“Pastors, Christians in general, we have fallen asleep at the wheel,” Tim Thompson intones in a video as a blistering guitar riff kicks in.
“The church used to be the public square,” he says as black-and-white footage rolls, depicting a gathering of white people dressed in 1950s-style clothing shaking hands with a pastor.
“What we have done essentially is given over the public square to the far left,” he adds, as the screen changes to show a young Black man wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt speaking into a megaphone.
The image shifts again to show a photo of a white man carrying a rainbow LGBTQ+ rights flag.
“We are not good with these things,” Thompson adds. “This is our watch now.”
It was 2019, and the video marked the political arrival of Pastor Tim Thompson, a lifelong resident of Temecula Valley who now leads the 412 Church Temecula Valley, which has helped stoke the culture wars that have roiled this suburban community in the Inland Empire.
In the years since the video debuted on his Our Watch YouTube page, Thompson has helped engineer a takeover of the Temecula Valley school board, recruited and groomed far-right school board candidates, helped form a political action committee to raise funds for like-minded candidates and pushed conservative ideology from the pulpit.
With Thompson’s politicking, voters elected a far-right majority to the school board, which quickling banned critical race theory, pulled books from library shelves, banned Pride, Black Lives Matter and other flags from being displayed and required teachers and counselors to inform parents if their child is transgender or nonbinary. The tumult was so fierce that parents, students and teachers launched a recall campaign, which will head to a vote on May 28.
A trim white man with a shaved head, Thompson speaks with urgency. He tells his congregants that his interpretation of Christianity should be “the greatest influence on culture” and should “increase the influence of Judeo-Christian values” in government, education, business, finance, entertainment and family. His message echoes that of 7 Mountains Dominionism, which professes that Christians must take control of seven areas or “mountains” of life: family, education, media, entertainment, business, government and religion.
Thompson’s church is part of a network of churches under the 412 banner. Its main campus is in San Jacinto and hosts English and Spanish-speaking congregations; there is also a branch in Todos Santos, Baja California. According to its website, the 412 Church (rendered as 4|12 on the site) was created in 1998 “by a small group of friends and families who would meet together in a family’s backyard.” The church says the founding members sought a place for worship where “everyone had a seat at the table regardless of personal history, family background, ethnicity, or gender.” Thompson preaches a less tolerant gospel.
In a Statement of Faith, Thompson and the church condemn homosexuality, gay marriage and the LGBTQ+ community in general. The statement also suggests that vaccines, specifically those that combat COVID-19, are “unclean.”
Tim Thompson’s Roots in Temecula Valley
The Temecula Valley of Thompson’s youth was awash with racism and neo-Nazi activity. In the 1980s, Ku Klux Klan leader Tom Metzger founded a white supremacist group in nearby Fallbrook. In the ’90s, a pair of 14-year-olds tied to local white supremacists were charged in two drive-by shootings targeting Latinos, while members of Hammerskin Nation, identified by the Anti-Defamation League as a neo-Nazi skinhead organization, were convicted of assault in the gang beating of a 21-year-old Black man as dozens of others watched. The district attorney called it “one of the most egregious incidents of racial violence that has occurred in Riverside County.”
There’s little public record of Thompson’s early years, other than he attended Temecula Valley High School at least in his freshman year and worked as a chaplain for the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, a relationship that served him well. A campaign committee for Sheriff Chad Bianco later gave $5,000 to the pastor’s political action committee. Bianco was a member of the Oath Keepers during the time Thompson was a chaplain but said he left the extremist group because “it did not offer me anything.” Thompson, as well as his adult son, Timothy Jacob, have been photographed or filmed sporting patches affiliated with the Three Percenters, a far-right anti-government militia.
In 2012, Thompson began cultivating his church. At that time it was called Venia, and met in rented spaces across the Temecula Valley, for a while in a bar. The congregation eventually found a building in 2016, and changed its name to 412 Murrieta and later to 412 Temecula Valley.
Before long, Thompson became a fixture at far-right rallies across the state. He spoke at the state Capitol in 2019 to a group opposed to sex education in public schools and returned a few weeks later to speak at another protest over California’s Health Education Framework. Days later he attended another rally on the matter outside of the Riverside County office of the California Department of Education.
“Teaching children about gender identity and telling them there is a gender spectrum that is more than male and female is wrong,” Thompson told the Orange County Register.
Shortly after launching his Our Watch podcast and nonprofit in May of 2019, Thompson began attending school board meetings throughout Southern California. On Nov. 14, 2019, he demanded the Murrieta Valley school board make the district a “sanctuary for parental rights.” During his public comments he denounced vaccine mandates, the gender spectrum and California state educational standards, which he described as “cultural Marxism.”
