2,422 videos 1,389,747,653 views US Joined Aug 30, 2018
Charlie Kirk is the Founder and President of Turning Point USA, the largest and fastest growing conservative youth activist organization in the country with over 250,000 student members, over 150 full-time staff, and a presence on over 2,000 high school and college campuses nationwide. Charlie is also the Chairman of Students for Trump, which aims to activate one million new college voters on campuses in battleground states in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election. His social media reaches over 100 million people per month and according to Axios, he is one of the "top 10 most engaged" Twitter handles in the world. He is also the host of “The Charlie Kirk Show,” which regularly ranks among the top news shows on Apple podcast charts.
Reconciling Right-Wing Politics with Jesus’s Teachings on Charity
A thoughtful dialogue exploring the tension between conservative worldviews and seemingly liberal Christian teachings about generosity and relationships with non-believers.
October 2, 2025
The Dilemma of Unconditional Giving
“Greetings. To meet you. Um, big fan of the show. I’m quite right-wing in my worldview. Uh, maybe to a fault.”
“No such thing.”
“Are you sure? Are you sure?”
“I guess I’ll find out. Because reading the Bible, I read some verses that from a right-wing perspective, I have a hard time squaring that circle. Being conservative, being right-wing, being redpilled, and squaring that with some of these very what seem to be very liberal teachings of Jesus and Paul in the New Testament.”
“And I have one verse here that really stands out to me. It’s from the sermon on the mount, Luke 6:30. Please try to find all the context that you can, but it’s the sermon on the mount. So, the context is the same as ‘turn the other cheek,’ ‘love your enemies.’ Everyone’s heard those, but no one’s heard, no one seems to talk about Luke 6:30 where Jesus says, ‘Give to everyone who begs from you, and from one who takes away your goods, do not demand them back.’”
“I’ve tried to get all the context I can. I’ve tried to steel man it, you know, and I can’t square that. ‘Give to everyone who begs from you’ seems to be unconditional. It’s not just give to Christians who beg from you, give to people in your community. It says, ‘Give to everyone who begs from you.’ If I did that, I’d be broke. We’d all just be living in a commune. We’d all be living in a commune if everyone followed that, you know.”
“Except the people you gave to, they’d be living it up on an island somewhere, right?”
“Yeah. So, that’s my first question. And I have a second one I’d like to get to if you have time.”
The Ordo Amoris: An Order to Charity
“Okay. Sure. Yes. We’re told to give freely, of course. So what is our Lord telling us? Because our Lord will tell us on the one hand ‘he who lives by the sword dies by the sword’ and on the other he’ll tell us to ‘go sell our cloak and take a sword.’ What does this mean? Is our Lord contradicting himself? Certainly not. He can’t contradict himself, so he’s telling us something.”
“On the example of giving freely, let’s make it really practical because I’ve struggled with this myself, especially when I was coming back to faith and I read this and I said, ‘What do I do? I just give away all of my money and live in destitution on the street?’ No. For two reasons.”
“One, we have certain obligations. We have obligations to those who are most within our sphere of responsibility, a father to his children, for instance, or to his wife. I think it’s First Timothy? I might be getting it wrong. I’m Catholic so our citations of verse and chapter are a little off. But it tells us that ‘a man who does not take care of his own is worse than a pagan.’”
“Our vice president actually spoke about this with the Christian concept of the ordo amoris, which St. Augustine writes about and then St. Thomas Aquinas explains in greater detail as the ordo caritatis. There is an order to charity. It would actually be immoral for a father to starve his own children to give to some drug-addicted bum on the street. It would be disordered.”
“It would be immoral for a man who is walking by a swimming pool with two drowning children—one is a child he’s never met, one is his own child—it would be immoral for him to abandon his own child in order to save another. So there is a way that we order our loves as we give to all.”
True Giving vs. Enabling Harm
“The second part of that though is when the drug-addled bum comes up to you and he says ‘give me some money’ and you give him some money. He says ‘give me more money’ and ‘give me all your money.’ You have to ask yourself: am I really giving to this person? Am I really loving this person? Am I really willing and advancing the good of that person?”
“In many ways I would like to just give a couple bucks to the bum on the street and be done with it and not have to think about it again. But I know that giving a couple bucks to the bum on the street in many cases will be bad for that person because he’s going to go take it and he’s going to go buy drugs or he’s going to go drink.”
