How a Wisconsin pastor is leading the far-right crusade to criminalize LGBTQ people and destroy Western Christianity
Last September, Rev. Matthew Trewhella, pastor of Mercy Seat Christian Church in Hartland, Wisconsin, a town of 10,000 in Waukesha County, gave a sermon titled “Charlie Kirk, TPUSA, and Homosex: A Warning.”
In the days following Kirk’s assassination on September 10, conservative pundits and politicians paid tribute to Kirk, with Vice President J.D. Vance hosting a special edition of “The Charlie Kirk Show” live from the White House.
But Trewhella, an activist and leader on the Christian Right for four decades, took a much different direction. While he described the assassination as “horrific, incredibly evil,” he explicitly denounced Kirk and his legacy organization, Turning Point USA (TPUSA). He called out the “deification” of Charlie Kirk, which, he said, “had reached bizarre and idolatrous levels … pushed by the media, by the Republicans, by the conservatives, and by countless Christian ministries and individuals.”
Attributing this to evil “political shenanigans,” Trewhella said, “The churchmen need to repent of using the current hoopla and virtue signaling for their own ends to promote themselves and their organizations.” But he didn’t stop there. He accused the Republican Party, Donald Trump and Western Christianity of “platforming” openly gay people and promoting what he calls “homo sex,” which he believes should be criminalized.
He continued the rhetorical assault in a tendentious essay titled “Four Reasons the Magistrates have a Duty to Criminalize Homosexual Acts,” posted on Mercy Seat’s website, where he reiterated his call for the criminalization of homosexuality. “Either the West will destroy itself or the magistrates will suppress the behavior,” he wrote. “History teaches us it will be the former.”
For more than a decade, Trewhella has taken his “Lesser Magistrates” argument to pulpits, podcasters and governmental bodies nationwide.
Although Trewhella has long held views against homosexuality, his attacks on the Republican Party were an unambiguous escalation that suggested the opening of a long campaign. Such an effort—in coordination with his reach online, his small but dedicated congregation, and far right activists across the country—would not only bring further pressures on an already beleaguered LGBTQ community, but it could fracture the close bonds between conservative Christianity and the Republican Party in which Trewhella has quietly played a significant role for years.
This is no small thing. Trewhella been a militant anti-abortion leader on the Christian Right since the 1980s, but in recent years he has also emerged as a revolutionary thought leader via his self-published 2013 book The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates: A Proper Resistance to Tyranny and a Repudiation of Unlimited Obedience to Civil Government. Rooted in his interpretation of 16th century Calvinism and the modern, theocratic Christian Reconstructionist movement, Trewhella’s book argues that when government strays from God’s word, it is up to lower-level government leaders to defy “ungodly” laws and remove the “tyrant” by whatever means necessary to restore a Godly order. Locally, lower magistrates might be mayors, sheriffs, county commissioners or town councilors.
In practice, Trewhella’s doctrine has gained traction on the far-right. He has notably found a powerful audience among those who consider themselves to be “constitutional sheriffs”—a far-right political myth that imagines county sheriffs enjoy extraordinary, and often extra-legal, powers. His justification for resisting state and federal laws deemed tyrannical and contrary to God’s law is congruent with the vision of biblically-based county government promoted by the growing Constitutional County movement, which the Public Wise research group has called “hyper-local authoritarianism” and “ ‘States Rights’ on Steroids.”
“Second Amendment Sanctuaries” according to pro-gun advocate and retailer tacticalgear.com
In 2024, Public Wise collected county-level data in nine battleground states (Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) and found that nearly one-quarter of counties had asserted some measure of county supremacy over state and/or federal legislation, or had permitted local law enforcement to decide whether to enforce that legislation. “When most eyes remain on the highest levels of government for increasing signs of democratic erosion,” the authors wrote, “we may miss a crucial battle being fought right now in our county-level governments.”
Trewhella has regaled numerous county governments and even the annual conference of the National Sheriff’s Association with his theory of the lesser magistrate. In recent years, the far-right Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) has also promoted Trewhella’s doctrine. Alongside the Florida Foundation for Freedom, CSPOA has begun drafting model county ordinances that encourage county commissioners to refuse to follow or enforce any federal or state law they see as unconstitutional. Taken together, Trewhella’s September pronouncements suggested this may be one means of waging his campaign.
