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By Aaron Hedge | FāVS News Reporter
Christian men who believe they have a right to administer their interpretation of God’s law to everyone else will gather at the Gorge Amphitheater in Central Washington this weekend. Their goal is to become even more manly and authoritative — and to elevate their status as power brokers.
At the first ever two-day “Freedom Con: Rise of the Statesman event,” hosted Friday and Saturday at one of Washington’s most prominent and beautiful concert venues, the men will worship, fellowship over workouts, bond with each other and encourage each other to take America back for Jesus.
Josh McPherson, who claims to have last winter sung a song to President Donald Trump in the Oval Office and is a disciple of the disgraced former Mars Hill pastor Mark Driscoll, organized the event through his organization Stronger Man Nation. He’ll use the event to elevate himself further as a rising star in the movement to take the U.S from voters’ hands and give it to Jesus, according to Dominick Bonny, an independent Central Washington journalist who’s covered McPherson and Driscoll for years.
A new national brand
“Josh wants to really make this Stronger Man Nation a national brand,” Bonny said, noting that Freedom Con is a signal effort toward that goal.
Stronger Man Nation is a conservative men’s ministry that has a “Man Card” program, encouraging fathers to take their sons back from the dark, secular world and mold them in the image of a hypermasculine Christianity. Freedom Con is part of that program.
McPherson, who did not respond to a request for an interview by publication time, is also the pastor of Wenatchee’s right-wing Grace City Church. And, as many Christian nationalist pastors do of their churches, he believes Grace City will be at the forefront of a worldwide Christian revival.
God “speaks timely words to a particular people,” McPherson preached to his congregation in January. “For and in this situation, the particular people is Grace City Church. Now that word given to a people can ripple and roll out from that people. God gave a particular word to the people of Israel, and it’s sort of rippled out around the world, which is pretty cool. And so it’s not that God’s word would be only for us, but it starts with us.”
Freedom Con promises to be a who’s who of nascent white Christian nationalists who believe their demographic is lost, but that, once it finds its way, God will bring his kingdom to Washington state and the rest of the country.
For example, Russell Johnson, a thin, somewhat effete-looking but charismatic Seattle megachurch pastor known for staging conflicts in the public square with leftist activists who recently brought his franchise to the liberal Spokane enclave of Browne’s Addition, will preach.
Erik Metaxas, a prominent conservative pundit and author of a discredited biography of the Lutheran, anti-Nazi dissident Deitrich Bonhoeffer, who participated in a plot to kill Adolph Hitler, will speak.
Tim Barton, the president of Walbuilders, a Christian nationalist organization teaching a revisionist version of the founding of the U.S. as an overtly Christian one, will also appear onstage.
Driscoll himself will appear.
These characters appear on the event’s website in ways not unlike men in a trailer for a Michael Bay film — rippling muscles accentuated by tight-fitting T-shirts, stubble, and strong beards. Men who can help other men achieve their “Man Card.” Some of these men, including Johnson and McPherson, have posed for photographs with President Donald Trump and support his war on Iran because, they say, it’s a tick on the checklist that will bring about the end times.
No women, no alcohol, no press
Promotional materials for the event, including an email distributed to the Grace City congregation, encourage men to attend and bring 10 other men. It’s a dry event, no alcohol allowed. It’s a men’s event; no women allowed. It’s a Christian event; Bonny wanted to attend as a journalist, but said he was excluded. The literature also encourages wives to push their husbands to the event. There are father-son activities structured around the macho conception of Christ, a dubiously biblical version of the Messiah that permeates much of the contemporary Christian right in the U.S.
Aaron Musser, an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America pastor in Leavenworth, said this fits right in with a toxic masculinity that appeals to young Christian men who want to embrace an identity that is overtly sexual and infused with testosterone but still hews to old notions of patriarchy. He said Driscoll, McPherson’s mentor, spoke in overtly sexual tone about “my smoking hot wife” social media posts as he ascended the Christian nationalist ladder.
Will it deliver?
“He infused a real neo-Calvinism into it, which had a lot of expectations on women to sort of deny themselves and their own agency,” Musser said.
Freedom Con seems to lack the attention of other soirées at the Gorge Amphitheater — which have included concerts by the Dave Matthews Band, Bob Dylan, Sheryl Crow and a host of others — according to Mayor Paul Worley of Quincy, the closest major town to the Gorge.
Locals, who Worley said are normally engaged with big events at the Gorge, don’t seem bothered by this momentary influx of Christian nationalists. From Worley’s perspective, no one in town seems to care. He said he’s seen posters around town advertising the event, but hadn’t heard anyone talking about it.
“Everybody’s business is their own business,” Worley said.
But if Quincy City Council Member Dan Dormier has anything to say about it, he’s glad it’s coming. A member of what he described as a church similar to Grace City, located in Ephrata, he lamented that he’d be out of town. He characterized the event as a community-building opportunity and wished he could go, asserting that Christian involvement in the public square is more important than the policymaking he does behind the dais.
“This event, if it does well, maybe it’ll get the church to come outside of its walls and to support and help people,” Dormier said.
The website advertising the event is an assertive and confident one, but Musser wondered if the concert would draw as many people as it seemed to think it might. Christian nationalist stars often inflate the impact of their events, he said.
“I’m curious how many people will go,” Musser said, noting he’d heard pastors from the church say, “I think we may have bitten off more than we can chew.”
This weekend will tell.
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