At a gathering of Christian nationalist preachers called Let Us Worship on Sunday night, Spokane Mayor Nadine Woodward took to the stage with other political candidates to receive prayers and an endorsement from former Spokane Valley legislator-turned-pastor, Matt Shea.
The event came almost exactly four years after Woodward denounced what she called Shea’s “divisive and extreme rhetoric and ideology.” Onstage Sunday, Shea began by striking an unmistakable chord of reconciliation.
“I want you to extend your hands,” Shea implored the crowd in a video of the event RANGE reviewed, “because we have an enemy we need to be fighting. His name is Satan. We don’t need to be fighting each other, amen?” The crowd shouted, “Amen.”
Woodward, her hands crossed in front of her, nodded positively.
Shea then laid his hand on Woodward and she raised hers in praise. “Father God,” Shea said. “We pray a blessing over the leaders you have chosen for this time. That you would give them your wisdom. That you would give them supernatural love, Lord. That you would give them supernatural discernment. That you would increase their faith. That you would increase their joy, that they could laugh in the middle of crisis, Lord.”
With wildfires having burned upwards of 20,000 acres of Spokane County in the last two days, Shea then seemed to feel the need to clarify what he meant by leaders laughing during a crisis. “Not laughing at the crisis, but knowing that you are still on the throne.”
Shea concluded by asking God to burden believers’ hearts to pray for leaders like Woodward during the day, at night, and into the following year. Shea then turned his prayer back to those leaders.
“Give them courage — your courage — to stand on the foundation — the rock — of Jesus Christ. Give them — right now, Lord — the unwavering ability to speak the truth into the darkness and no matter what anybody says around them, they will glory and honor and praise you in every single thing they do. In Jesus’ mighty name, and everybody in one gigantic shout said — ”
“Amen!” The crowd called back.
Joining Woodward onstage was Earl Moore, Spokane City Council candidate for District 3, along with Spokane Valley city council candidate Jessica Yaeger and Natalie Poulson, who unsuccessfully ran for Washington State legislature in 2022.
Woodward did not return multiple requests for comment throughout Sunday and into Monday morning. Her campaign released a statement Monday morning where she mischaracterized the nature of the event, blaming Shea by saying he “chose to politicize a gathering of thousands of citizens who joined together yesterday to pray for fire victims and first responders.”
But the event was explicitly political, not an impromptu prayer gathering for the area’s fires that was hijacked by a politician.
Let Us Worship is a nationwide tour that consciously mixes conservative politics and evangelical praise led by Christian nationalist praise leader Sean Feucht. Feucht’s other major touring project Kingdom to the Capitol (K2c), and is a partnership with Turning Point USA Faith. Originally a conservative organization that focused on campus radicalism and actively stayed away from conservative Christian politics, the TPUSA Faith arm launched early in the pandemic to connect their brand to charismatic conservative faith movements.
On Friday, we wrote about the extensive connections both Feucht and TPUSA have to Shea and two other Spokane-area men, Caleb Collier and Gavan Spies, a former EWU professor, who all share a similar hope to turn America — or at least a piece of it — into an explicitly Christian nation.
While the Spokane Let Us Worship was not affiliated with TPUSA, Collier confirmed to RANGE that he and Spies organized the event, and that it had been planned for months.
Reached on her cell phone Monday morning, Earl Moore confirmed she had attended. “I have no comment, I have no comment,” she told RANGE. “I am a prayer warrior. I went there to pray. End of conversation.”
The Children’s Crusade
Woodward receiving a blessing from Matt Shea, the pastor, is a considerable shift from her last campaign for mayor, where she unequivocally denounced Shea, the state lawmaker.
On August 14, 2019, The Guardian had reported Shea’s connection to Team Rugged, a group training children, teenage boys and young adult men in warfare. “Those who attend will learn combatives, the use of a knife in defense, close quarters shooting with rifle and pistol and how to work effectively in teams of 2, 3 and 4,” wrote Team Rugged founder Patrick Caughran in an email to Matt Shea in July 2016.
It’s not clear if Shea responded to that email, but a year later, in July 2017, Shea posted a Facebook Live video promoting Team Rugged during the annual God and Country event in north Stevens County.
