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.
Sean Feucht turned his worship ministry into a multimillion-dollar enterprise and a powerful force in Christian nationalism. As whistleblowers and a major donor demand an accounting of ministry finances, the White House keeps inviting him back.
Key Takeaways
- Revenue at Feucht’s flagship nonprofit jumped twentyfold to $5 million in 2020, the last year it disclosed its finances publicly. His ministry has since bought nearly $7 million in property, and he and his wife hold millions more in homes and rentals.
- A California businessman who gave $250,000 for a 2023 tour sued Feucht for fraud in federal court in March 2026.
- Nine people who worked inside Feucht’s four nonprofits signed a 2025 statement accusing him of embezzlement, wire fraud, and failure to report income to the IRS, and called for an independent investigation and his removal from financial control.
- The Trump administration has kept him close through all of it. He has led White House worship services and headlined a federal housing agency’s rally on the National Mall.
Sean Feucht is giddy in the video he posted to social media on April 25, 2025. The curly-haired Christian nationalist bro points out Trump’s bright red Tesla on his way to the West Wing door like a man showing off his driveway. “So encouraged by the faith leaders God has here in the White House,” Feucht gushed. Five years ago, the state of California treated his concerts as a public-health hazard.
He knows the building well. Trump’s White House stopped releasing visitor logs in April 2017 and confirmed in February 2025 that the second term would be no different. The record of who worships there is whatever gets posted online — and Feucht posts.
By his own accounting, he has been inside at least four times since December 2019, when he crammed into the Oval Office with 49 other pastors and worship leaders as the first impeachment gathered pace. “He sat at his desk, and he said, ‘Pray for me,’” Feucht told Fox News. His latest post outside the West Wing went up on May 15, 2026.
The troubadour who has tied his star to Trump’s is trailed by grift allegations. His product is a crowd — public squares packed with young people singing the country toward Christian rule — and the Trump administration keeps booking it. He has described the LGBTQ+ community as “a cult bent on perverting and destroying the innocence of every child.”
Feucht runs four nonprofits, a 50-state touring operation, and an $11 million real estate empire reaching from a surf town in Orange County, California, to a hunting property in Montana, to a row house on Capitol Hill. Nine people who helped him build it accuse him of embezzling from it. A donor is suing to get his money back.
Neither has kept him off a federal stage.
The donor is Steve Bray. He sells generators in Anaheim — his company has passed a billion dollars in lifetime sales — and gives the profits away through a philanthropy he funds with his wife and staffs with an eight-person board that researches a ministry before a dollar moves.
Feucht came to the office on March 6, 2023. He answered the board’s questions and handed over internal financial documents and a report Bray says will figure in the lawsuit. When the board asked what would happen to the $5 million already in his accounts, he assured the room it was all committed to the work. “He’s very, very, very convincing,” Bray recalled. “We bought into it, hook, line and sinker.”
The donation moved through Bray’s donor-advised fund: $250,000, enough for 10 or more dates on the 2023 “Let Us Worship–Kingdom to the Capitol” tour.
Then Bray visited Camp Elah, the house Feucht keeps in Washington, D.C., near the Supreme Court, for what he calls ministry and prayer meetings. Bray’s own daughter owned a comparable property nearby, and the generator salesman started running numbers on Feucht’s reported $119,000 salary. “None of this makes sense. None of it fits together,” he said.
Bray sued on March 6, 2026, three years to the day after Feucht sat in his office.
The federal complaint accuses Feucht of fraudulent misrepresentation, negligent misrepresentation, unfair business practices, and civil theft by false pretenses, and asks the court for a full accounting of what happened to the money.
Let Us Worship
Feucht was born in Montana in 1983 and grew up leading youth-group worship. He founded Burn 24/7 in 2006, in a dorm room at Oral Roberts University, and grew it into a prayer-and-worship network that now claims outposts on six continents. He led worship at Bethel Church in Redding, California, the New Apostolic Reformation’s flagship megachurch. In 2020, he ran for Congress as a Republican in California’s 3rd District and lost the March 3 primary.
Coronavirus cases were climbing toward the highest count in the country. Gov. Gavin Newsom banned singing in churches on July 1 and closed indoor worship in most of the state on July 13. Feucht took the singing outdoors and called it Let Us Worship.
It was “the most raw, organic, gritty gospel,” he told Fox News, and people were getting healed, saved and delivered. He baptized them in the fountain outside Fresno City Hall. The next day, on a San Diego beach, he dunked his own son in front of 5,000 unmasked people.
