Spokane church organizing Seattle stop of national anti-trans tour

By Aaron Hedge |FāVS News

God’s fire will spread west from Spokane again Saturday night.

On Fire Ministries (OFM), the dominionist downtown church run by the far-right former legislator and Army intelligence officer Matt Shea, is organizing the Seattle stop of a national anti-queer worship tour aimed at stopping gender-affirming health care.

It will take place at Cal Anderson Park in Capitol Hill from 2 to 9 p.m. Protests of the event have been happening since the beginning of the month, and there will be another protest during the event at the Cal Anderson Park skatepark where organizers will “get loud for our trans people.”

(The event was first reported in The Capitol Hill Seattle Blog.)

The national tour is organized by the dominionist Portland pastor Jenny Donnelly, who appears often at OFM to oppose gender-affirming care for children. The series is titled Mayday USA, which refers not to the labor celebration but the international distress signal because Donnelly believes society is in distress as society increasingly accepts transgender people. 

In 2022, about 0.5%of people in the U.S. identified as transgender, but dominionists view acceptance of them as an existential threat to society.

According to The Transgender Law Center, “The U.S. ranks third in the world for trans people who are violently killed, after Brazil and Mexico.”

For example, in September, Sam Nordquist, a transgender man, flew to New York from Minneapolis to be with a woman he believed was in love with him. But five months later, he was dead, having been allegedly tortured and murdered by the girlfriend and six of her friends.

Donnelly’s tour is part of a broad Christian effort — one that’s gained steam under the right-wing federal government that took power in November under the second term of President Donald Trump — to deny that transgender people exist in order to deny them health care and even exclude them from public places. 

Dominion flows from Spokane

Mayday is organized under the banner of Donnelly’s “Don’t Mess with Our Kids” movement, a parents’ right campaign that denies trans people exist and asserts that public schools are indoctrinating children to be queer.

But many dominionist events in Seattle would be more difficult without support from Eastern Washington. Much of that support lies in the low-slung buildings on Pacific Avenue in downtown Spokane that house On Fire Ministries. Donnelly was at that church, where she has spoken at least four times in the last two years, on March 2 to promote the Mayday events.

During that appearance, Donnelly said people from all over the country flee to the Pacific Northwest (PNW) looking for a lefty haven where they don’t have to worry about conservative Christian strictures, some of which dictate they suppress their sexuality and gender identities. Invoking unspecified conversations she said she had with parents around the country, she said she wants to make the PNW into a place where no one can escape her version of the Christian God.

“They ran to the northwest to get away from the God in their family,” Donnelly, who made a fortune from a multi-level marketing campaign, told the OFM congregation on March 2. “The more I heard that, the more I said, ‘God I’m not okay with that.’ I’m not okay with us being a sanctuary state for young adults to run from God.” 

But because Donnelly, Shea and others like them are here, the PNW is not safe for people trying to escape fundamentalist Christianity.

“That is the most unsafe place to run if you’re trying to get away from God,” she said, emphasizing that churches like hers, The Collective Church, will snap them up.

Shea did not return a request for comment on this story.

Donelly implored members of OFM to join the entire national tour.

“You are being recruited into a fight that you never thought would happen,” she said from the OFM pulpit.

Kiara Buck, a member of OFM and an administrator and teacher in Spokane’s School of Kingdom Inheritance, which teaches students how to conduct “spiritual warfare,” is traveling with Mayday USA for the full tour. She organized a fundraiser to pay for her travel costs on Facebook. Buck did not respond to a request for an interview about the tour.

‘Simply a war cry’

At the Houston event on May 18, Ross Johnston, the founder of California Will Be Saved who is helping Donnelly organize the tour, stood onstage in a black sports jersey, black basketball shorts and a black, flat-brimmed hat and raffled off bicycles and gift cards to attendees under 13 years old.

But it was bigger than just prizes.

“We’ve come not for a picnic, not for a play date, but we’ve come for the presence of the Lord,” he said, striding across the stage, pointing out at the crowd and cueing up several lead worshippers who were with him on the stage. “I want to challenge you. You might not know me, and I might not know you. But I promise you this. If you give Jesus the next 20 to 30 minutes of your time, I believe the presence of the Lord is going to touch your mind, he’s going to touch your body, and he’s going to save you just in time.”

