Leavenworth Pastor Pushes Back On 'Biblical' Basis For Christian Nationalism

Pastor Aaron Musser gave a presentation to a full house yesterday, deconstructing many of the arguments men like Josh McPherson and Mark Driscoll make to justify their actions

The case for Christian nationalism faced a rigorous rebuttal not from a secular journalist or historian on Sunday, June 14 at the Chelan County Fire District #3 firehouse in Leavenworth, Washington, but from a Christian pastor who spent more than an hour deconstructing the theological argument for the belief.

About 125 people packed into the sweltering firehouse to hear Pastor Aaron Musser of Faith Lutheran Church in Leavenworth give a presentation called “Demystifying Christian Nationalism.”

Musser started by saying that ironically Christian nationalism distorts both Christianity and nationalism, and those who use it do so to play on the real anxieties that we have about the world we’re living in. They take our anxieties about money, affordability, our safety and the safety of our children as well as fears of becoming obsolete, unneeded or replaced economically, and uses them to manipulate and divide.

“Christian nationalism gathers real anxieties like these, not related to Christianity or nationalism, and they put them under this sign of moral decay – the world is going to hell in a hand basket – with a spiritual warfare frame,” Musser said. “The spiritual warfare frame then justifies aggression toward whoever that frame casts (as being in) the camp of the devil.”

Having an enemy is integral to the plot, but the potential enemies are interchangeable. It could be queer and trans people, feminists, non-Christians, immigrants, non-believers and/or liberals, he said. The point is there are good guys on one side and bad guys on the other. It’s like a John Wayne movie, he said, it’s cowboys and Indians.

“We start with something like existential fear, very real fears that all of us feel in this day and age, and give it a biblical diagnosis. ‘This is why you feel that,’” he said. “‘And here are the problem people that will make it so that you don’t feel that anymore. That’s the enemy-making. And then we lead toward a militant political order.”

It’s a “deep story” and also a political worldview and in a handout he broke it down to its basic beats:

• America was founded as a Christian nation

• God specifically blessed America

• “Real” Americans are traditional Christians

• That blessing is now under threat

• The nation must be “taken back” from dangerous outsiders

Through this sort of a lens you get a masculinized, macho version of “strongman Jesus” and you have to submit to that particular faction’s authority on the matter, he said.

Members of the crowd listen to Musser’s presentation Sunday. Photo by Dominick Bonny.

On the handout Musser also provided a list of the rights and institutions at risk when a worldview like that takes hold in a society:

• Voting access

• Women’s autonomy

• religious pluralism

• LGBTQ rights

• immigrant rights

• public education

• privacy and protection from surveillance

• local democratic accountability

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Taking On Mark Driscoll

Much of the young pastor’s presentation was focused on Mark Driscoll – friend and mentor to Grace City Church Pastor Josh McPherson here in North Central Washington.

Musser introduced Driscoll in a diplomatic way, avoiding the fact that the Calvinist firebrand once referred to women as “penis homes” and allegedly used church donor funds to buy up copies of his own book to make the New York Times Best Sellers list. Instead he described Driscoll’s controversies in more general terms and explained why his first mega church, Mars Hill, disintegrated after Driscoll resigned in disgrace.

“So the reason that Mark Driscoll was removed from Mars Hill was that he wrote – he was really incendiary as a person – and he wrote a lot on blogs that were revealed as him. Later blogs that demonized femininity. Blogs that were just super misogynistic in general and also Islamophobic and homophobic and just some really, really rough stuff, terrible stuff that he wrote,” Musser said. “In addition to that he cultivated a really toxic workplace culture. He was in the process of being removed from his position, but then he left before the process was completed because he experienced a ‘vision from God’ that told him it was time to go. So he avoided accountability.”

Musser then played a clip from Driscoll’s most recent guest appearance at GCC in which Driscoll uses a false dichotomy in order to separate the world into two camps: “globalistic atheists” or Christian nationalists. Driscoll’s biblical argument for why God wants people to belong to nations and therefore be nationalists is based on the story of Babel, in Genesis 11 verses 1-9.

