Editor’s note: This profile is part of a GPAHE series examining the people shaping American Christian nationalism in post–Project 2025 America. Christian nationalism is distinct from Christianity itself; mainstream churches have publicly rejected the movement as a distortion of the Christian faith. The figures profiled here are the architects of a theocratic, political project working to fuse American national identity with conservative Christian supremacist rule and dismantle democratic institutions.
Mark Driscoll was driven out of the megachurch he founded, the church-planting network he founded, and most of mainstream evangelicalism. Then Charlie Kirk handed him a microphone. Now Driscoll preaches American Christian nationalism to a digital audience in the hundreds of thousands.
- Driscoll resigned from Seattle’s Mars Hill Church in October 2014 after the church’s board found he had been domineering, arrogant, and quick-tempered. Three months earlier, the Acts 29 church-planting network expelled him from the organization he co-founded, citing “ungodly and disqualifying behavior.” Mars Hill had paid the marketing firm ResultSource $210,000 in church funds to game the New York Times bestseller list for Driscoll.
- Driscoll openly named himself a Christian nationalist at Grace City Church on February 19, 2026.
- Charlie Kirk called Driscoll “one of the best, most important Bible teachers in the world” and made him a regular on TPUSA platforms. After Kirk was assassinated in September 2025, Driscoll claimed a prophetic vision of Kirk ascending into the sky.
- Driscoll announced in April 2026 that he would preach the main session at Trump’s Rededicate 250 event on the National Mall. The White House told reporters he had never been invited and asked him to stop. His own church billed him to preach the day before at a separate Mall rally run by Sean Feucht.
Mark Driscoll stood at the pulpit of Grace City Church in Wenatchee, Washington, on February 19, 2026, and said the thing he had been denying for years. “The slander is, ‘You guys are Christian nationalists!’” Driscoll told the crowd. “Well, I don’t want to be an atheistic globalist so yes, I am a Christian nationalist. Globalism is the satanic attempt to align individuals against God. Nationalism is God’s answer to globalism.”
Ten years earlier, a comeback looked impossible. Mars Hill had collapsed under him, and the evangelical mainstream had cut him loose. He rebuilt anyway, on his own terms.
Christian nationalism’s preachers cast politics as spiritual warfare and their enemies as demons. Driscoll has worked from that script for years. Grace City was the first time he called it by its name.
The Mars Hill Collapse
Driscoll co-founded Mars Hill Church in Seattle in 1996. At its 2013 peak the church operated 15 campuses across five states, with weekly attendance approaching 15,000, and Driscoll’s sermon podcasts drew millions of downloads. It all ran on his persona, a profane, combative act marketed to young men. As early as 2000, he was posting anonymously on the Mars Hill message board under the pseudonym “William Wallace II,” attacking what he called the “pussified nation” of “homoerotic worship loving mama’s boy sensitive emasculated” evangelical men. The same posts described women’s bodies as “penis homes.” He apologized for them only in 2014, 14 years later.
Mars Hill came apart in 2014. In March, World Magazine revealed the $210,000 ResultSource contract that pushed Driscoll’s Real Marriage onto the New York Times bestseller list. In August, the Acts 29 board removed him from the more-than-500-church network he had built and asked him publicly to step down from ministry. That same month, a group of pastors filed formal charges inside Mars Hill for abuse of power, plagiarism, climate of fear, and misuse of church funds. The Mars Hill board concluded Driscoll had been guilty of arrogance, a quick temper, harsh speech, and domineering leadership. He resigned on October 14, 2014. The church would not disclose his severance terms, and dissolved within weeks.
The Wilderness Years
Driscoll spent 2015 quiet. He moved his family to the Phoenix area, told supporters in folksy email updates that he was “healin’ up,” and bought up the digital assets of Mars Hill’s old Resurgence ministry, including its email list, through what Driscoll called an “independent auction,” but the Mars Hill chronicler Warren Throckmorton doubted was ever publicly advertised. Religion Unplugged’s Bob Smietana reported that Driscoll met quietly with a group of about a dozen Phoenix-area pastors at Scottsdale Bible Church, told them he had repented and learned from his mistakes, and asked for their support. California megachurch pastor Larry Osborne, who had served on an advisory board overseeing Mars Hill during its collapse, signed on as “wise counsel” to Driscoll’s new operation. Trinity Church launched on Easter Sunday 2016 in Scottsdale, 18 months after Mars Hill’s collapse. Trinity operates without an elder board, and Driscoll answers to a private board of trustees the church has never publicly named.
