The face of a growing town 30 miles north of Portland is undergoing a transformation. A blue brick convenience store was recently re-made into a rustic-chic bakery called Al and Ernie’s. Around the corner, a former dairy building was recast as an indoor farmers’ market with a fresh coat of white paint with black trim. A nondescript three-bedroom house from the 1930s was renovated to become Spurgeon’s Pipe and Cigar shop. The pattern continues along Main Street.

And where orange plastic construction fencing stretches around a grassy lot the size of a football field, soon this community will host a new convention center, and beside it, a new stone chapel with tall, narrow windows for First Presbyterian Church.

Welcome to Battle Ground, Washington: A rapidly growing community of roughly 23,000 people, that’s being reshaped by a group of business leaders and a pastor engaged in the “Christian localism” movement.

The driving force behind these changes is Camden Spiller, co-owner and CEO of Maddox Industrial Transformer, far and away Battle Ground’s fastest-growing company.

Spiller and his colleagues at Maddox have spoken openly about purchasing properties and developing land in Battle Ground. During a presentation to the city council last year, a Maddox executive said the company had invested in at least 30 properties in town. Using state and county property records, OPB confirmed that number, identifying more than a dozen corporations controlled by Spiller that have purchased over 30 properties in Battle Ground in the past six years.

Spiller’s purchases have raised hopes from some residents. He’s revitalizing parts of the city’s downtown. But the changes have also raised questions about whether there is a religious vision for Battle Ground.

The church pastor for whom Spiller is building a new chapel has spoken about the importance of “governing unbelievers.” That pastor, C.R. Wiley, has ties to a prominent self-described Christian nationalist in Moscow, Idaho, who wants his faith to shape how that town is run and who has endorsed turning the Ten Commandments into civic law.

Spiller is also listed as a director of American Reformer, an evangelical Christian nonprofit with a mission to “promote a vigorous Christian approach to the cultural challenges of our day.” Wiley is on its advisory board. American Reformer has published authors who argue in favor of Christian nationalism. The organization also hosts a fellowship for young professionals who are interested in politics, which it says is designed to “recapture existing institutions to bring them under the Lordship of Christ.”

On social media and on city streets, people are wondering about Spiller’s intentions as he and his corporation grow their influence over local businesses, politics and religious life. And the transformation has made a persistent national debate about the degree of separation between religion and civic life an urgent question in a community that remains split about Spiller’s activities.

“Really what is at stake is what defines America, for me,” said University of North Georgia Professor Matthew Boedy, who has written about Christian nationalism and has followed its growing influence in Moscow, Idaho.

“Is it religious liberty? Is it economic liberty? Is it this idea that we could, as a democracy, work out our issues together?”

Key names in this story

• Camden Spiller: CEO of Maddox Industrial Transformer, the fastest-growing company in Battle Ground, who controls a piece of around 30 properties in the city.
• C.R. Wiley: Senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Battle Ground, which soon will use the church being built by a company Spiller controls. Spiller is also a board member of Wiley's church.
• Max Booth: Vice president of real estate development at Maddox Industrial Transformer, who co-hosted a "Christian localism" podcast with Wiley.
• Eric Overholser: Mayor of Battle Ground, who is also employed by Maddox.
• Doug Wilson: A pastor working to make Moscow, Idaho, into a "Christian town" and America into a theocracy – a government run according to the Christian faith. Has multiple ties to Wiley through podcasts and book deals. Spiller has spoken on podcasts at the college Wilson founded in Moscow.

OPB contacted both Spiller and Wiley for interviews via phone and email. Spiller declined an interview. Wiley did not respond. Despite their ties to people and institutions who have embraced the idea of Christian nationalism, neither Spiller nor Wiley has spoken publicly about their view of it.

In a March 2026 essay published in the local newspaper, the Battle Ground Reflector, Spiller said his investments in Battle Ground are rooted in Christianity.

He said he hopes to strengthen the community “whether or not you share our faith.” In the editorial, he cited a favorite Bible verse that states, “seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you.”

Spiller sent an emailed statement to OPB saying his investments in Battle Ground are intended to promote local entrepreneurship, create jobs and support a more vibrant community.

