For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. — Ephesians 6:12
For some Christian denominations, that verse represents a kind of repudiation of Christian nationalism. They see it as warning about focusing too much on earthly conflicts, emphasizing that the real battle is spiritual, not political.
But many American Christian nationalists take the absolute opposite lesson from the same verse: They define “principalities and powers” as all about systems, countries, political parties. To fight against the wickedness in these powers, in their view, means taking political power for themselves and their allies to properly guide the country.
In our more than a decade as journalists, across multiple publications, we’ve covered the “Patriot pastors” who deliver sermons about ammunition and bomb shelters, who’ve seen the Pacific Northwest as a redoubt. We’ve written about the bands of Groypers — extremely online, trollish Nick Fuentes fans — who immigrated to Idaho with a white supremacy-tinged faith that focuses very heavily on contempt for Jews. And we’ve investigated the growing power that a Moscow, Idaho pastor has wielded on state and even national politics.
Consider this the next stage of our long reporting project: In this monthly feature, we want to expand that reporting, going deeper and wider on the Christian nationalist movement. We will interrogate schisms and the alliances, seeking to understand how those operating in our backyard reflect and influence national trends. We’ll interview experts, critics and adherents of Christian nationalism. We want to bring a skeptical lens, but never a blurry or distorted one. Our goal is not to scare you or to whip up outrage, but to help you understand a complicated and often contradictory movement.
When we say “Christian nationalism…”
But let’s begin with that pesky phrase, “Christian nationalism:” It’s a phrase that gets used broadly and sloppily to refer to everyone from those who think students should continue to be allowed to pray in school to those who want to ban non-Christians from running for office or bar married women from voting.
But paint with a broad brush and you cover up the fine lines: Just because someone likes “In God We Trust” on their money, is opposed to abortion or believes that God has a plan for America, doesn’t mean they’re all in on “theocracy.”
So we plan to use this definition: Christian nationalists are those who want to use the force of law, policy and other institutions to give their version of the Christian faith a superior position over other belief systems.
Believing that, say, the government should help fund faith-based charities from any religion is not Christian nationalist. Believing that the government should only fund faith-based charities if they are part of the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church is. Similarly, door-knocking to evangelize or producing media that has a Christian message isn’t Christian nationalist. Believing that Christians should control powerful industries at the exclusion of other groups is.
In other words, Christian nationalism isn’t a synonym for Christianity — it’s not even a synonym for conservative Christianity. Plenty of conservative Christian pastors and pundits have preached sermons and penned essays warning against what they see as Christian nationalism’s perversion of their faith.
If you have even a passing curiosity about how the Inland Northwest and its many Christian nationalist figures fit into the ideology’s national landscape this newsletter is for you: We’ll try to offer insight for both the experts and the neophytes. We’ll write For-Dummies primers for those who’ve barely heard of Christian nationalism and detailed original in-depth journalism for obsessives.
The team:
DANIEL WALTERS grew up attending a charismatic Pentecostal church, the kind where people would speak “in tongues” and join conga lines during worship services. In his family, Christian radio dramas were the primary source of entertainment. He remains a practicing Christian. He attends church at City Covenant, a downtown Spokane congregation full of members with a wide variety of political perspectives and a very intense Christmas cookie contest.
Throughout his 15 years at the Inlander, he covered Christian nationalism, particularly digging into the fights between an ardent Christian nationalist Rep. Matt Shea and the Spokane County sheriff. While at the Inlander, he won multiple awards for his coverage of extremism and vigilantism. At InvestigateWest, he exposed the fact that one of Idaho’s most influential think tanks hired an alt-right Christian nationalist to shape its messaging. More recently, he’s parsed the dubious testicular claims of the Idaho Family Policy Center, a Christian nationalist group that was sued by a Coeur d’Alene drag performer for defamation.
