On August 11, an evangelical crusade took place in Portland, Oregon—and it reveals some breathtaking arrogance on the part of its creators. It attracted decent numbers who came to hear preachers lament how much “darkness” the city contained and how sad its creators were that the city’s residents had “pushed Jesus out” of their lives. But this story has a twist that might not surprise any Christians already living there: Many Portland-area Christians don’t see their city as dark or hopeless at all.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 8/22/2025. They’re both available now! From introduction: Ancient Japanese dance festival in Portland on August 23rd.)
SITUATION REPORT: PDX Crusade hits Portland, along with quite a lot of evangelical arrogance
On August 11, evangelicals held an event called PDX Crusade at Portland’s Moda Center. Its main sponsor, megachurch Athey Creek, boasted that 35,000 people attended it. They also claimed that 3,200 people answered the altar call, and they’re claiming those people as conversions. Their volunteers distributed tons of Athey Creek-branded Bibles and tracts, so the church is hoping to see a lot of those people become congregants.
Seventeen churches helped Athey Creek produce this crusade. Of note, Athey Creek isn’t in Portland proper. It’s in West Linn, which is some distance south of the city. Of even more interesting note, none of those 17 churches are in Portland either. A few are in nearby suburbs Tigard and Beaverton. Another couple hail from across the river in Vancouver, Washington. Not one church involved here had a presence in the actual city of Portland. (Maybe real estate prices are just too high these days.)
The crusaders characterized Portland as this horrifying desolate and lost city. They painted its residents as desperate and lacking hope—life qualities that they claimed only evangelicalism could provide.
However, none of this is new. Evangelicals have perceived Portland in this way for generations now. There’s a particular arrogance they display when looking at that part of America—and more than a little greed.
The sheer hype of the Portland crusade
It must have been quite a spectacle. Eighteen churches total spent what had to be a small fortune to light up the concert venue and run smoke machines and big-screen TV feeds of their performers. They hired some big-name musical talent, too: Chris Tomlin, Zack Williams, CAIN, Anne Wilson, and others. Athey Creek’s senior pastor, Brett Meador, preached about Portland’s “darkness” and offered his religion as the answer to residents’ apparent despair and hopelessness.
Athey Creek is claiming victory after the event. They say 3,200 people came forward for their altar call, which Meador set up after his sermon. Evangelicals like to believe that only heathens respond to altar calls, so they’re hinting they got 3,200 conversions. A writeup of the event from K-LOVE (a humongous Christian radio station) outright says all of the altar call respondents represent “public decisions to follow Jesus.”
One article about the event also tells us that some of the crusade’s attendees hope its success marks big changes in how Portland residents feel about religion. The pastor coyly says PDX Crusade will return next year if Portland’s residents can impress him with just how appreciative they are of his largesse. But I suspect he’s extremely hopeful about making it an annual event.
To be sure, the event’s merch shop is still active. The crusade’s main page excitedly informs buyers that each shirt purchase “helps put 5 Bibles into the hands of new believers” and any purchase “makes an eternal impact.”
None of what Meador says about Portland is true, though, of course. And I doubt his success claims, too.
Evangelicals have always gotten really arrogant about Portland
All that talk about Portland’s lostness and desperation is part of a long-held evangelical belief about the city.
For starters, Portland is an extremely nonreligious town. As of 2023-2024, Pew Research found that religiously-unaffiliated people just barely outnumber Christians there (44% vs 42%)—and that’s the only city in America that can say that. In Portland, 10% of residents say they’re atheists, 14% are agnostic, and 20% are “none of the above.” Just in 2007, 67% of Portland residents claimed to be Christian, so the sharp increase in unaffiliated people is fairly recent. Pew Research has also found that the Christians in Portland also tend to be less devoted than those elsewhere.
Portland’s always had a more secular outlook than the rest of the country. In 1992, Christianity Today confirmed that reputation in a story about a Billy Graham crusade occurring there. They lamented that only “15 percent of the population attend church on Sunday morning,” calling the city “a center of liberal politics and independent, self-sufficient lifestyles” and taking aim at it for having “one of the highest levels of satanic worship activity on the West Coast.” Even before that, a 1920 revival flyer claimed that “Portland’s greatest need” was “a revival of old time power.”
Speaking as someone who lived in Portland in the mid-1990s, I call shenanigans on the Satanism claim. I didn’t encounter or hear of a single Satanist the entire time I was there. Though I’d deconverted a year or so earlier, I definitely was an odd duck there, since I still dressed like a Pentecostal and held some evangelical culture-war stances. Long skirts, uncut hair, and no makeup weren’t fashionable yet there! But maybe Satanists just aren’t as conspicuous as women in “holiness standard” garb.
Evangelicals love thinking that non-evangelicals are lost, sad, pathetic little children who need the loving hands of their Designated Adults to find their way to hope and meaning. But that’s now how some actual Portland ministers feel about their hometown. One of them, Karyn Richards-Kuan, summed up the sentiments of those rejecting this characterization:
It was all these congregations sort of looking into the city as this big, bad, dark place, rather than the congregations who are serving in the city and who see it as a place of great light and opportunity.
But… but… how can any city not Jesus-focused 24/7 contain light and opportunity?!? It’s impossible! (/s) It all reminds me of that old joke: “You’re a vicious, two-timing, deceiving, lying backstabber. But baby, there’s still hope for us!”
I wouldn’t ever want to join any group that held such a low view of outsiders. That’s a good way to end up in in a really tribalistic group guaranteed to hurt people.
That thing about altar calls is way too optimistic too
As I mentioned, Athey Creek claims 3,200 people responded to the event’s altar calls. K-LOVE even claims that number represents how many people made “public decisions to follow Christ.” Neither is likely to be true, and it’s evangelicals’ fusion with fundamentalism that is to blame here.
