Anti-abortion activist Seth Gruber and his organization, White Rose Resistance, held a “Last Stand” for western civilization at BRAVE Church this weekend. Gruber is promoting his new book and film, both titled “The Last Stand,” and made a stop at the Englewood campus of one of Colorado’s most politically involved megachurches.
Former pastors of BRAVE have given testimony in the legislature in support of anti-abortion measures and signed on to a letter from Colorado pastors opposed to legislation to expand rights for transgender youth. BRAVE hosted the Sept. 14 memorial to assassinated Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, which served as a springboard for Victor Marx’s gubernatorial campaign. While BRAVE currently has two campuses in the Denver Metro area, it briefly took over Colorado Springs’ Fervent Church, which hosted El Paso County GOP meetings and in 2024 hosted a Gideon 300 training presented by former gubernatorial candidate and failed Colorado GOP chair candidate Joe Oltmann. BRAVE’s senior pastor, Jeff Schwarzentraub, was one of the featured speakers for Gruber’s event.
As a church involved in Colorado’s culture wars, BRAVE is an apt place for Gruber’s “Last Stand,” which he says is against the forces of evil destroying American society — namely LGBTQ people and abortion. “We’re really in a last stand moment,” said Gruber during a May 13 appearance on the Jeff and Bill Show. “We really don’t have much time left.”
Gruber introduced the event Friday evening by discussing Pride, which he called “the queen of all vices and now apparently the vice of all queens.” He urged the audience to take back the month of June.
“June is Life Month,” Gruber proclaimed. “I was this close to purchasing a rainbow flag — I was gonna burn it on stage, but I thought maybe not inside a church. You know, fire safety and all of that … You know what’s incredible? What the Lord did four years ago, the same month that we launched the White Rose Resistance, like as a formal ministry, with our launch, and it was the overturning of Roe v. Wade.”
During his appearance on Jeff and Bill last month, Gruber expounded on the need for Christians to take a stand during Pride month. “Under the Trump administration, Christians have a tendency of just kind of becoming apathetic and kind of lazy, thinking, ‘You know, it’s a friendly administration. Everything’s good,’” he told host Jeff Hunt, who offered listeners a discount on the $100 tickets for the event with promo code HUNT. “Frankly, things have not been worse in quite some time. We’re killing more babies right now — every 12 months — than we were before Roe v. Wade got overturned. Things are very, very evil. There are kids who are being created by gay daddies and mommies — and this is legal — and children no longer have a right to a mother and a father. We need the church to wake up, and so the Last Stand is a declaration based on historical fact that nations who codify sexual perversion and child sacrifice do not last. They’re already on life support. What we have in America right now, Jeff, is what Hilaire Belloc, [G.K.] Chesterton’s best friend, described as a ‘cut flower civilization.’ Western civilization is a cut flower. It’s been ripped out of the Protestant Christian soil that gave it such a flowering in the first place, and now Christians, or patriots who are not Christians, have put that flower on their kitchen counter and said, ‘Isn’t it beautiful.’ But we’ve forgotten that it’s already dying. And so the Last Stand is to inspire and awaken and mobilize the church, particularly the next generation, to plant that flower back into the soil that made it great in the first place so that our grandchildren will not be raised in Bernie Sanders’ gulags.”
While the Last Stand Festival’s video introduction was an AI-generated video of pilgrims that emphasized the “Protestant Christian soil,” one of Gruber’s more notable speakers, former Planned Parenthood clinic director turned anti-abortion activist Abby Johnson, is a Catholic, a distinction which has caused friction with other elements of the anti-abortion political right, notably abortion abolitionists. In February, Johnson attended the “Justice Alone” conference in Des Moines, Iowa, much to the chagrin of abolitionists.