The onset of the pandemic further propelled Thompson into the spotlight. Days before Gov. Gavin Newsom’s stay-at-home order was issued, Thompson addressed the pandemic in a sermon entitled “A Christian Response to Coronavirus,” echoing a conspiracy theory that “there’s zero doubt that this [the virus] was a purposeful attack.” Several months later, he was arrested outside the state Capitol for violating the stay-at-home order by attending a large rally.
“As a person who loves law enforcement, it was kind of embarrassing to be hooked up and taken” into custody, he told the Los Angeles Times. “This has really been hard on my reputation as a law-abiding pastor. That part of it was kind of frustrating.”
On the eve of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, two of Thompson’s congregants joined fellow members of the Three Percenters in Washington, D.C., and gave a shout-out to “Pastor Tim” as they filmed themselves.
“Our pastor’s watching right now,” one says, and then another adds, “Pastor Tim, we are here in the heart of the evil fight right now.”
Thompson did not respond to Capital & Main’s requests for an interview or say whether he was the person the men were addressing.
The two men, Derek Kinnison and Ronald Mele, were convicted along with two other Three Percenters of storming the Capitol to obstruct the certification of President Biden’s victory. Kinnison and Mele have yet to be sentenced.
Several months later, Thompson hosted U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene at the 412 Temecula Valley Church when other Southern California venues canceled on her and listened as she railed against the government and the “evil” Congress and urged the church to remake the government in its own image. “It’s easy to go to the school board and say, ‘I’m not going to allow you to teach this sexual immorality to children,’” she said. ”It’s our generation’s time in Christ’s church right now to stop the communist takeover of our country.”
Thompson then praised Greene’s words and gave her a blessing: “You’ve brought a bold voice to a very weak Congress… a Congress who has gone so far away from your heart that they don’t even know the difference between male and female… Lord, would you embolden her more?”
‘Tonight Is the Night We Begin to Take Back Our State’
By September 2021, Thompson decided to take things into his own hands. That month, he and a man who lives in Idaho created the Inland Empire Family PAC to support regional school board candidates.
The following March, the PAC hosted an NFL-style “endorsement draft” of conservative Christians who ran against school board members in Lake Elsinore, Menifee, Murrieta and Temecula. “Tonight is the night we begin to take back our state,” Thompson told those at the event.
The pastor went on to denounce public schools as “Satan’s playground.”
Thompson said he and his team interviewed and vetted the candidates before they received the PAC’s endorsement and funding. Five of the nine candidates supported by the PAC were elected to their respective school boards: Jill Juanita Leonard in the Lake Elsinore Unified School District, Nicolas Pardue in Murrieta Valley Unified School District, and a board majority in the Temecula Valley Unified School District made up of Joseph Komrosky, Jen Wiersma and Danny Gonzalez. Gonzales has since stepped down and moved to Texas, and Komrosky has been targeted for recall.
In the weeks leading up to the election, each of the Temecula candidates were featured and endorsed on Thompson’s Our Watch podcast — part of the 412 Temecula Valley’s ministries. Tax experts say that’s a violation of law that forbids churches from participating in campaign activity.
“The line is if that person is running for reelection and it’s close to the election, you can’t give them a platform to promote the candidacy. You can’t endorse them,” says Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, professor of law at the University of Notre Dame. He said that legality is based on timing: Church leaders are free to have politicians join sermons and benedictions and are free to advise on policy – but the endorsements cannot occur during the runup to an election. “If you want to have a candidate to speak with your church, you can do that. And only if you provide equal opportunity for all the candidates in that race.“
But according to Mayer, that doesn’t mean that the Internal Revenue Service is likely to get involved. “It’s just too politically sensitive for the IRS,” he said. In 2004, the IRS investigated All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena following an antiwar sermon and threatened to revoke the church’s tax exempt status.Three years later, the investigation closed with the church’s tax exempt status still intact.
“I’m not aware of any public information about a church being audited for campaign intervention since then,” said Mayer, whose firm represented All Saints.
In a November 2022 report, the Texas Tribune examined multiple recordings of religious leaders discussing candidates during sermons or other church activities that violated IRS guidance on political campaigning. Mayer said there is no evidence any of the churches were audited, possibly due to the reverberations of a 2013 scandal. That year, the IRS began intensive scrutiny of applications of conservative organizations seeking tax exempt status. It triggered several investigations, legal actions and monetary settlements. In 2017, the IRS issued an apology for its actions.
“If there was a reason for the IRS to be gun shy about going after politically active charities before, now there’s an added pressure,” Mayer said. “The last time they actually did go after politically active churches … people lost their jobs and were subpoenaed by Congress,” Mayer said.
