The controversy over Sean Feucht’s “Let Us Worship” tour in Canada last summer has returned, thanks to his company’s decision to sue the City of Moncton for cancelling the permit for his performance.
Fortunately, reporters have been referring regularly to Feucht’s hateful comments about “the 2SLGBTQ+ community, abortion rights and critical race theory.”
I’m not a legal expert, so I will leave aside the question of whether Moncton Council had the right to cancel the concert. Except to say that from my reading of the news reports, it seems that Feucht’s team was not entirely upfront about the controversies swirling around the singer when they requested the permits in the first place.
What I do have expertise in is the history of religion, and it is Sean Feucht’s broader goals that remind me so much of the time in Europe when governmental control over one’s belief was the standard.
So, who is Sean Feucht, and why the controversy? Briefly, Feucht is a member of an informal movement called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), made up of charismatic Christians who seek to capture all elements of society and government for “king Christ.” Charismatics believe that they are filled by the Holy Spirit to know God’s mind, hence they believe themselves to be authoritative prophets ordained to reshape the world.
Feucht’s speciality may be music and worship, but these are merely tools in “spiritual warfare” against “demonic strongholds.” What are these? According to a July 1, 2025, article in The Atlantic, Feucht teaches that Trump is “God’s chosen one” and that abortion supporters are “demons.” We can draw the implications.
In historian Matthew D. Taylor’s recent book on the NAR, The Violent Take it by Force, Feucht is described as a “first-order right-wing provocateur” (p.173). When confronted with protests, he responded: “we’ve faced threats from Satanists, Antifa, drag queens, from tyrannical governmental leaders. … These globalist companies, they do have a religion. Their religion is the rainbow religion. It’s the LGBTQ, wokeness, Satanism, whatever you want to call it” (p.192). Apparently Feucht sees himself as a Biblical David who will “bring down … the giants of abortion, the giants of perversion, the giants that indoctrinate our kids with Satanic ideology” (p.192).
These are dangerous words that could very easily lead some to violence. Even so, Feucht claims that he is being persecuted, as reported in The Times and Transcript on July 25, 2025, when he said, “We will not cower in the face of religious persecution – whether in America, Canada or anywhere else. We will find places to pray.” Yet, according to Taylor, Feucht “is the bully, forcing himself into public spaces, permits be damned” (p. 204). It is the confrontation he craves for it feeds his “persecution neurosis,” as Taylor calls it.
In his August 5, 2025 Telegraph Journal report on the controversy, Adam Huras quotes New Brunswick M.P. Mike Dawson’s claims that the cancellations were both an infringement of “freedom of speech” and “a coordinated, state-sponsored campaign of censorship dressed up in the language of ‘safety’.”
I beg to disagree. Dawson offers no evidence of coordination or planning behind the cancellations. Instead, what we witnessed was a protest arising from local citizens deeply concerned about an American extremist spreading harmful opinions north of the border. Coming hard on the heels of the U.S. President’s threats to annex Canada and to destroy our economy, our fellow citizens’ anxiety and anger over such MAGA propaganda is reasonable.
I too do not like censorship. But we are faced with a conundrum. Feucht’s fellow extremist Christians are behind the MAGA Project 2025 playbook that is reshaping American society today. They seek to use their government to enforce their religiosity and morality upon the population. They are succeeding in the U.S. in ways we never thought possible.
Feucht and his coreligionists want to control what the rest of us can think and how we behave. They are opposed to science, replace history with mythmaking, and condemn any data that challenges their extremist worldview. They are right now restricting the freedoms of minority and racialized groups. They are attacking the rights of women. Ultimately, they oppose even the concept of human rights and the practice of full democracy.
Feucht wishes to return us to the sixteenth century when Christian governments used their coercive powers to enforce adherence to specific beliefs and morality. The result was decades of bloody persecution and religious conflict. This did not end until the middle of the seventeenth century when Enlightenment philosophers formulated persuasive arguments not just for religious toleration, but for religious diversity and of the private, personal nature of beliefs.
That struggle for religious freedom was built on the suffering of sixteenth-century Christian dissenters who were harshly persecuted by other Christians in power simply because they disagreed with some teaching or practice of the state church. They died for their beliefs, whereas Feucht misconstrues criticism as persecution. Anabaptists, Baptists, Mennonites, and Quakers, among others, pleaded with their rulers to allow them to worship and to believe as they saw fit. Their judicial executions built the case for freedom of speech. Now Feucht and his fellows want to return us to the ‘good old days’ when Christian governments controlled who deserves such freedom.
While Feucht can sing, pray, and preach as he wishes, it is essential that we all know what his real plans are. His movement seeks to end freedom of speech for others.
Based on the spontaneous protests here, Canadians don’t want any of this. We renounce the dangerous and socially destructive NAR/MAGA campaign. Yes, freedom of speech is a cherished right. The challenge is to find a balance, for if we allow Feucht and his fellow extremists an unopposed voice in the public space, we might be sending a signal that there’s nothing harmful about it. If they succeed, we will in fact lose that cherished right.
Perhaps there is no easy solution to this conundrum, but if all of us are fully informed, we will not fall for this noxious message lurking under the cover of a “Christian” identity.
Gary K. Waite is a Professor Emeritus of History at the University of New Brunswick.
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