Hard-right extremist Matt Shea has been increasingly active in the Christian supremacist movement, including attending an anti-trans event in Seattle on May 27 sponsored by Don’t Mess With Our Kids (DMOK), at which more than 20 attendees were arrested.
Listed as an antigovernment group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, DMOK is run by leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a Christian supremacy movement bent on putting all areas of shared life, including the government, under the authority of NAR followers. NAR is the dominant Christian supremacist movement in the U.S.
DMOK calls abortion a “modern-day child sacrifice” and a “demonic altar,” while also pushing the fiction that supporting trans and queer children constitutes demonic abuse. The group hopes to stoke parental anxieties about children into a political flame that will ignite theocracy across the country.
Shea endorsed and attended the Seattle event. A former six-term Washington state legislator, Shea was notorious for his ties to militias and charges that he engaged in domestic terrorism. An independent report in 2019 for the Washington House of Representatives stated he had “planned, engaged in, and promoted a total of three armed conflicts of political violence against the United States government.” In response, the Legislature stripped Shea of his committee positions and ejected him from his own GOP caucus.
None of this stopped Shea. Now out of government, he continues to be part of a growing web of hard-right groups, united by antigovernment ideologies and Christian extremism, that have taken root in the Pacific Northwest.
Shea the lawmaker and his biblical war
After being elected to the Washington Legislature in 2008, Shea became a sought-after speaker on the hard right. He was particularly popular among militias and antigovernment groups, including the Oath Keepers.
While serving as a lawmaker in 2018, Shea distributed a document called “Biblical Basis for War.” The text argues that one should completely crush one’s ideological enemy. One must “Fight to win so you don’t have to fight again,” and, if the enemy does not agree to terms, then one must “kill all males.” The document lists five demands the enemy must meet to avoid this fate:
“Stop all abortions;
No same-sex marriage;
No idolatry or occultism;
No communism;
and Must obey Biblical law.”
This text is not just a recipe for war; it is a call for genocide. Within a patriarchal and supremacist worldview, to “kill all males” not only means that a people will be rendered incapable of defending themselves, it also means the effective destruction of the community’s future, as the women left will only be able to procreate outside the community.
Shea’s reference to killing the men, and the inference that the rest of the community will be at the victor’s mercy, is perhaps an allusion to Deuteronomy 20:13-14, which reads: “And when the Lord your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword. You may, however, take as your plunder the women, the children, livestock, and everything else in the town, all its spoil. You may enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you.”
Shea denied the document was anything more than notes he made for sermons that drew on biblical notions of warfare. Shea’s own actions and affiliations, however, undercut his disavowal. He was involved with a group that offered small-arms trainings. One member of the group stated on a video, a local CBS affiliate reported, that this was “basically a school of learning for young men” to give them all the “skills that they need to be effective in Christian warfare.”
The local sheriff offered a different characterization. In an email to The Spokesman-Review, he said Shea’s document wasn’t written as “a Sunday school project or an academic study.” Instead, former Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich said, it was “a ‘how to’ manual consistent with the ideology and operating philosophy of the Christian Identity/Aryan Nations movement and the Redoubt movement of the 1990s.”
“Biblical Basis for War” takes images and narratives from the Hebrew Scriptures — commonly called the Old Testament in Christianity — out of context and reimagines them to support Shea’s modern political agenda. These are dog whistles of the right, not ancient truths, and they make it easy to see that Shea is contorting biblical stories to fit his present-day, extremist, violent theology.
When news first broke of Shea’s “Biblical Basis for War” document, he said in a video that it reflected just war theory, a centuries-old theological tradition in various Christian denominations. The just war theory not only sets the conditions for when war is allowed but also sets parameters over how violence should be used during war, employing the least force necessary to make sure one’s declaration and execution of war are just and restrained. “Just war” theorists oppose atrocities and the dehumanization of the enemy, striking a balance between the theological imperatives of justice and loving one’s enemies.
This is not the case with Shea. His outline for biblical war advocates for total cultural and political domination and the use of outright slaughter to achieve these goals. “Kill all males” is the kind of indiscriminate slaughter that just war theory hopes to guard against.
Shea appears to have taken existing antigovernment and hard-right conspiracy theories and folded them into one, combining violent Christian extremism, the communist-baiting conspiracy theories of the John Birch Society, armed militias, localism and secessionism. He is an example of how these hard-right movements can combine to create a very dangerous mix that threatens democratic governance.
Lawmaker turned religious leader
Shea’s violent Christian supremacy and his ties to the extremist right eventually cost him his legislative career. His own Legislature requested an independent investigation into his purported involvement in several violent acts by antigovernment extremists. The report accuses Shea of training young men for holy war based on the principles laid out in his “Biblical Basis for War” and for supporting insurrections, including two armed standoffs orchestrated by members of the Bundy family. The report also said he met with members of the Oath Keepers, including the group’s founder, Stewart Rhodes, where they discussed “militias, weapons, stockpiling ammunition, the Bundy Ranch, Special Forces, and snipers.”
After the investigation, Shea lost his committee positions and membership in the GOP caucus, which he once helped lead. He did not run for reelection in 2020. Soon after his political career ended, Shea became a pastor. He took over a church in Spokane from Ken Peters, whose goal is to seed “Patriot churches” around the country. Soon after, Shea broke with Peters and founded his own church, On Fire Ministries, also located in Spokane.
