Expanding Territory

“We declare that Fort Worth is yours, Jesus,” Mercy Culture Church recently posted. “We declare your justice and righteousness resound in every part of our city. We declare no other spirit but the holy spirit is seated on the throne of Fort Worth.”

Mercy Culture is the newest edition to the Gateway Church Network, the massive North Texas-based evangelical movement led by Robert Morris, a former advisor to disgraced, twice-impeached former president Donald Trump. Gateway boasts nine campuses throughout the country and tens of thousands of worshipers every week, but six of its largest churches are in North Texas.

Apparently, Landon Schott, Mercy Culture’s “spiritual father,” according to social media posts by Schott and his worship leaders, has the power to declare which spirits sit on certain cities.

A former Gateway Church member, Iris, who asked that we conceal her last name for her safety, said she isn’t surprised by Schott’s words and actions and those of Mercy Culture leadership. Along with allegedly controlling the behavior of staffers, the church openly endorses Republican candidates despite federal laws that prohibit tax-exempt churches like Mercy/Gateway from engaging in political actions that go beyond addressing general social issues.

Mercy Culture also remains the loudest local voice of bigotry against noncisgender and queer folks who are regularly targeted by religious institutions that maintain that some forms of love are OK while others are not (“ Unholy Ground,” Mar. 9). Schott’s Instagram stories are a trove of hateful messages that call on his followers to boycott same-sex weddings and denounce nonbinary gender pronouns.

Sheriff Bill Waybourn, county judge candidate Tim O’Hare, and Tarrant County district attorney candidate Matt Krause — all Republicans — enjoy staunch public support from Mercy Culture leadership.

To understand Mercy Culture, Iris said, you have to understand the church system that created it.

Gateway and Mercy Culture are part of a growing trend within evangelical circles, she continued. These so-called charismatic churches emphasize the gifting of supernatural powers from the holy spirit, Iris said, referring to supposed insights solely given to the faithful by their god.

When Iris moved to North Texas in 2014, she saw attending church as an easy way to make friends.

“I’m bad at making friends,” she said. “I started going to Gateway after moving here. They are a big deal in charismatic Christian circles. I got into their music program.”

Gateway Church staff began grooming Iris through what’s called platform coaching. Any volunteer or staff member was held to a higher standard because they were considered to be on the church’s platform, she said.

“These churches expect you to adhere to a certain standard,” she said. “That’s how they weed out the gays. If you want to volunteer at children’s ministry or elsewhere, you have to take a membership class and sign a waiver that you uphold a Biblical life.”

Iris said female church members were expected to abstain from premarital sex, drinking alcohol in public, and wearing revealing clothing. The rules were much more rigid for women than men, she said. She left Gateway after the church hosted Trump in 2020 during his visit to Dallas.

“When Trump came to the Dallas Gateway campus, I thought, ‘Are you kidding,’ ” Iris recalled.

The meeting, which was held during the height of protests that followed George Floyd’s murder, devolved into a platform for Trump to voice support for law enforcement and to delegitimize the Black Lives Matter movement. Iris saw the choice of location as an acknowledgment that Gateway Church had endorsed a white supremacist.

In 2020, the Washington Post said that Trump’s rise to power can largely be attributed to support from charismatic church leaders who saw the credibly accused rapist as a prophesied leader who will curtail LGBTQ+ and women’s rights while restoring the United States to what evangelicals perceive to be its Christian founding, even as many of the founding fathers were nonreligious Deists who were adamant about keeping the church out of government business.

The Post wrote, “Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White and many more lesser-known but influential religious leaders prophesied that Trump would win the 2020 election and helped organize nationwide prayer rallies in the days before the Jan. 6 insurrection, speaking of an imminent ‘heavenly strike’ and ‘a Christian populist uprising,’ leading many who stormed the Capitol to believe they were taking back the country for God.”

Evangelical churches continue to see growth in membership even as mainstream church attendance continues to decline. Based on data by the Pew Research Center, self-identified Christians made up 63% of the U.S. population in 2021, down from 75% a decade ago. The very group that Schott regularly singles out for living “sinful” lives, LGBTQ+ folks, is growing as a proportion of this country’s population. Around 20% of Gen Z — older teens and younger twentysomethings — identify as LGBTQ+, according to a recent Gallup poll.

Mercy Culture’s most recent project, The Justice Reform, is a residence that will house “up to 100 girls for long-term restoration — one to three years — depending on their need for physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual healing,” according to the project’s website.

The venture’s Instagram page states that there are 29.1 million victims of human trafficking every year in the United States, meaning that, according to Mercy Culture, roughly one in 10 Americans is kidnapped and forced to perform sex acts at any given time. Department of Justice figures put that number at around 200,000. Child sex trafficking is a central focus of many charismatic churches, and many of the misconceptions about the extent of the problem have been spread by QAnon conspiracy theories that seek to tie the sexual mistreatment of youths to Democrats and the Deep State, whatever that could be. Child abductions by strangers grab headlines, but those criminal acts are exceedingly low. FBI figures put the number of under-21 kidnappings by strangers at around 300 per year. In a country that has around 80 million young people (ages 1 to 19), that makes for an exceedingly small percentage.

Iris said Mercy Culture’s focus on human trafficking should turn toward victims within evangelical church congregations. Sexual assault and harassment tend to occur in places where the offender knows the victim and where there is a power structure that makes assaults easier to hide, Iris said. According to The New York Times, nearly 400 Southern Baptist leaders have pleaded guilty or have been convicted of sex crimes since 1998.

The feedback Iris hears from several friends who left Gateway for Mercy is that Schott is allegedly mean-spirited and thin-skinned. He allegedly calls out congregation members who do not enthusiastically clap and hoot during his sermons, Iris said. Her experience at Gateway Church and the emergence of Mercy Culture have turned her off from organized religion for the time being.

Schott and his supporters truly believe they will take over Fort Worth and control the city’s elected officials and broader culture, Iris continued. That worldview leaves no room for non-Christians who do not conform to Schott’s warped perspective.

“My friends and I have discussed what makes the current form of Christianity so toxic,” Iris said at the end of our chat. “The whole push for evangelicalism didn’t start until the 1980s. The church leadership has been Gen X and older. They were not born into it. These younger Millennials and Gen Z — people like me — were born into it. This is all we know.”