The Mars Hill pattern followed him to Trinity. In February 2016, four former Mars Hill members filed a civil RICO lawsuit accusing Driscoll and former executive elder Sutton Turner of diverting designated donations. The plaintiffs lacked the funds to serve the defendants within Washington’s 90-day window; a federal judge dismissed the case in August 2016, ruling that the complaint was not frivolous on its face.
In July 2021, nearly 40 former Mars Hill elders — the majority of pastors who had served at the church when formal charges were filed against him — released a public statement declaring his abuse had continued at Trinity. “Mark is presently unfit for serving the church in the office of pastor,” they wrote, calling him unrepentant. That same year Driscoll’s head of church security at Trinity resigned and published an open letter accusing him of “immoral, unethical, and unbiblical actions,” claiming dissenters had been surveilled and followed by private investigators on Driscoll’s staff. In December 2021 Driscoll asked his Trinity congregation for an $850,000 year-end push, $650,000 of it above the regular budget, to pay for new cameras, lighting, a better sound system, a recording studio and office, and a year-end party. His comeback turned his followers’ devotion into revenue, with no one empowered to ask where it went.
The most detailed look inside Trinity came from Vince Manuele, a teenage worship-team member whose family was cast out after he dated Driscoll’s daughter. What he describes lines up with what Trinity’s former security chief had already alleged. Driscoll graded staff for loyalty on a one-to-ten “Spectrum of Trust.” Congregants who stayed close to the banished family were warned to pull away or lose their standing. Junior interns, some of them still minors, were asked to sign nondisclosure agreements forbidding them to tell even their parents what went on at the church. Trinity called the NDA allegation “categorically false.”
Charlie Kirk Brought Him Back
The founder of Turning Point USA introduced Driscoll on “The Charlie Kirk Show” in August 2023 as “one of the best, most important Bible teachers in the country — in the world, actually,” and gave him a regular spot in front of the TPUSA audience. On that first broadcast, Driscoll attacked seminary-trained pastors as “neutered, compromised beta-males” and held up Old Testament prophet Elijah — a “man’s man” who, in Driscoll’s telling, slaughtered 400 false prophets — as the right model for American clergy. He sold hats on his RealFaith website branded “WWED” for “What Would Elijah Do.”
TPUSA Faith, the religious arm of Kirk’s $85 million political operation, launched in 2021 to carry his campus politics into the pulpit and arm pastors with an end-times worldview. Driscoll was an early draw, his sermons packaged into ready-made kits for clergy on the group’s site. Kirk promoted his sermons and books to an audience of young conservatives, most of whom had been in middle school when Mars Hill collapsed and knew nothing about it.
Kirk was assassinated on September 10, 2025, while speaking at Utah Valley University. Six days later, Driscoll posted on Facebook that “if your church didn’t address the demonic murder of Charlie Kirk this weekend, the pastor is a coward and needs to repent or resign.” That same week, he told his social media following he had received a prophetic vision during worship of Charlie Kirk ascending into the sky like a magnet, gathering up pieces of metal beneath him. Senator Ted Cruz shared a clip of Driscoll praising Kirk. Mike Cosper, host of Christianity Today’s podcast “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill,” has tracked Driscoll’s online audience climbing into the hundreds of thousands since the Kirk killing. From the Trinity pulpit in October 2021, before he was anything close to a household MAGA name, Driscoll told his congregation that his videos already reached 300,000 men.
The Christian Nationalist Network
Christian nationalist theology comes with a battle map. The Seven Mountain Mandate divides American life into seven “mountains” — government, media, education, family, religion, business, and the arts — and commands Christians to take each one through spiritual warfare against the demons said to hold it. The proof text is Genesis 1:28: “Have dominion.” Christian nationalism is not fringe: in 2024 PRRI found that 30 percent of Americans hold these views.
“Demons are often involved in perversion, transgenderism, and sexuality that is perverse,” Driscoll preached in a recent sermon. Jessica Johnson, the anthropologist who spent years embedded inside Mars Hill researching her book Biblical Porn, describes Driscoll’s current rhetoric as “increasingly power-hungry, violent, conspiracy-obsessed,” and Christian nationalist. Jennifer McKinney’s 2023 academic study Making Christianity Manly Again traces the line from the Mars Hill subculture to the rise of evangelical support for Trump.
