How Christians Should Vote, According to Grace City Church Pastor Josh McPherson
In a new voting guide, the Doug Wilson and Mark Driscoll acolyte rebukes Kamala Harris and 'the progressive left,' rewrites American history and repeats debunked rightwing misinformation
When it comes to voting the most important thing for the American Christian to do is obey, according to Grace City Church Pastor Josh McPherson.
“There is no debate, there is no discussion, there is only obedience,” McPherson wrote in a GCC new voting guide out this week.
Christians are to obey God, or rather those who speak for Him like McPherson, because the government’s “authority is derivative.” But that authority doesn’t derive from “We The People” like you may have been taught in a “government school.”
It comes from the divine authority of God. And those who don’t recognize this are wicked “pagans.”
“Jesus is lord over governments and nations, just as he is lord of the church,” McPherson wrote. “Here in the United States, our government has recently specialized in breaking commandments and rewarding wickedness. Meanwhile, anyone who would voice opposition is told to ‘keep their religious convictions out of politics.’”
McPherson’s reframing of US political philosophy also extends to history.
He claims, without providing any citation other than the Bible, that the US was founded as a Christian nation. Furthermore, the Founders had no intention of establishing a wall between church and state.
“We’ve seen the irrefutable evidence that our founding fathers built a nation squarely on the tenants of Christianity, building a framework that flowed from the Bible itself,” he wrote. “We’ve seen how the founders had no intention of separating the Church from the State, and proved it by building our constitution on the foundation of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
But he does not cite the irrefutable evidence in the footnote included on that bullet point. The only citation McPherson provides is to a passage from the Old Testament book of Isaiah.
“For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our king; it is he who will save us,” it reads.
Yet experts, historians, and the Founders themselves tell a different story.
“The notion that the Founders were divinely inspired” is an “utter misrepresentation,” writes Seth David Radwell in “American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing Our Nation.”
According to Radwell, the opposite is true.
“Most of our Founders (including the Moderates) were ‘long-standing adversaries of instituted religious authority,’ even if they were privately men of faith,” Radwell wrote. “Furthermore, the separation of church and state had been codified in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution and had been reaffirmed by the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, which specified in unambiguous terms that the country was not founded in any sense on the Christian religion.”
In Radwell’s estimation, fetishizing the Constitution as a “sacred,” irrefutable and unchangeable religious text stunts it from the being the “living and evolving national charter” it was meant to be.
And if the Framers weren’t explicit enough when they wrote that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” in the First Amendment, President John Adams stated unequivocally that the US was not founded as a “Christian nation” in the treaty of Tripoli in 1796.
“The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,” Article 11 of the treaty reads.
According to McPherson, the more Christianity influences a society the better that society is.
“Christianity has a rich history of wonderful influence on the societies it takes hold precisely because Christians who follow Jesus work out their spiritual life in the physical world in practical ways,” he wrote.
Yet he fails to explain how the Crusades, the Inquisition, the European wars of religion, witch hunts or religiously-backed colonialism that resulted in the genocide and enslavement of entire peoples qualify as “wonderful influences.”
Also, Enlightenment philosophers and later the Framers of the US Constitution did not devise and refine the concept of separation of powers in government to “reflect the image of God,” as McPherson wrote.
It was the French political philosopher, historian and judge Montesquieu who is credited for the idea of separation of powers in government. Like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, Montesquieu was a deist who did not believe in a personal god. In fact they considered organized religion to be “superstition” peddled by charlatans and both of his most famous works, “Persian Letters” and his opus, “The Spirit of Laws,” were banned by the church.
In the latter, Montesquieu outlines his political philosophy and details what a separation of powers in government should look like in order to provide a rational, more equitable society for everyone in it – not just the aristocracy and the clergy. In fact, he and many other Enlightenment thinkers saw the relationship between the church and the state as one borne of corruption that only breeds more corruption, superstition and irrationality in public affairs.
Montesquieu was a major influence on James Madison especially, and it’s Madison who wrote a majority of the US Constitution.
From Revisionist History to Misinformation, Conspiracy Theories
In his voting guide McPherson calls out Vice President Kamala Harris by name three times, and calls the current administration “globalists.”
The term globalist has long been used as a slur for Jewish people. Often it’s used as a dogwhistle tied to the conspiracy theory that an international cabal of elite Jewish bankers, politicians and media members control or seek to control the nations of the world. It’s a vestige of the ancient conspiracy of the “International Jew,” which existed in Europe long before it was adopted as a core component of Nazi ideology during Hitler’s rise to power. It is still prevalent in Neo-Nazi, White Christian nationalist and anti-Semitic rhetoric to this day.
