Matthew Boedy is a professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of North Georgia, a leading expert on Turning Point USA and its founder, Charlie Kirk, and the author of an important and alarming new book The Seven Mountains Mandate. It’s important to give some context: Our conversation took place before Charlie Kirk’s murder and so obviously doesn’t anticipate or respond to it. Boedy characterizes that act of political violence as heinous, as do I. But the Seven Mountains Mandate — and this interview — both document a sweeping white Christian nationalist agenda to which Kirk was an essential contributor, and that work continues. Many thanks to Matt for his time, and for his meticulously sourced book.
Greg Garrett: Matt, could you lay out the premise for your book and maybe tell us a little bit about what those “seven mountains” are?
Matthew Boedy: The premise of the book is that there are seven cultural institutions that Christian nationalism wants to retake or take back for Jesus, including business, government, family, and education. They believe those areas are under the control of Satan, under demonic or anti-Christian influences, so this is why I call the Seven Mountains Mandate a strategy of Christian nationalism.
The Seven Mountains Mandate has been around for several decades now, but one of the people most recently attached to it is Lance Wallnau, charismatic preacher, visionist speaker. He’s credited with the metaphor of the mountains, even though the idea of the list came before him. He was very influential in President Trump’s first term, wrote several books about Trump being an Old Testament figure and helped, with other people, to pass along the idea of the Seven Mounts mandate to Charlie Kirk, who was the founder and president of Turning Point USA.
Matthew Boedy
Turning Point USA is a large, multifaceted organization. Most people think of it as a college student group where Charlie Kirk goes on campus and debates people and he puts up video. They actually have more high school chapters now than they do college chapters. But Kirk has refashioned Turning Point since 2020 into a Christian nationalism organization, and he has put his millions of dollars in each of the seven areas.
So Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk are clearly advocates of the Seven Mountains Mandate, and they’re making Turning Point USA the indispensable organization for that strategy of Christian nationalism.
GG: What are some of the most alarming acts you’re seeing right now that you can trace directly back to the Seven Mountains mandate?
MB: Clearly the Mountain of Government is where a lot of people have their attention, getting advocates of the Seven Mountains Mandate elected to high government places. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is an advocate of the Seven Mountains Mandate, so getting him elected to that position is really key. Charlie Kirk has said Donald Trump is the first president to understand these seven areas. I don’t think necessarily that’s true, but Trump is the mover of this mandate.
If you step outside the Mountain of Government, what’s next most important? I was going to say the Mountain of Education, the voucher system and defunding public education, and then the attacks on education, ending the Department of Education, attacking higher education. Those are all parts of the Mountain of Education for me.
If I had to pick a second one, I would pick the Mountain of Family, which is a bit vaguer in the sense of what they’re trying to do. They’re trying obviously to institute a cultural consensus around the definition of family, and whatever does not fit they’re not merely ignoring it or arguing against it, they are on the attack against it.
So in that chapter I talk about Turning Point USA ambushing a professor at Arizona State who is gay, but then also doing their own investigation of a person who wants to transition and confronting them. These things are new in the battle for the Mountain of Family.
Turning Point is just taking the rhetoric and the action to whole new heights, and they have the money to do it.
GG: You tweeted earlier this year that Project 2025 is a part of the Seven Mountains Mandate, and it feels like so many things in the second administration are an assault on one or the other of the different mountains, like Trump taking over the Kennedy Center and trying to create a new consensus about what American culture is.
“All that … seeds revisionist history or pushes history that is mythical to brand America as a Christian nation.”
MB: Think about the seven areas, the Mountain of Entertainment (and it kind of includes arts in that), but also take the national institutions, the Kennedy Center, the Air Force Academy, all the military academies, and add the 1776 Project, which was in Trump’s first term. All that is about, at high levels, making American culture into a Christian culture in a way which honors Donald Trump, obviously, but also seeds revisionist history or pushes history that is mythical to brand America as a Christian nation.