This move did not moderate Shea’s views. Instead, he seems to have linked his fortunes to the NAR. This movement has been central in organizing support for President Donald Trump, and over the last decade, has become the theology of MAGA and the Trump administration. NAR leaders helped rally their members to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, and the days preceding, with some speaking the day before in favor of Trump’s continued presidency. Several leaders have espoused their own Christian supremacist vision, claiming that they, as “the Church, are God’s governing Body on the earth.”
Shea and the NAR
Shea doesn’t just promote local NAR leaders. There is strong evidence that Shea’s new church is itself NAR, and that he is at the center of a growing Christian supremacist movement in the Pacific Northwest.
Shea’s On Fire Ministries professes the “fivefold ministry” principle that aligns with NAR based on a reading of Ephesians 4:11-13 from the Christian New Testament:
“He himself granted that some are apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.”
NAR sees this passage as a God-ordained leadership structure prioritizing apostles and prophets that seeks to replace current Christian denominations, especially those organized around democratic processes and values. In their place, the NAR aims to reestablish apostles, who have total authority over their church networks, and prophets, who receive commands directly from God. That structure is far more authoritarian than those of many mainline Christian churches. It creates a top-down hierarchy that gives great power to individual leaders.
Shea has preached in support of other NAR theologies, such as the “Seven Mountains Mandate,” an easily remembered word choice used by some in the NAR that divides society into seven areas, all of which dominionist Christians are called to conquer and dominate to create a theocratic America. Shea has met with Lance Wallnau, a leading NAR figure and prophet who coined the term “Seven Mountains.” According to People for the American Way, Shea has expressed his theology of domination publicly:
“My love of God and my love for his word is the source of my nationalism, because I want to see it rule. … The most important thing we will ever do is proclaim the kingdom of Jesus Christ throughout all the world. … The second most important thing is to make sure we can do the first most important thing, and that’s the purpose of government.”
Shea often uses a laptop during his videocasts featuring a sticker reading in bold, “DOMINION.”
Shea has also shared the stage and worked with several NAR leaders beyond Wallnau, particularly those in the Pacific Northwest, including Jenny Donnelly, the NAR apostle behind DMOK, as well as Sean Feucht, a worship singer and Christian supremacist. Feucht has toured the country visiting each state capitol, as well as the U.S. Capitol, to play music meant to dispel the demons who, according to many NAR leaders, hold sway over legislatures and the Democratic Party.
Feucht is a good example of the kind of corruption that top-down charismatic authority invites. Five leaders of Feucht’s organization have recently called for an investigation into purported abuse, embezzlement and fraud, an “abuse of power” and outright lying. These accusations come just two years after Shea presented Feucht with a “Defender of Liberty Award” in June 2023, claiming it was a divine directive.
Christian extremism in the Pacific Northwest
Shea has become a leader in the growing religious extremism taking root in the Pacific Northwest. Beyond the Patriot Church, which started in Spokane, Shea has spoken at the Collective Church in Cashmere, Washington. The church is connected to the Portland-based NAR leader Jenny Donnelly and co-run by a rising star in the NAR world, Folake Kellogg. Both Shea and Kellogg were part of the May event in Seattle where over 20 protesters were arrested, and Shea has interviewed both Donnelly and Kellogg on his podcast.
Shea seems to have connections to many Christian extremist groups beyond the NAR. He has been involved in Marble Community Fellowship in Stevens County, Washington, and has been an annual speaker at its “God and Country Celebration.” This connects Shea with another Christian supremacist strain, as one of the fellowship’s recent pastors is Barry Byrd, who has promoted the deeply racist and antisemitic Christian Identity theology.
Shea’s many connections illustrate the ways in which theocratic extremists fit far too comfortably with other branches of political extremism. Their worldviews overlap, seeing the diversity of the United States and inclusive, meaningful democracy as an existential threat. Their vision of Christianity is so narrow that most of humanity, as well as compassion and common decency, are excluded.
Shea preached to a 2013 Idaho audience about stockpiling ammunition for his vision of the future:
“We want to prepare for the inevitable collapse that’s gonna happen. And yes, I said that as a politician here onstage. It’s gonna happen! We all know that! The question is, and I think the question should be for all of us, what are we gonna do afterwards? What are we gonna do with that opportunity?”
Shea is part of a matrix of movements and organizations steeped in conspiracy theory, apocalyptic thinking and extremist theology. As journalist Leah Sottile wrote, “In Shea’s world, the country is on the verge of collapse.” This paranoid worldview justifies and sometimes outright promotes violence. It coyly hides behind biblical imagery and narrative, and its adherents claim they’re using metaphor or just engaging in their faith tradition. But this movement’s leaders deploy this imagery politically to achieve a Christian supremacist world. Leaders like Shea look to a future where the need for such violence is an “opportunity.”
Image at top: Matt Shea, a former Washington state legislator, attended an anti-trans event in Seattle on May 27, 2025, at which more than 20 attendees were arrested. (Photo illustration by the SPLC; original images from Alamy and iStock)