Fundamentalists have long had a tradition of altar calls. At the end of evangelistic sermons, it’s common for the preacher to issue one. It means going to the front of the meeting-place (usually the sanctuary right in front of the dais and pulpit) and getting rowdy.
Done properly, altar calls are a very slightly more genteel version of a punk concert’s mosh pit. People let loose during them. It’s an exercise in group catharsis and blissed-out euphoria. I won’t minimize what a complete trip they can be. They are amazing—and completely earthly in nature. The more people get involved, the more fun altar calls can be.
People can let down their hair at altar calls. They dance, sing, clap, run around and around the venue’s interior, hop up and down, laugh or sob or both at once, and—yes—roll around on the floor like overjoyed dogs.
Altar calls also draw in potential converts, of course. Once they’re in place, rowdy fundamentalists surround them, laying hands on them and praying loudly—often while speaking in tongues, which subtly coaches the converts in how to respond if they’re swept away by all that emotion. (In fundamentalism at least, only women were allowed to touch women, if you’re curious. I don’t know how evangelicals handle it, but my crowd was strict.)
When I was fundamentalist back then in the 80s and 90s, evangelicals looked down on these sorts of displays. They viewed them as too feelings-based, too ecstatic, too much of a high that couldn’t last. But their end of Christianity was even then fusing with mine. By the end of the 1990s, the fusion was complete. Now evangelicals do altar calls, and I’ve no doubt this one at PDX Crusade was a little rowdy.
What I do doubt is that 3,200 people out of 35,000 attendees chose to convert that night. I suspect the real number is closer to dozens. A few hundred might have reconverted after a period of laxity, and a few hundred more might have chosen that night to rededicate themselves to greater fervor.
But we can rest assured that the rest were at that altar call for the emotional high—and to lay hands on new converts. My then-husband Biff was famous for his enthusiastic behavior with new converts at altar calls.
Since Athey Church probably won’t ever reveal just how many of those 3,200 people were actual new converts, I’d lay money on most of them being preexisting members of the member churches participating. Anyone there who wasn’t already a member of those churches was likely a friend or family member of theirs. Knowing what I do about Portland, almost no actual heathens were there on their own initiative.
One neighboring town’s church-planting flop reveals that same arrogance
In 2021, a bright-eyed evangelical seminary graduate posted a message on a Reddit community devoted to Eugene, Oregon. Eugene is further south down the highway from West Linn. The OP wanted to move to the Pacific Northwest because he and his wife wanted to live “near the mountains and evergreens,” and Eugene appealed to them because it didn’t seem “as expensive as Seattle or Portland.”
(I looked into him a bit, BTW. He’s a Southern Baptist and a Calvinist/Reformed theo-bro. You’ll have to trust me here, though. I wasn’t as strict about archiving back then, and he very quickly deleted both his OP and his entire Reddit account.)
More importantly, this guy wanted Eugene’s residents to pay for him to be there. He wanted to open a church and use that as his livelihood.
It’s so telling that he didn’t mention Jesus ordering him to go to Eugene. Most evangelicals would have phrased it that way to borrow authority from their god. Instead, we get only the earthly motivations for this proposed move. He clearly conceptualizes pastoring as just another job—no different from opening a furniture or antiques shop. It’s almost refreshing to see, though in the comments, he brought all the usual expected condescension.
However, Eugene’s Reddit community didn’t appreciate his suggestion and immediately caught into his self-interest and arrogance. Most responded very negatively to him. Even Christians cautioned him about his attitude. The top comment advised:
Here in Eugene, we don’t think Portland is liberal enough. You have yourself a great day now.
Another was more forthright:
Go elsewhere. We don’t need or want more people who brainwash others about the existence of imaginary beings.
Eugene Redditors despised this guy’s presumption that Eugene people needed or wanted another evangelical church in their midst. You could just about hear them fuming “HOW DARE HE?!?” as they replied.
But that’s utterly standard for evangelicals. They view themselves as humanity’s Designated Adults: the mommy and daddy figures who force their recalcitrant toddlers to eat vegetables instead of candy for dinner.
Portland doesn’t need saving, and neither does anywhere else—except from evangelicalism
It can be very tempting for Christians to look at Portland in the same way as Southerners look at Mississippi. No matter how hard it is to find converts in their own cities, it’s always going to be much harder in Portland. For evangelicals, Portland will always represent evangelism on hard mode.
Maybe that’s a comfort, in its way. If evangelicals fail to make converts, they can tell themselves that Portland’s just so dark and full of demons that anyone would have trouble. The entire city rides on iron chariots, so to speak, and we all know how weak Yahweh is against those!
Their god, if he were real, would operate just like the Force in Star Wars movies. A small object is just as easy to move as a large one, in those movies. And likewise, a tiny miracle is no different from a huge one, in evangelicalism. So nobody should care how tough a town is to convert, or where a targeted population lives. Evangelicals should be able to make sales anywhere. They should be like Neo at the end of the Matrix, moving completely outside the laws of the simulation.
But that’s the problem, isn’t it? They can’t do any of that. Now that their religion is growing more voluntary by the day, they’re having a harder time than ever justifying the expense of their only product—which is active membership in their churches. That’s why they’re going for broke with right-wing politics. If they can’t control people through voluntary membership in churches, then they’ll try to do it through laws.
I’m glad Portland has stayed resolutely nonreligious. I hope it stays that way. Evangelicals already have the Deep South and Midwest. They can’t even make those hellholes livable. One trembles to imagine what damage they’d wreak on Portland, if they controlled any more of it than they do.
NEXT UP: We review the next Alpha Course video, the one about prayer! Prayer works miracles! Except when it doesn’t. But it totally does though. Oh wait. See you soon! <3
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