Conservative Commentator Glenn Beck Interviews Grace City Church Pastor Josh McPherson
The two talk Politics, the Constitution, Christian Nationalism and McPherson spreads Covid misinformation in a lengthy interview on Beck's "Blaze" network
Grace City Church Executive Pastor Josh McPherson flew to Texas recently to be a guest on conservative radio commentator Glenn Beck’s podcast, and the two hit it off while commiserating over the persecution Christians face today.
Glenn Beck: “We are entering a time when we have freedom of religion.”
Josh McPherson: “Yes.”
Glenn Beck: “But we are losing our freedom of religion to ‘freedom of worship.’”
Josh McPherson: “Yes.”
Glenn Beck: “Tell me the difference.”
McPherson said that the idea of freedom of worship was “pushed by” a presidential candidate a few elections ago and it’s a “psych-op smokescreen to silence and contain the church.”
This idea of “containment” is to get Christians to keep their worship behind closed doors. Beck gave an example of a “choir” in London being threatened with “arrest” for singing hymns on the street outside their church this month.
You can watch that exchange here:
While Beck’s retelling of the story is clearly meant to portray persecution at the hands of a tyrannical and bigoted government cog, the facts paint a different picture.
In late January, a Christian busker called Harmony London set up her keyboard on a London sidewalk and started performing. She was approached by a volunteer officer Maya Hadzhipetkova who said she was busking without a license. Harmony insisted she was not busking but rather sharing the gospel. Hadzhipetkova maintained it was unlicensed busking and threatened to seize the young woman’s keyboard.
During the altercation, the volunteer officer stuck her tongue out at a cell-phone camera as someone was filming her. The London Metropolitian Police have apologized and denounced Hadzhipetkova and she is now under investigation by Scotland Yard. But a selective recounting of the encounter and the volunteer officer’s bizarre behavior provide the raw materials for a convenient narrative if you are trying to make the case that governments persecute Christians.
McPherson expanded on the theme, citing this article by evangelical writer Aaron Renn, and said they are in a “negative world reality” where people are punished for being Christian. According to Renn and McPherson, a Christian can say something that would have once been celebrated but now they “get shot at” for expressing the same thing. That change can be tracked directly back to 2014 and the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, the “cancellation” of some leading evangelical figures, and the “Obergefell ruling,” McPherson said. In that landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled the fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples by the 14th Amendment.
“It was codified into law by the Supreme Court that the Christian ethos and value in regards to the sexual ethic and definition of marriage was no longer relevant to us as a society,” he said. “At that moment the table had turned and now we’re in a negative world reality so it’s not advantageous to identify as a Christian anymore.”
The interview got started on the topic of Covid, and McPherson shared a couple of his favorite unsubstantiated claims, including the assertion that Confluence Health committed medical fraud to make it seem like there were more Covid cases than there were to keep the “lockdowns” going.
He told the story of a friend who worked at Central Washington Hospital during the beginning of the pandemic. According to McPherson, this friend told him that his manager told him to repeatedly test a COVID-19-positive patient and count each positive test as representing a separate patient. That one Covid-positive patient was counted as 36 Covid-positive patients, according to McPherson.
He related another story from another friend “who runs an ambulance business” who told him about a patient they transported to the hospital after a car crash. The patient later died, and McPherson related what his friend told him about that to Beck.
“‘So we brought a guy in today from a head-on collision, 36, and they charted it as a Covid death,’” McPherson said, paraphrasing his friend.
He went on to say that at that time any person who died with Covid was counted as a Covid-death.
You can watch that clip here:
From there the two got into why McPherson sued Washington State Governor Jay Inslee over pandemic-era public health mandates.
Much of the lead up to that story has already been covered, since he has written about it in his manifesto “We Do Not Consent,” but in this retelling he provided a few more details.
“We got to the one-yard-line and the judge essentially told us ‘if you can get confirmation from your local health district that they can handle this pandemic, I’ll rule in your favor,’” he said.
The judge he’s referring to is Chelan County Superior Court Judge Kristin Ferrera. McPherson’s story makes it seem like this was something Ferrera told them in a private meeting, or behind closed doors. But that cannot be because Ferrera had no such meeting with McPherson or his lawyer. All communication she had with the plaintiffs in this case was done in court, she said.
