The Family Research Council held its annual Pray Vote Stand activist conference Sept. 24-26 at Cornerstone Chapel, a right-wing megachurch in Leesburg, Virginia. At the end of the conference, FRC President Tony Perkins announced that this would be the final PVS summit, saying that the organization will prioritize efforts to build church-based Pray Vote Stand chapters in every county in the U.S., an initiative launched earlier this year.
Being organized as local “cells” will make the movement less vulnerable to political or legal attacks, said Perkins. Using rhetoric popular among dominionist activists, Perkins said such a network would allow conservative Christians to “occupy” until the Lord returns.
Organizing at the local level was one theme of this year’s gathering, along with perennial religious-right favorites like viewing politics as spiritual warfare, promoting anti-Muslim bigotry, criminalizing abortion, and reversing progress toward LGBTQ equality. Right Wing Watch will be reporting on the conference over the next few days.
A Friday breakout session hosted by Colorado-based dominionist Andrew Wommack’s Truth & Liberty organization was listed on the schedule as “Saving Your State: How Truth & Liberty is Transforming Colorado.” A flyer handed out by Truth & Liberty carried a less optimistic headline: “How to Keep Your State from Becoming Colorado.” One of its instructions: Win small first so you can win big later.
Pricella Tiegen, Colorado Director of Field Operations for Truth & Liberty, described her strategy for building political power at the local level by identifying, getting to know, and mobilizing conservative pastors. She said the group is using successful organizing in Pueblo as a model for “taking territory” in other cities.
She described doing research to find a “remnant” of Pueblo pastors who shared T&L’s worldview. Her first meeting brought five core pastors together with Christian nationalist activists David and Tim Barton and Mark Gonzalez. The next meeting had 22 pastors. In 2023, she said, the group helped elect the mayor, a city councilmember, and three school board members. During her remarks and in conversation with activists afterward, Tiegen stressed that going “incognito” is an important part of their strategy, so as not to alert their enemies on the left. “We are doing it in Colorado silently…We’re not in media,” she said.
Truth & Liberty created a nonprofit called Transform Colorado that she said has identified 3000 churches statewide that are distributing voter guides for the midterm elections. Tiegen said their voter guides have helped them flip school boards throughout the state.
Also promoting the importance of local races was a team from iVoterGuide, a project of the American Family Association’s political action arm, that creates voter guides designed to mobilize conservative Christian voters to back candidates who share the group’s worldview. Debbie Wuthnow, the project’s president, told attendees that the group is expanding its reach from national and statewide races to local elections like school boards, based in part on research by FRC-affiliated pollster George Barna finding that many people do not vote in down-ballot races because they don’t know anything about the candidates.
Recruiting conservative clergy and congregants to run for office has long been a priority of Christian nationalist organizers. Among the Saturday speakers was Scott Thomson, lead pastor of River of Life Church and a member of the city council in Oroville, California. He was introduced as having “helped transform the city council from having no members connected to a local church to having a super majority of Christians who actively serve in their churches.” Thomson used his time on the platform to plug his book, “The Watchman’s Call,” which “equips believers, pastors, and leaders to reclaim their biblical role in shaping culture.”
Another panelist, pastor Travis Carey of Calvary Chapel of Greater Portland in southern Maine, talked about his efforts to encourage other churches in Maine to be engaged in politics and public policy, saying, “Anyone who somehow has bought into the secularist lie that America is not a Christian nation has slept through history class.” Carey compared the situation of Christians in the U.S. today with Christians in Germany during the rise of the Nazi regime:
My fear is that if the Lord tarries in coming back, and 30 years from now, if we don't get involved, I think the next generation is going to say, “Where was the church? Where was the church when genitalia was being mutilated? Where was the church when the seculars were taking over? Where was the church when the drag shows were happening in elementary schools?” So we have to get involved because we are the watchmen on the wall. God has called his church to be an offensive weapon, and it his primary vehicle in which souls would be saved. And we are to stand on the truth of God's holy word. So we have to act.
Perkins’ decision to drop the activist summit may also reflect the fact that Pray Vote Stand—previously known as the Values Voter Summit—is no longer the political powerhouse it once was. FRC launched the Values Voter Summit in 2006 after the implosion of the Christian Coalition, whose Road to Victory conference had been the preeminent national gathering for Christian-right activists. It got some competition a few years later when Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition began holding an annual Road to Majority conference, which is ongoing.
In its heyday, FRC’s gathering drew President Trump, Vice President Vance, and multiple members of Congress. This year, the Trump administration was represented by U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who called in from Jerusalem. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a longtime Christian-right activist and friend of Perkins, called in from his backyard in Louisiana, and Sen. Josh Hawley and his anti-abortion-activist and attorney wife Erin sat down for a conversation with Perkins as part of the event’s opening ceremony.
In addition to FRC Action, conference sponsors included AFA Action, religious-right legal groups Alliance Defending Freedom and First Liberty, Truth & Liberty, youth-focused RenewaNation, phone company and right-wing funder Patriot Mobile, and Seven Weeks Coffee, which donates a portion of its sales to anti-abortion pregnancy centers.
