Questions after Charlie
Date
09/08/2026
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Questions after Charlie
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WORLD Radio - Questions after Charlie
One year after his friend and mentee Charlie Kirk was assassinated, Christian apologist Frank Turek is hearing different questions on college campuses—less about whether Christianity is true, and more about leading friends to faith. WORLD’s Todd Vician reports.
Frank Turek speaks during the public memorial service for Charlie Kirk in Glendale, Arizona, September 21, 2025. Getty Images / Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP
Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.
MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, September 8th.
Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.
Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.
NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.
Coming next on The World and Everything in It: Apologetics on campus, a year since the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Frank Turek was nearby when Kirk was fatally shot at Utah Valley University. For years, Turek had been a mentor and friend to Kirk, and a veteran of college campuses himself.
REICHARD: He founded the campus apologetics ministry called Crossexamined.org in 2006.
WORLD’s Todd Vician talked with Frank Turek about how ministry to college students has changed over the years and the intense spotlight he shared with Kirk.
TODD VICIAN: Frank Turek has spent 20 years crisscrossing the country speaking at colleges, high schools, and churches. It’s there that he challenges skeptics and encourages Christians. He calls college campuses the most-strategic real estate in America.
TUREK: We go to colleges because it's the most anti-Christian real estate in America. What we're trying to do is throw the Christians a line and put a stone in the shoe of the skeptics so they start thinking about things.
Turek knows that by the time college students line up behind a microphone to ask him questions, they’ve already been catechized by the culture more than the church.
TUREK: Instead of teaching kids how to think, we're teaching them what to feel. And that can be dangerous because if you follow your feelings without reason or without moral restraint, you're gonna wind up in a very dark place. You're gonna wind up ruining your life and probably the lives of many other people.
This concern is the focus of his latest book and his college tour that he’s calling, “Jesus versus the war on reality.”
TUREK: Truth is what corresponds to reality, and our view of reality should be what really is true. Not what we want to be true, not what we hope to be true, not what we prefer to be true, but what really lines up with reality.
In his book, The War on Reality, Turek zeroes in on assumptions behind the cultural trends cutting off the roots of Western civilization.
TUREK: There really is a war on reality going on, and it's been going on for quite a while—whether it has to do with identity and transgenderism, Marxism, socialism, evolution, the idea that the family is outdated. There are so many lies that are being told to people and they believe them and they wind up ruining their lives and maybe their eternity by believing these lies.
Teaching believers to dismantle those lies is at the core of Turek’s approach.
TUREK: There's no truth. Is that true? You ought not judge. Why are you judging me for judging? Right? So many of these claims that are brought up are just, they're just flat out self-contradictory. And we don't know logic enough to recognize it.
He says discipling is about more than teaching how to be a better Christian.
TUREK: If we taught people how to think half of what they need to know to defend the Christian faith, they'd already know.
That emphasis on critical thinking was central to Turek’s relationship with the late college apologist Charlie Kirk, who counted Turek as a friend and mentor. Turek taught Kirk how to uncover the assumption behind a question before responding.
KIRK: While religion may occasionally make bad people do good things, if you want to get good people to do bad things, you use religion. How would you respond to that? Okay. What is good?
Like Kirk, Turek holds fast to the principle that voting through a biblical lens is important. Laws and policies flow from elections and can either help or hinder human flourishing.
TUREK: If you don't think politics is important, why don't we try and do World Magazine in Tehran? We can't. Politically, they've ruled it out. You know, there's no First Baptist Church of Tehran. There's no Calvary Chapel of Mecca. There's no Cornerstone Chapel of Cairo. Why? Because they don't allow it politically, or they make it very difficult politically.
He called Kirk someone he had been waiting 30 years to meet. Someone well connected in the secular world who wouldn’t compromise on the gospel.
TUREK: We think we can bifurcate things. I'll be a Christian in church and, you know, at home and those kind of things. But at work, I get to do what I want, you know, out in the community I get to do what I want. In the voting booth I do what I want. No, no, no, no. Charlie rightly pointed out that we're supposed to be Christians in every area of life.
Frank was nearby… when Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University. He said he’s seen a shift occur on college campuses in the year since Kirk’s death.
TUREK: The shift occurred from skepticism to more evangelism, meaning that I got a lot more questions from people saying, ‘How do I convince my friend to be a Christian,’ whereas prior to that, I was getting maybe a lot of questions on, you know, how do we know God exists? Or, you know, why do you think that's true? I don't know what's gonna happen long term, but yeah, in the past year, that's been one positive ripple of a very tragic event.
Turek returned to college campuses this month as classes resumed. He’s no longer debating new atheists, but he’s still unapologetically defending Christianity.
Reporting for WORLD, I’m Todd Vician.
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