“And so I’m not really giving him something. I’m damaging him. I’m not really loving him. I’m neglecting him and I’m trying to move on. So we’re called to give freely, but giving doesn’t only refer to our money. We can give of our talents. We can give of our loves. We can give of our care. That I think is how you have to begin to understand those verses.”
“Our Lord is identified with the logos, the divine logic of the universe. Our religion is a religion that makes sense and that has to make sense. This is not true of all religions. Islam famously is a voluntarist religion that says that God is purely transcendent and pure will, that to quote Pope Benedict who is himself citing a medieval Islamic writer Ibn Hazm, ‘if the god of Islam commanded his followers to worship idols, he could do that sort of thing.’ But that’s not our conception. Our religion is one that makes sense and so we can apply reason and logic to our faith and we’ll find that we only go further and deeper into our faith.”
Dealing with Unbelievers and Family
“All right, I’m glad you touched on the ordo amoris. That’s really how I try to view the world—that we shouldn’t be afraid to say our family, my family matters more than other families. That’s the reality. I experience it.”
“It does to you certainly. As yours should matter more to you than mine.”
“Yeah. But how does the unbeliever fit into that? How does—let’s say I have a brother who doesn’t believe? How does the ordo amoris apply then? If you run into a baptized bum on the street that you’ve never met or your brother who’s apostasized or something, who are you supposed to—”
“I think I’ll have to defer to the scholastics on that. I’m not—I’ve got a few Bible verses here that pertain. Anyone comes… it’s one of those very small print Bibles.”
“I have one of those, too. Very hard to read.”
“I wrote down a bunch here and unbelievers. Here we go. 2 Corinthians 6:14. ‘Do not be yoked together with unbelievers.’ Just don’t be yoked together with unbelievers. It’s pretty straightforward.”
“‘For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with the darkness? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever?’”
“Then there’s another one. 1 John 4:2-3. ‘This is how you can recognize the spirit of God. Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God. But every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist which you have heard is coming and is even already in the world.’”
“So if my brother doesn’t believe, that’s the spirit of the antichrist. Why should I have anything to do with him?”
Being an Instrument of God’s Grace
“Well, God wills his salvation and he might be using you as an instrument for his salvation. And he sends you out in a great commission to make disciples of all nations and always to be ready to make a defense of your faith. So I would say while you should of course be aware of the spirit of the antichrist and recognize the distinction between believers and unbelievers, don’t give priority to the antichrist over Christ.”
“Don’t give priority to the privation of good, to evil over good, who is the light who has overcome the darkness. The darkness rather has not overcome the light. Recognize that God is constantly creating the world and God is constantly calling you to be near him and allow yourself to be an instrument of his.”
“That means sometimes in love rebuking people who are behaving in a way that they should not. That means evangelizing. That means not mincing words about the truth. That means not making light or compromise with false religion. But it means going out boldly.”
“I mentioned this earlier, but our Lord tells us that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church. Some people seem to think that that puts us in a defensive posture, that offensive forces are going to perhaps prevail against us. We’re talking about gates, the gates of hell, meaning that Christ’s church, the bride of Christ is advancing. Christ conquers death on the cross and the church is advancing and shattering the gates of hell and calling all toward him. And you should be part of that.”
“It’s not that people cannot turn their will away from God. God does in fact give us free will and as St. Augustine says, ‘He who made you without your participation will not save you without your help.’ We do have free will but don’t underestimate the grace of God and don’t resist being an instrument of it for everyone’s good especially for your brother.”
“That’s a hypothetical brother. I should say that brother doesn’t exist but that’s good.”
“I have one last final question if I could.”
“What do you think? You’ve been voted out. Sorry. I would have heard it. I wanted to hear your question. But listen, in the free marketplace, vox pop, vox dei. I didn’t set the rules. Trust me.”
“Thank you, though. Thank you. Real quickly, what’s a mackerel snapper?”
“What is a mackerel snapper? What does that mean?”
“A mackerel snapper is a sort of fellow who swims the Tiber all the way to the eternal city. A mackerel snapper is one of our icon-loving, metal-wearing, scapular-heaven papists. I’m talking about the Catholics. That’s what it means. It means Catholic. It’s because we don’t eat meat on Fridays.”
