For over a year, Awaken Church, a controversial evangelical congregation, has been planning to expand into Coronado to plant its sixth San Diego campus.
However, Awaken’s anticipated expansion has been met with backlash from some Coronado community members, mainly due to its politicized evangelism that has merged Christian nationalism and right-wing political activism with biblical principles.
In light of the church’s ongoing events in the community, including an Easter service that was held at the Coronado Community Center, Brad Willis, an ex-NBC News correspondent and Coronado resident, has organized a May 19 screening of the documentary “God & Country.”
Since October 2022, Willis has written blog posts on his online Substack site about Awaken, including a critical five-part series about the church and the invitation to the “God & Country” screening.
The 2024 documentary is not specifically about Awaken, but delves into Christian nationalism’s growing influence on faith and democracy. Featuring interviews with religious scholars, evangelicals and theologians, it explores concerns about the movement’s impact on the nation and Christianity.
The free public screening will be held at Coronado High School Performing Arts Center at 3 p.m.
Following the film, there will be a discussion panel led by Peter Bolland, a Southwestern College professor of philosophy and humanities, along with J.T. Greenleaf, pastor of St. Paul’s United Methodist Church (UMC) of Coronado, and Steve Mather, pastor emeritus at Coronado Community Church.
Willis and Mather did not respond to a request for comment.
In an interview last year with The Coronado News, Mike Yeager, a pastor at Awaken, said resistance to the church is the product of a smear campaign by Willis and others.
“I understand that there are real concerns in the Coronado community because of misinformation spread by a few,” Yeager said at the time. “…But, above all else, our mission is to build a church that is fresh, real, and powerful, a place where people can come and hear the life-transforming message of Jesus Christ.”
“God & Country” panelists speak on Christian nationalism
Bolland and Greenleaf said Willis reached out to them within the past month to see if they would be interested in speaking at the screening.
Bolland, who teaches courses on world religions, said he agreed to moderate the event “right away because this [the Christian nationalism movement] is such an important, broader concern in the United States, not just Coronado.”
In 2022, the Pew Research Center reported that many Americans are unfamiliar with “Christian nationalism,” and among those who know about it, more express a negative view than a positive one. However, perceptions of Christian nationalism vary widely, with some envisioning strict theocratic rule and others seeing it as simply embracing moral values like helping others.
Bolland said Willis introduced him to the conversations around Awaken Church. From there, he said he educated himself on its lead pastor, Jurgen Matthesius, and the church’s mission.
“[Matthesius’] online presence and some of the adjacent work that they [Awaken] does seems so militaristic and [has] pretty vitriolic rhetoric about everybody who opposes them,” Bolland said, “and that kind of thing caught my attention like, wow, this is an unusual church, which on its own website, claims to just be sort of an evangelical church that believes in miracles.”
In 2023, addressing the criticism Awaken has received for planning to expand, Matthesius declared during a sermon “The demoniacs on Coronado…don’t get to dictate. We’re gonna drive them out and the church is coming to Coronado.”
In an online announcement that same year, Matthesius said “Our vision is 16 campuses in San Diego, literally surround the city, and then we can say ‘Come out with your hands up, we have you surrounded.’”
“That language is inflammatory, but beyond that, it’s just not helpful,” Greenleaf said. “It’s not who this community is. My experience of Coronado has been consistent. These are loving, extraordinarily generous people. They care that this is a safe space where people belong.”
Not a religious movement, but a political movement
To Bolland and Greenleaf, Christian nationalism is a political movement rather than a religious movement.
“To many of us, this is a deep betrayal and frankly, abandonment of principals of the United States as a place of freedom, where we are free to choose our own religious perceptions,” Bolland said. “One of the things Christian nationalism does, and this in the rhetoric of Awaken Church, is divide the world into two groups. There’s this very binary view that there’s ‘us,’ and then there’s ‘everybody else’ and we are the righteous, and everybody else is demoniac.”
Referring to how the Constitution of the United States says no religious tests are needed for holding public office, Greenleaf said, “This notion that somehow the United States and the Constitution enshrines the country as a Christian nation is directly refuted by both the religious test piece and the First Amendment.”
This is one of the reasons why the UMC of Coronado pastor accepted the invitation to speak at the panel.
To Bolland, he doesn’t “really have a dog in the fight.” Although he is not a Coronado resident, he said he hopes to bring an objective perspective to the panel.
“Churches have the right to exist, no matter how extreme their views are,” Bolland said. “That’s what liberty is, groups like this get to exist. I’m drawn philosophically to that kind of paradox — that we want to have freedom and thinking, religion and practice. But once your freedom starts to harm others, or inhibit the liberty of others, then that’s a problem.”
In his weekly email newsletter to the UMC of Coronado congregation, Greenleaf said he is “not speaking on anybody’s behalf, for the church and that [the screening] is not church-endorsed.”
“My intent is to come to this panel discussion with all of the grace, mercy and patience that I can summon up,” Greenleaf said.
With 35 years in ministry and 46 years in San Diego, Greenleaf said it’s important to make space for people.
“We can’t push people out because we don’t agree with them,” Greenleaf said. “What I’m opposed to — in Coronado and any community — is when a group of people from outside the community come in with an agenda to upset, spread fear, and demonize people within the community.”
Doors for the screening open at 2:30 p.m.