To wit: “Globalist” is a favorite term of conspiracy theory king, 9/11 “truther” and Sandy Hook denier Alex Jones.
McPherson also uses the word “demonic” three times, mostly in reference to liberal policies, like the right to a safe, legal abortion.
And that’s where more misinformation comes in.
“When a major political party brings mobile abortion butcher wagons to their rally like taco trucks, celebrating the dismemberment of children on-site, this is a political party that must be resisted by all Christians,” McPherson wrote.
He’s repeating a debunked claim that Planned Parenthood had mobile abortion clinics at this year’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Some on the right, like Jones, claimed they were performing surgical abortions on-site.
“They are killing kids at their political rallies,” McPherson wrote.
This is not true.
A Planned Parenthood branch provided free medication abortion and vasectomies by appointment only through a mobile health clinic in Chicago at the same time as the DNC, according to PolitiFact, a non-partisan fact checking website.
And that was not even a part of the DNC’s program. The DNC’s website did not list Planned Parenthood as a partner, sponsor or vendor for the event and did not mention it in its official press release for the convention.
He also claims that the “progressive left” wants to separate parents from their children who want to have “tax-funded sex-change surgeries.” And they want to put “pornographic books in public schools and libraries” and even hand them “directly to children.”
McPherson also claims that the left wants to “undermine the sovereignty of our nation” by making it easier to vote than it is to “rent a car.”
These claims are all false.
The first is predicated on a 2023 Washington state bill, the second is tied to strategic misinformation aimed at getting public libraries defunded and the claim that anyone is handing pornography to children in public schools or libraries seems to be cut from whole cloth by McPherson himself. Also it’s already easier to vote than it is to rent a car.
The implications of espousing the view that exercising the franchise should be harder than renting a car should give the reader pause though. There are already historical precedents for making voting more difficult, like poll taxes and literacy tests, and there is no debate that those were white supremacist policies designed to keep freed slaves and their descendants disenfranchised and politically and economically powerless.
In all, McPherson uses the term “progressive left” five times.
In a litany rife with ellipses at the end of the document, titled “A Final Word,” McPherson writes that the left is “attempting to criminalize the biblical values of Jesus” by pursuing an “overt war on parents and their God-given authority over their children” while promoting the “permeation of transgender ideology” and consistently trying to “silence freedom of speech through cancel culture and censoring voices that dare to question ‘woke’ ideology.”
And while McPherson is outspoken in his denouncement of Harris and the left, there is no dressing down of Trump or the right.
And he addresses that.
“Honest Christians will acknowledge that there are ungodly and immoral politicians on both sides of the isle – that’s plain to see,” he wrote. “But what is equally plain to see is that there are currently way more political problems for Christians on the left than there are on the right.”
The left is nothing less than a threat to our constitutional republic, according to McPherson. And saying that isn’t being “political or partisan” – it’s “prophetic” and it’s a warning.
“This is a prophetic warning to evil: repent while you still can,” McPherson wrote.
If you’d like to read McPherson’s voting guide, you can request a copy here.
In Other News: “Project Man Card” Year Three and Another Turn with with Glenn Beck
This weekend is GCC’s annual rite of passage for teen boys, the “Project Man Card” retreat and camp out up the Entiat Valley. In addition to shooting a .50 caliber sniper rifle, the boys and their dads got to play with official Chelan County Sheriff’s Office equipment, like a padded combat suit and night vision goggles, the first year.
I covered the inaugural year at the time and you can read that here:
Grace City Church Celebrates Its Inaugural 'Project ManCard' Class' Rite of Passage
The men of Grace City Church celebrated the “rite of passage” of 20 boys who completed their “Project ManCard” course at an event in Wenatchee, Wa. on Dec. 7, 2022.
Last year they drove across the Entiat River in ATVs, disturbing fragile salmon beds, and built fires on public lands. You can read a recap of year two here.
Chelan Douglas Land Trust Spokeswoman Angela Morris said that this year they’re following the rules though.
“They have followed our policy of submitting a third party use form and were given instructions on where the property boundaries are located,” she wrote in an email.
The boys and their dads get back today.
In other news, McPherson was a guest on Glenn Beck’s podcast for a third time last week. He, one of his children and associate pastor Adam James flew to Dallas, Texas so McPherson could appear on Beck’s podcast.
You can watch or listen to Beck’s podcast here.
When churches become involved in political sway, they should absolutely lose their non-profit status. They are, at that point, just one more lobbyist.
Great article. I have too many friends and some family that are GCC members. It is terrifying to observe how their ideology has transformed over the past few years to support the views of Mcpherson. I am hoping that history repeats itself and institutions like this find their demise in their leader's endless pursuit of power. For Wenatchee- Bethesda - take two.