Dream City Church features AI Charlie Kirk, compares him to Jesus

“First, I want you to know that I’m fine,” said a disembodied voice from the speakers inside Dream City Church in Phoenix on Sunday.

It sounded like Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old right-wing activist whose Turning Point USA organization had built such a close relationship with the church. It was meant to. But it wasn’t Kirk, who’d been brutally murdered by an assassin’s bullet days earlier at an event in Utah. This was a creation of artificial intelligence.

“My soul is secure in Christ,” the voice said. “Death is not the end. It’s a promotion.” As the congregation of roughly 4,000 sat silently enthralled, the AI version of Kirk instructed them not to “spend one second mourning me. I knew the risks of standing up in this cultural moment, and I’d do it all over again.” Then “he” offered a last commandment:

“Pick up your cross and get back in the fight. Do it with joy. Do it with strength. And never let evil think it won.”

The crowd erupted in applause.


The AI Kirk was shared during the service because Dream City head pastor Luke Barnett hoped the sound of Kirk’s voice might provide his flock with a sense of closure after Kirk’s gruesome death. Over the past several years, Kirk — and, by extension, Turning Point — had fostered a close association with Dream City, the megachurch located in north Phoenix. Turning Point has held monthly “Freedom Night in America” events at the church for the last several years and has also sponsored political rallies for Donald Trump.

Sunday marked the first full service since Kirk’s death. (A smaller Wednesday service was held in the immediate aftermath of his murder.) A series of speakers — Barnett and his 88-year-old father, founding pastor Tommy Barnett; Angel Barnett, Luke’s wife; and Brandon Tatum, a right-wing influencer and police officer who was close to Kirk — spoke darkly against the “evil” of an unnamed and undefined other side. Kirk was a martyr for the church’s cause, mentioned alongside Jesus Christ himself, and his killing was a full-throated act of religious persecution.

“Charlie Kirk did not die for his political views,” said Barnett. “He died for his spiritual views.”

At Dream City, Kirk was the latest casualty in a “spiritual war.” On Wednesday — before Kirk’s killer had been captured, much less identified — Barnett had already cast Kirk’s death in those apocalyptic terms.

“The early church, they experienced the most explosive growth when Christians were thrown in the coliseum being fed to lions,” he said. “President Trump just said, ‘There’s an assault out on Christianity in America, a bias toward Christ,’ and this happens the very next day. Isn’t it amazing? So we really are in a spiritual war.”

A close relationship

This type of rhetoric is not abnormal at Dream City or churches of its ilk. Walk into any Pentecostal Charismatic church in the nation and you’ll hear leitmotifs of “war,” “battle,” and “weaponry.” The Bible itself is steeped in it: Paul says in Ephesians to “be strong” and wear “the armor of God,” while Christ himself tells his followers that “he did not come to bring peace, but a sword,” a verse Barnett refers to quite often.

Times of political tumult have a way of animating scripture into bristling flesh. In the live chatroom for the church’s 9 a.m. Sunday sermon, New Times posed a question: “Where does the country go from here?” In response, congregants were convinced of Dream City’s centrality to how the future plays out.

“Dream City is going to lead the Spiritual revival,” one person responded. “Call out the evil and the bad churches.”

Another said, “The Great White Harvest is at our door. I believe the Lord will bring beauty out of ashes as a result.”

Dream City churchgoers understandably felt close to Kirk. Turning Point USA, Kirk’s youth-focused organization, has held a close relationship with Dream City Church since 2020. It was that year, Angel Barnett recounted on Sunday, that he and his son ran into Kirk for the first time at a Latinos for Trump rally. Kirk would later ask if he could host a “young conservatives rally” in their auditorium, which would evolve into the “Freedom Night in America.”

Kirk was not just an online personality for the people in this church, but a physical presence in their lives. A number of audience members asked how they might better deal with those who say hateful things about Kirk after his death.

“A friend of mine posted on Facebook, ‘Charlie is a piece of S,’” one attendee said. “Hate bubbled up in my heart and I said, ‘Forgive me, Lord.’ God knows I want to love the other side like Charlie did.”

(The meaning of the terms “hateful” and “love” may be in the eye of the beholder, in this particular case. Kirk didn’t so much “love the other side” as much as he attempted to drum it out of existence, spreading hate about LGBTQ+ people, arguing that Black people in prominent positions didn’t deserve them and warning that immigrants were a threat to dethroning white people as the dominant force in American society. When confronted with such a list of Kirk’s sincerely held beliefs — often including Kirk’s own words promoting them — many conservatives have accused their political opponents of “celebrating” Kirk’s death.)

To answer that congregant’s question, Tommy Barnett invoked the Son of God. “Just imagine what they did to (Jesus),” he said. “They beat him. They tortured him … But the Bible said that they didn’t crucify him. He laid down his life. He put his arms out and said, ‘I give my life for you.’” Both Barnett and an audience member referred to Kirk as a “martyr.” They placed blame not so specifically on Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old man accused of killing Kirk, but on an “enemy” from the “other side.”

Talk of war, and nonviolence

At the same time, Dream City’s leaders were careful to avoid endorsing violence. “We have a perspective,” said Angel Barnett in response to the question about how to love a neighbor who might have hated Kirk. “We think we’re fighting people. We are not fighting people. This is a spiritual battle of heaven and hell that will give us the grace to forgive, have mercy and see really what’s going on.”

“When I saw what happened to Charlie,” Tatum said, “my first instinct was violence in my mind. I said, ‘I’m going to go down there and I’m going to avenge his death.’ I was sick of it. I’m sick of them treating us like this.” He paused. “That was my first reaction,” he said, to laughter.

“You have to take control of that thought. And I thought about Charlie … Look at how he speaks. He wants people to be peaceful. There’s a way in which Jesus did his ministry. It wasn’t slapping people over the head” — notably, two Turning Point employees infamously attacked an Arizona State University professor they disagreed with — “I’m going to beat you by winning.”

That kind of rhetoric makes a Dream City service tricky for an interloper. The church’s message is often hard to parse, full of authentic love and compassion but also scorn for those who oppose its worldview. “The Bible says that in this world we will have persecution, we will be despised. That is the rule,” said Tommy Barnett, ending his statement with a touch of thoughtful encouragement. “But you can be the light.”

For Dream City, Kirk’s death means expansion. “We’re going to double down,” Luke Barnett said at the Wednesday service. “We’re going to feed more people. We’re going to see more people saved. We’re going to proclaim with more of a clarion call than ever before that marriage is between a man and a woman. We’re going to proclaim live never before that there are only two sexes, male and female. And god decides that at your birth.”

He looked right into the camera to speak directly to “the enemy” — an enemy on which the church is careful to wish no physical harm, but an enemy nonetheless.

“You’ve just unleashed the dragon!” he said. “You’ve unleashed the Kraken!”