AARON HEDGE grew up a Christian in a loosely organized group of families that met in the wild areas of Western Colorado to worship the Lord, speak in tongues and wrestle with demons. It was a separatist culture that felt Christians should not be part of the secular world in any way except to evangelize. They even contemplated building a compound in the wilds of New Mexico.
He went to college and deconstructed and now considers himself an atheist, but he believes Christianity is important and even beautiful in many ways. After short careers in the military and the power industry in Texas, he moved to Washington to earn a writing degree from Eastern Washington University and found himself obsessed with Christian nationalist groups in Spokane, specifically On Fire Ministries, the far-right church former Rep. Matt Shea started after he was kicked off his post leading the Republican Party in the state House of Representatives.
They were not separatist. They wanted to invade the secular world and take it over for Jesus. After he graduated, he found himself leading coverage of the August 2023 surprise when former Mayor Nadine Woodward appeared alongside Shea and worship pastor Sean Feucht at a concert. And he’s been leading coverage about Christian nationalist groups in and around Spokane since.
HAYDEN TANK grew up in “spirit-filled” Assemblies of God churches in southeastern Washington, and became a “non-denominational” evangelical missionary in his early 20s with Youth With A Mission (YWAM). He spent months in Nepal and India to nominally spread the gospel while leading teams of missionaries on outreach, but instead found himself slowly drifting away from Christian fundamentalism. After his stint as a missionary, he spent years clinging to a more progressive, personal Christianity, but is now an atheist.
In 2023, he was laid off from his tech job in Austria and, amidst a wider plateau in hiring, he spent his extended unemployment falling in love with the Bible again, this time as an object of historical study. He sped through dozens of increasingly academic works examining the texts of the Bible in their various historical contexts, eventually launching The Bible Lore Podcast in late 2024. The one-man production is an accessible, chronological history of the Bible, featuring a variety of interviews with scholars and the occasional comedian. He has discussed his research as a guest on shows like Super Structure with Julian Feeld and Chapo Trap House. He moved back to Spokane in 2025 after six years away.
AND we expect occasional cameos by other RANGE fan favorites like Valerie Osier and Luke Baumgarten, who both have their own messy relationships with religion.
The first issue
The fight over Christian nationalism goes all the way back to before the founding of our country. You can read James Madison and Patrick Henry go at it, old-timey style, with many of the same arguments that Christian nationalists and their critics use today.
But with Christian nationalists continuing to exert influence on the White House and the Idaho legislature, it’s worth going deep on this movement. Each month — at minimum — we’ll help you understand what makes Christian nationalists tick, and who might get hurt if they get their way.
Let’s start by unpacking the election with our first edition of Biblepartisan, where we focus on the intersection between Christian nationalism and partisan politics.
BIBLEPARTISAN: What the 2026 midterm elections tell us about the state of Christian nationalism
If this were the kind of newsletter purely focused on whipping up subscribers, we might tell you that, now, more than ever, Christian nationalism is a growing threat to the nation. But it isn’t that kind of newsletter: The truth is, Christian nationalism was dealt a significant blow in this month’s election.
The floor collapsed for Republicans, who are far more likely to seek to tear down the wall between church and state, fight against trans rights and abortion rights, and force schools to promote Christian ideas and literature.
The election revealed a reinvigorated left-wing version of Christianity — represented by future Texas Sen. James Talarico, who left Presbyterian seminary to run for office, and megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton — advancing as the right-wing version appeared to be in retreat.
Liz Yates, a researcher with the democracy advocacy nonprofit Western States Center, told RANGE this massive loss can be partly attributed to Christian nationalist forces finally showing their real cards. It’s a two-fold dynamic: “Christian nationalism is one of the central movements of the authoritarian movement because it uses sort of like religious rhetoric and framing and symbolism to try to obscure some of the most extreme bigoted elements that the movement is trying to advance,” Yates said
“But then you see in Idaho there are Christian nationalists who are trying to promote a certain version of the Bible being read every day in school,” Yates said. “So that is clearly prioritizing one particular version of Christianity, one particular religion over others.
