Poison Pews

Megachurch Politics in Michigan

On Lake Michigan, looking West

This week I spent a day visiting friends on the western shore of Lake Michigan. Settled by the Dutch, the lakefront villages of Ottawa County are orderly and neat and attract tourists and money from Chicago. Late summer is lush, pick-your-own blueberry patches everywhere, sweet corn at its sweetest. Stunning sunsets turn the great lake into a sea of gold every evening. It is one of many areas of our country where beauty and plenty reveal why settlers thought of America as the new promised land.

But for many, it’s not enough.

For the first 30 years of my life I lived in one or another of the bubbles of geographic isolation and social alienation in Michigan and Illinois. I remember well the hard and lonely edge to existence in some of those places. Today, physical isolation from coastal and urban culture remains, but smartphones cricket away in back pockets, demanding instant attention to facts real and fake and to the distant world, always possibly verging on catastrophe.

Ottawa County has been taken over by county commissioners who, nostalgically, see commies under every bed like grandpa did. In 2022 a political movement calling itself Ottawa Impact won the county government on a platform stating that “The Democratic Party is currently led by radical progressive Marxists who seek to divide the American people, rapidly bringing our nation to a state of decline which is nearing socialism and communism.” 

Instead of mustering consensus over local education, health and roads, the new commission’s first order of business was exacerbating rifts, starting with replacing the“Marxist” county motto “You Belong Here” to “Let Freedom Ring.” The new motto, according to their resolution, more accurately conveyed America’s “true history” as a “land of systemic opportunity built on the Constitution, Christianity and capitalism.”

The new commissioners fired the health commissioner (replaced with an HVAC service manager who had gained fame protesting mask mandates) and proclaimed Ottawa a “constitutional county,” using the language of the constitutional sheriffs, who are engaged in a micro-civil war claiming local law is sovereign, and allows them to ignore state and federal law.

Ottawa Impact was founded by 37-year old Joe Moss, a father and political neophyte who runs a small technology company focused on building software for “schools, colleges, and businesses.” So far so good, a Mr. Smith going to Washington. American democracy at its best.

Mr. Moss was motivated to get into politics over outrage that the state forced his kids’ private Christian school to shut its doors during the pandemic. He is a member of one of dozens of new local megachurches where members are bathed every Sunday in homophobic sermons and political propaganda about radical Marxists. According to a Washington Post reporter who spent a few days covering the group:

On a typical Sunday at Moss’s Wellspring Church, people swayed and sang as the band worked its way through the 30-minute set that began every service. Then they settled into the pews and listened as their pastor warned of the “many people” in the country who were “trying to destroy everything that is righteous and good and pure and holy.” They were the sort, he said, who were demanding free condoms at school, “gender fluidity books” in the public library and drag queen story hours.

It’s always us versus them at the megachurches. So many white American Christians, arguably the best defended human beings on planet Earth, have been brainwashed into thinking of themselves as one election away from facing lions in the Roman colosseum.

Lawn sign in Allegan County, Michigan, a “Second Amendment Sanctuary” county

Guns are practically sacramental in this worldview. The new commissioners recently proclaimed Ottawa a “Second Amendment Sanctuary” — just as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed a bill that made Michigan the 19th state with a red flag law. Red flag laws allow the government to seize the weapons of people deemed “an extreme risk” to self or others. As a Second Amendment Sanctuary, in theory, Ottawa law enforcement officers can now ignore the state law. Women and children living in homes with an armed domestics abuser will be free to die, and troubled people considering suicide or mass shootings will be free to go about it.

Let freedom ring.

The last time I was in Michigan, two years ago, I was reporting on the self-proclaimed militia members who, motivated by misogyny, gun-nuttery and pandemic mask rage, plotted to kidnap their governor. My visit happened to coincide with the Fourth of July: a good time to find out how people in the kidnap plotters’ community in post-lockdown Michigan defined freedom - the notion, the urge for - the word that had motivated the crime.

I took my i-phone and notebook to a fireworks display a few counties east of Lake Michigan, near where the militia men were awaiting trial. The evening was warm and hundreds of campers were parked in a public campground. Children gamboled on grass as fireflies began to flicker in the trees. This was the Midwest at its best, as I remembered it from my childhood summer nights.

I stopped at RVs, picnic tables, and recorded men and women in lawn chairs around portable barbecues. To a person, they couldn’t define independence. They got all tangled up in tautology. Was it a sensation? An act? Typical was a woman on a golf cart streaming with Trump and American flags. After some deliberation she said “just that feeling of freedom, I guess.” I pressed her: what was the feeling, though? She could only answer with the word we were trying to define. “Just, feeling free, I guess.”

There might be no better state in which to feel free than the back woods of Michigan. We were taught to call it the Mitten State in elementary school (it’s a north-pointing peninsula shaped like a mitten surrounded by the Great Lakes with a thumb pointing northeast attached to Canada). But it’s also known as the Wolverine State - after the snarling, vicious little beast (presumed extinct, last spotted in Michigan in the 1800s) that once roamed the forest. I never saw a wolverine. But you can still find arrowheads on newly plowed fields, and walk like members of a native tribe, barefoot and alert in the forest, holding a weapon, listening for startled birds and wild beasts.

But winters are long. Imprisoning. When the high green corn is cut and trees turn leafless for winter, poverty shows itself. Abandoned silos, idled auto parts factories, tractor trailers waiting out the black ice, salt-crusted pickups and dinged up SUV’s spilling children at Dollar Generals. Late winter crust of salt on the boots. Dirty mittens scratching at the glazed car windows like Sisyphus and the rock. 

To people waking on a Sunday morning in March to the prospect of the fiftieth straight sunless day, struggling to maintain a sense of purpose, reaching for phones on which millionaires and Tik Tok influencers pump alternate lifestyles and alternate facts into cortexes, the megachurches offer real community around a vengeful God who hates commies, and a Rambo Jesus whose promise of salvation has somehow come to involve unfettered access to guns and that word, so stirring, so elusive, freedom.

Related material

WAPO feature

Red flag laws

Ottawa constitutional county