Christian Men's Conference Features Men Who Disparage Women
Speakers Josh Howerton, Mark Driscoll, and Graham Allen headline a Christian nationalist men’s conference set at the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington. (TRR Graphic)
A Christian men’s conference, aiming to gather 20,000 fathers and sons at The Gorge Amphitheater in central Washington state in June, has a line up of speakers who have disparaged women and referred to them as their genitalia.
The Father’s Day weekend Freedom Con is organized by Stronger Man Nation, a Christian nationalist group founded by Josh McPherson, pastor of Grace City Church in nearby Wenatchee. This year’s speakers include Josh Howerton, who made “jokes” about sexually subservient women; Ryan Visconti, who said wives are toxic unless they’re weaker than men, and Graham Allen, who spoke of his mother as a “vagina.”
Perhaps the most controversial is Mark Driscoll, who under the pseudonym William Wallace II, once wrote that God created women to be “penis homes.”
Driscoll was celebrated as an “evangelical bad boy” whose brash style was a model for reaching a postmodern generation until mounting accusations of misused funds and spiritual abuse threw his church into crisis. He abruptly resigned from Mars Hill Church in Seattle in 2014.
He has since has relaunched and rebranded in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he’s reportedly demanded unquestioned loyalty from staff and hired firms to surveille ousted members.
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According to McPherson, the Freedom Con conference is “summoning” Christian men who will fight for freedom.
“It is our land. It is our heritage,” McPherson said in an announcement video. “We will rise together. We will stand together. We will resist together. We will not watch Washington state plunge into the abyss. We will liberate Washington state. We will dedicate Washington state back to Jesus Christ.”
One of the nation’s bluest states, Washington is split between its conservative half in central and eastern counties and its far more populous western half across the Cascade mountains. It was the only state where the GOP did not gain ground during the 2024 presidential election.
A second video, released last week, advertised the Stronger Man Nation Freedom Con with a montage of manly men doing manly things. Footage of actor John Wayne firing a lever-action rifle and baseball great Babe Ruth slugging a ball out of the park transitions into shots of contemporary podcasters, preachers and politicians.
McPherson and Driscoll best friends
Since launching Trinity Church in Scottsdale, Arizona, Driscoll has risen like a phoenix, returning to public attention as a Christian champion of aggressive masculinity and Donald Trump’s political agenda and style.
Driscoll “tried on a number of hats,” Mike Cosper, host of “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill,” told The Roys Report (TRR) in 2025. “What he’s found in the last couple of years is a niche that really works for him. … MAGA Mark is like the new Mark.”
But Driscoll was always welcome in Wenatchee, a three-hour drive east of his old church. He has described McPherson, pastor of Grace City, as one of his best friends and a “friend who sticks closer than a brother.”
McPherson trained under Driscoll in 2010 and modeled Grace City after Mars Hill. The central Washington church is estimated to have about 4,000 members. A few years ago, it was reportedly able to raise $15.5 million in 10 weeks for a new school and to plant a church across the country in Georgia.
McPherson has served on the board of Mark Driscoll Ministries and has asked Driscoll to preach at his church multiple times in the last 12 years.
In Driscoll’s most recent sermon at Grace City last month, he called Grace City one of America’s greatest churches, and said he and McPherson work together very closely.
“Pastor Josh and I talk on the phone a lot, especially for heterosexual men,” Driscoll said. “We talk on the phone a lot — like junior high girls would think we talk a lot.”
In that sermon, Driscoll also spoke about the need for Christians to get aggressive about politics. He said Christians are responsible for bringing everything under the authority of Christ and fighting the “Jezebel spirit” of the End Times, which he said has a stronghold in his former hometown.
Driscoll pointed specifically to Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, a Democratic Socialist who has spoken publicly about having an abortion. He said her office, with its promotion of diversity, is one of Satan’s “injection points.”
“Make no mistake what you guys are up against,” Driscoll said in his hour-long sermon. “It’s powerful. It’s evil. It’s demonic. It’s entrenched. And what you’re trying to do is remarkably important because if the church won’t fight, there’s no one left to fight.”
Pursuing political power
Such political rhetoric has become common at Grace City in the last few years, according to independent journalist Dominick Bonny.