She pointed to the Moscow City Council elections last year when voters rejected candidates affiliated with Doug Wilson’s Christian nationalist church, which misleadingly positions itself as “the fabric” of the progressive college town.
“As the mask goes off, I think it's just less appealing,” Yates said.
There was some nuance of course: it’s not only Christian nationalism that freaked people out. Gas is too expensive, the rent too damn high and Trump is waging an extremely unpopular war in Iran.
Also, right here in the lefty Pacific Northwest, some of the Christian nationalist agenda made some surprising gains. A bill that bans transgender girls from school sports and requires students who want to play in girls sports to be examined passed.
But Yates said this victory for a central Christian nationalist goal — a nation that doesn’t recognize the gender spectrum — was messaged so subtly that people might not have associated it with Christian nationalism.
“I don’t think voters in Washington would have supported it if they understood that in that context,” she said.
November 3 blew the Trump coalition to smithereens. Over the next two years, factions on the right will scrap and scramble to pick up pieces and cobble them together into their preferred version of the GOP. And the different strains of Christian nationalism will be a huge part of that fight.
In fact, Christian nationalists may have helped contribute to the scale of Republican defeat. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth — a bro with a Crusader meme “Deus Vult” tattooed on his right bicep — is an acolyte of Doug Wilson, the influential Moscow, Idaho Pastor who authored books like “Frequently Shouted Questions About Christian Nationalism.”
Hegseth was a prime champion of the war in Iran, emphasizing how quick and easy he expected it to be. He was very wrong. The war drove up gas prices and was cited as among the top issues driving opposition to Republicans this year.
Meanwhile, an entirely different faction of Christian nationalists — the sort who use “Christian” as a synonym for “White” — also sabotaged the Republican party. Railroad commissioner candidate Bo French, who wants to ban Islam and accused his Jewish opponent of "mocking Christianity, the virgin birth, and Christian communion,” drew widespread outrage for tweeting a picture of Indian-American students cheering on the University of Texas football team and writing “the problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”
While some Christian leaders came to his defense, South Asian voters turned out in droves in Texas to not only defeat French, but turn the state blue.
Devin Burghart, executive director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, an organization that tracks extremism, expects to see a lot of right-wing Christian political activists take a momentary pause to figure out the next step.
"We're starting to see clamors of folks who are trying to downplay the notion of being in electoral politics,” Burghart said. “It's not uncommon for evangelicals, when they experience a pretty big trouncing in the polls, to retreat to that position, at least momentarily. It’s an opportunity to regroup, and strategize.”
But when the dust settles, expect the different factions of Chrisitian nationalism to once again take up their sword to fight the left — and each other. Issues like America’s approach to Israel remains a stark dividing line between, say, the evangelical strains of Christian nationalism and the “trad” Catholic strains.
"It comes down to their view of Jews. For one side, they're demonic. They're a nefarious force out to cause all kinds of evil things,” Burghart said.
But, meanwhile, a more evangelical pro-Israel side argues God commands nations to bless Israel, and even sees the country as instrumental in bringing the second coming of Jesus.
“The fact that you have folks like Tucker Carlson trying to carve out an antisemitic anti-war position at odds from the MAGA base is telling,” Burghart said.
As this fight unfolds, expect Principalities & Pastors to continue to track it.
A few other notable developments from the election throughout our region:
— Katy Cornell, a Washington House candidate for Gig Harbor, was accused of being a Christian nationalist. While she denied it, she still lost by nearly 9 percentage points.
— In Boise, Ada County Commissioner Ryan Davidson barely lost his seat. Davidson was an ally of Ammon Bundy, an anti-government activist responsible for the 2016 occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge standoff. Bundy adopted a kind of Mormon version of Christian nationalism as part of his anti-government activism.
