faith, a spinoff of the late MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA organization, that is dedicated to equipping Christians “who are prepared to defend our God-given rights.” And he’s been on the road this spring and summer, insisting to one audience after another that he does not believe you can “manufacture a revival.”
The irony of this is thick — manufacturing a revival is exactly what Miles is trying to do. The Make Heaven Crowded tour, Miles explains to congregations and the press along the way, was started after a late September memorial service for Kirk, who was killed by a gunman’s bullet earlier that month. At the time of Kirk’s death, Miles had been serving as director of TPUSA Faith for 18 months after serving as the pastor of Nfluence, an Indiana church whose name sounds more like a bad tech startup than a Christian congregation. Miles called the memorial, which was held at the State Farm Stadium outside of Phoenix, Arizona, “the most significant gospel presentation in the history of Christendom,” insisting that 170,000 people showed up and “almost a billion” watched it.
More realistic estimates put the crowd size between 63,000 and 90,000 attendees, and, if one is being generous, 20 million viewers. Still, it’s easy to see how those numbers led Miles and Kirk’s widow Erika, who took over TPUSA, to think they could leverage the moment into a revival tour.
As the name suggests, the tour’s stated goal is mass conversions to Christianity. And while Miles insists this is about sharing the gospel over politics, videos from the event make clear that the hope is also to point voters toward the Republican Party. After all, right-wing politics was Kirk’s life’s work, despite revisionist efforts to paint him as a Christian prophet.
At the first stop of the tour in January, Erika Kirk declared “we will change this country” through a “revival” brought by an evangelical movement that “rises up and prays for this nation.”
These many months later, though, it seems that Charlie Kirk’s heaven isn’t going to be so crowded after all. The tour’s stops have been exclusively at evangelical churches and universities with crowds that don’t look especially different than what you’d get on any given Sunday at those locations. Despite TPUSA being marketed as a youth organization, and despite claims from the pulpit that there’s a youth revival in the works, the people spread out through semi-full auditoriums have tended to be gray-haired or balding. Even at Regent University, where one would expect a robust audience of young Christians, video of the event shows mostly older attendees — and plenty of empty seats.
The content of the programming suggests the organizers are well aware that they’re not trying to win souls to Christ as they claim. Sure, there’s the usual array of professional converts, with sometimes iffy stories about how they found Jesus after being lost in the wilderness. But strikingly, most of the speakers don’t even pretend at that, admitting that they grew up Christian and focusing on biological reproduction as their best bet for growing the church ranks, a message that meshes well with the increasingly white nationalist bent of Kirk’s beloved GOP.
Perhaps the funniest sign that Make Heaven Crowded isn’t doing so hot? The striking absence of Erika Kirk, who spoke at the kick-off event in Los Angeles but has otherwise been missing in action. She was reportedly scheduled to show up at the Orlando, Florida, stop in February, but that was canceled at the last minute. Kirk also bowed out of scheduled appearances in Plano, Texas, and at Iowa State University. But these absences haven’t received as much attention as her cancellation of a University of Georgia event in April, which left Vice President JD Vance speaking to an underwhelming crowd. While the excuses change — “family time,” “security concerns” and “scheduling conflicts” have been cited — the one constant is that Erika Kirk manages to not appear when the crowds aren’t looking robust.
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Politics also seems to be playing a role in this underwhelming tour. Miles has repeatedly insisted his goal is saving souls and not shilling for Republicans, but the organization’s conservative agenda is never far from the surface. The Make Heaven Crowded tour is sponsored by Preborn!, an anti-abortion group, and each stop features heavy-handed shaming of women of who have abortions. One speaker after another turns to politics, such as Blaze Media’s Allie Beth Stuckey, who lectures the crowd about how same-sex marriage and abortion supposedly offend God, or Christian commentator Millicent Sedra, who argues that this is an age of “sexual perversion” based on “young people dressed up as fairies, dressed up as dogs” and “kitty litters in the toilets” — a reference to a widespread and debunked conservative hoax.
In his stump sermon, Miles all but admits that the tour’s apolitical pretense is dishonest when he insists that Kirk’s “political views were only there because they were an extension of his theological views.” (The timeline shows the opposite — that Kirk embraced evangelicalism because he thought it would expand his political reach.) “I got this crazy belief that everything in life is theological,” Miles continued. “Every issue that you can think about is actually first and foremost a spiritual issue.”
Miles and other conservative Christians have every right to bring their religious beliefs to their politics, as do progressive Christians. But the larger context of the Make Heaven Crowded tour exposes a sinister element of manipulation at play. In the same speech, Miles extensively threatens the crowd with eternal damnation if they reject his spiritual — and therefore political — worldview. He ominously warns that “our last days” are nigh and how you choose to live them will determine your “eternity.” It’s a theme echoed by many of the speakers: Only by agreeing with the fundamentalist worldview can one change their “eternal address from hell to heaven.”
While it’s never explicitly stated, the math is easy to add up. The only way out of hell is to be their kind of Christian. The only way to be their kind of Christian is to embarce far-right politics. Ergo, be a right-wing Republican or you’re going to hell. This message is no doubt soothing to the crowds that show up, clad in their red hats and looking indistinguishable from any MAGA gathering.
It must be hard to feel morally superior when the leader of their political movement has started a foreign war for no good reason and keeps finding ways to block the full release of the Epstein files. Being told that everyone else is going to hell likely provides that boost of self-deluding self-esteem they need to stay the course. But as a message to bring new people in the fold, “the road to heaven is MAGA” will not work.
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