Sean Feucht can’t always get what he wants.
At his Christian supremacist “Revive in 25” prayer rally at Gas Works Park on Saturday, there were no fist fights to film. No “trans terrorism,” or demonic forces. No suppression of his First Amendment rights, though he implied on Facebook that the Seattle Police Department knew antifa was coming and was preparing for a fight. No such luck.
Feucht is a professional provocateur who ascended to Christian nationalist superstardom in 2020, when he launched a “Let Us Worship” tour to protest COVID restrictions. He’s continued his travels. As Kate Burns wrote for The Stranger earlier this week, Feucht selects liberal cities for maximum political combustibility, setting the stage for a confrontation that will fuel weeks of “Christians under attack” content in right-wing media.
Seattle was the perfect place. In May, the Christian supremacist group Mayday USA’s anti-trans rally in Cal Anderson Park on Capitol Hill that ended with Seattle Police arresting 23 protesters, in some cases violently. After Mayor Bruce Harrell denounced the “far-right” rally as an attack against transgender people and the city’s values, Mayday USA held an unpermitted “Rattle in Seattle” protest on the steps of City Hall to protest, claiming they’d been discriminated against as Christians. They hadn’t.
A repeat would be exactly the thing he’d hoped for, especially a few days after a former student shot up a Catholic school in Minneapolis, killing two children (court records show the shooter identified as trans at one time). In an Instagram rant, Feucht said trans people had a “demonic spirit hellbent on stealing, killing and destroying.” Feucht even planned to play Cal Anderson, but last minute talks between organizers and city officials moved it to Gas Works. On social media, he falsely teased that the city had issued a permit and may revoke it, but even that gambit didn’t pay off.
Feucht had his permit. And his stage, his band, his scenic view of Lake Union, and the power of the Holy Spirit. But no spectacle, just people exercising their constitutional rights with pro-trans signs and banners, queer flags, crackling megaphones and a kazoo brigade. Police only arrested one person on the edge of the event, but it’s still unclear why. His calculated, political return to the “spiritual battlefield” of Seattle was a flop.
Because without controversy, who is Sean Feucht? He’s a lame guy strumming a guitar in a field for an audience magnitudes smaller than the earthshaking revival he expected (or that was implied by the enormous fenced off area). It was just another Saturday night; just another bad rock concert in Seattle.
Pursuit NW lead pastor Russell Johnson, who helped organize Feucht’s concert and preached with White House Faith Office head Paula White-Cain earlier this month, posted on Twitter that “antifa is NOT sending its best.” In a sermon in Kirkland this morning, he read the same statement from Mayor Bruce Harrell he read last night, which thanked Revive in 25 for moving the event. (“Seattle is, and always will be a place where all voices can be heard, where prayer and peaceful protest are both protected” it read. “…As Mayor, I will always stand on the side of love and free speech and whoever stands on that side, stands with me.”) Johnson claimed the statement as a victory.
“Over the last 90 days [since the Mayday rally], what is said in scripture is true—the heart of the King is like water in the hand of God,” Johnson said. “He moves it in whatever direction he wishes … You should have seen the faces of the media and the protesters—it was like, ‘How on earth did Pursuit pull this off?”’
Before his last song last night (and an ask for donations, “not much, but something”), Feucht noticed the protest had thinned behind him.
“I hate that!” he said. “Don’t leave before we’re done! Just extend your hand Lord. We just say ‘Get them with your love.’” The crowd extended its hands. His keyboard player, Chino, used to protest him, he says.
“We speak over them—may they be those who once were against God, and now they’re for God!” he shouted.
Feucht started his show at 5 p.m. Wario Kazooman Savage was a few minutes behind (Wario Kazooman Savage is a pseudonym, obviously).
“Make sure you get a kazoo, the kazoo is your power,” they said as I walked down the path toward the protest.
Savage wore a pink cowboy hat, shaggy pink cheetah-printcoat, and blushed-out pink clown makeup. Up close, I saw their penciled-in moustache. They stood in front of a stuffed horse. A trans flag hung in the tree beside them rippled in the breeze.
Billed on posters as the “WORLD’S LARGEST” kazoo performance of Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club,” with an accompanying Roan lookalike contest. The “silly” protest was meant to minimize the confrontation experts say Feucht wanted.
Savage says they’ve done a lot of “renegade” shows in the electronic music scene with their best friend. The two were sitting on Savage’s bedroom floor when they heard Feucht was coming to Seattle.