— But in many parts of Idaho, Christian nationalists felt they had plenty to celebrate. The Idaho Family Policy Center, the Doug-Wilson-supported think tank that has pushed mandatory Bible reading, started its post-election blogpost quoting Deuteronomy: “Rejoice! Our Lord has fought for us — and He has given us the victory.”
The Idaho Family Policy Center had helped lead the opposition to Prop 1, which would have rolled back Idaho’s abortion ban. The initiative did better than Kamala Harris did in the presidential election two years earlier, but fell far short of passing.
— Christian nationalists may also be happy about the victory of Scott Herndon, a far-right legislator who believes women who get abortions should be considered murderers.
“I think it is also indicative of the longer term organizing that's been going on there in Northern Idaho,” Burghart said. “The kind of across-the-board far right organizing there in the Panhandle has been starting to bear some fruit.”
—Turning Point USA, which has an arm that advocates for Christian nationalist policies, spent tens of millions on political ads against Democrats in Arizona, Nevada and New Hampshire, only to see most of those efforts fail.
— Transgender candidate Allison Montgomery flipped a seat in deep-red Alabama, to which local Christian dominionist pastor Matt Shea responded on Twitter, in a post that misgendered her, “No way.”— Former General Michael Flynn, a friend of Shea’s and President Donald Trump’s inaugural national security adviser, lamented the election results from a Christian nationalist perspective, invoking the Greek word for church: God “expects his ‘ekklesia’ to stand their ground, and we failed!”
Blessed Are The Links
What the Principalities & Pastors team has been reading lately
The JD Squad
Erick Erickson, Christian and a longtime right-wing talk show host, is sick of the Christian nationalists doing things like calling for the repeal of the 19th Amendment, praising Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and dreaming of an undemocratic patriarchal future.
But he says Vice President JD Vance seems to be embracing them instead of distancing himself.
“These are not conservatives,” he writes in the New York Times, “They are progressives with a different set of enemies.” ~ DW
Nick Knackered
In the wake of the assassination of conservative pundit Charlie Kirk, white nationalist Nick Fuentes — a longtime enemy and troll of Kirk’s — began gaining significant amounts of momentum with the young on the “America First” right, including with an interview with former Fox TV show host Tucker Carlson. But more recently, according to Vanity Fair, Fuentes’ influence has been fading, and he’s encouraged his followers to deny support to the Republicans, largely over the war in Iran.
“I can’t wait for Republicans to get destroyed in the midterms and then everyone in the admin to be impeached,” one Fuentes post on X said. But some see this as just Fuentes’ long-term strategy: hope the Republican party collapses, and then strike when they’re at their most vulnerable. ~ DW
Thwarted agenda in Texas
As Texas Monthly reporter Robert Downen writes, Christian nationalists had been gearing up to go gangbusters. They’d put in motion a revamped, Christ-centric public school curriculum. Lt. Governor Dan Patrick was working directly with the Oval Office to enshrine more Christian laws in federal policy. They were doing it from a foundation solidified after decades of Christian organizing around abortion rights.
Texas voters showed them their Christian nationalist house, in fact, may be built on sand.
Not long after reporting the build-up of Texas Christian nationalism, Downen, writing about the election results, declared the movement dead — at least for now. ~ AH
CN Brand not enough to save Russell
And in news not related to the election, the British comedian Russell Brand — who found temporary solace from a host of sexual assault allegations in the arms of Christian nationalist musician Sean Feucht — will likely face prison after being convicted on charges based on the allegations. Brand had made a name for himself as a raunchy leftist megastar, but after he was accused by women of rape and sexual assault, he came out as Christian and soon found himself baptizing people in the Atlantic Ocean with Feucht, among other photo ops trying to wash himself clean of the scandals.
But now he’s been convicted on one of the rape charges and three sexual assault charges. More convictions may come, and it’s unlikely Christ’s most prominent minstrels will be able to save him.
For his part, Feucht — a prolific poster of Christian grievance to social media who repeatedly brought his ministry through Spokane in the last several years — does not appear to have weighed in on the conviction. ~ AH
