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After negotiations with the city, organizers behind an August 30 worship rally hosted by Christian supremacist celebrity Sean Feucht have agreed to relocate “Revive in 25” from Cal Anderson Park to Gasworks Park.
The original site of the rally, Cal Anderson, is smack dab in the middle of the city’s gay neighborhood and where, this May, Christian supremacists held a different, explicitly anti-trans event that ended with Seattle Police officers arresting 23 protesters. Wanting to avoid a repeat and “recognizing that Cal Anderson Park is an important gathering space for our LGBTQ+ residents…we worked with the organizers to suggest alternative park locations,” according to a statement from Mayor Bruce Harrell and City Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth.
According to the statement, the city cannot deny or “unilaterally relocate” public permits “based on the content of the speech or the impacts of that speech on the community.”
As first reported by Publicola last week, on the advice of City Attorney Ann Davison, the city was set to issue the group a permit at Cal Anderson before it hit the brakes to hold these last-minute talks. The city met with organizers Monday, sources confirmed with The Stranger, before releasing the permit today. It’s unclear who exactly was in those talks.
“Revive in 25” is a tour of “America’s darkest, most broken cities” and a continuation of the “Let Us Worship” movement Feucht started during the grifter renaissance, the summer of 2020.
Feaucht rose to prominence during the pandemic for holding large, maskless worship concerts across the US and Canada to protest public health measures and bans on mass gathering, which Feucht considered thinly-veiled attempts by bureaucrats and politicians to prevent faithful Christians from praising God. This, of course, made no sense: COVID restrictions applied to all citizens, not just Christians, and unmasked singing indoors is an incredibly efficient way to spread airborne illness. But to evangelicals who built their spiritual lives around all-absorbing group worship, Feucht’s message resonated and he became a star in his world. He came to Cal Anderson shortly after the George Floyd protests. When he tried to play Gas Work Park without a permit a few months later, the city shut the park down to prevent the spread of COVID.
Matthew D. Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore, Maryland who wrote about Feucht in his book The Violent Take It By Force, says when these COVID restrictions wound down, Feucht found a new far-right cause, setting his sights on the government, generally, the left, the “woke mob,” and an LGBTQ “agenda.” Feucht, who prayed over Trump during impeachment hearings in 2019, has advocated for a country where “Christians are making the laws,” though faith-leaders in Washington, Oregon and Idaho have denounced his beliefs as hateful and anti-LGBTQ. Feucht has called the “transgenderism” movement “demonic.”
To perpetuate this narrative of an unhinged, demonic, spiteful, and anti-Christian left, Feucht has adopted a simple playbook. He shows up in places he isn’t wanted, provokes an angry local reaction, and twists footage of the event into propaganda to serve his narrative, Taylor says.
That strategy should sound familiar. In late May, MayDay USA, a group of far-right Christian supremacists, held an anti-trans #DontMessWithOurKids rally in Cal Anderson.
Tensions were high, but there wasn’t violence until Seattle Police showed up in riot gear and arrested protesters. MayDayers were asked to leave early, and police protected their exit.
MayDay USA exploited video of the arrests, editing video to look like protesters were violent and aggressive in the face of the faithful. And when Mayor Harrell issued a statement referring to the event as an “extreme right-wing rally,” they used it to paint a picture of religious discrimination, where a state-endorsed, anti-Christian mob seized an innocent Christian worship service. To capitalize on the attention, organizers planned a swift action on the steps of city hall, a “Rattle in Seattle” to assert rights that the city hadn’t violated. It was quite the about face: Days before, the group posted on social media that the MayDay rally was a battle in a spiritual war against child “butchers” and demonic forces.
“The big blow up that happened in Seattle got these guys so much attention, so much power, because they mean they have direct channels from the White House,” including Paula White-Cain, who heads President Donald Trump’s White House Faith Office. This Sunday and Monday, White-Cain preached in Seattle and Kirkland alongside Russell Johnson of Pursuit Church, who told crowds at the MayDay USA event that our society suffered from a “sexual sickness.” Callie Craighead, the Mayor’s press secretary, confirmed that White-Cain “was not a part of conversations around this permit.”
Local governments in Canada have begun to catch on to his divisive strategy: Eight Canadian cities have revoked Feucht’s permits, citing safety concerns and code of conduct violations.
But today, he seems pleased.
Just got confirmation for our BIG ANNOUNCEMENT about August 30th in Seattle. This will be EPIC!!👀
Remember when the city blocked us out of the park last time??? WHELP…. https://t.co/lJOCdthSjo
— Sean Feucht (@seanfeucht) August 19, 2025
