This story was written in partnership between RANGE and FāVS News, a nonprofit newsroom covering faith and values in the Inland Northwest. Learn more about FāVS’s work here.
On a recent flight home, Spokane Valley City Council member Al Merkel found himself sharing a first-class armrest with an unexpected seatmate: Christian supremacist Matt Shea, the former state representative of Spokane Valley, who was ousted in 2020 from the Republican caucus over accusations of domestic terror.
Merkel was coming back from visiting his father in the Carolinas; Shea was returning from the rhetorical front lines of a spiritual war against the forces of jihad and communism, phantom threats that have loomed large in his mind for decades. He knew this war was about to break into the physical realm in deadly fighting between the US and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Specifically, he’d been flying from American city to American city training pastors and Christians on how to fight Muslims and leftists.
Merkel and Shea talked. Having moved in the same Republican circles for years, Merkel told RANGE it would have been awkward not to. The council member was surprised by the nuance of the conversation. Shea, who now pastors a Spokane church, didn’t seem the right-wing extremist Merkel had come to expect in the proudly anti-Muslim apostle. In fact, Shea agreed with Merkel that Jessica Yaeger, Merkel’s colleague on the council, had gone too far when she’d declared herself a “proud Islamophobe" on social media.
Average Muslims, they agreed, are okay, Merkel said.
“Maybe he was tailoring his message for me, knowing what I might say,” Merkel said. “But in order to do that, you still have to have some comprehension, right?”
Shea’s views on Islam and communism stretch back decades. For nearly as long, Shea has been warning anyone who will listen that, if Christians don’t act, “Western civilization” will fall.
For years, Shea has worked to build a national and even international audience for his views, without finding the kind of viral fame many others have. Shea does have powerful admirers, though, and in this latest barnstorming tour of America he's working as a spokesperson for the multi-million-dollar conservative nonprofit America’s Future, chaired by former General Michael Flynn, who was ousted from the first Trump administration.
The tip of the spear
Shea’s tour included speeches at large churches. He went on former CBS journalist Lara Logan’s far-right podcast. (As of the organization’s latest tax filing, Logan was also a board member of America’s Future). Brian Noble, who runs a think tank partly dedicated to anti-Islamic sentiment, hosted Shea on his podcast.
In January, Shea connected with ousted Trump advisor Steve Bannon on Bannon’s far-right podcast War Room, which in 2023 topped the Brookings Institution’s list of shows spreading misinformation.
“We educate, we equip and we empower pastors and citizens,” Shea told Bannon.
Bannon approvingly compared Shea to the political operative Frank Gaffney, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center named “one of America’s most notorious Islamaphobes” and heaped praise on Shea for sharing “legendary” expertise on Islam with Flynn. (Shea has no formal theological training.)
It’s rare that Shea allows himself to be interviewed, and he never talks to reporters, but, according to him, this is not a normal time. Shea, Bannon and other Christian nationalist figures believe Islam is on the verge of collapse and Christ is about to return to Earth.
But a victory for Christians requires action, so the most tangible goal of Shea’s national campaign was to push a ballot measure in Texas that would advise lawmakers to ban Sharia law over the finish line. There is no more potent battlefield in this war than that state, where GOP lawmakers are waging a coordinated campaign of anti-Muslim bigotry and where Shea spearheaded efforts by a conservative group to advance an anti-Islamic ballot measure.
On March 3 of this year, 95% of Texans ended up supporting the measure. This followed a ban on faith-based Islamic communities in the state passed by the Texas legislature and signed by Governor Greg Abbott into law in 2025.
“What [the measure] basically said is that it's illegal for Sharia to be the basis of any law in the country,” said Terry Kyllo, a Lutheran minister and executive director of Paths to Understanding, an organization dedicated to strengthening relationships between Christians and Muslims in Washington state. “Well, that's stupid because the US Constitution explicitly states that [the Constitution] is the law of the land.“
The bill led to an explosion of anti-Muslim hate on social media and has become part of model legislation advanced by far-right lawyers.
Sharia, which is translated roughly as “the way,” is not a system of law but a moral code that some Muslims adhere to, much in the same way some Christians follow the Ten Commandments.
Though there is escalating fear among people who adhere to Shea's scorched-Earth version of Christianity that their ways of life are being sidelined, there has perhaps never been a time in the US when corporations and followers of Jesus have been more powerful. Corporate wealth in the US has never been more robust. And though Americans are leaving organized religions in droves, Christian radicals have never had more control over the American government.
Shea insists Muslims and communists are a threat here in Washington, too. There are no communists in the Washington state legislature, and only two of nearly 150 state lawmakers identify as Muslim. More than 50% of the state population is Christian, while the most generous estimates say the Muslim population is less than 2%.
Of the 535 seats in the US Congress, zero are held by communists, though four are held by Muslims, all in the House. About 20,000 thousand Americans — a little more than .005% of the population — were registered with the Communist Party USA in 2024, a party leader told C-SPAN that year. While Islam is the third-largest religion in the US — behind Christianity and Judaism — only about 4.5 million Americans identify as Muslim, or a little more than 1%.
