TPUSA's revival tour is a disaster

[marmar]

TPUSA’s “Make Heaven Crowded” revival tour is a disaster
Charlie Kirk’s death did not inspire the national spiritual awakening that was promised

By Amanda Marcotte
Senior Writer
Published May 17, 2026 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) “Ibelieve 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.

....(snip)....

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. .................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/05/17/tpusas-make-heaven-crowded-revival-tour-is-a-disaster/