The 2020 run’s finale landed on the National Mall on October 25, in cold rain. Reporters on the ground saw a crowd short of the 15,000 his organizers had predicted. Feucht claimed 35,000, and no one ever counted.
Let Us Worship returned to Portland on August 8, 2021. More than 40 uniformed men with batons and helmets ringed the crowd. Among them was Tusitala “Tiny” Toese of the Proud Boys, barred at the time from political protests as a condition of probation. Feucht said he had called churches for help with security after the previous day’s confrontations. He denied any association with the Proud Boys and said he was not familiar with the group.
Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri had prayed with him at the October finale. Feucht asked God to elevate “men and women of faith” into political power.
The Seven Mountains
Feucht’s tours run on the theology of the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR — a loose conglomeration of self-styled apostles and prophets who teach that Christians must take dominion over society before Christ returns, waging spiritual warfare against the demonic powers they believe hold it. Its Seven Mountain framework maps that dominion across government, media, education, business, family, the arts, and religion.
Feucht grew up at the movement’s altars, and his mentors were two of its major apostles: Lou Engle and Ché Ahn, whose TheCall prayer rallies drew him in as a teenager. He stood in Washington, D.C., on September 2, 2000, in a crowd organizers put at 400,000, asking God, as he later told the story, to reverse the “death decree” of Roe v. Wade.
In a 2022 sermon, he asked why believers shouldn’t lead the way in every sphere of society. He has ascribed public support for abortion and trans rights to demonic spirits. At a Tulsa stop on April 20, 2023, he embraced the Christian nationalist label from the stage, telling the crowd that yes, he wants the kingdom to be the government, and that critics who say so have him dead to rights. From other stages he has praised Trump as God’s chosen one. Turning Point USA’s faith division funded the Kingdom to the Capitol tour that carried the message to all 50 state capitols — the tour Bray believed he was underwriting.
A February 2025 Public Religion Research Institute poll found that a majority of Republicans support or sympathize with Christian nationalism.
Worship scholar Emily Snider Andrews told Christianity Today that the world of Bethel, the megachurch where Feucht led worship, talks about its mission in the language of invading and infiltrating: “Worship becomes the means to carry out revival in our world.”
The Collection Plate
Hold the Line, Feucht’s flagship organization, took in $243,000 in 2019. In 2020 it took in $5 million. That was the last number the public would see: the organization restructured as a church, which exempted it from the Form 990 disclosures required of ordinary nonprofits, and it has not filed one since.
MinistryWatch, a Christian nonprofit that grades the country’s 1,000 largest ministries on transparency, gives Sean Feucht Ministries a D, a donor-confidence score of 19 out of 100, and a standing recommendation that donors withhold giving.
Property records show the ministry has purchased nearly $7 million in real estate since 2020: parsonages in Washington, D.C., and San Juan Capistrano, California, a 40-acre hunting property with a cabin in Montana, and 458 acres in Real County, Texas. Feucht and his wife personally hold about $4.5 million more, including seven rental properties in Pennsylvania, a home near Bethel in Redding, California, a Montana property 15 minutes from the ministry’s hunting ground, and an oceanside Dana Point condo bought in April 2025 — three months after the couple sold an Orange County house for $1.7 million. The ministry paid him $119,000 plus a $48,000 housing allowance in its final public filing for 2020, while Light a Candle, his missions organization, added a $37,000 salary and Burn 24/7, his prayer network, another $17,500.
“Decimated”
In June 2025, the people who ran those nonprofits went public. Five former leaders — later nine — published a documented account on a website called Truth and Freedom Stories, and recommended that Feucht be investigated for fraud, donation diversion, and embezzlement. The allegations ran from restricted-donor fraud and credit card misuse to bulk cash smuggling, and they described spiritual coercion, unpaid labor, and retaliation against anyone who asked questions.
Christy Gafford ran Burn 24/7’s national network until the organization expelled her. By her own account, Feucht called her self-seeking, self-righteous, and divisive for pressing its leaders on accountability.
Richie Booth kept the books for Burn 24/7 and Light a Candle after arriving as an intern on Feucht’s congressional campaign. He told the Associated Press he saw ministry money and personal spending run together for years and assumed at first it was carelessness. He watched volunteers pour themselves into believing they were doing something good, wreck their health, neglect their own finances, and end up, he said, “decimated from how much they gave.” Feucht answered with a video dismissing the group as “embittered, upset, angered former volunteers” who had been let go over moral failings — a claim the accusers flatly reject.