“[Johnson] came to our conference, with clear motives to cause a scene,” Abolitionists Rising posted on social media site X. “During [T. Russell Hunter’s] talk recapping the history of the abolition movement, not 10 minutes in to the talk, [Johnson] started shouting during his presentation. Russell was talking about the early days and how every pro-life leader opposed our efforts to criminalize abortion as murder. He mentioned that pro-lifers told people to ‘not get in a tizzy’ about rape exceptions in bills, as well as other quotations from pro-life leaders who still oppose us to this day. Abby then started shouting that she had said the bit about not getting in a tizzy. Not only did she interrupt his presentation, but she came to the conference wearing a Students for Life shirt, an organization that still opposes abolition to this day, as well as wearing images of Mary on her boots (knowing that this is a Protestant conference).”
Other speakers included Nick Vujicic, an Australian evangelist and motivational speaker with tetra-amelia syndrome, a condition characterized by the absence of arms and legs. “It’s to my last breath to stand for life,” he said. ”They said I would not walk. My parents would say, ‘If we knew we would have killed him because he’d never have a quality of life.’ I thank God that God has the last say. My brothers and sisters, this is the last stand.”
Vujicic’s appearance this weekend comes as anti-abortion activists online have been discussing the recent news about YouTuber Jesse Ridgway, who announced he and his wife’s decision to end a pregnancy after a diagnosis of trisomy 21, or Down syndrome.
Other notable speakers included George Grant, who appeared in Gruber’s film “The 1916 Project.” Colorado Times Recorder columnist Logan Davis attended a school led by Grant. In his Society of Professional Journalists award-winning column, Davis writes: “Grant is a leader in [classical Christian education] and a diehard Christian nationalist who has advocated for the death penalty for homosexuality, and openly declared that ‘world conquest’ is the goal of his brand of the faith. At school, Grant taught us – and countless other CCE students up to the present day through his curriculum – that the Crusades were a righteous, Christian struggle. He taught us that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that Christians should rule it in accordance with Biblical laws. He taught us that the Civil War was not about slavery, and he taught us that, even if it was, slavery was not as bad as it has been made out to be. And those fringe beliefs are not unique to Grant: they are core to the CCE movement, and have been uniformly embraced by Doug Wilson, the movement’s founder. In fact, in 2004, Grant joined Wilson for a speaking tour promoting a controversial new pamphlet by Wilson which argued that American slavery was a largely beneficent institution.”
Another Christian “educator” speaking at the conference was Tim Barton, son of Christian historian David Barton, who has been accused of peddling revisionist historical points in his work that focuses on rejecting the separation of church and state. Other, less notable speakers peddled their latest books, like podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey’s “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion,” and the event hall was well-represented by various factions and chapters of Turning Point USA. Gubernatorial candidate Victor Marx, also spoke during the event, which took place Saturday, the day before Marx’s performance in his recent gubernatorial debate was lampooned by HBO’s John Oliver.
Marx’s appearance at BRAVE Church during the Charlie Kirk memorial resulted in a campaign finance complaint. “I attended the Charlie Kirk memorial service at Brave Church on September 14, 2025, with my husband,” wrote Cori Kennedy in her Feb. 26 complaint. “We registered through the online sign-up page, which required our names, email addresses, phone numbers, and zip codes. On October 2, 2025, I received a campaign text message on my phone paid for by Victor Marx for Governor, sent to the number I had provided through the church’s registration system. The message was signed by Pastor Jeff, Senior Pastor at Brave Church, soliciting donations and volunteer support for the Marx campaign. I received a second, identical campaign text on October 10, 2025. I had not signed up for or consented to any campaign communications. The only way the campaign could have obtained my contact information was through the nonprofit registration system used for the memorial event.”
Whether the assembled throng of evangelical conservatives at this weekend’s event will move the political needle on abortion in the state is hard to say. In April, Angela Eicher and Faye Barnhart of Brush, who have consistently submitted anti-abortion ballot measures during election years, were approved to collect signatures for initiative 283, which would repeal Amendment 79, which enshrined the right to abortion in the Colorado Constitution. In recent years, Faye and Eicher’s measures have failed to gather enough signatures to make the ballot.