A video excerpt of Trewhella’s September sermon posted on The Future of Christendom YouTube channel, titled “Pastor Matt Trewhella Calls Out Compromise of TPUSA and Scott Presler,” offered a glimpse of the dramatic new rift.
Scott Presler, a 37-year-old openly gay Republican voter mobilization activist, is Exhibit A for Trewhella’s grievances.
Presler—who first came out as gay after the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida—got his start as an organizer for the Republican Party of Virginia during the 2016 election. He made a name for himself organizing anti-Muslim “March Against Sharia” rallies in 2017 and eventually became a prominent speaker in the “Stop the Steal” movement promoting Trump’s false claim the 2020 election was stolen.
Standing at 6’5,” with strait black hair hanging down to his belt, Presler is a striking figure. In 2023, TPUSA began featuring Presler at events to promote the unsuccessful campaign of Carolyn Carluccio, the anti-abortion GOP candidate for a Pennsylvania state supreme court seat. And, in 2024, Kirk gave Presler a reported $5 million for electoral work in Wisconsin. (Presler also became a co-founder of Gays for Trump ahead of the 2024 election.)
In Trewhella’s view, TPUSA and the Republican Party’s collusion with openly gay figures like Presler is not merely hypocrisy among politicos claiming to promote wholesome “family values.” He sees it as defiance of God’s law, for which there will be consequences.
In his essay calling for the criminalization of homosexuality, he complained that “the form of Christianity we have in America and throughout the West is a hybrid—it is not true Christianity.” What’s more, he said that it “is incapable of reforming itself—and as such God must judge and destroy it. Judgement has begun in the house of the Lord.”
This judgement goes beyond the erasure of civil rights for LGBTQ people in American society. The events of the past six years, Trewhella has said, constitute a “low-level civil war going on in our nation.” In Trewhella’s view, that war strikes at the heart of America’s constitutional democracy—a war he plans on winning.
Trewhella was not alone in objecting to the deification of Kirk. Soon after Kirk’s assassination, progressive pastor and author John Pavalovitz called the glorification of Kirk “shameful Christian idolatry.” But Trewhella’s views stood in sharp contrast to many other Christian conservatives.
Some leaders of the evangelical, neo-charismatic New Apostolic Reformation, for example, issued hosannas about Kirk in the wake of his assassination.
Apostle Lance Wallnau called Kirk “our greatest leader.” Apostles Mark W. Pfeifer and John P. Kelly, co-convenors of the International Coalition of Apostolic Leaders, joined the chorus, declaring “Charlie Kirk has embodied what it means to be an apostolic leader” and that “he may be considered one of the most important voices in our nation’s history… he may have saved America from sliding into a far-left liberalism that represents the antithesis of everything the Bible teaches.”
This was not the first time Trewhella broke with the conservative consensus. Nor are his views of establishment complicity anything new. In a speech in 2023, he denounced mainstream evangelicalism and Christianity Today magazine. As Phoebe Petrovic reported in 2024 for ProPublica and Wisconsin Watch:
‘When you see sodomy running rampant, when you see women in government, when you see men behaving like effeminate little squirrels, judgment is in the land,’ Trewhella said during a 2020 sermon.
Last year, he said homosexuality should be treated as a crime, noting that the Bible called for the death penalty for ‘the filth of sodomy.’
Following TPUSA’s 2024 announcement that it would fund Presler’s Wisconsin electoral efforts, Trewhella called Presler “an open sodomite” and said that Kirk was a “Trojan Horse in the Republican Party.” He complained that Kirk had long sought to normalize homosexuality to Christians and conservatives.
In his September 2025 sermon, Trewhella cast himself as a prophetic truth teller who has often been made a pariah by the Republican Party. He described himself as being routinely “vilified” for speaking up, invoking his stance against the Iraq War and his condemnation of public health safety protocols during the Covid-19 pandemic—where he compared mask mandates to the kind of infringement of freedoms that led to the Holocaust. But, in his own telling, the same people who vilify him end up seeing that “what I say is true.”
Republicans’ platforming of gay people is just the latest example, which he said “sends mixed signals to our sons and daughters. It spits in the face of God and impugns his law and word.”
