Spokane Pastor Matt Shea took to his Patriot Radio podcast last Tuesday to reiterate that Mayor Nadine Woodward knew in advance that a long-planned Christian nationalist concert she attended Sunday was not a spontaneous prayer call for fire victims, as Woodward claimed Monday in statements. Shea said Woodward had been invited and accepted before wildfires began consuming parts of the county and hundreds of homes the previous week.
“We had planned the Let Us Worship rally here in Spokane, Washington, months and months and months ago, and Sean Feucht had agreed to come on August 20,” Shea told his podcast audience. “So we had this all set up. And before the fires, we had invited Mayor Nadine Woodward on the platform there at the event so we could pray over her, and she accepted the invitation prior to the fires.”
His remarks elaborated on a tweet he had posted Monday saying Woodward knew the details of the event.
Shea hasn’t spoken directly about his role in planning the event, though his use of the word “we” suggests he was more than just a fellow guest like Woodward. Shea did not respond to email and Twitter requests for comment, and has not spoken to most media outlets in years.
Shea’s account of the event contradicts Woodward’s dual statements in which she denounced Shea’s far-right politics and claimed she didn’t know he would be there when she decided to attend.
The first of Woodward’s Monday statements read: “I am opposed to his political views as they are a threat to our democracy, and I regret my public appearance with him. I was invited to share in prayer with several thousand citizens out of heartfelt concern for fire victims, first responders and our whole community.” Woodward issued her statements in response to a storm of criticism over her appearance from her mayoral challenger Lisa Brown, political critics and local faith leaders. Brown had retweeted footage taken by Joseph Peterson of Woodward standing on stage with Shea, along with a message that read, in part, “The Mayor should be disavowing Matt Shea, an anti-woman anti-LGBTQ extremist, associated with political violence. Instead she is on the stage with him while fires rage in our county.”
Let Us Worship is a national tour of Christian concerts founded by the far-right celebrity worship leader Sean Feucht. Feucht tweeted Friday that “thousands of unified believers” had attended the Spokane event. The Friday before the Let Us Worship rally, RANGE published a story describing the planned event and detailing the connections between Shea, Fuecht and Turning Point USA Faith, which sponsors other Feucht events.
Peterson, a local designer who attended the Let Us Worship event, live tweeted photographs and videos of Woodward onstage, eyes closed and at times smiling, as Shea laid a hand on her shoulder, blessed her and prayed for her. His images circulated quickly, causing an uproar on social media and prompting a letter signed by local faith leaders demanding Woodward commit to the separation of church and state.
On his show, Shea castigated Brown’s tweet, and apparently referenced Peterson: “Lisa Brown posted from what appears by all circumstance to be a self-proclaimed antifa guy, and that’s still being investigated.”
The event was free, was advertised as open to all, and Peterson told RANGE Friday that he did not sneak in. Although he was mostly dressed in black that evening (dressing in all black has been used as a protest tactic by groups of antifascists to avoid individuals being identified among large groups, but is not, strictly speaking, the “uniform” of antifa), Peterson also said that he is not affiliated with any antifa group and that he has not been contacted by any investigators — either by official authorities or Shea’s allies.
Woodward’s sparse public comments through the week about the dust-up have left a vacuum in the conversation around it. RANGE sent several rounds of requests for comment to the mayor, her campaign team and her communication director at the city, Brian Coddington. None have been acknowledged.
It’s possible that she and her teams believe silence will deaden the controversy. A week on, however, that vacuum is still being filled by her opponent, her critics on the left, and of course Matt Shea.
“I was a little shocked at the whole news story that came out and shocked at the response of the mayor,” Shea said on his show. “And many people have been asking me, ‘Well how do you wanna handle this Matt?’ I haven’t said everything yet, but what I want to say right now is we just need to continue praying for the mayor.”
Woodward and Shea have a rocky history dating back to Shea’s time in the legislature. She denounced him in 2019 following an investigation that showed he had played a role in several high-profile standoffs between right-wing extremists, including militia groups and federal agencies. That investigation led to his ousting as the chair of the Washington State Republican caucus and his eventual expulsion from the caucus entirely. Though Shea was still wildly popular in his Spokane Valley legislative district and probably would have won again, he chose not to run for reelection.
Back on his pod, after criticizing the mayor’s “bad advisers,” Shea also attacked Brown, a Democrat, who he said “politicized the event.” He insisted Let Us Worship is not political.
“No politics is even talked about, other than praying for our leaders, which isn’t politics,” Shea said on the show. “Praying for our leaders isn’t a political thing, it’s a biblical thing.”
Shea’s assertion is undercut by his own words last Sunday. Moments before he invited Woodward on stage, Shea told the crowd it is the responsibility of Christians to pray for political leaders and about issues, including the wildfires that were burning in Eastern Washington. He then listed several subjects that form the backbone of conservative politics in the US. “Every problem we face in this country,” Shea said, “whether it’s a wildfire, whether we’re talking homosexual marriage, transgender issues, whether we’re talking about the economy, every single problem in this country has one answer, and his name is Jesus Christ.”
Let Us Worship began as a political protest. The first event took place in 2020 on the Golden Gate Bridge as a rally of believers against the temporary public health rules that prohibited large gatherings to stop the spread of COVID-19. Feucht saw the restrictions, some of which barred churches from gathering in person without masks, as an attack against Christians. After COVID restrictions ended, Feucht kept touring and remade Let Us Worship as a general-purpose protest against, among other things, the separation of church and state, Black Lives Matter and what the tour sees as “unchartered [sic] abuses of religious liberty.”. While Feucht has not explicitly said Let Us Worship is a project to spread Christian nationalism, he has identified himself as a Christian nationalist.
“If Christian nationalist means that I love God and I love the country that he put me into,” Feucht told Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk on Kirk’s podcast last year, “and I want to fight for that country and the best for that country and I want that country to be a Christian nation, which America is, and I want that country to have the kingdom of God represented, which we do here, then maybe yeah, maybe I am a Christian nationalist.”
During last week’s Patriot Radio broadcast, Shea perceived the media coverage of the event as an “attack” on him and tied it to what he sees as a broad-scale campaign by a shadowy network of lefties trying to create a new system of global government.
“Why did they attack me?” Shea asked, referring in part to an investigation of his role in several high-profile standoffs between extremist groups and federal agencies that resulted in his ouster from the top position in the Statehouse Republican caucus, allegations he said were “totally debunked multiple times.” “Why did they attack president Trump so much? Could it be that we are a threat to this globalist cabal and its proxies at the local level and these communists and jihadis that want to destroy the United States?”
This is a tactic Shea has used for years, first against local media and with greater frequency as his notoriety and connections to national figures like Feucht and the Bundy family grew. He even employed it last year against the media in Poland, after he and a small group of allies appeared in Kazimeirz Dolny, a small, picturesque town with a group of at least 60 Ukrainian orphans displaced by the Russian invasion.
Shea’s words reflect the tension at the heart of the Christian nationalist project. They want the United States remade in the image of Christ and governed under biblical law, but are skeptical of America’s secular media and government, and perceive it as a bastion of, in Shea’s words, “the enemy.”
But building political power is central to the Christian nationalism, so believers like Shea and Feucht will likely continue reaching out to and praying over elected officials and candidates.
Whether they will continue doing so quite this publicly remains to be seen.
