Two months after appearing onstage at a Christian nationalist concert and being prayed over by far-right former lawmaker Matt Shea, Mayor Nadine Woodward tweeted a photo of herself with her arm around a woman wearing a shirt that read, “DON’T MESS WITH OUR KIDS.” It is the slogan of a national anti-gay, anti-trans campaign saying acceptance of 2SLGBTQIA+ youth is eroding the nuclear family and is a sign of a world slipping into chaos.
And it just so happened that this weekend, Shea hosted one of the campaign’s representatives, Jenny Donnelly, at his downtown church On Fire Ministries, where Donnelly spoke to the congregation and signed her books. Her remarks focused on the need to reject increasing tolerance of 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals. Queer people, she said, are “tormented” and need Christian love.
Woodward appeared to be campaigning in the photo. She and her spokesman Brian Coddington did not return an email requesting comment. We will update this story if they do.
Don’t Mess With Our Kids advocates for requiring that school employees be barred from talking about sexual orientation, requiring that schools inform parents if their kids begin to use different pronouns at school and a full abortion ban at any stage of pregnancy, among other demands.
“I’m going to show you one of the ways the devil takes our kids,” Donnelly told dozens of congregants on Saturday night as a projector displayed an image with text that read, “The Problem: 1 in 5 GenZ self-identify as LGBTQ+.” Donnelly cast the existence of transgender people as a new phenomenon and a front for spiritual warfare, saying, “‘Am I a girl? Am I a boy?’ I mean, I didn’t grow up in this stuff, so I’m thinking, whoa. And it’s a spirit. Because I’m gonna tell you right now, not a single one of them wanted it, right? Not a single one of them wanted it.”
Historians and sociologists say trans and non-binary people have lived in every human society around the world across history.
Donnelly continued, saying people who embrace their 2SLGBTQIA+ identities are broken souls on the inside and need Christians to come tell them the truth and save them. She described a young woman or a girl who came to her distraught and weeping over a same-sex relationship the girl was in but didn’t want. Donnelly told the crowd she saved the girl and then saved her girlfriend, too. These characters didn’t have much dimension — they simply cried that they were lost and Donnelly saved them both.
“It was torment. They were tormented with same-sex, um, images,” Donnelly said. “Probably a lot of it is pornography. Okay? A lot of ’em in pornography. And I just thought, ‘These poor babies, these poor babies, they need us right now.’ And you know what? We pray for them. We get their parents involved, cast out some demons and they’re free by Monday.”
The American Psychological Association says 2SLGBTQIA+ identities “are not illnesses and do not need treatment.”
Co-opting coming-out language originally crafted to affirm queer identities, Donnelly said Christians have a responsibility to publicly explain why those identities are bad. “We’ve got to come out of the closet and tell everybody. … It used to be one in a hundred adults. Now it’s one in five children.”
While it’s true that far more people now openly identify as queer than in prior periods of American history, that’s largely attributable to increasing social acceptance, rather than substantive changes in people’s sexual preferences.
Donnelly cited a quote from Adolf Hitler and characterized 2SLGBTQIA+ communities as trying to claim youth for “evil” ends.
“When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already,’” Donnelly quoted Hitler. “What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time, they will know nothing else but this new community.’”
She explained: “We have to understand that any nation that the enemy [referring to Satan] wants to start crumbling to nothing, you always see them go after the kids. Why? To start unraveling the family, you always start from the bottom, you unravel it from the bottom.”
Invoking Nazi Germany to describe liberal values is a common tactic of Christian nationalist and other far-right figures — they often compare abortion to the Holocaust and say left-wing thought is authoritarian.
During parts of the event, a small boy played with his light-up shoes just below the stage; a girl about the same age fiddled with her dress and stockings.
Donnelly is a pastor at Tetelestai Ministries and founder of the Her Voice Movement (HVM), which seeks to “lead one million women to Washington D.C. for a prayer gathering.” HVM claims to be “divinely connected to Lou Engle,” a charismatic Colorado Springs pastor whose website says, “This socially convulsed post-Roe era puts a demand upon every church in every state to seize the moment, fill the vacuum, and lead the parade of history.”
This echoes Christian nationalist rhetoric among many connected organizations and movements that advocate for Christians to have a heavy — if not exclusive — role in all social arenas from lawmaking to art. The movements stridently oppose any policy that benefits 2SLGBTQIA+ people and can claim many recent political victories like the overturning of Roe v. Wade and other decisions that collapse the separation of church and state.
Donnelly blamed the perceived sinfulness of modern society on churches that are not involved enough.
“They’re not the ones that were supposed to fill the earth,” Donnelly said of people in the 2SLGBTQIA community. “They are filling the earth instead of doing it in their own way. But we can’t look at a drag queen, or whatever, and go, I’m so mad at them for doing this, they didn’t do this. They took up space that the church left open.”
But she hopes to help change that. HVM stages protests across the country and has planned a coordinated demonstration in Washington D.C. and at each state capitol, including in Olympia in April.