He added that TPUSA also featured the also openly gay Trump ally, Richard Grenell on its eight member “Honorary Board” in 2024. During the 2024 election campaign, Grenell called Trump “the most pro-gay president in American history.”
Grenell is a significant figure in the Trump world. He served as Trump’s ambassador to Germany from 2018 to 2020 and as Acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) in 2020—making him the first openly gay cabinet level official in U.S. history. Trump appointed him as interim President of the Kennedy Center in 2025. (A few months later the board voted to add Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center.)
It is of course, more than paradoxical that the Trump administration has waged a wide-ranging assault on the rights of LGBTQ people in all areas of the federal government, and beyond.
The same could be said of Kirk. As Pavlovitz wrote, “In a 2024 episode of his show, Kirk quoted a Leviticus passage calling for gay people to be stoned to death, referring to it as ‘God’s perfect law,’ and called for ‘a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor.’ ”
But Trewhella is not wrong that the late Charlie Kirk, Presler, and Grenell are part of the mainstream of the Republican Party. And there are, of course, many other openly LGBTQ figures in the Republican Party, the conservative movement and the Trump administration.
Trewhella flagged these prominent figures to highlight his charge that Republican and conservative leaders are “selling filth as freedom.” As he wrote in his September essay, “The powers that be, seem to want to create a new civil religion which includes homosex being accommodated, embraced and honored.”
Trewhella is no ordinary Christian Right activist. As ProPublica reported, he grew up in a Catholic family, but found himself living a “life of sin and crime” after joining a gang on the east side of Detroit where he “dealt drugs, stole cars, firebombed houses, robbed businesses, burglarized homes, fought other gangs, and fenced stolen items to the Mafia.” At 17, he found his way to an evangelical drug rehab program, where, in 1978, he “was converted to Christ.”
By the early 1980s, Trewhella had become a militant anti-abortion leader and, after graduating from Valley Forge Christian College, became pastor of Mercy Seat in 1989. He split with the direct-action group Operation Rescue following the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta in 1988, and co-founded Missionaries to the Preborn in Milwaukee. There, he led massive abortion clinic blockades but found infamy in 1993 as one of three dozen signers of a manifesto that declared the murder of abortion providers to be “justifiable homicide.” He also called for the formation of church-based militias.
In recent years, he has become the eminence grise of the abortion abolitionist movement, which not only seeks the outright criminalization of abortion, but sneers at incremental anti-abortion measures as “regulating murder.”
The notion of abolition has become an influential discussion in the anti-abortion movement. In Missouri, for example, abortion abolition activists have proposed a new abortion ban that will go before voters in November this year, which seeks to undo a 2024 ballot measure that enshrined the right to abortion in the state’s constitution.
For more than a decade, Trewhella has taken his “Lesser Magistrates” argument to pulpits, podcasters and governmental bodies nationwide.
On his website devoted to the topic for his organization Defy Tyrants, he highlighted a recent example of the efficacy of his campaign. In Craig County, Virginia, the county board passed a resolution in December 2025 declaring their Appalachian county “a 2nd Amendment Sanctuary County.” They were concerned about a suite of prospective gun control legislation introduced by the Democratic Party-controlled legislature and likely to be signed by Abigail Spanberger, the newly elected Democratic governor.
County Supervisor Jason Matyas says he foresees the Democrats imposing a “gun control tyranny.” The doctrine of the lesser magistrate, he wrote was:
[T]he linchpin to fight these state laws that infringe upon the 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms. Since all magistrates swear to uphold both state and federal constitutions, they are not bound to enforce laws contradicting those constitutions. Therefore, county officials in Virginia… must… not only refuse enforcement of gun control measures seen as unconstitutional violations of the 2nd Amendment, but to actively resist it, even to the point of threatening the agents of tyranny with arrest and imprisonment.
Whether the resolution turns out to be hot air or a revolutionary throwdown remains to be seen.
Trewhella gave four reasons in his essay for why lesser magistrates need to take action. Briefly, he argues, “because God criminalized such acts in His law; because God Himself destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah for their homosexual acts”; “because the purpose of such laws and the last 15 years demand such a conclusion”; and finally, because “True love—biblical love demands that such acts be criminalized by the magistrates.”
