Four days after the death of white supremacist and Christian nationalist Charlie Kirk, members of Ignite Church in Williston held a vigil for the slain podcaster and Turning Point USA founder. While this particular event is no surprise from Ignite, whose pastor was a personal friend of Kirk’s, what might surprise Vermonters is that one of the state’s highest-profile music and entertainment venues, Higher Ground, has booked an Ignite Church event for this weekend.
Ignite Church is led by Todd Callahan, who runs another Ignite branch in Florida. Despite the church website’s generic Christian mission statements, Callahan’s beliefs are anything but generic. He platforms right-wing extremism and conspiracy theories and maintains close ties to Turning Point USA. Callahan and Ignite have hosted Kirk in Vermont in the past and helped facilitate Kirk’s appearance in Burlington for his “Exposing Critical Racism” tour in 2021.
Callahan’s own online presence is replete with far-right rhetoric, from climate change denial and opposing gay marriage to defying Vermont’s masking and gathering mandates during the height of COVID pandemic infections. On a 2024 episode of his “Shatterproof” podcast, Callahan described Democrats as “demonic politicians,” saying the party “idolizes sexual perversion through the LGBTQ agenda” and “doesn’t protect the innocence and virtue of children instead indoctrinates them.”
Ignite compulsively insults people who leave negative Google reviews of the church, dismissing them as “trolls” or claiming that their criticism stems from the COVID “scamdemic.” Indeed, at the vigil, Callahan described defiance of COVID protocols in liberal Vermont and “Bernie country” as a defining moment in his relationship with Kirk, who amplified his COVID protocol evasion efforts on Kirk’s national platforms.
Callahan’s politics extend to Ignite Church’s sponsored events. Ignite screened a 2024 film by disgraced former Trump National Security Advisor Mike Flynn, who after the 2020 election called on Trump to suspend the Constitution and declare martial law. Ignite also held screenings for Dinesh D’Souza’s election fraud conspiracy film “2000 Mules” and the documentary “Whose Children Are They?,” a collection of anti-public school moral panics over gender, race, and sex education.
A Career of Stoking Hate
During the vigil for Kirk, Callahan lauded him as a family man he believed would be president one day. “Charlie didn’t care what color you were,” Callahan said. “He didn’t care what your socioeconomical status was. He cared, number one, that you loved God with all your heart, all of your mind, and all of your soul.” Such a description is a dramatic departure from Kirk’s own stated priorities and the entirety of his professional life in politics.
Charlie Kirk used bigotry to build and outrage his audience. He said on his show in 2023, “Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.”
Kirk repeatedly espoused and helped normalize the white nationalist and antisemitic “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. In March 2024, he told his listeners, “The great replacement strategy, which is well underway every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.” The previous year, Kirk said, “Jewish donors have been the number one funding mechanism of radical open-border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions and nonprofits.”
In September 2023, Kirk told an audience that transgender people are “an abomination to God,” and in April 2024, he said, “We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately.”
On September 9, 2025, the day before his death, Kirk wrote that “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America,” and told an audience that he wants “not to have my kid be taught the lesbian, gay, transgender garbage in their school. While also, not having them have to hear the Muslim call to prayer five times a day.”
Despite Callahan’s glowing portrait of a humble servant of God, Kirk called empathy “a made-up new-age term that does a lot of damage,” echoing a growing anti-empathy trend on the Christian right. Kirk also told an audience in 2023 that the loss of human life via gun deaths was a “prudent deal” in exchange for the Second Amendment.
Callahan closed the Ignite Church vigil by urging those in attendance to “see the legacy of Charlie carried on through each and every one of us.”
Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Carried on Through Ignite and Higher Ground
This Sunday, September 28, Higher Ground will host Ignite Church’s “Praise Party,” targeted at young adults. It is the first time Higher Ground has hosted Ignite. While the South Burlington venue has hosted controversial musicians before and has faced past accusations of a hostile work culture, holding public events for an organization so enmeshed with the far right appears to be a departure for a venue that has embraced progressive causes.
Higher Ground has historically partnered with and hosted many LGBTQ+ friendly events and artists, including Pride Ball, the annual “Winter is a Drag” show and “New Queers Eve,” and fundraiser events for the Pride Center of Vermont, including next month’s “Color Ball.”
On June 3, 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the venue posted that “Higher Ground stands with the Black community against racial injustice, violence, and discrimination of all kinds. We will continue to listen, support, and take action toward radical justice and social change within our community and beyond.”
Of the Black Lives Matter protests, Kirk declared that BLM stood for “burn, loot, and murder.” Callahan announced during an August 2020 service that he was filing suit against Colchester School District because they were flying Black Lives Matter flags. Of George Floyd, Charlie Kirk said, “this guy was a scumbag.”
Higher Ground did not respond to requests for comment.
UPDATE 9/26/2025: The Rake Vermont has received word that Higher Ground has cancelled the event. The event page is no longer on the Higher Ground website.
Photo at top by Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 2.0.
Matt Moore is a writer from Vermont. He is on the editorial collective of The Rake Vermont.
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