“To help make this an even better place to live, work, and raise a family,” Spiller wrote. “As locally-minded entrepreneurs, we’re always open to looking at business opportunities that will create more jobs and amenities for our community.”

Local leaders are nonetheless grappling with what it means for one person, and the company he leads, to have such a dominant presence in a small town.

“It can be a little concerning sometimes, and you wonder, ‘Hey, where are we going with this?’” Battle Ground City Councilor Shane Bowman said.

In some ways, he said, it’s ideal for Battle Ground to be the location of a thriving company that wants to invest in the place it calls home.

“The challenge will be, as you get bigger and bigger and bigger is, is there a quid pro quo?” Bowman said. “Is there something like, ‘Hey, we did this for the city; this is what we want.’”

Investments funded by a fast-growing business

The wealth that’s enabling Spiller to invest in Battle Ground is closely tied to Maddox Industrial Transformer, the company he co-founded with his brother.

Brothers Camden and Mac Spiller started the business a decade ago after working at a company in the same industry in Texas.

Maddox builds and refurbishes electrical transformers that are used across the country. Its products include the ubiquitous green metal boxes that transform the electricity voltage between the grid and users. The company also makes the gray metal transformers you might see at electrical substations behind barbed wire fencing.

Maddox has grown at fantastic speed — with over 400% revenue growth in the past three years — in part because of the unquenched thirst for electricity needed for data centers and the AI boom. Its customers include Amazon, Meta, X, and many other commercial and industrial power users, Spiller said in a 2025 interview at New Saint Andrews College.

The company employs 125 people in Battle Ground and about three times that number nationwide, Maddox Vice President of Real Estate Development Max Booth told the city council in August.

Maddox also has operations in Greenville, South Carolina, Batavia, Ohio, and Moscow, Idaho – the town an influential Christian leader has been working to transform.

During a 2024 interview on the podcast of New Founding, a Christian investment company, Spiller said Maddox expects to do $1 billion in revenue by 2027.

“If you need electricity, you’re kind of our customer,” he said.

Maddox was founded on Christian values, according to its website. But Spiller says it has avoided being pigeonholed and does business with everyone, regardless of whether they share his worldview.

“The wokest of companies buy from us,” he told the New Founding podcast. “It’s a space where, if you are excellent, they need you.”

Mixed community reactions

Through Maddox, Spiller has given back to Battle Ground in ways that go beyond his real estate investments.

The family-owned company sponsors a popular Independence Day fireworks celebration. Its renovations of the downtown coffee shop and farmers market brought new life to two rundown properties, City Manager Kris Swanson said.

“The community, I think, thinks those things are fantastic,” she said.

Spiller and his colleagues at Maddox say these investments are retaining jobs, encouraging local businesses and supporting community life.

“The overwhelming majority of feedback we’ve received from staff, neighbors and community leaders about our involvement with churches and non-profits regionally is very positive,” said Booth, Maddox’s vice president of real estate development, in an emailed statement. Booth declined multiple interview requests.

OPB contacted a dozen residents, public officials and business owners in buildings owned by Spiller or near Spiller acquisitions. Some, like the city manager, felt positive about the changes. Others were mixed.

Several declined to discuss the recent purchases. Two said they needed to remain neutral on the subject. Three said they didn’t want to speak publicly about the changes that were connected to Spiller and Maddox.

“I don’t want any part of it,” one business owner said when asked for an interview about Maddox’s recent property acquisitions. “They’re a $1 billion company. They push on me and I disappear.”

Growing political connections

The presence of Spiller’s company is also growing in Battle Ground politics.

In January, Eric Overholser, a production operations manager at Maddox, was elected mayor after serving as a city councilor since 2023. Deputy Mayor Aimee Vaile is married to a Maddox employee. Another Maddox employee was recently elected to the local school board.

Vaile did not respond to interview requests. Overholser declined interview requests, but in a statement said he takes “the responsibility of maintaining transparency and fairness very seriously.”

Overholser said he will ensure Maddox and Spiller do not get favorable treatment when it comes to future developments in Battle Ground.

“If a matter comes before the council where there could be a perceived conflict, the appropriate ethical guidelines and disclosure requirements are followed,” Overholser wrote.

Some Battle Ground residents are nonetheless concerned.

