Critique of TPUSA’s Women’s Leadership Summit

By Elizabeth Prata

SYNOPSIS

Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit aims to empower women through civic engagement and political activism. However, the article critiques this initiative, questioning its alignment with biblical roles for women which are supposed to be primarily focused on home and motherhood. It highlights inconsistencies among speakers promoting activism while diverging from scriptural teachings on femininity and family responsibilities.

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This photo is making the rounds on social media. It is a poster advertising all the speakers for TPUSA Young Women’s Leadership Summit.

Turning Point USA Announces Young Women’s Leadership Summit 2025. Turning Point USA’s mission is “to empower informed civic and cultural engagement grounded in American exceptionalism and a positive spirit of action”. It uses words like American Exceptionalism, grassroots, patriots, and the like. It’s a political/civic organization aimed at helping people “develop knowledge, skills, values, and motivation, so they can meaningfully engage in their communities to restore traditional American values like patriotism, respect for life, liberty, family, and fiscal responsibility.”

Charlie Kirk is the founder and current President of this organization, which aims to the youth demographic to become civically engaged and politically motivated.

One segment of the organization is the Faith section, “dedicated to empowering Christians to put their faith into action” and one subsection of that Faith arm of TPUSA is the Young Women’s Leadership Summit. Here we come to the poster below.

TPUSA says it is “the largest conservative event” for women of all ages, designed to celebrate traditional values, unite a sisterhood and basking in “faith, family, and well-being” and to…”prepare to lead.” Lead what, we are not told.

If we are to celebrate and affirm traditional, Christian values revolving around family and femininity, as the ‘About’ states, then exactly what are women to lead? A city? A country? Homes? The Bible is clear that a woman is to have a primary orientation of the home and in the home, raising children if she is given that blessing, supporting the husband as help-meet. Submitting. But I suppose a national conference called “Young Women’s Submission Summit” would not garner as many speakers or attendees.

Young Women’s “Leadership” Summit…? I suppose a national conference called “Young Women’s Submission Summit” would not garner as many speakers or attendees.

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Doesn’t TPUSA’s goal of changing young women into activists contradict the biblical role for women of home and motherhood? Besides, isn’t home and motherhood THE primary activist role in our culture, anyway?

Doesn’t TPUSA’s goal of changing young people, including young women, into activists, contradict the biblical role for women of home and motherhood? Isn’t home and motherhood THE primary activist role in our culture, anyway?

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Indeed, some of these speakers do not model submission. We see Congresswomen and Senators, women who have stepped out of the biblical role to lead but will speak at a conference telling other women to be traditional and biblical. Do as I say, not as I do?

I am not familiar with most of these women profiled in the poster. I wrote on my Facebook page recently about my disappointment in Allie Beth Stuckey. I have heard Heidi St. John’s name quite a bit. But to do my diligence, I looked at Heidi’s published and public speaking schedule, information, and her bio:

She has 7 children, and “homeschooled their kids all the way through high school and are still finishing up with a few at home”, as per her Bio in About Heidi and here.

Heidi ran for election to the U.S. House to represent Washington’s 3rd Congressional District. She lost in the primary on August 2, 2022. She wrote in 2022 of her decision to campaign for Congress, “With my family by my side, I have decided it’s time to step out to serve and to lead.” 

She is a bestselling author, speaker, founder of The Heidi St. John Podcast & Faith that Speaks. She is a mom, grandmom, and a business owner. She is gone from home often with speaking events:

And preaching events too. Here she is in May 2025 on Mother’s Day preaching to the Abundant Life church, a multi-campus church in KS-MO, introduced by Lead Pastor Phil Hopper. Her sermon was titled The Ministry of Motherhood, some irony there, and here is the link.

I have nothing against Heidi. She’s probably a lovely person. I’ve seen video testimonials from her children, most of them grown now, of her care and love for them. But we sisters are frogs in ever heating water, not noticing how much that the biblical spheres have enlarged.