According to McPherson, the lawsuit would have succeeded if not for “the guy” from the Chelan Douglas Public Health District who “weaseled.”
“He’d been with us the whole time now he’s not answering phone calls, emails, long story short he totally weaseled,” he said. “We found he had been talking with the attorneys from Washington and kind of had a sweetheart deal going with them. So he weaseled and wouldn’t give us the authority.”
You can watch that clip here:
The person he’s saying “weaseled” is almost certainly Berry Kling, who was the executive director of the CDCH at the time. McPherson’s claim that Kling or the district’s public Health Officer Dr. Malcom Butler were ever in support of the lawsuit is a lie.
In fact, Kling said the health district’s involvement in the lawsuit was “bad for the district” and went on record about the pressure he was getting from health district board members Ruth Esparza, Dan Sutton, Marc Straub as well as Chelan County Sheriff Brian Burnett, who was Chelan County Sheriff at the time.
Essentially they were asking him to lie.
“I cannot in good conscience provide a sworn statement to Superior Count under penalty of perjury containing statements on matters of public health which are being used in a misleading way to support allegations I know to be untrue,” he wrote. “I did not volunteer to comment on the lawsuit and the plaintiffs’ attorney might have checked with me before asking me to do this, but having been asked to submit a sworn statement I could not submit a false one.”
Kling testified under penalty of perjury to the truth of that and other statements he made in an official letter to the board in May 2020, and you can read that entire letter here.
Esparza, Sutton, Straub and Burnett were all involved in the lawsuit, and I covered that curious connection back in 2021. The conflict of interest inherent in sitting members of the region’s public health board joining the lawsuit seems to have been lost on Esparza, Sutton and Straub, but it wasn’t lost on the state attorney general’s office, who accused Straub of abusing his power at the time.
Kling announced his early retirement about that time, and Dr. Malcom Butler resigned as public health officer. The district’s longtime nursing director Carol McCormick also retired that month.
“The Bible Calls Us To Be Patriots”
Beck said he came across McPherson’s preaching on Instagram and was impressed with his blunt and some would even say offensive style.
“I think there is something inherent in the word of God, in the gospel of Jesus Christ, that is offensive and stirs offense,” McPherson said. “And if we’re preaching in such a way as to stir offense then we’re probably not preaching the pure gospel…”
He also addressed why so much of his preaching is political.
“Covid took progressive minds that had gathered to the urban centers, stepped on it like a boot, all the rats scattered off the ship,” he said. “Now they’re in small town rural America voting the way they voted, they’re, they’re, running from places they destroyed with their politics.”
You can watch that clip here:
Beck kept bringing it back around to the topic of Christian nationalism. Near the end the two had a lengthy discourse on the subject, wrestling mightily with how to define the term.
“I’m a Christian and I live in a nation,” McPherson said. “But I think the Bible calls us to be patriots.”
They ended up landing on a definition of the term that was pretty positive overall, but McPherson never said he personally identifies as a Christian nationalist. He actually distanced himself from the phrase quite a bit. A term he seemed much more open to was the phrase “Christian imperialist.”
“I was reading a friend, and he said uh, uh, ‘I have issue with the phrase Christian nationalist and my problem with the phrase is the nationalist. I’m a Christian imperialist,’” he said, smiling.
That emperor is Jesus “and I serve him,” he said.
He was very specific in defining where “man’s rights” come from.
“Government do not give men rights. God gives men rights,” he said. “Government was not designed to give men rights, which means government cannot take men’s rights. Our government was, was born to acknowledge sovereign rights given to man and then protect them.”
You can watch a clip with most of those quotes in it here:
And you can watch the entire interview on Glenn Beck’s YouTube channel here.
Beck ended the interview with an invitation to McPherson to come back on the podcast to talk about GCC’s Strongerman Nation.
Good writing Dominick! Thank you for watching it so I don’t have to 🙄
Not convinced that "christian imperialist" is any improvement over "christian nationalist".
This topic is especially frightening.