Liam Bernhard ran Burn chapters in Oklahoma and the mid-South, put in as much as 50 hours a week on top of a full-time job, covered ministry costs from his own pocket, and got branded a communist, a fascist, and woke for asking where the money went.
A longtime missionary in Iraq worked alongside Light a Candle for years and testified anonymously that Feucht exaggerated or fabricated miracle stories from the region to impress donors. By the missionary’s account, Feucht’s demand for social media content publicly exposed the identities of local converts — people for whom exposure can be fatal — and prompted an Iraqi government investigation into Light a Candle and other missionary groups. “Sean is not a safe leader,” the missionary wrote.
In a 27-minute video, Feucht named the religious press itself as the adversary. Julie Roys had covered the whistleblower allegations, and Christianity Today had reported on his ministry’s finances. He dismissed both as “hack job journalists” bent on tearing him down.
The Church Defense
On June 5, 2026, Feucht’s lawyers asked the court to throw the case out with prejudice. Once Bray sent the $250,000 through the National Christian Foundation, they argued, it stopped being his — along with any right to sue over what became of it. “Plaintiff did not cut a check to Defendants,” attorney David A. Shaneyfelt wrote. The motion says nothing about where the money went.
The filing added a second defense: Let Us Worship operates as an association of churches, and the First Amendment keeps the government out of church finances. The same church status that ended the ministry’s public disclosures in 2020 now shields it from a donor’s demand to see the books. Feucht’s lawyers called the demand a fishing expedition meant to harass him.
The names on the motion reach well past a Calabasas, California, law office. Feucht also retained Lex Politica, the Washington firm whose Supreme Court and appellate practice is chaired by Erin Morrow Hawley — the Alliance Defending Freedom attorney who argued the Supreme Court’s mifepristone case and is married to Sen. Josh Hawley. Filing alongside her is John Ehrett, credited as a contributor to Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership — the authoritarian road map the administration has been enacting since its first day — while serving as Senator Hawley’s chief counsel, and most recently chief of staff to a Federal Trade Commission member. Both are awaiting the court’s permission to appear in the case.
The motion also records what came before it: at a May 29 conference between the two sides, Feucht’s lawyers offered to settle the matter with a confidential third-party audit, its results shared with Bray. By the lawyers’ account, Bray turned it down.
Bray told an interviewer on March 18, 2026, that ministries hide behind church status to keep their books shut. The oversight ran in a circle: prophetic minister Shawn Bolz held a seat on Feucht’s board, while Feucht, tax filings show, sat on the board of Bolz’s Love Coalition in 2019 and 2022.
Bolz would call a stranger out of the crowd and recite the facts of that person’s life as a word from God. Bethel Church cut him off after leaders came to suspect he had been reading his subjects’ social media first. He denies it. The board with authority over Bolz was Love Coalition’s — and Feucht sat on it.
The lawsuit made the news, and Feucht contacted Bray out of the blue. By Bray’s account, neither man had called the other before. Bray said he would meet him. He also said a man who takes his ministry public gives up his privacy. If Feucht’s lawyers are right, nobody has standing to ask what happens to the money moving through his four nonprofits. A federal judge in Los Angeles will decide whether that holds.
The Partner
A week out from the 2024 vote, Trump personally congratulated Feucht for defending religious liberty after his prayer rally on the Mall. Just after 3 a.m. on November 6, Feucht posted a video of a worship session breaking out at Trump’s election headquarters — the West Palm Beach convention center where the campaign gathered for its watch party.
During inauguration weekend, he prayed over the incoming attorney general and agriculture secretary, and posted that he was working through four worship services in a single day, laying hands on members of the new cabinet. Pete Hegseth had been promoting Feucht since 2020, when the Fox & Friends host put him on air to champion the lockdown-defying concerts. On a June 17, 2023, broadcast, Hegseth ran Feucht’s 50-state tour dates on screen and told viewers, “A revival is what we need.”
Feucht embraced him at the National Cathedral’s inaugural prayer service on January 21. Before the month was out, he announced that House Speaker Mike Johnson had invited him to hold worship in the Capitol, and he and Hegseth were already discussing a service inside the Pentagon — months before the defense secretary staged one. On February 7, Trump stood up the new White House Faith Office and handed it to televangelist Paula White-Cain. By June, Feucht had become a repeat worship leader inside the building.
