Ginny Applington’s testimony Monday night would have felt at home spoken in front of any number of evangelical congregations. “In the body of Christ,” she said, “we pray for all of our leaders. We pray for all of humanity. We pray against biblical sin and repent for our own.”
But Applington wasn’t at church. She was speaking in front of the Spokane City Council, and quickly into her 2-minute turn during open comments, those comments grew ominous.
“Darkness is about to fall,” said Applington. “God is taking back Spokane and He is taking back all the nations. … God is raising up the church, and the gates of Hell will not prevail against Him.”
Applington was one of at least eight people who spoke during the council’s open comment period to protest a proposed resolution to censure Mayor Nadine Woodward for her appearance at a Christian nationalist concert, where she accepted a prayer from the fiery local pastor Matt Shea.
Not everyone who spoke Monday night identified as a Christian, but those who opposed the censure resolution echoed similar sentiments, believing the proposed censure – which the council has discussed in committee but has not voted on – wasn’t just about Woodward. It was a step down a slippery slope toward the widespread persecution of the Christian faithful.
“If the city council wants to stop her from doing that, do they want to silence all Christians?” Rebecca Murakami told RANGE just before the meeting. “What is the plan behind that? One thing leads to the next.” Murakami is a member of On Fire Ministries, the church far-right former legislator Matt Shea, who prayed for Woodward at the concert, founded in 2021. Applington is as well.
The Passion of the Christians
Censure is a tool sometimes used by a legislative body to formally shame the behavior of elected officials. The liberal council majority censured Council Member Jonathan Bingle last year for refusing to wear a mask in City Hall. In June, Republican lawmakers in the United States Congress censured Rep. Adam Schiff, D. Calif., for investigating Donald Trump.
This censure, if passed, would express the council’s collective disappointment at Woodward’s actions, but would not prevent Woodward from practicing her religion.
Last week, the former Spokane Valley City Councilman Caleb Collier encouraged listeners of his podcast Church and State to attend the council meeting to protest the proposed censure, which was advanced by Council members Betsy Wilkerson and Zack Zappone. Collier characterized the move as an existential issue for the church, comparing American Christians to Holocaust victims.
“We’ve got to get on the offense here,” Collier said on the show. “Christians, you need to wake up and come to the cold, hard realization that you are the modern Jews in Nazi Germany, and you’ve got to wake up and start fighting before you end up in the boxcars.”
Asked how the city government censuring Woodward might lead to the widespread persecution of Christians in Spokane, Applington pointed to pandemic-era public health measures as evidence of “totalitarian control” aimed at silencing the faithful.
“They already tried to do it during COVID,” Applington said. “They tried to shut down the churches. They tried to mask us up. They told us we couldn’t sing. But you could go to Walmart?” In saying this, Applington was echoing talking points popularized as early as April 2020 by right-wing Christians like Feucht, Shea and Collier.
A smoldering controversy
On Aug. 20, as wildfires killed two and incinerated hundreds of homes in Medical Lake and Elk, Woodward took center stage at the Podium as part of the Spokane stop of the Let Us Worship tour. About a minute after saying gay marriage and “transgender issues” are “problems” that “have one answer, and His name is Jesus Christ,” Shea laid a hand on Woodward’s shoulder, asked God to give her “supernatural discernment” and hugged her after the prayer.
Lisa Brown, Woodward’s mayoral opponent in the fall election, demanded Woodward commit to equal rights for every demographic, including 2SLGTBQIA+ communities that are heavily targeted by the Christian nationalist movement.
The controversy has not died down in the three weeks since the event, despite the mayor’s sporadic attempts to explain herself. Woodward said she had known little about the event before attending and had not expected Shea to be there. She insisted she thought she was going to an event to pray for people suffering from the wildfires.
Woodward maintained that stance in a TV interview last Friday with KHQ’s Sean Owsley.
“I was taken up to the third floor of the Podium, which I wasn’t sure why I was being taken up there by one of the organizers,” Woodward said. “Matt Shea entered the room and introduced himself. … I was never told that he was going to pray over me, that he would be onstage with me. I just thought he was there along with 4,000 other members of the local faith community.”
Shea had disputed this characterization, saying Woodward was invited weeks before the event and long before the fires had started. But he committed to continuing to pray for the mayor and urged listeners of his podcast, Patriot Radio, to do the same.
She said that before the event, she had never heard of the leader of Let Us Worship, Sean Feucht, who is known for his fiery anti-2SLGBTQIA+ rhetoric, and that she had never heard the term Christian nationalist before the event.
Feucht has explicitly embraced Christian nationalism, which believes that solely or majority Christian legislators should be the ones writing laws. During his time in the Washington state legislature, Shea was accused of domestic terrorism after he played a role in three standoffs between anti-government organizations and federal agencies. At the time, Woodward condemned Shea for that role.
Collier said on his show that he had been tipped off to the censure resolution on Labor Day, several days before the resolution’s final draft was posted to the Urban Experience Committee’s agenda portal. He told RANGE he could not disclose his source.
Zappone and Council member Michael Cathcart said they did not know how Collier learned of the censure, but Zappone contends that at the time Collier spoke out on his radio show, the censure had only appeared on a preliminary agenda of the council’s Urban Experience Committee, and had not been published publicly.
Those preliminary agendas are only distributed to council members and council staff, so however it ultimately landed in Collier’s possession, the leak most likely started there, Zappone said. “Those are the people that would have passed it along.”
With the mayoral election coming in November, Woodward continues to distance herself from Shea and others in the far-right Christian world. But the Christians who spoke at City Council this week appear content to keep offering their support whether or not she wants it.