David Bowman, no relation to City Councilor Shane Bowman, has lived in the Battle Ground area for over a decade. He was impressed with Spiller’s essay in the Reflector newspaper, but couldn’t figure out why someone who is in the business of remanufacturing transformers would want to open a church.

As he started listening to interviews with the CEO, he became worried.

“There’s too many dots connecting here with Camden Spiller and Christian nationalism for me to be comfortable,” Bowman said.

‘Governing unbelievers’

Some of the most thorough explanations for what’s happening in Battle Ground don’t come from Spiller or his company, but from the local pastor of a church he’s involved with.

In 2023, Max Booth co-hosted a podcast called The Battle Ground Project with Pastor Wiley of First Presbyterian Church, which will have a new home in the complex Spiller is building.

First Presbyterian is a part of the Presbyterian Church in America, an evangelical denomination that’s socially conservative when it comes to views on divorce, sexuality and abortion. The largest denomination in America is the Presbyterian Church USA, which tends to be more progressive.

The Battle Ground Project podcast featured interviews with local elected officials and business owners, including Spiller, Joe Kent, who ran for Washington’s 3rd Congressional District and until recently worked in the Trump administration, then-city council candidate Overholser, and others.

Booth and Wiley described the show as “an experiment in Christian localism,” a term that refers to promoting Christian values in a person’s local sphere of influence, whether that’s politics, work or recreation. They discussed business and politics in Battle Ground on the show and posted episodes online.

Shortly after OPB began investigating this story, the episodes were removed from podcast feeds.

Also in 2023, Wiley described his church’s project in Battle Ground during a conference at the Evangelical Reformed Church in Tacoma titled “Building culture in hostile territory.”

His descriptions of the church’s activity mirrored investments by Spiller.

In that Tacoma sermon, Wiley said his church was developing “third spaces” where people could gather outside of home and work. Those places included Al and Ernie’s, he said, which would double as a Bible study location after hours. It also included Spurgeon’s Pipe and Cigar shop, with a name alluding to the mid-1800s London evangelical Charles Haddon Spurgeon, a known lover of cigars. Spurgeon opened a pastor’s college that led to the expansion of Baptist churches around the city. Both Al and Ernie’s and Spurgeon’s are owned by LLCs under Spiller’s name, according to Clark County property records and the Washington state Department of Revenue.

“We want owned space,” Wiley said. “We want to be the people who have a very strong say, significant say, in how things are done and how the business is conducted.”

Wiley also said that his church was venturing into politics. It was promoting two candidates for local office, he said in that 2023 speech. A short time later, Overholser was first elected to the Battle Ground City Council. Both Wiley and Booth also ran for city council seats that year, though neither made it past the primary.

“What we, as Presbyterians and people who belong to the reformed tradition, bring to the larger church, are the resources of a public theology that helps us to govern unbelievers,” Wiley said during the talk.

He described the importance of drawing on theological traditions from Lutherans and Roman Catholics that historically governed in parts of Europe as the inspiration for how to lead others who are not religious today.

“If we’re going to have a mature approach to public governance, we need to think about what it means to be in charge when there are some people who don’t agree with us,” Wiley said.

The ‘Moscow model’

Another fellow reformed Presbyterian pastor connected to Wiley has garnered national attention for how his church has grown its influence in northern Idaho.

For years, Pastor Doug Wilson’s Christ Church has been expanding its footprint in Moscow, Idaho. Wilson, a self-described Christian nationalist, is well known for his hope of turning Moscow into a Christian town. On a larger level, he wants America to become a theocracy – a government run according to the Christian faith.

Wilson believes one of the biggest recent wins for conservatives has been the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, and he hopes the U.S. Supreme Court does the same with the Obergefell decision that legalized same-sex marriage in 2015. He argues that women shouldn’t have the right to vote and he has defended slavery in his past writings.

“I know Camden and I’m friends with Chris Wiley,” Wilson said in an interview with OPB. The two pastors have appeared together on a number of podcasts in recent years. Wiley’s books are published by Wilson’s publishing house, Canon Press. Spiller has also been on podcasts at New Saint Andrew’s college in Moscow, where Wilson is a founding board member.

Booth said in a statement to OPB he was familiar with Wilson, but the pastor “has no association with Maddox or affiliated companies, in Battle Ground or elsewhere.” Wiley and Spiller did not respond to emailed questions about connections between the activities in Battle Ground and those of Christ Church in Moscow.

