An attack on Charlie Kirk

Matthew Boedy’s The Seven Mountains Mandate (Westminster John Knox Press, 226 pp.) is less a critique than a declaration of war—against Christian influence, the nuclear family, and the very idea that God belongs in the public square. Behind its alarmist prose is a simple premise: that American Christians, especially evangelicals, are conspiring to seize control of seven facets of cultural life: education, government, media, family, business, religion, and entertainment. Boedy considers Christians a danger to the republic and a threat to democracy. He wants readers to brace for a coup every time someone says grace in public.

The target of Boedy’s ire is the abovementioned mandate, a theological and cultural framework embraced by some evangelicals. Its core idea is not new: If Christians want to shape culture, they can’t retreat from it. It calls for cultural reengagement with purpose, preparation, and presence.

Boedy, a professor at the University of North Georgia, sees tyranny in this. To him, belief in objective truth, Biblical morality, and spiritual authority is a threat. And his chosen villain is the recently assassinated Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA. Boedy has long painted Kirk as a menace, a fixation only sharpened when his own name appeared on Turning Point’s professor watch list. The fact that the book is coming out right after the death of Boedy’s central foil adds a darker, unintended weight. What was once a polemic now reads as a kind of grave-­dancing, an attack on a man who cannot defend himself and, by extension, on the millions who followed him.

Boedy’s obsession with Kirk borders on pathological—Kirk isn’t just a character in the story, he’s the shadow behind every curtain, the man Boedy blames for everything from school board elections to the erosion of secular order. Boedy accuses Kirk of exploiting fear, manipulating youth, and presenting dominionism as patriotism. But what’s more revealing than what Boedy says is what he omits: For millions of Americans—especially parents, pastors, and teachers—this vision is not about domination; it’s about protection. They’re not seeking power for its own sake. They’re trying to protect children, families, and churches from a culture that has lost its moral anchor.

That is Boedy’s blind spot. He treats Biblical conviction as extremism. When Christians assert the value of life, the sanctity of marriage, or the need for clarity in schools, Boedy hears fascism. He lumps together prayer groups and political rallies, religious hope and militant nationalism, and blurs every line between thoughtful civic engagement and theocracy. He never allows for the possibility that ordinary believers might act not out of hunger for dominance, but from fear that silence means surrender. Dismissing this isn’t analysis; it’s contempt dressed up as scholarship. His entire thesis rests on the dangerous assumption that faith in the public sphere is inherently oppressive.

Boedy is not stupid. He’s articulate, and he’s done his research. He even insists on his own Christian identity, which makes the venom in this book more jarring. Published by a Christian press, it reads like an insider’s denunciation, a work designed to give secular critics the credibility of a “Christian witness.” But the witness here is hostile. It is less confession than prosecution, less honest wrestling with the faith than a betrayal of it. There is no nuance, no charity, no admission that Christians might be responding to cultural collapse, not causing it. There’s no recognition that public schools are failing, that the family unit is disintegrating, that a godless elite now occupies most cultural mountains.

Boedy’s smug and sanctimonious tone presents his enemies as not just wrong but evil. That makes for poor analysis and even poorer understanding. He never asks what, beyond lust for power, might motivate the Christians he critiques. In doing so, he exposes the emptiness of his own argument. If Christians are truly so dangerous, why reduce them to caricatures instead of confronting their ideas with seriousness? Boedy claims to offer objective analysis. In reality, what he delivers is projection layered with contempt. He despises everything Christianity represents, and that disdain drips from every word. The cross, to him, is a red flag.

The strength of the book—if we can call it that—is in its archival work. Boedy tracks the movement’s development from the 1970s to today. He explains how figures like Francis Schaeffer, Bill Bright, and Lance Wallnau contributed to a theology of cultural engagement. Schaeffer challenged Christians to confront secularism head-on. Bright believed evangelism shouldn’t stop at the church door. Wallnau repackaged the idea of cultural engagement for a media age. But Boedy weaponizes this history to warn of an alleged Christian uprising. He sees coordination where there’s conviction, conspiracy where there’s concern.

This robs Boedy’s argument of any real weight. He misunderstands the mandate itself. The Seven Mountains framework isn’t about enforcing faith. It’s about not being ashamed of it. It’s about building a culture where kids aren’t confused about gender, where marriage means something, where media don’t mock prayer, and where the church isn’t bullied into silence.

In the end, Boedy gives us a book that’s not about mountains at all; it’s about his own fears. Those fears—sharpened by his enmity with Charlie Kirk and projected onto a grieving movement—reveal less about Christianity than about the insecurity of academia itself. Let the reader decide which vision for the nation preserves freedom: the one that silences faith or the one that speaks it boldly.