Detractors to my assessments of women like Allie Beth, Priscilla Shirer, Beth Moore, Joanna Gaines, Christine Caine, Raechel Myers, women who claim to be biblical but live a very forward life, are numerous. One constant rejoinder I receive is, ‘Well her children are grown now, she has time and energy to serve the Lord in other ways!’

And this may be true on an individual basis. Each woman who decides to travel in order to speak at events can make her own interpretation of the pertinent verses and with her husband, if she has one, make her choices in Christian liberty. I can’t wholesale decry this activity for each and every woman. I can only remind about what the Bible says. (See verses at end).

As much as I wrote negatively in the past about the activities of some of these false teachers/liberal women, the same goes for the conservative Allie Beths and Heidi St Johns. Conservative women do not get a pass from Jesus for their lifestyle and doctrinal decisions. While in all likelihood motivated for a love of Him and wanting to share Him, some women have by ever widening the biblical boundaries, stepped OUT of the roles He has set for women, moms, grandmoms. Heidi St. John flying halfway across the county to preach a Sunday Service to a church is not acceptable on Mother’s Day or any day. Why wasn’t she at home with her children, husband, and grandkids on Mother’s Day?

Dorcas, Lois, Eunice, Lydia, Priscilla poured themselves into the women around them and transparently shared their very life with their neighbors. Would Dorcas’ friends have come to know and love, and have wept as much when she died, if Dorcas was speaking elsewhere half the time? Would Paul have been as blessed with Lydia’s hospitality if the house was often closed up while she was tending to her business franchises shuttling back and forth between Philippi and Thyatira? Would Priscilla have missed an opportunity to share the Gospel in a more substantial way with Apollos if she was out campaigning for Guild President? With Lois and Eunice preaching and speaking elsewhere so often in a calendar year, including Sundays, how would they share a life with the younger women to whom they are supposed to be ministering and teaching? Or giving an example to their grandkids?

You get the idea.

Sister, if you are developing a social media platform/writing a book/increasingly being asked to share your testimony or wisdom at churches you must travel to, think hard. All these are good things…CAN BE good things. But they can also draw you into a vortex of sin that widens and before you know it, tentacles have grabbed you from below and you can’t get out.

Yeats’ famous poem, The Second Coming, presents a vivid picture

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

It is very easy to widen one’s sphere as satan nudges us further away from the Lord. He is subtle and he does this incrementally. EVERY decision you make regarding your public ministry, if you have one, needs to be carefully considered, thoroughly discussed with your husband, or your elders if you don’t have a husband. Drifting apart from the falconer, so to speak, by missing church, letting Bible reading go slack as you travel, leaving family behind, getting busy with your business instead of the Father’s business, it all happens sooner than you can think.

I would advise to avoid TPUSA Faith. Hear more at the video below-

This conversation between John Root and Justin Peters on TPUSA Faith is eye-opening. I started it late in the interview where Justin asked Root about TPUSA Faith or you can slide to the beginning and hear the whole thing.

Again, I am sure these TPUSA Faith women are nice. They likely have or used to have good motivations. They probably justified their early decisions with scripture. But as Justin Peters has said many times, “Sincerity is not the issue, truth is the issue.”

A woman’s primary orientation, work, attention, and location should be the home.

Older women likewise are to be reverent in their behavior, not malicious gossips nor enslaved to much wine, teaching what is good, 4so that they may encourage the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, 5to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands, so that the word of God will not be dishonored. (Titus 2:3-5).

So I advise the younger widows to marry, have children, and manage their households, denying the adversary occasion for slander. (1 Timothy 5:14).

The LORD God also said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make for him a suitable helper.” (Genesis 2:18)

Women are to be silent in the churches. They are not permitted to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. (1 Corinthians 14:34-35).

But we urge you, brothers and sisters, to excel even more, and to make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands, just as we instructed you, (1 Thessalonians 4:10b-11).