McPherson opposed COVID-19 pandemic mandates that restricted church gatherings and preached in November 2020 that Christians are sometimes morally required to break the law. Church members were urged to get involved in local protests and in 2021, a group refused to comply with the mask mandate at a school board meeting.
Church leaders said at the time that to contend for truth in contemporary culture, Christians need to seek power.
“If godly people will not seek political power and use it,” McPherson wrote in an ebook defending the idea of Christian nationalism, “godless people will. Your choice.”
Grace City’s executive pastor, Adam James, preached a sermon calling for Christians to run for office to fight the forces of cultural Marxism. Last month, he announced he’s running against a fellow Republican for a seat in the state legislature.
“The hour is late and the hour is dark,” James said. “Our state deserves fighters.”
Recruiting fighters
The Stronger Man Nation conference has been explicitly designed to mobilize such fighters.
“We will fight for our wives, our children, our faith, and our freedom,” McPherson said in his announcement video, filmed in front of a mounted deer head and a flag. “America did not make it 250 years because weak men scrolled in silence. … I’ve called warriors and patriots in Christ to join me in this historic moment. No more apologizing for biblical manhood.”
Several of the invited speakers have run for political office before. Nate Schatzline, a pastor at Mercy Culture Church in Fort Worth, Texas, is also a state representative who has served two terms.
Schatzline’s pastor, Landon Schott, once claimed, “You’re not a Christian if you vote for a Democrat.” And Schatzline has pushed churches to endorse political candidates, which until recently was prohibited under the terms of religious tax exemption. The New Yorker called him one of the “new faces of Christian nationalism.”
“We’re not taking seats in government,” Schatzline said on a Stronger Man Nation podcast. “We’re giving seats to God in government.”
Refused to apologize
Graham Allen, an Iraq war veteran and podcaster, ran in a Republican congressional primary in South Carolina in 2021, trying to unseat a congressman who had voted to impeach Trump. When a Republican suggested he should run in Mississippi, where he was born, Allen sarcastically apologized.
“I’m sorry that I couldn’t control what vagina I came out of and where it was located when I came out of it,” he said.
Allen, who was raised by his grandparents, later repeated the comments to a Republican’s women’s group. Facing backlash, he said he wouldn’t apologize for his biblical view of gender.
“I can’t help what vagina I came out of,” Allen said again, according to local media reports. “I will stand by that truth. … Babies come out of women and men are men.”
He later dropped out of the race.
Other speakers at the Freedom Con conference have not run for office but are politically active Trump supporters, who speak with urgency about what they call a crisis in masculinity. The full line-up includes authors Eric Metaxas and David Barton, podcaster Chad Robichaux and pastor John Lovell.
David Crowder is scheduled to perform, “bringing his signature vintage Southern rock to the men of FREEDOM CON on Saturday night,” according to the website.
Controversy is church growth strategy
None of the speakers are strangers to controversy. Pursuit NW pastor Russell Johnson, who once aspired to run for U.S. Congress but started a multisite church in the Seattle suburbs instead, has clashed with local authorities, neighbors and progressive activists.
Last year, he was involved in a Mayday USA event in Seattle, which one city leader called a “far-right rally” designed “to provoke a reaction … in the heart of Seattle’s most prominent LGBTQ+ neighborhood.”
More than 20 trans-rights protestors were arrested for allegedly attacking police and people at the event. Christian organizers later sued the city over the incident.
Johnson says fearlessness is what the times demand and will only grow the church.
“I want to be on the most wanted posters in the hallways of hell,” he said on Christian nationalist Lance Wallnau’s podcast. “I want all of hell to have a panic attack when Pursuit gathers for worship, when we gather behind candidates, when we speak out on social issues …. I just want to keep my foot on the gas.”
Masculine aggression is also the means of rejecting what McPherson describes as the deadly threat of empathy.
“Empathy is dangerous. Empathy is toxic. Empathy will align you with hell,” he said in a podcast last year. “And — this will be controversial — women are especially vulnerable to this.”
Women are not invited to the men’s gathering at The Gorge, according to the FAQ page on Stronger Man Nation website. Tickets for attendees under 12 cost $99. General admission for 12 and up costs $149.
Daniel Silliman is senior reporter/editor at The Roys Report. He began his two decades in journalism covering crime in Atlanta and has since led major investigations into abuse and misconduct in Christian contexts. Daniel and his wife live in Johnson City, Tennessee.
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