“And we were like, how silly would it be if we came to just be clowns,” they said. “We’re not hurting anybody—we’re just literally taking up space. Nothing wrong with that. We’re here, we’re queer.”
Savage had no idea their protest echoed a 2005 action in Olympia, Washington, when clowns mocked a neo-Nazi rally on the capitol steps. It worked so well even the police were laughing. When Nazis went to Spokane the next year, clowns followed. Nationally, clowns have an impressive track record against Nazis. They work because Nazis are stupid (see The Producers, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Nazis).
Before the festivities began, Savage introduced the Rev. Osagyefo Sekou of Valley & Mountain Fellowship, a United Methodist church in Columbia City. As an “old country Black man” from a town with 11 houses and 35 people (Zent, Arkansas), he said he wanted to share his tradition with them.
“Is that alright?” he asked, and began his blessing.
Every one of them was “fearfully and wonderfully made,” he said, breaking “every curse” spoken against them and “every lie” told about them for being who God called them to be on earth. He prayed they would know those Christians were lying to God, that they knew they were “cast down, not out,” persecuted, but not forsaken.
“And God, may they know what is happening on the other side of the field is a heresy against your gospel—and goes against the essence of who Jesus Christ is,” he said. “And most of all, we ask that they might find joy—joy in their friendships, joy in their relationships, and joy wherever they go. And may they know they are perfect the way they are.”
He told the crowd he loved them; that they were his whether they loved that or not. Like any good minister, he invited them to his “weirdo” church. His youth pastor was nonbinary. And if he called them “baby” when he greeted them, it’s because he’s a southerner.
“That’s how I keep from misgendering you,” he said with a smile, handing the mic over to Savage, who warned the crowd about the suspicious, unmarked van up the street. Agents of some kind were inside, they said, and pointed out a dirt exit road for anyone who wanted to leave.
“All that being said, let’s get fucking silly,” they said, cuing the music. The crowd blew along, buzzing like a cloud of mosquitos. When the drums kicked in at the chorus, Savage lifted a hand in the air and swayed. They exhaled when the song ended. What a workout, they said, and invited the lookalike contestants to the stage, which was judged by kazoos instead of applause. It was sublime, and like most great music events, it was over in less than half an hour.
The crowd drifted down the hill toward Feucht’s concert, blowing whistles and horns, ringing bells, and screaming at the top of their lungs. Steph, a trans 19-year-old Roan lookalike contestant, wheezed “Entrance of The Gladitators” on her accordion (aka the circus song). “It’s always a good day to spread queer joy,” she says over a bleating airhorn.
Another lookalike contestant, Jessamy (“like Sesame”), wore a cowboy hat and Christmas ornaments as earrings, was not queer, but there to stand with the queer community. Absurdity is an attention-grabbing way to combat the fear these groups perpetuate.
“As you can see, there are many a queer folk here,” she says “Seeing them having fun, dressing up, having a good time, shows they’re not broken; they’re not defective the way people who spread Christian nationalism would have you believe.”
On the other side of the fence, a crowd swayed to Feucht’s music, arms raised above their heads in prayer. Children danced with their parents. A woman in a lawn chair on the periphery smiled at me between bites of her subway sandwich. Although there were already ten feet between us, a man shuffled away as I passed, eying me with suspicion. A man with a billowing, red “JESUS IS KING” flag slung over his shoulder walked toward the stage with a raised arm.
Feucht lauded the diversity of his band. “Y’all can work on your diversity a little bit back there,” he cackled over the horns. Trans flags waved behind as he thanked Jesus for sending his best to this city, and he introduced the next song, which he wrote in the Montana mountains he grew up around. One of the reasons he loves coming to this “crazy” city, was that his dad took him here to see the San Antonio Spurs play the Supersonics at Key Arena.
“What would happen if we had church inside of it,” he said. “That was the first thought that hit my mind as an eight year old … “Come on–just lift up your hands. Lift up his name over this city.”
“I just want to speak the name of Jesus,” Feucht sang. “To every dark addiction starts to break. Declaring there is hope and there is freedom—I speak Jesus.”
The guitars rolled in like a thunderhead. A dog to my right lost its mind.
I want to be clear. Feucht’s music blows absolute ass. Not because it’s Christian rock, or worship music (I’m Catholic, I fuck heavy with hymns). Great religious music is everywhere. It’s in gospel, in soul, in blues. In Vedic chants. In meditative, ambient new age tapes. There’s George Frederick Handel’s The Messiah, Sufjan Stevens, Sam Cooke. There’s spirituality in Frank Ocean, in the band MeWithoutYou. The Louvin Brothers were fire and brimstone bible thumpers, but goddamn, those beautiful songs.
