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Katy Cornell is the Republican running for a seat in Washington’s 26th Legislative District. She’s a pastor, as well as the wife of a pastor, which she highlights on her campaign website, but a casual observer would never know from her “Key Issues” page what her positions are on culture war issues. She doesn’t mention them.
She doesn’t talk about Donald Trump or abortion or LGBTQ rights. She doesn’t even mention that her district include the town of Bremerton, which is where an egomaniacal Christian football coach Joe Kennedy demanded the right to hold attention-seeking prayers at midfield after games; the Supreme Court ruled in his favor years ago.
But as she says, she’s running as a “common-sense Republican focused on solving problems, not creating more division.”
I will work to represent all people in our district while protecting constitutional freedoms including freedom of speech, religious liberty, and individual rights. I believe Washington residents are tired of division and want leaders who can bring people together to solve problems and move our state forward.
What’s bizarre, though, is that despite years delivering sermons at SOZO Church (which she began with her husband), none of them can be found on the church’s YouTube page.
Her husband explained back in July, during an appearance on a podcast, that he personally took down “several thousand videos” so that they couldn’t be used against his wife. Tom Cornell said people were clipping excerpts from those sermons to “make it sound like you're just crazy.”
… I’m gonna be very honest. I took down several thousand videos because, what was happening was, my wife is running for House Rep.
She’s running to be, um, to be elected to be the… for the House of Representatives for Washington State. And they were just taking videos and then chopping ‘em up to make it sound like you’re just crazy.
So, so I said, I’m going to be the worst, um, I’m the biggest barrier to you getting elected, because they could just chop—I have thousands of hours of teaching, and they’re just taking it, making you, you just, they don’t care. They don’t… they don’t care if it’s true. They just want people to look crazy. So they were cutting it and making it sound like you’re saying stuff you’re not saying.
And so I said just take it all down.
So… um… so that… that’s why I don’t have a ton, uh, on there anymore.
At no point did Cornell explain what people were taking out of context. He didn’t explain what “they” were pretending she said, compared to what she was actually saying.
And who were these people posting all the clips?!
As someone who’s very familiar with online clippers who post those kinds of excerpts, they’re almost never taken out of context. No one’s putting words in the mouths of these pastors. It turns out that just sharing a 1- or 2-minute clip from certain sermons can be damning because Christian pastors have a habit of saying batshit crazy and wildly offensive things.
But I guess we’ll never know the context since those videos were taken down.
Just one problem.
It turns out some thoughtful people downloaded many of those sermons before Tom Cornell could take them down, anticipating exactly this kind of response.
Perhaps the most damning clip was a two-minute excerpt posted on March 5 by “SometimesPDF” from a sermon in which Katy talked about why you need to disown your secular friends because they will lead you into “witchcraft” and “drugs” and “contaminate” you.
Another clip showed Katy defending Trump against accusations of white supremacy when he assumed the guilt of the Central Park Five and called for them to be executed. (The accused men were later exonerated.)
In late June, another Bluesky account called “Christian Nationalism is for Losers” began sharing even more clips from SOZO sermons because there were rumblings about how those sermons were being taken down.
They posted excerpts from Tom talking about how Christians need “dominion” over the Earth and that separation of church and state was a “lie” our society has bought into. They pointed out that Katy was called an “apostle” but that title was removed from her online presence after her campaign launched.
She was rabidly anti-trans.
She wants women to be submissive to their husbands.
She and her husband said Islam and Buddhism were fake religions that committed “witchcraft” because they didn’t communicate with God through Jesus. (Katy nodded along as her husband said these things.)
There was also a clip of Katy saying people in mental institutions needed Jesus to be healed.
In July, the clips picked up steam. Here’s Katy saying, of same-sex couples, “The enemy has worked so hard to destroy marriage.”
There were sermons in which Katy said she got rid of Netflix and stopped playing Pokemon and wouldn’t let her family enjoy Halloween because it was leading them all away from Jesus. (That was a five-minute clip. Hardly out of context.)