And while The Guardian revelations happened in the heat of the mayoral election in 2019, Shea had been a known quantity for years. In 2018, writing in Rolling Stone, Leah Sottile — a long-time documenter of the far-right in the west and former Inlander staffer — ran through a long-list of Shea’s known accomplices: “he has allied with some of the most high-profile conspiracy theorists and anti-government extremists in the American West: from Cliven Bundy and his sons to a neo-Confederate Idaho preacher to the head of the Oath Keepers, an extremist group that believes “the United States is collaborating with a one-world tyrannical conspiracy called the New World Order.”
The idea of turning children into foot soldiers for holy war is reminiscent of the Children’s Crusade of 1212, but former Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich told The Guardian it reminded him of something else. “It almost sounds like going back to the Hitler Youth concept,” he said.
Four days after The Guardian revelations, on August 18, then-candidate Woodward issued a blistering denunciation of Shea that also called for his constituents to vote him out of office:
“I strongly condemn Representative Matt Shea’s divisive and extreme rhetoric and ideology. I believe in inclusive and open leadership that equally represents all residents. I call on his constituents to make their decision about what values they want represented in Olympia.”
On Sunday night, though, Shea welcomed Woodward on stage and prayed over her.
As RANGE has reported extensively, whether it’s training ballot-box watchers to surveil elections or having direct connections to members of the white nationalist Patriot Front, the years have done nothing to dull Shea’s revolutionary zeal.
So if Shea hasn’t changed, what has changed about Woodward?
We emailed and texted Woodward for comment, messaged her campaign team on Twitter, and texted a fundraiser with connections to Woodward in the hopes they could connect us. If the mayor or her team respond, we’ll update this story.
‘Let’s pray for a fire that would consume Spokane.‘
Woodward wasn’t originally supposed to be in town this weekend. On Saturday night, she posted on social media that she and her husband had been out of town celebrating their wedding anniversary, but had come back early “because of our region’s fires.”
The Let Us Worship revival was supposed to be somewhere else, too.
Originally scheduled to be held outside under the Pavilion, the event was moved indoors to The Podium due to the wildfire smoke that has choked the area since Friday. Joseph Peterson, a local designer, live-tweeted the event, estimating that there were approximately 1,000 people in attendance. “There were actually more people there than I was expecting,” Peterson told RANGE.
Before Woodward stepped on stage, much of the rhetoric used fire metaphors. Feucht, Shea and their fellow organizers seemed to lean into the tragic wildfires that had burned around 20,000 acres since Friday.
Peterson quoted the group as saying things like, “We don’t care about the smoke. Let’s pray for a fire that would consume Spokane,” and asking God to “Sweep our city like a fire sweeps through the woods.” Range was unable to independently verify these quotes from Peterson as there was no accompanying video.
Fire is a common allegory in the Bible used to describe God and the way he moves in his believers, from Moses encountering God as a burning bush to God self-describing as a consuming flame that will either purify believers or destroy sinners. In 2 Peter, chapter 3, God describes the final judgment: “the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and the works that are upon it will be burned up.”
Just before Shea led Woodward onstage, one of a succession of pastors who offered thoughts said, “We serve the King of Spokane. God is on the throne. We are going to let out a war cry to declare victory over Spokane.”
A little later in the night, there were more admonishments to God to bring fire to a region choking on smoke and communities deeply scarred by the loss of more than 200 structures and at least two lives. “Let’s begin right now to just ask God for another installment of fire,” Peterson quoted in his tweet thread. “Another installment of a rushing wind that sweeps through this city and destroys every idol.”
At 8 am Monday morning, the Woodward campaign released a statement on both the wildfires and the Let Us Worship event she attended. Quotes attributed to her begin, “Yesterday I spent eight hours witnessing first-hand the depths of wildfire devastation and the heights of humanity.”
After criticizing Shea for politicizing the event as mentioned above, Woodward is quoted saying, “I attended the event with one purpose only and that was to join with fellow citizens to begin the healing process.”
RANGE followed up once again to ask how she could have mistaken a Christian nationalist event that had been planned for months for a gathering to pray for victims of a tragedy that began two days earlier.
If Woodward or her campaign respond to any of our requests for comment, we will update this story.
