It’s hard to know what you’re in for when you step through the doors of Sheridan Church. The building itself is a beige box, one story, squatting in the back of a generous parking lot. It has no windows. If the signage was different it could pass for a strip club. The security guards wanding the crowd as we funneled in did nothing to dissipate the strip club impression, although past that the vibe is more dentist’s office.
I had turned up to attend an event titled The Case for Israel, taking place on the anniversary of the October 7th attacks. Jackson Lahmeyer, the pastor of Sheridan Church, was hosting Christian Zionist commentator Erick Stakelbeck. Joining them was Clay Clark, a serial entrepreneur and, I guess, church guy.
Lahmeyer first came to prominence running for office against James Lankford in 2022 on a wave of opposition to COVID-19 pandemic health restrictions. He carried that momentum into the nonprofit Pastors for Trump. I went to this service to learn just what exactly a pastor for Trump believes, and what he tells his congregation. Just what kind of Christianity is going on here, exactly?
Tulsa has long been home to evangelicals with a hard-right streak. People like Oral Roberts and Billy James Hargis once used the city as a base of operations to maintain their ministries and donation networks. They lambasted their followers with warnings about communism, socialism, racial integration of public schools, the media, higher education, radical Islam, immigration, or whatever the boogeyman of the day was. They also implored them to donate to their ministries, usually with a breezy scriptural justification implying some kind of blessing in return. This practice is often referred to as the prosperity gospel.
Lahmeyer is the latest pastor in this tradition, updated for the age of MAGA. As The Pickup’s editor-in-chief Matt Carney observed when he visited Sheridan Church last year, Lahmeyer has fused MAGA political messaging with a modern evangelical style. In the same way that Oral Roberts once leveraged the latest in broadcasting technology, Lahmeyer streams his end times sermons directly to YouTube, and they often feature guests who are popular in MAGA world.
I made my way through security at Sheridan, and, after grabbing my free American flag, shuffled into the next room. I passed a wall advertising books and T-shirts. Two women were hawking raffle tickets. Today the prizes were MAGA hats signed by Don Jr. and some other Trump flunkies.