The music started, and the crowd worshipped to songs produced and influenced by the dominionist ministry out of Redmond, California, Bethel Church, the formative ministry for the dominionist Spokane pastor Cal Pierce and the anti-queer worship celebrity Sean Feucht.

Then, Donnelly got onstage to tell a story that was not only about personal salvation but was deeply political in nature.

“When families are healed, America will be restored,” she said. A massive screen behind her displayed #DONTMESSWITHOURKIDS. “Now ‘don’t mess with our kids’ — this is a grassroots movement. This is not an organization. This is simply a war cry.”

She told the story of the movement, which originated in Peru when evangelical churches staged mass protests against queer rights in schools that resulted in the ouster of the education minister in that country. Donnelly brought the movement to the United States and has relentlessly promoted it since.

“Copy/paste USA,” she declared to the crowd.

What is dominionism?

Donnelly’s organizing has much influence in Spokane and even surfaced in the mayoral race of 2023 when then-Mayor Nadine Woodward appeared in a campaign photo standing next to a woman wearing a T-shirt bearing the hashtag.

To understand why this matters, it’s important to explore the idea of Christian nationalism and one of its most powerful variations. In the broadest terms, Christian nationalism is the belief that the U.S. was founded by Christians, influenced by Christian principles and should be governed by them. Most Christians in the U.S. identify with some version of this value.

But some Christians — including Shea and Donnelly — exercise a distilled version of Christian nationalism known as dominionism. Dominionism takes the biblical idea of man’s dominion over the natural world — mandated in Genesis 1:26 — and amplifies it to argue Christians should have control over other people.

It adheres to the “Seven Mountains Mandate,” a notion pioneered by the dominionist celebrity Lance Walnau that says Christians are supposed to control the seven “mountains” — institutions and industries — of social influence. Shea rattled those off to his congregation last September in a sermon: “education, religion, family, business, government-slash-military, arts and entertainment and the media.”

This is a controversial idea in the world of Christian nationalism, and many apologists oppose it. But it has taken root in the fabric of all American lives in the form of the Trump administration, which is blessed by a narrative that the philandering real estate mogul is ordained by the Christian god: what else could explain his miraculous survival of two assassination attempts during the 2024 campaign?

Where does that narrative lead? The administration seems to believe it justifies the wholesale rejection of transgender and other queer people, who it denies exist and whose rights it has swiftly eroded.

According GLAAD, an American non-governmental media monitoring organization, “Trump Accountability Tracker” the president has banned trans women from sports, stopped investigations of discrimination cases relating to gender identity, eliminated HIV resources from government websites, cancelled diversity equity and inclusion programs, mandated trans women who are incarcerated to be housed in men’ s facilities, banned trans people from military service, defined sex in relation to the kind of reproductive cell a person produces and many other policies that oppose the queer community.

The omnipresent flame

This is not the first time On Fire has been instrumental in anti-queer organizing on the West Side. In 2023, Shea’s church provided war horns, horse trough baptisteries, labor, transit and bodies for a concert by the anti-queer worship pastor Sean Feucht.

The Donnelly events echo the Feucht event, which was also part of a nationwide tour aimed partly at ending health care for queer and trans people. The ambience starts, someone prays earnestly for God to move, the bass drops, people dance and worship and cry and throw the paraphernalia of their sinful lives onto the stage. Baptisms are performed. 

It’s unclear what actual effect this has on the community — especially with an organization like Donnelly’s Her Voice Movement, which is not incorporated (Feucht’s Sean Feucht Ministries is an incorporated nonprofit that files public tax forms). But if one believes the story implied by the relentless marketing of the events, God is moving and trying to make the US a straight nation.

Not so, said Rev. Gen Heywood of Veradale United Church of Christ, a queer-affirming church in Spokane Valley, in an interview for another story earlier this week. She hoped for a society where trans people can be accepted.

“Can they just be a human being and not be looked at as somehow odd or other?” she asked “Can they just be a child of God?”