The Gorge Amphitheatre sits on a bluff above the Columbia River, in the dry middle of Washington state, where the forests west of the Cascades give out, and the land turns to sagebrush and bare basalt. The seating is a long slope of grass that runs down toward the stage, and past the stage the ground falls away into the river canyon, so the bands play against open sky and rock that goes orange when the sun drops. People drive a long way to get there. By most accounts, it is one of the most beautiful places in the country to hear live music, and the calendar usually lives up to the setting.
The Dave Matthews Band has made the same Labor Day trip nearly every year since 2006. In late May, the stage belonged to Brandi Carlile, who grew up in Washington, is openly gay, and comes back most summers. This time she brought a long bill of women that ran from Bonnie Raitt and the Indigo Girls to Sheryl Crow and Wynonna Judd, over three nights into the canyon dusk.
Three weeks later, on Father’s Day weekend, the same stage goes to the men. “Freedom Con: Rise of the Statesman” will draw thousands to the Gorge for a Christian-nationalist revival centered on manliness, fatherhood, and the pursuit of political power. Women are not allowed on the floor; the ones who want to be there pay $55 for the privilege of waiting on men and cleaning up after them.
The host is a Wenatchee pastor whose ministry trains teenage boys with a .50-caliber rifle and teaches them to chant “Slay the Dragon.” The best-known speaker on the bill, Mark Driscoll, once called women “penis homes.” The Christian nationalist speakers sit close to federal power. Several have spent time inside Donald Trump’s White House over the past year, and the movement they belong to is working to write its theology into American law. It all arrives two weeks before the country marks 250 years of independence.
The man behind it is Josh McPherson, who leads Grace City Church in Wenatchee, an apple town a few hours east of Seattle. In a promotional video, he sits in front of a mounted deer head with an American flag at his shoulder, looks into the camera, and makes his pitch. “We will liberate Washington state,” he says. “We will dedicate Washington state back to Jesus Christ.” Another video appeal cuts from John Wayne firing a rifle to men in camouflage hauling weights, a tug-of-war, a boy swinging an axe.
The Roys Report, an evangelical watchdog that has followed this world for years, described Freedom Con as a Christian nationalist men’s conference. McPherson does not dispute the label. He wrote an ebook titled Christian Nationalism, and it opens with a warning: “If godly people will not seek political power and use it, godless people will,” further adding, “So we rise — not in anger, but in holy resolve. Not waving a partisan banner, but lifting the cross of Christ over every sphere of life. Because every knee will bow — not only in church, but in congresses and courts, classrooms and corporations.”
For three years, McPherson, through Grace City and Stronger Man Nation, has run a program it calls Project ManCard, a four-day rite of passage for boys between 14 and 17. “Boys were made to kill dragons,” McPherson says of it. In the first ManCard class, 20 teenagers crossed a river at night in water cold enough to carry ice, then rappelled down a 40-foot cliff while 16 instructors, some of them former police and military, ran them to exhaustion. A recap video shows one boy looking through the scope of a .50-caliber rifle that appears to be a Barrett M82, the anti-materiel weapon the military uses to disable armored vehicles.
At the closing ceremony, the boys recited a creed they had memorized. It ends, “I’ll kill the dragon. I’ll win the girl.” More recent church videos show boys handling pistols and AR-15-style rifles at supervised drills. Grace City filmed the whole thing, and the documentary will premiere at the Gorge during Freedom Con.
Over the weekend, fathers and sons will tackle an obstacle course to earn a “Stronger Boy Way” patch. The Gorge bars firearms and weapons of any kind from the venue and the campgrounds, and screens for them with metal detectors at the gate. The other contests lean on raw strength: “Lift it. Carry it. Win it,” the program promises, “raw competitions that punish weakness, demands all you’ve got, and rewards the men who show up ready. You know, Man Stuff.”
McPherson calls the gathering a summons to statesmanship. Tickets start at $179 and climb to $349 for a VIP package. There is a Harley-Davidson to be raffled live onstage, and his men’s-ministry brand, Stronger Man Nation, sells the merchandise, which includes a “Dragon Killer” toddler shirt for $19, sized for a boy still in Pull-Ups.
