Judson University hosted Turning Point USA’s “America: Love it or Leave It” college campus tour Oct. 6 in a chapel packed with the organization’s supporters and only a few protesters outside.
The Chicago-area school identifies as an evangelical liberal arts institution affiliated with the American Baptist Churches USA.
Faculty, staff, students and visitors, many wearing patriotic clothing, lined up to enter Herrick Chapel, and many had to be turned away from the event, the Chicago Tribune reported. Media were not allowed inside.
Erika Kirk at Juson University Oct. 6 (Screencap)
The rally was led by Erika Kirk, widow of TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated in 2025. The tour also features regular speakers such as Donald Trump Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Ben Shapiro and Glenn Beck, among others.
“This is not a good look for an institution that claims to want to be part of our extremely diverse community and actively recruits students of color to attend their university,” Elgin (Ill.) City Council member Tish Powell said in the Tribune report.
She followed up with a quotation from poet Maya Angelou: “‘When people show you who they are, believe them.’ We see you, Judson University. No more plausible deniability.”
While the university said it did not invite the tour to campus, its website and that of TPUSA confirm a strong relationship with the organization.
“Judson University has a partnership with Turning Point Education,” the school said in its 2025 statement of mourning over the death of Charlie Kirk. “The offices of Turning Point Education are on Judson’s campus, and Judson is scheduled to serve as the second location of Turning Point Education’s Prep Year program.”
TPUSA announced its “second on-campus Prep Year initiative” with the school Oct. 6. The nine-month program provides high school graduates an alternative to a traditional college education.
Students at Judson University cheer for Erika Kirk at an Oct. 6 rally on campus. (Screencap)
“The collaboration with Judson … advances Turning Point Education’s mission to reclaim, revive and restore education by equipping the next generation with truth, wisdom, and character,” the publicity says.
The arrangement will address the “ideological chaos and cultural rot at college campuses and classrooms” by promoting a “grounded worldview” needed to succeed in community, business and family.
“This partnership with Judson University will allow students time to deepen their faith, understand what they believe, and build a grounded Christian, pro-America worldview before taking the next step in their lives,” Erika Kirk said.
The TPUSA worldview was shaped by the decidedly right-wing, racist and Christian nationalist worldview of its founder, who famously called Martin Luther King Jr. “awful” and “not a good person.” He also said Black women “do not have the brain processing power” to be taken seriously.
For her part, Erika Kirk has fully embraced those convictions and earlier this year went on record to label protests against immigration agents and tactics as “demonic.”
The TPCUSA approach embraced by Judson University appears to be at odds with the actions of ABCUSA and its domestic ministry arm, the American Baptist Home Mission Society. The denomination openly ministers to immigrants, is participating in a lawsuit to block U.S. immigration enforcement actions in churches and praised a minister arrested for protesting detention centers.
The “handful” of protesters outside Judson’s chapel called out TPUSA for minimizing the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good at the hands of immigration agents while making Charlie Kirk out to be a saint, according to the Tribune.
“I see a lot of Republicans talk about First Amendment rights and how they are very important and should be upheld. But when a left-leaning person tries to express themselves, they shut them down and say all this crazy stuff about them,” one demonstrator said. “I know a lot of the things Charlie Kirk said, and a lot of them were not good. A lot of them were hurtful to many demographics.”
Judson University based in Elgin, Ill., was founded in 1963 as the undergraduate division of Northern Baptist Theological Seminary before becoming an independent college and later a university. It was named after Adoniram Judson, the first American Baptist missionary sent abroad.
In 2017, the university was granted an exception to Title IX, allows it to legally discriminate against LGBT students for religious reasons.
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