Feucht’s songs suck. They are structureless, Jesus-themed madlibs. There are no hooks, no stories, and little substance. It’s only an impression of meaning. Even “Awesome God” has hooks.
I bump into Rev. Sekou in the crowd. The music sucks, he says, and he wanted to sit down. We trudge across the field, and he makes a seat of someone’s cooler. In his tradition there is “ain’t no oil on the one and three, all the oil’s on the two and four.” Think about Black musicians who created the greatest musical tradition in the history of the Western World, he says, musicians like pastor and singer Al Green, saxophonist John Coltrane, soul queen Aretha Franklin, guitarist and singer Albert King, the queer, Black, and soulful rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Rosetta Tharpe, and jukebox king Lewis Jordan.
“You know, the entire country ain’t produced that kind of music,” he says.
Rev. Sekou doesn’t mention it, but he’s a musician. He performed a Tiny Desk concert with the Seal Breakers in 2018. He started that show with the same line as his blessing Saturday—by saying he was from a small town with 11 houses and 35. In his tradition, they do a little call and response, he said, and asked if they would talk back to him. (“There’s a lot of trouble in the land,” he said then. “But we’ve got one question: do you want to be free?”) The owners of the cooler he’s sitting on listen intently from their picnic blanket.
“This theology is market-driven theology. This idea that when praises go up, blessings come down. It’s an extractive and capitalist discourse which has dominated contemporary Christian music over the last 20-30 years. It’s poorly written music, it’s repetitious. The most dangerous part of it: there’s no lament, so there’s no way for you to go before God and grieve—to have pain, agony and despair. That’s part of the human existence.”
Theology tells us more about what we believe than what the Bible says, he says. Using religion to justify a cause is part of a great American tradition—after all, religion was used to uphold and to oppose slavery. America at its best, has attempted to incorporate and care for the most vulnerable, a “strong part of the Christian tradition,” he says.
“One of the challenges with the guys on the right is there is a limited clergy who actually have theological education,” he says (Rev. Sekou is a PhD candidate in religious studies). “So most of them, like, hear from God, and then they start preaching and they understand the theology that they have—all theology is inherited and ideological.”
Just then, someone on stage says that this performance was not about a brand, or provoking, or about Let Us Worship.
A person on the picnic blanket behind Rev. Sekou chortled, pink bangs wisping from their mostly shaved head.
“‘Let Us Worship’ is literally on the damn canvas tent,” they said.
“This is not protesting every church,” answers their friend in all black. “It’s not about Jesus.”
On stage, Feucht says the Lord, with a giant smile and magic eraser, is “erasing all of the things” that plague Seattle. Linda is standing next to me. She came from the south of the city and asks if I am religious.
“I’m a Catholic” I say.
“Well, that’s not–” she says, stopping herself. She grew up Catholic. But she’s a real “Jesus Person” now. She’ll go see anyone who loves the Lord.
“But they have to be real Jesus people,” she says.
“Do you think he’s a real Jesus person?” I ask, pointing out Feucht’s former associates have accused him of moral, spiritual and financial abuse over many years. Their signed statement “strongly urged” he be “removed from positions of leadership and financial stewardship.”
“One thing is for sure—this is the honest truth—I know Jesus personally; Jesus won’t let people be successful if they don’t love him.” We all reap and sow, she says, that’s in Galatians.
“There are many successful people in this world who do very evil things and are rewarded for them,” I say.
“Not in heaven.”
“Not in heaven, but on earth, and we’re on earth right now.” “It wouldn’t keep going—God would stop,” she says. “Say they’re doing something, somebody would probably step in.”
“How would you feel if those allegations were proven true?”
“Well I would have to see it side by side.”
After Linda takes me on a tangent about the quality of my skin, lying Bob Ferguson, the fairness of “illegals raping our children,” and trans women in the state’s women’s prisons, I shut off my recorder and thank her for her time. She asked my name.
Vivian, I say.
Something clicked and she smirked behind her sunglasses. Like Elon Musk’s “son…daughter,” she says.
“Do you believe in heaven?” she asks.
I told her I did. In truth, I have no idea.
“Well, you can’t get there.”
She put her hand on my shoulder.
“I want that to happen for you.”