In March 2025, HUD Secretary Scott Turner asked Feucht to join the department’s walkthrough of the Altadena wildfire wreckage. “I’m bringing my guitar. We’re going to worship. We’re going to pray,” Feucht promised his followers the day before. On April 25, he was back in the White House for a worship event marking the administration’s first 100 days, posting “Worship over the West Wing.”
In July 2025, six Canadian cities revoked permits for Feucht’s tour, citing safety concerns and his record on LGBTQ+ people and abortion. At his July 25 Montreal show, a protester smoke-bombed the stage, and the city fined the host church $2,500. In the early hours of July 27, back across the border, Feucht posted a photo of himself in front of his tour bus, kissing U.S. soil. He spent August calling it persecution.
Feucht rebooked the July dates and played every one. On July 31, Abbotsford denied him a permit outright.
Elias Dummer is a Canadian worship musician who has toured the same cities without incident. He answered Feucht in Premier Christianity on August 8: five years of persecution talk had produced no court challenge and no complaint to any Canadian rights body. The story sells tours, and the tours raise money. “Canadians aren’t buying what Sean Feucht is selling. Neither am I,” he wrote. Feucht hit back inside a week.
On September 6, Housing Secretary Turner hosted him at a department-sponsored worship service on the Mall, then declared on social media: “Faith is back in our Nation’s Capital.”
Charlie Kirk had endorsed Feucht’s 2020 congressional run, then invoked the seven mountains from the CPAC stage the same week. When Kirk was assassinated on September 10, 2025, Feucht declared him a martyr within days.
The White House partnership became official in February 2026. Feucht announced on Facebook that his Roots of Revival tour was partnering with both bodies planning the anniversary — America250, chartered by Congress, and Freedom 250, created by Trump — and with the White House Faith Office. The tour would run 20 stops from March to September 2026, routed through the sites Feucht lists as America’s spiritual birthplaces: Cape Henry, where he says the first cross was planted; Valley Forge, where Washington prayed; Gettysburg; Azusa Street, where the 1906 Los Angeles revival launched Pentecostalism — and with it the movement that made him. The White House had already named Let Us Worship a founding partner of its America Prays initiative.
Hung Cao, a retired Navy captain then campaigning for a U.S. Senate seat in Virginia, sat for an interview on Feucht’s program in 2023 and warned that in Monterey, California, “a lot of witchcraft and the Wiccan community has really taken over there,” and that Christians had to mobilize before the same fate reached Virginia. In April 2026, Trump made Cao acting secretary of the Navy. The clip resurfaced.
The stop landed at the Sylvan Theater, beside the Washington Monument, on May 16, 2026, the eve of Rededicate 250, the government prayer rally that would rededicate the country to God from the same Mall. Trump and Hegseth appeared on the jumbo screens. Mike Johnson came in person and closed in prayer.
In an interview published on May 15, Feucht declared the last days underway and pointed believers to his new book, No Turning Back. His publisher put it on sale four days later. After months of partnership, the White House said Feucht’s event had nothing to do with the Freedom 250 program. It went ahead anyway.
The schedule runs through Chicago, Virginia Beach, Missoula, and Boise this summer, with Baton Rouge booked for Halloween and West Palm Beach for November. Bray’s terms have not moved since March: show where the money went, or give it back.
In His Own Words
“This administration, I believe, is carrying some of the most anti-Christ agenda.”
— January 20, 2021, telling followers in an Inauguration Day video where the incoming Biden administration stood.
“We want believers to be the ones writing the laws. Yes. Guilty as charged.”
— April 20, 2023, accepting the Christian nationalist descriptor from a Tulsa stage.
“We need real wild Jehus … those that are willing to destroy works of darkness.”
— August 22, 2024, summoning modern versions of the biblical king who trampled Jezebel, in a video posted to his followers on the closing night of the Democratic convention, which he was watching from the road.
“Every single penny you have donated has gone to fulfill kingdom-ordained purpose.”
— June 10, 2025, answering nine former workers in a video after they published their allegations against him.
“To publicly profess deeply held Christian beliefs is to be labeled an extremist.”
— July 24, 2025, casting six Canadian permit cancellations as religious persecution in an official statement.
“In partnership with our own government and to know that they have our back.”
— February 9, 2026, describing on a livestream what it means to run his 250th-anniversary tour with White House support.
“Worship is a huge part of how we wage war.”
— May 15, 2026, framing worship as an end-times weapon as his federal tour reached Washington.