Still, the anti-Muslim fearmongering central to Shea’s worldview — coupled with the much larger, better resourced megaphone supplied by America’s Future — could mean actual harm Muslim communities across the country and here in Washington.
Sheikh Adam Jamal, an imam with the Muslim Association of Puget Sound, said the community he represents is afraid of being identified as Muslim in public because of the anti-Islamic rhetoric that has resurfaced under the presidencies of Donald Trump. The problem is so acute, Jamal said, that it’s difficult to get Muslims in Washington to respond to opinion surveys or talk to the press.
He pointed to an inquiry from a Seattle television station. “I remember asking so many people to speak to reporters,” Jamal told RANGE. “They said the last thing we want is to incur more discrimination and more injustice against us because we've spoken out and for — and multiple people said this — crazy people to come after us because we said something.”
Equipping the spiritual ranks
The anti-Islam project of Christian nationalism is two-fold. Participants start by straw-manning Islam as not just a religion, but as a totalitarian political project to control the world. Simultaneously, Christian nationalists like Shea insist Christians should be in control of every influential sector of society.
“There's nothing that they say about Islam that isn't true about [their version of] Christianity,” said Shane Burley, a Portland journalist who covers antisemitism on the far right, including among churches affiliated with Shea’s.
Shea didn’t respond to a request for comment on this story, and has been vague in his media appearances about exactly what his anti-Muslim campaign intended to do.
But video recorded December 8, which RANGE obtained, shows one of Shea’s speeches during the campaign during which he describes “communist” and “jihadi” forces as “working in lock step” to “do violence in the country.”
The groups he named included the mostly defunct leftist firearms organization called the John Brown Gun Club;, Indivisible, a progressive organization that was instrumental in peaceful No Kings protests last year; and, of course, antifa, a leaderless movement that mobilizes in opposition to fascism.
It’s unclear how the groups are connected to jihad or communism. He said this collusion was evident in recent mass protests against violent and likely illegal immigration enforcement by federal agents, including No Kings. He did not provide sources to support these claims.
Speaking before an audience of Eastern Washington conservatives at the December 8 event hosted by the right-wing Northwest Grassroots Coalition, Shea painted an apocalyptic picture of a world governed by progressive structures. He suggested former President Joe Biden had given Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan to China so China would undermine US elections in favor of Democrats. He said Barack Obama was planted by jihadi and communist networks to mesmerize unthinking lefties. He said those same forces are installing Muslim sleeper cells in the US to attack at a strategic time. He said vaccine mandates during the COVID pandemic were a tactic to create a list of targets who wouldn’t comply. He said leftist gun clubs are organizing in concert with antifa and queer rights groups to commit violence against Christians.
He gave his audience the website addresses of the organizations he pointed out and encouraged them to do their own investigating. He said when leftist groups have planned a protest, Christians should show up to the site the day before and worship the Lord and take communion — “and see what happens.” He said pastors should tell their congregants to support Donald Trump, as he did with his congregation during the 2024 presidential campaign. He acknowledged that his enemies were “a bunch of old hippies, usually,” but asserted that those hippies “want to overthrow the United States government and the Constitution before they die.” He identified specific reporters who criticized Shea and Flynn as "propagandists" for antifa and called for them to be investigated. (He pointed to projected images on a wall and called the reporters “that guy,” but it’s unclear in the video who the reporters are.) He encouraged the attendees to “fight back” against the forces he’d illustrated, but he said they needed to be trained.
It was not clear precisely what kind of training Shea was referring to, but he encouraged the audience to “text me or email me” to learn more. But Shea gained some of his notoriety in the 2010s for boosting a training program that groomed young men for “biblical war” known as Team Rugged.
Fringe end times theory
Shea’s war against Islam broke into the physical realm when, on February 28, Trump’s Defense Department started an unsanctioned war against Iran, decapitating the country’s leadership and bombing a school where dozens of children died.
The action dramatically escalated tensions in the Middle East between Israel and its Muslim neighbors. And it comported with Shea’s end-times worldview. A former soldier and politician, he belongs to a movement of charismatic evangelical churches called the New Apostolic Reformation, which sees these developments as central events in the Christian effort to establish God’s kingdom on earth, tilling the ground for a 1,000-year reign of Christ.
Other sectors of Christian nationalism oppose the war, but the NAR is one of the most influential forces driving the American agenda under Trump. Paula White-Cain, an NAR apostle (like Shea), is Trump’s spiritual adviser. Trump Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth belongs to another branch of Christian nationalists led by the Moscow dominionist pastor Doug Wilson, who believes Christians should run every country in the world (though they don’t believe in ushering in the 1,000-year reign).
On the Sunday before the February 28 attacks on Iran, Shea told his congregation the war was just around the corner and that they should anticipate it with joy.
“I’m a warrior kind of guy,” he said, striding across the stage at his downtown church On Fire Ministries. “When I see a fight coming, I get excited.”
