Christian Collins’s speaking message can be said in one sentence, and he repeats it because it has to be lived, not only heard: know what you believe and why, stand up for what you believe, and live out what you believe.
That order matters. Conviction without reasons becomes a slogan. Reasons without courage stay in a journal. Courage without a life to match it is a performance. Collins asks the next generation to hold all three together.
He did not start from a settled faith. A conversion experience made him a Christian conservative, and he graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with that foundation. The change was not a change of team colors. It was a change in what he held to be true, and why. When he now tells students to know what they believe, he is asking them to do the work he had to do himself: examine the claims, test them, and be able to explain them when someone pushes back.
Standing up for those beliefs is the second step, and it is the one that costs something. Collins is a pro-life speaker, a credentialed minister with Grace International, and a seminarian. He is president of the Texas Youth Foundation and founder of Texas Youth Summit, an annual conference that exists to form young conservatives and Christians for public life. On campuses he has continued the Pick Up the Mic work of open conversation. Standing up, in his telling, is not a search for a fight. It is a refusal to go quiet when the truth is unpopular.
The third step is the one that keeps the first two honest: live it out. Collins is the author of Second Wind, a daily devotional written to help people pursue God and a greater calling. He was raised by missionary parents and has been to all 50 states and seven continents. He is married to Dr. Jincy Collins. The point of those details is not to stack credentials. It is to say that belief is supposed to shape a whole life — work, marriage, travel, and the ordinary hours no camera will see.
This is the message he carries from stage to campus to church. Know what you believe and why. Stand up for it. Live it. If the next generation will do those three things, they will not need someone else to hand them a script. They will already know how to pick up the mic.
You can hear that charge in Christian Collins’s 2026 Texas Youth Summit speech, which Right Side Broadcasting Network carried. He also shared a shorter video with the line, “Know what you believe. Know why you believe it.”