“So back in Genesis 11 there’s something called globalism. Everyone is getting together and speaking the same language, speaking the same language, working together.” Driscoll said. “They don’t know and love God. God looks at them and says, ‘This is a problem. If they don’t love me and they’re united together nothing will stop them.’ And so the entire plan of secular satanic humanity is globalism.”

Here’s that clip:

Musser then pulled up a slide with Genesis 11:1-9 and read through it word for word.

“Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, ‘Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.’ They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.’ But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.’ So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel — because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth,” Musser read.

Then he addressed Driscoll’s interpretation of the passage.

“The things that I didn’t hear in that were anything about satanic sort of demonic powers. I didn’t really hear anything about nations. I hear about scattering,” he said.

The moral of the story, according to Musser, is that God punished them for their hubris not for their unity. It wasn’t working together that was the sin. It was mortals acting like they know better than God, he said.

You can listen to Musser’s full rebuttal to Dricoll’s point in this clip:

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Watch for DARVO

When they’re called out, most Christian nationalists will use a tactic often employed by domestic abusers in order to deny any wrong doing, Musser said. It’s called the DARVO strategy and it stands for “Deny, Attack, Reverse Vicim and Offender.”

It’s starts by denying wrongdoing or gaslighting the other party in order to downplay the severity of the lie or abusive action. Then you go on the attack, trying to undermine the credibility of the party confronting you and questioning their sanity or motives. And finally it’s time to switch it up and play the victim card – insisting that the liar or abuser in the situation is actually the victim.

It was a tactic employed by The Pursuit NW’s Pastor Russell Johnson after the Mayday 2025 event at Cal Anderson park last summer, which ended in violence and arrests.

I was at that event and covered it myself so if you’d like to see how Johnson and his fellow Christian nationalists used the government’s reaction to the debacle against them, you can do that here.

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Breaking Down The Themes

While doing research on the topic, Musser said he went over the past year of sermons at Grace City Church and ran the transcripts through a program to analyze what common themes and keywords were being used.

What emerged as commonly used were “Satan,” “demons,” “strongholds,” “war language,” “deception,” “deliverance,” and “unseen realm.”

“I took every single Sunday so I’m not missing stuff,” Musser said. “And this period, because a lot of Christian nationalist churches preach on themes, there was a theme of spiritual warfare. This yellow portion is where they were talking a lot about Satan and demons and war and deception, which is Satan’s ultimate tool. And then the unseen realm – this idea that there’s something going on above and beyond what we can sense and see.”

The colors on the graph in the picture above represent different sermon series, and the size of the chunk that color gets relates to how much those keywords were used.

Musser said that even when political reporters cover Christian nationalism they tend to overlook topics like spiritual warfare in their coverage, which I find to be true. It is important to factor in though because when you convince someone that they are literally on the side of God and anyone who opposes them is on the side of the devil it can lead to serious misery and mayhem (see: Crusades).

You can listen to Musser’s whole breakdown of that analysis here:

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How To Hold The Line

At the bottom of his handout and at the end of his slideshow, Musser included suggestions about what can be done to thwart the encroachment of religious authoritarianism on American democracy. It too was presented as a bullet point list:

• Do not accept scapegoating as an answer to real problems

• Ask candidates clear questions about democracy, rights, public education, religious pluralism, and the rule of law

• Share reliable information

• Support coalitions across faiths, parties and communities

• Focus on the real needs Christian nationalism distracts from: housing, wages, healthcare, climate resilience, education, safety and belonging

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Bonus: A Tool For Identifying Christian Nationalist Candidates

Folks from the Confluence Indivisible Elections Team reached out to me this spring and asked me to help identify Christian nationalist and GCC-affiliated candidates in the upcoming local elections in Douglas and Chelan counties this year.

So I did that and their team produced this high quality voter’s cheatsheet to help voters understand where candidates lie on the spectrum from mainstream Democrats and Republicans to election-denying religious extremists.

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