In another sermon, Katy said that victims of sexual abuse needed to forgive their rapists (along with themselves and God).
She also nodded along when her husband explained that “most cancer” is rooted in “unforgiveness and bitterness,” spurred on by Satan.
And naturally, she delivered a sermon on abortion in which she implied everyone who’s ever had one regrets it—”Nobody feels good about it.” That included victims of rape.
In a story published by the Seattle Times, Katy says none of this matters because she’s “not running to be anyone’s pastor,” adding that she would represent everyone regardless of their beliefs.
But her sermons and campaign suggest otherwise. Hell, the campaign paid for Joe Kennedy, of all people, to attend a campaign event. She knows damn well who she wants supporting her. It’s not the people who support church/state separation.
She’s all in on Christian Nationalism. And the fear is not that a Christian would get elected; that happens all the time. The fear is that she’ll try to legislate her beliefs. Does anyone really think she’ll protect reproductive rights? LGBTQ rights? How will she steer money to evidence-based addiction recovery programs when she’s made it clear she thinks Jesus is the Cure?
There’s another issue that the Times doesn’t explore in depth, but it’s still relevant: The Cornells are supporters of the New Apostolic Reformation. Advocates for the NAR believe in the Seven Mountain Mandate, which says Christians like them should seize control of education, government, business, etc. And it seems that the Cornells would rather avoid any mention of that than admit Katy’s run for office is a way to push legislation that promotes their religious views.
Cornell denied online accusations that she is a Christian nationalist, saying she doesn’t believe that the government “should establish or enforce Christianity or any other religion.”
“I believe in limited government, individual liberty and protecting everyone’s constitutional rights,” she said.
There’s a way to reconcile that denial with her beliefs, though. She can easily and truthfully say she doesn’t want “Christianity” pushed by the government while still pushing for legislation based on her faith that imperils women’s rights and trans rights. (Katy told the Times she does indeed oppose abortion rights.)
That’s what Christian Nationalists do in damn near every place they get elected. Katy is just savvier about hiding her true intentions. Not enough, clearly, but she’s trying.
Her opponent in this race, Renee Hernandez Greenfield, downplayed the revelations—perhaps because she still needs plenty of Christian support to win the race—but she noted how problematic this all was:
Hernandez Greenfield told The Times she found both the videos and the decision to delete them “troublesome” and “concerning.” She said that given some of the videos Cornell has left online, it is “hard to imagine how bad the things she’s deleting are.”
“Our community is diverse and expansive, and the legislator is responsible for being sure we’re connecting with all communities,” she said.
For what it’s worth, there were more Democrats than Republicans who voted in the top-two non-partisan primary, which suggests Hernandez Greenfield is in a good place heading into the end of the voting period. But no one should take anything for granted. Katy Cornell is hoping her carefully crafted image—devoid of mentions of her actual beliefs—can make her seem like a sensible candidate even though she’s repeatedly embraced all matters of Christian extremism.
I also want to highlight one other thing. The person behind the Bluesky account said they began looking into the sermons back in January.
As they worked to save videos of the sermons, they noticed videos began to disappear if they had Cornell’s name attached to them, prompting the page owner to save them.
I spoke to the person behind the account yesterday. What they told me is even better than that.
As Tom began removing videos from YouTube, he must have forgotten that his church also posts sermons on the less-popular Vimeo, and he forgot to take the videos down from that site. That’s how the person was still able to download the sermons that were being taken down on YouTube.
“I’m good at the internet,” they told me.
The Vimeo videos have since been removed.
And the devil took them up to a high mountain and showed them the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said, "Behold, all of this I will give to you, if-"
And the white Evangelicals said, "Hail, Satan!" and bowed low.
And the devil looked confused and said, "Really? That fast? Didn't even let me finish...wow, you guys are assholes."
She’s a “common-sense” Republican. I know what that is code for.