“The West faces only two options when it comes to the unleashing of homosex behavior in the nations,” he declared, “either the West will destroy itself or the magistrates will suppress the behavior. History teaches us it will be the former.”
He added that the religious revival many evangelicals are counting on to save the day in the End Times, is “off the table” because, he says, “Christianity in the West is a whore. It has accommodated itself to homosex.”
Trewhella’s high profile call-out of conservative Christian and political leaders comes amidst overlapping political contexts. There have been many efforts by the far-right to pass county and local resolutions, variously declaring themselves to be Second Amendment sanctuary cities or counties, as well as “sanctuary cities for the unborn,” and “Constitutional Counties.” Though they are mostly symbolic and non-binding resolutions, they are clearly part of a process of building a political movement.
There is no sign yet that Trewhella and his colleagues are seeking County LGBTQ Criminalization resolutions. But then again, 10 years ago not many would have foreseen Texas would pass a law making performing an abortion a first-degree felony and that any doctor convicted could face life imprisonment. The sponsors of these other resolutions are the kinds of people Trewhella has already been able to influence.
These county resolutions have not received much national attention; however, they are on the radar screen of John E. Finn, Professor emeritus of Government at Wesleyan University. He wrote in The Conversation that it is not clear how many constitutional counties there are. But that there at least some—in rural areas of Michigan, Virginia, Texas, Nevada and New York:
As a scholar of constitutional theory, I believe more will follow, especially in the roughly 1,100 counties of the nation’s 3,200 counties that have already declared themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries. …But where Second Amendment sanctuaries aim to create havens for gun rights allegedly under siege, the constitutional county movement has a broader agenda.
He also notes that most of these are probably unconstitutional in so far as they call on public officials not to enforce state and federal laws. He writes: “The dangers they pose to the U.S. constitutional system are substantial. This way of thinking is profoundly mistaken and undermines Americans’ collective commitment to constitutional democracy.”
Several conferences on “County Before Country” drew hundreds of people to East River Church, in Batavia, Ohio, a village in rural Clermont County until 2023. The host church started a new conference series in 2024 called “Guts and Grace.” “Whereas ‘County Before Country’ had a broad cultural focus,” Pastor Michael Foster explained, ‘Guts and Grace’ will specifically focus on the reformation and revitalization of the church in America.” (Apparently, he thinks there is hope for the church after all.)
At the County Before Country conference in 2021, people learned about survivalism and resistance to “government tyranny.” Jason Storms, Trewhella’s son-in-law, discussed when it is right to take-up arms.
Jason Storms heads Operation Save America (OSA) an abortion abolitionist group, a successor organization to Operation Rescue. OSA promotes Trewhella’s notion of the Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrate and is based at Mercy Seat Christian Church, where Storms also serves as a pastor. He has led members of the church in protesting an LGBTQ picnic in a public park in Milwaukee.
OSA is smaller than it was in its heyday, and it claims to be nonviolent, but Storms often talks about, and trains for, possible political violence. In a short 2023 conference video, Storms calls for Christian men to form militias and train for combat. He said he joined up with men from his church during the pandemic to do this.
“Get an AR-15, get a combat weapon and get some other combat gear,” Storms instructed. “I would strongly recommend everybody have an AR-15 and 9 mm.” He said he couldn’t encourage people strongly enough to get an AR-15 and find a group to form a “tactical unit.” He said he was sure that “there men in your church who are looking for this,” and he offered to help to find them.
“I don’t want to live under tyranny,” he said. “That means I must be able to fight, and to win.”
Trewhella’s ongoing verbal attacks on the Republican Party, the conservative movement and the Christian Right may eventually draw responses from his targets, and perhaps from the rest of society. Whether the civil magistrates who have passed resolutions on the Second Amendment, abortion, and the Constitution will also seek to criminalize homosexuality remains to be seen. And Trewhella didn’t say how God would destroy the Christianities of which he does not approve, or whether God might require anyone to carry out his will. But Trewhella and his associates seem to be preparing for the call.
In the meantime, Trewhella and those who share his theocratic visions of county level constitutional government, may continue to fly under the radar of public consciousness.
Frederick Clarkson is a Senior Research Analyst at Political Research Associates in Somerville, Massachusetts. He has written about politics and religion for four decades and is the author of Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy and editor of Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America.
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