GG: I teach at Baylor University. Many of my readers are alums of Baylor or have attended other Christian universities. What should we be watching for or maybe are even seeing right now in terms of the kinds of attacks that are in line with the Mountain of Education? How will we know that they are coming?
MB: Well, I think a good example is what happened at Emory this past week. Emory is a private institution here in Georgia and of course a big research player, and they ended their DEI program. Diversity was one of their big values, both in terms of students and faculty recruitment. So to end all programs!
Emory is following the public university system here in Georgia who did that a year ago. So if Emory is a match for Baylor, then Baylor’s efforts at DEI or anything that doesn’t align with the Trump agenda for higher education will be targeted. It’s just a matter of time before they name Baylor as some sort of outlier.
As a private university, you think they’re protected. Emory is a fine example that they’re not. But also the Christian part of Baylor is interesting because the Mountain of Education and the Mountain of Government and the Mountain of Religion also want to promote a very specific definition of Christianity, which I would assume Baylor does not meet.
And so how do they do that? Taking research money away is one thing. Ending DEI programs is another. I mean, we’ve seen ways in which they both attack public and private universities. But also it is about bringing the MAGA mob, whether online or in person, bringing that pressure. And that really has started at Harvard and Columbia but also spread to other schools.
GG: Why did you want to write this book or why did you feel compelled to write this book? It can’t have been easy to step into this day on day.
MB: There were two reasons. When Charlie Kirk moved Turning Point USA to a Christian nationalism orientation, which he was against before 2020, I recognized it right away. I heard what he was saying about the seven areas of cultural influence, and I understood what he was saying, so I wanted to investigate it more.
But really what drove me to the book was the widespread nature of the attack upon our democracy, not just the Mountain of Government, but all the other things. With an organization like Turning Point, which keeps becoming more powerful and having more money drawn into it, it seemed like the visions of this plan actually were going to be put into effect.
“I thought everybody knows who this is and everybody know this, but that was not the truth.”
In my little bubble, I thought everybody knows who this is and everybody know this, but that was not the truth. I guess what I’m saying is that I’m now under the impression that very few people actually know about this big, huge threat to our democracy.
GG: What can we do, those of us who read the book or do see what you’re writing about and see the ominous nature of it, both for our faith and for our country? What actions could we take?
MB: Well, the protests we’re witnessing, all that is good. But as I tried to get at in every chapter, what is democracy supposed to look like opposite the picture I just gave you in this chapter?
Obviously be involved in cultural institutions that promote democratic elements, and that means religious pluralism, but it also means healthy debate, and it also means coming together and trying to find common ground, which none of the people in this movement do.
I write about rebuilding our country street by street. That takes conversations with individual people. I’m just one person in a small town and I know ten, 15 people. I can talk to them, that’s fine. But there is a national issue here, and that brings it back to being in the streets. We do need national attention to a national issue.
I don’t know if you’re going to convince your local MAGA neighbor to change their vote or change their ideas. But when I have spoken to community groups about this, they do want to do something. They do want to act against it. I guess that’s a little bit of hope.
So band together. People banding together with people who are under attack is one thing that does bring you hope because you’re not isolated. I’ll say here in Gainesville, Ga., in a heavily red district, both congressionally and state and locally, you really have to not just find the individual people who may agree with you, but you also have to find ways in which to work at the local level to change things.
Greg Garrett
Greg Garrett is an award-winning professor at Baylor University, where he is the Carole McDaniel Hanks Professor of Literature and Culture. One of America’s leading voices on religion and culture, he is the author of 30 books, most recently the novel Bastille Day and The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity. He is currently administering a major research grant on racism from the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation and finishing a book on racist mythologies for Oxford University Press. Greg is a seminary-trained lay preacher in the Episcopal Church and Honorary Canon Theologian at the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris. He lives in Austin with his wife, Jeanie, and their two daughters.
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