The money moves the way it has for years at Grace City. The church draws thousands to three Sunday services at a 12-acre Wenatchee compound, and, according to journalist Dominick Bonny, who has closely tracked its finances, it has raised roughly $44 million from its members over its first 15 years. A single campaign at the end of 2023, the most recent Bonny has documented, pulled in $15.5 million in pledges over 10 weeks. The median household income in the surrounding Chelan County is $83,000. The money has paid for a recording studio, a K-12 academy, and a two-year college that opened in 2025, with a second church location underway in Rome, Georgia.
The 13 men McPherson has booked to speak come out of the same world. Several preach on one another’s podcasts and have run private pastor-training cohorts together. The roster includes:
- Mark Driscoll, the biggest celebrity preacher in Christian nationalist circles, built the Seattle megachurch Mars Hill into an empire and then watched it collapse in 2014 after his own elders described him as quick-tempered, arrogant, and domineering. He has remade himself for the Trump years and buddied up with Turning Point USA before and after Charlie Kirk’s death. TPUSA has bought an outright sponsorship, its logo now posted to the Freedom Con wall.
- Nate Schatzline, a Texas state representative and Fort Worth pastor whom The New Yorker counted among Christian nationalism’s new faces, leads For Liberty and Justice, a Fort Worth nonprofit that claims to have helped elect more than 100 candidates in Texas. His church recently acquired a prayer house directly behind the Supreme Court. “We’re not taking seats in government,” he told McPherson’s podcast. “We’re giving seats to God in government.”
- Russell Johnson, a Seattle-area pastor identified by Cascade PBS as a Christian nationalist, has appeared at rallies with Matt Shea, the former Washington legislator who once endorsed paramilitary “biblical training on war” for boys.
- Eric Metaxas, a radio host who has become a fixture of Trump-era evangelicalism and spoke at Trump’s Rededicate 250, will be there too; his book Letter to the American Church compares the pastors who won’t fight abortion and “cultural Marxism” to the Germans who refused to resist Hitler.
- Tim Barton brings WallBuilders, the organization he inherited from his father, David, who has spent 40 years arguing that the founders never meant to separate church from state and advocating for the Ten Commandments in public schools.
These speakers, intellectuals and pastors share one aim, and they state it openly: to tear down the wall between church and state and to run the country according to their interpretation of scripture. That separation is a load-bearing part of American self-government, and they want it gone.
What these men believe about women is a matter of public record. In the early 2000s, posting under a pseudonym on his Mars Hill message board, Driscoll called women “penis homes,” and he told the ones who objected to “hike up your skirt and come to my house” and “shut the hell up.” In 2024, Josh Howerton, another speaker on the Freedom Con bill and the lead pastor of the Dallas-area Lakepointe Church, used the two minutes before a sermon to tell the women of his congregation how to behave on their wedding night: “Stand where he tells you to stand, wear what he tells you to wear, and do what he tells you to do.” The congregation laughed and cheered. McPherson, on a podcast last year, told his listeners that empathy is dangerous, that it will align a person with hell, and that women are especially prone to it.
The women of Grace City already understand their place at Freedom Con. The conference FAQ tells wives and daughters, in so many words, not to come. A sign-up sheet for the church’s all-female host team appeared online in May and came down soon after, but not before it laid out the terms. A woman who had finished the church’s introductory program could work the gates, the booths, or the “tidy team,” so long as she first bought a $55 “serve ticket,” whatever her age. The ticket came with a T-shirt and a place among the church’s Noble Women. If she wanted to hear any of the preaching, after her shift was completed, she could sit apart in the Noble Women tent, away from the area where the men would gather.
Live Nation has owned and operated the Gorge since 2006. The company did not respond to multiple GPAHE inquiries about whether anyone reviewed Freedom Con’s roster before it booked the date, or whether it screens its headliners for what they have said about women.
In 2020, McPherson’s first men’s conference drew about 1,000 men to his church grounds. This June he expects 20,000 at the Gorge, in a town of 809 people. Among them will be the boys who have obtained their ManCard and can recite its creed: “I’ll kill the dragon. I’ll win the girl.”
As America approaches its 250th birthday, one of its most celebrated concert venues will host a movement that began as a religious subculture. The marquee promises the rise of the statesman. The statesmen are already rising.
