By Julia Duin | Roys Report
The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News.
(Opinion) – When we pulled into the Grace City Church parking lot the morning after the Fourth of July, the first thing we saw wasn’t a cross. It was an American flag; that is, numerous flags, each waved about by a different parking lot attendant.
The fireworks had ended the night before, but the national holiday was ongoing at Grace — the Christian nationalist megachurch in Wenatchee, a medium-sized town nestled next to Washington’s Cascade Mountains. Red, white and blue were the liturgical colors of the day at the 2,000-person congregation known for its FreedomCon Men’s conference and close association with controversial pastor Mark Driscoll.
The church is perched on a slope overlooking the “apple capital of the world,” so-called because of the region’s prodigious fruit output — and the state’s ranking as the country’s top apple grower. My daughter and I, who were visiting from the Seattle area, met up with a friend — also a visitor — in the spacious courtyard in front of the church. We were all curious to see what a typical service at Grace was like.
After nodding at the greeters at the door — all of them men in red T-shirts — we were hit with an explosion of Americana the moment we stepped inside. Red, white and blue banners were everywhere. A welcome desk in the middle of a vast entrance hall was decked with small paper bags handed out to newcomers. Inside were stickers emblazoned with “Jesus is Freedom” in blue denim and rust-red tones, along with a fire engine-red mug emblazoned with “Jesus is Freedom.” I thought this was theologically puzzling; Jesus promises freedom, but he never said he himself is freedom.
I began racking my brain as to where I’d heard this before. Ah, yes, the late Charlie Kirk was wearing a “Freedom” T-shirt when he was assassinated nearly a year ago. I began to connect the dots: Jesus, freedom and of course FreedomCon, the large June 19-20 rally that Grace City held at the Gorge Amphitheatre on the shores of the Columbia River. (The event has a trailer on YouTube.) These folks were co-opting the word “freedom” as part of their brand, just as pro-life opponents have co-opted the word “choice.”
There was a lot of he-man branding going on in that large entrance hall. I noticed the large stuffed deer mounted over the second-floor balcony. Then I glimpsed a taxidermized bear to one side and a trophy mountain goat to the other.
“There’s a lot of dead animals in here,” my friend muttered. The place, with its vast fireplace and rough wood wall panels, felt like an enormous hunting lodge.
The church offered little navigational help to the uninitiated. There were no programs at the door and no introductions for the folks onstage. The three worship songs performed weren’t anything I recognized.
I had thought this place would be ultra-Reformed with hymnbooks, considering its connections to Mars Hill, the former neo-Calvinist evangelical church empire in Seattle once headed by disgraced pastor Mark Driscoll.
Then Kyle McMullen, head of Vector West University, the church’s two-year Bible school and “anti-woke Christian college,” took to the pulpit for a solid hour of sermonizing on “national gratitude.” (The church also runs a K-12 school, which uses textbooks from Logos Press, a company started by fellow Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson.)
I’ve rarely heard sermons encouraging Christians to get involved in politics, as evangelical churches normally run the other way. But this place revels in it. This past Sunday, during the meet-and-greet portion of the service, members were instructed to ask each other, “Have you voted yet?”
After McMullen finished, up walked Josh McPherson, the lead pastor, clad in a T-shirt and jeans. He needed troops to campaign for Adam James, one of the church’s executive pastors and a candidate for the Washington Legislature whose political fate will be decided during the Aug. 4 primary.
James has raised eyebrows around the state for his lack of political experience and prowess at fundraising. When he announced his candidacy in March, he took in nearly $200,000 off the bat, far outstripping his two challengers. He’s running in the 12th legislative district, which includes parts of western and central Washington in three counties. To date, he’s raised $345,879, according to public disclosure records. Incumbent Michael Steele, also a Republican, has raised one-third that amount.
But the election is not a slam dunk even in conservative north central Washington, McPherson reminded us.
“We are running into, you know, significant spiritual warfare,” he said. “What Kyle preached this morning is more profound than you know. I think, ask yourself why the prevailing thought that’s been pushed not by the left but by Christians last 30 years is, ‘Oh, we don’t combine church and politics.’ The two things that impact people’s lives more than anything else, we’re not allowed to talk about.
“It’s wild, it’s demonic, and it’s the great failure of evangelical church in the last 30 years. … I don’t think Christianity counts until you check where it lands on the pavement of politics, because it actually gets expressed publicly. I believe, as we’ve been saying for years now, politics is one way to love our neighbor on a corporate level, and so we’re right into spiritual warfare.”
I am guessing that’s how he would term the protestors, dressed in red robes and white bonnets out of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” who demonstrated outside of one of James’ campaign stops on July 22. They didn’t like James’ stances – as described on his website and in sermons given at Grace — with all the MAGA overtones to them. The concept of Christian dominion over local, regional and national politics gives many inhabitants of this deep blue state the willies.
It’s hard to say how the James campaign will land even in Wenatchee, hardly a cookie-cutter kind of place despite the innate conservatism of its farm-and-ag-centered community. During our weekend trip of dropping by wineries and cideries and biking along the Columbia, I experienced a city with an art and music scene patronized by a diverse set of individuals.
An adult story hour at the downtown Watercore Taproom on a Friday night drew an overflow crowd of progressive millennials. The pop/rock band playing across the river at the Union Hill Cider Co brought out the families-with-kids folks.
The cider company venue is where an Adam James rally was slated for late July, McPherson reminded us.
McPherson is the voice behind the Stronger Man Nation podcast and a host of other initiatives designed to support Christian men. FreedomCon was merely his formal calling card on the national stage, and curiously, no regional outlet — except for the Wenatchee World — covered it.
The New York Times — aided by the savvy religion writer Ruth Graham, who’s known for being alert to nascent trends — did show up. She reported this colorful quote straight from Mark Driscoll, a keynote speaker at the conference: “Heterosexual, sober men who marry girls and read Bibles, we’re the new punk rock!”
(Not a few people have noted his use of “girls” instead of “women” to describe females.)
Driscoll seems to have made Grace City his second home when visiting Washington state. As former members of Acts 29 network, he and McPherson go way back, and Driscoll seems bent on completing a job he left unfinished when he fled Mars Hill . Which is “flipping” Washington state through mobilizing Christians to get to the polls and vote red.
True, Washington is so left-leaning, it’s functionally a one-party state. But the way these guys described it, its 8.1 million inhabitants are oppressed by “diabolical evil,” which they’re out to change.
In an essay for the Spokane-based FāVS News, two sociologists — Joshua Tom of Seattle Pacific University and Jason Wollschleger of Whitworth University — described their weekend attending FreedomCon. Speaker after speaker, they said, portrayed the state as sitting at a demonic crossroads. Driscoll called his former Seattle base “one of the two injection points for the atheistic communistic poison that is seeking to destroy the United States of America.”
Not to be outdone, McPherson called the Evergreen State “a covert black-op state for every demonic progressive idea that the demonic powers are trying to run on our nation.”
Staged in a venue more known for top acts like Brandi Carlile or Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts, FreedomCon only partially filled the 27,500-seat venue overlooking the Columbia River. Still, it was Grace City’s way of serving notice that it could summon 4,500 men to hear a message about Christ and politics.
Whether it can place one of those men in the legislature should become clear by Tuesday night.
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