Wilson said he was unaware if “Battle Ground is inspired by the Moscow model.” In past interviews, he’s said that a fundamental part of Christianity is expanding the religion as a missionary. Wilson said he supports religious businesses revitalizing small towns and getting involved in politics.

“Basically, if it’s peaceful, then what that is, is democracy,” he said.

The growing number of businesses operated by Christ Church members has created divisions in Moscow that have sometimes led to boycotts of shops owned by members of his church. Wilson called those boycotts unfair.

“If a businessman in our church opens a restaurant, that’s not the Christ Church restaurant,” Wilson said. “But people here act as though it is.”

Boedy, the professor who’s written about Christian nationalism and its connections to prominent figures like Charlie Kirk and the Trump administration, says what’s happening in Battle Ground is reminiscent of Wilson’s efforts in Moscow.

“They have a school, they have a seminary, they have a college, they have a church. They don’t own the entire town yet, but they’re a very big presence in Moscow.”

That Moscow model features a church at the center to try to imbue towns with a Christian culture, Boedy said. It’s part of a broader trend in a number of communities across the U.S.

Another example is the Highland Rim Project, a Christian intentional community in Tennessee and Kentucky. Wilson’s Christ Church also opened a new chapter in Washington, D.C., last summer, which U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has attended.

“This idea of Christian localism is another way of saying ‘to Christianize America,’ just not doing it nationally,” Boedy said.

Hoping for good intentions

Some of those concerned about one religious group’s growing influence in Battle Ground are, themselves, religious.

“Freedom of religion, do your thing, but don’t try to influence and have power,” Bowman, the city councilor, said. “Because if you go back to the scriptures, power in itself is what people seek that is evil. And I haven’t seen that yet, but it doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

Bowman, who is Mormon, said his interactions with Spiller and the other higher-ups at Maddox have been nothing but positive. But he said he’s also heard the concerns going around town, which get more complicated when they connect to a controversial figure like Wilson.

Bowman said concerns about Spiller’s real estate purchases could just come down to residents being uncomfortable with change — worries that will disappear with time.

He said he’s heard Battle Ground residents referencing the fictional town “Pottersville” from the 1946 film “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which depicts a dystopian version of Jimmy Stewart’s Bedford Falls.

“There’s been some talk of that,” Bowman said, “people calling it Maddoxville.”

Battle Ground resident Pamela Martel, who says she is also Christian and attends a church in Portland, is one of the residents who fears that fate. Like many of her neighbors in Southwest Washington, she moved from Portland in search of a more affordable place to live and a small town that felt safer than the big city.

After hearing about the properties being bought and their connection to Maddox, Martel started doing her own sleuthing on county property record websites. Seeing the different corporations and tracing them back to Spiller left her worried about a lack of public information about what’s happening – and about why.

“People think that they are trying to buy up downtown because they want to own it all,” Martel said.

“I don’t like the idea that someone else comes in with a Christian ideology saying that this is the only Christian way and if you don’t follow our way then you’re out,” she said. “And I don’t want to live in a place where that becomes forced upon everyone else.”

She hopes that her worries are wrong, and that the intentions behind Spiller’s and Maddox’s property buys are to support Battle Ground and to maintain its small-town feel.

“I’ll be honest. I hope I’m wrong,” Martel said. “I 100% hope that I am 100% wrong. Because if I’m wrong then that means that somebody is doing something really great for this town. And I really want that to be the case.”

This story was written and reported by Erik Neumann, edited by Courtney Sherwood, Tony Schick and Gillian Flaccus, and digitally produced by Sukhjot Sal, with photos by Saskia Hatvany and visual editing by Kristyna Wentz-Graff.

This examination of the people involved in bringing changes to Battle Ground, Washington, was reported out of our Southwest Washington bureau. None of OPB’s journalism happens without you, and thanks to our valued donors we are expanding our regional journalism, with new reporters in Southwest Washington and Eastern Oregon. Help us tell more stories like this one — and ensure stories like this reach as many people as possible — by joining as a Sustainer now.

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News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/04/30/battle-ground-purchases-ceo-spiller-maddox-christian-influence/