Driscoll now preaches regularly at Grace City Church in Wenatchee, Washington, whose lead pastor Josh McPherson calls Driscoll one of his “best friends.” McPherson preached an explicit Christian nationalist program in 2024 sermons, telling congregants who were “suspicious” of government to run for office and dismantle it from inside. The Grace City circuit ties Driscoll to theologian Doug Wilson of Moscow, Idaho, the most influential ideologue of American theocratic dominionism, whose project of replacing American democracy with what he calls a “Christian republic” shares its donors and its pulpit guests with Driscoll’s circle, right down to the vocabulary.
That circle gathers in the open in June 2026, when Driscoll headlines McPherson’s Freedom Con at the Gorge Amphitheater, a men-only rally his Christian nationalist ministry, Stronger Man Nation, hopes will draw 20,000 men to plan how to take Washington state “back” for the church. McPherson casts the state as a “sanctuary state for abortion” and a “cesspool state for the trans and mutilation of children.” The lineup seats Driscoll beside the WallBuilders pseudo-historians David and Tim Barton and Nate Schatzline, a Texas legislator-turned-preacher. Also on the program is podcaster Graham Allen, who served a short stint at the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
James River Church runs a separate event with a confusingly similar name, the Stronger Men’s Conference, in Springfield, Missouri. At its April 2024 gathering, Driscoll attacked the opening act — an aerial sword-swallower and former male stripper named Alex Magala — as “the Jezebel spirit.” In the same set, he called demons “non-binary” and “transgender,” beings whose “sexuality shifts on a spectrum.” Pastor John Lindell of James River, who had invited him, climbed onstage and asked him to leave. Lindell apologized to his congregation that Sunday for inviting Driscoll, called Driscoll’s behavior “demonic,” and revealed that Driscoll had privately accused one of Lindell’s sons of “a list of dark sins” and urged another to split James River Church away from his father.
What He Wants
In a March 2026 sermon at Grace City Church in Washington, Driscoll told the congregation that Christians are responsible for bringing everything under the authority of Christ. He singled out Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, a Democratic Socialist who has spoken publicly about having an abortion, branding her office one of Satan’s “injection points” in a city he cast as a stronghold of the “Jezebel spirit of the End Times.” Seven Mountain dominionism, the theology Driscoll preaches, identifies secular government as enemy territory occupied by demonic powers. Apply that logic to Mayor Wilson and the goal shifts from winning an election to performing an exorcism. Back in Scottsdale, the Trinity Church building-fund appeal names the enemy as the “Four Horsemen of Feminism, Transgenderism, Socialism, and Islam” and vows that the church will lead the fight.
Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, on which Driscoll’s longtime allies Eric Metaxas and Paula White-Cain serve, must deliver its report on “threats to domestic religious liberty” by July 4, 2026, six weeks before midterm voting opens. The findings are meant to guide federal enforcement of religious-exemption rules everyone else has to live under. Driscoll holds no seat on the commission, but he has spent twenty years preaching the theology it was built to protect. In October 2024, he sat in on the National Faith Advisory Board meeting in Atlanta where Trump, then a candidate, promised the pastors a faith office reporting directly to him. Reach was the one thing he had lacked, and Kirk supplied it. He will never hold office, and he never needed to. His power is the pulpit, where he makes dominionist theology sound reasonable — framing opponents as demons and government as ground to be seized — for a generation of young men with no understanding of why his own church threw him out years ago.
In his own words
“It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband… is not responsible for her husband’s sin, but she may not be helping him either.”
— Blog post after the Ted Haggard scandal, when the married evangelical leader was caught paying a male escort for sex and buying meth, 2006.
“If Christian males do not man up soon, the Episcopalians may vote a fluffy baby bunny rabbit as their next bishop to lead God’s men.”
— Blog post on the election of a woman as an Episcopal bishop, 2006.
“There is a pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus, and by God’s grace, it’ll be a mountain by the time we’re done.”
— Mars Hill leadership meeting, 2007, the day after firing two elders.
“The wife performing oral sex on the husband is biblical… Ladies, your husbands appreciate oral sex. They do. So serve them, love them well.”
— Sermon on Song of Solomon, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2007.
“Everything God creates for good, Satan counterfeits for evil… God creates a Kingdom, Satan counterfeits it with Egypt. It’s spiritual warfare.”
— Interview on his book Win Your War, 2019.
“A demon is a transgender, non-binary, sexual being on a spectrum, committing sexual sin, and promoting tolerance.”
— Sermon from his New Days, Old Demons sermon series, 2023.
“A Christian man who doesn’t work is worse than a non-Christian. This includes you, stay-at-home dads.”
— X post, May 25, 2025.
