This story is part of an ongoing investigation into disinformation in collaboration with The War Horse, the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and Mother Jones.
Just as former president Donald Trump told Fox News last week that he wanted to use the US military to “handle” what he called the “enemy from within” on Election Day, an obscure military policy was beginning to make the rounds on social media platforms favored by the far right.
The 22-page document governs military intelligence activities and is among more than a thousand different policies that outline Defense Department procedures.
The Pentagon updated it at the end of September. Although military policies are routinely updated and reissued, the timing of this one—just six weeks before the election and the same day Hurricane Helene slammed into the Southeast—struck right-wing misinformation merchants as suspicious.
They latched onto a new reference in the updated directive—“lethal force”—and soon were falsely claiming that the change meant Kamala Harris had authorized the military to kill civilians if there were to be unrest after the election.
That’s flat-out not true, the Pentagon and experts on military policy told The War Horse.
“The provisions in [the directive] are not new, and do not authorize the Secretary of Defense to use lethal force against US citizens, contrary to rumors and rhetoric circulating on social media,” Sue Gough, a Department of Defense spokesperson, said Wednesday night.
But as Trump doubles down on his “enemy from within” rhetoric, DOD Directive 5240.01 continues to gain traction among his supporters as ostensible proof that Harris, not Trump, wants to use the military against American citizens.
By early last week, “5240.01” began to spike on alt-tech platforms such as Rumble, 4chan, and Telegram, as well as on more mainstream platforms like X, according to an analysis by The War Horse and UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center.
On Ron Paul’s Liberty Report, a YouTube show, the former Texas congressman told viewers that the policy meant that the country is now a “police state.” Republican Maryland congressman Andy Harris told Newsmax host Chris Salcedo last Wednesday that he was concerned the Defense Department was pushing through policies without congressional oversight.
“This is exactly what the Democrats said Trump would do. And they’re doing it,” he said. “This means that after an election, they could declare a national emergency and literally call out the Army in the United States.”
“It’s particularly ironic since Biden/Harris have just pushed through DoD Directive 5240.01 giving the Pentagon power—for the first time in history—to use lethal force to kill Americans on US soil who protest government policies.”
By that evening, his post on X had 5.6 million views.
Joseph Nunn, a lawyer with the Liberty & National Security program at the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, and a leading expert on domestic uses of the military, had a clear response to the social media storm.
“There’s nothing here. People like Michael Flynn should know how to read a DOD directive.”
“There’s nothing here,” he said. “People like Michael Flynn should know how to read a DOD directive.”
Contrary to claims online, DOD Directive 5240.01, which last had been updated in 2020, does not grant any new powers to the military. That’s not how military directives work. Like them or not, all military policies are subject to US law; they do not create new legal authorities.
Directive 5240.01 has a narrow focus: It only addresses military intelligence, and the section that has circulated online specifically deals with intelligence assistance to civilian law enforcement.
The paragraph that contains the term “lethal force” refers to a requirement that the Secretary of Defense—the highest level of the Defense Department—must now authorize military intelligence assistance to civilian law enforcement when lethal force might be involved.
“This is not an independent source of authority,” Nunn said. “We really should look at this as an administrative safeguard that is being put in place.”
Military intelligence has long been authorized to provide assistance to federal law enforcement agencies, as well as state and local law enforcement when lives are endangered, under limited circumstances. That could include providing technical expertise or helping with international anti-terrorism or counter-narcotics operations, for instance.
“A reference to lethal force in a directive like this doesn’t mean they’re planning to have snipers on rooftops in covert ops,” said Nunn, who has written on limiting the role of the military in law enforcement. “The nature of law enforcement will sometimes involve the use of lethal force.”
A video on Rumble falsely declares that DOD Directive 5240.01 has authorized the military to use lethal force on American citizens.
In its response to The War Horse, the Pentagon said the directive’s update was “in no way timed in relation to the election or any other event.”
“Reissuing 5240.01 was part of normal business of the Department to periodically update guidance and policy,” the DOD’s Gough said.
The Defense Department has issued or revised 10 other directives and instructions since it updated “5240.01” at the end of September, ranging from a policy on space-related military activities to guidance on public affairs’ officers use of military vehicles.
“It’s not unusual to update DOD regulations,” says Risa Brooks, a political science professor at Marquette University and a former senior fellow at West Point’s Modern War Institute. “It doesn’t signal some nefarious agenda.”
The update to “5240.01” brings the policy in line with other Defense Department directives. One of those is known as DOD Directive 5210.56—an entirely different Defense Department directive than the one updated last month. It lays out rules when troops across the military can use lethal force outside of military operations, limiting it to “imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm” or to protect critical national security assets.
Posts online, including the one that Flynn shared, claim that Directive 5240.01 runs afoul of a legal statute known as posse comitatus. The Posse Comitatus Act, which dates back to Reconstruction, generally forbids military troops from acting as domestic police. Civil liberty experts consider it an important civil rights protection against possible military overreach.
Despite the conspiracy claims spreading online, the directive clearly states that military intelligence units assisting civilian police must consider the Posse Comitatus Act.
“The updated issuance remains consistent with DoD’s adherence to the Posse Comitatus Act, commitment to civil rights, and support of other safeguards in place for the protection of the American people,” Gough said.
Anti-government memes began spreading on alt-tech sites like Gab alongside posts about the updated directive.
Spreading misinformation about the military can be particularly damaging “to the relationship between the military and the public,” Brooks told The War Horse.
“This sort of politicization, this idea of sowing mistrust in the military in order to gain partisan advantage, is really corrosive,” Brooks said. “There’s a motive. There’s something to be gained by spreading these rumors.”
Ironically, however, Rep. Harris, the Republican congressman, was right about one thing when he claimed that if Kamala Harris wins, she “could declare national emergency and literally call out the Army in the United States.” That’s because any president, regardless of party, has the power to mobilize military troops against American citizens in certain circumstances. Only one candidate—Trump—in this year’s presidential election has outright suggested it.
But that presidential power isn’t granted by a random military policy. It’s granted by the Insurrection Act.
A law nearly as old as the country itself, the act gives a president essentially unilateral authority to temporarily suspend the Posse Comitatus Act and call on military troops to suppress domestic rebellions. The law effectively leaves it up to the president to decide what constitutes a rebellion.
“There are essentially zero procedural safeguards in the Insurrection Act,” Nunn says.
During his first administration, Trump and his allies reportedlyconsidered invoking the Insurrection Act both during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and again after he lost his re-election bid. And legal experts say that any follow through on Trump’s increasingly frequent threats to use the military domestically, including against “radical left lunatics,” would likely come through an invocation of the Insurrection Act.
Republicans are saying that the real misinformation is being peddled by Democrats. They claim the Harris-Walz campaign is taking out of context Trump’s comments from his October 13 interview with Fox News Maria Bartiromo, with some suggesting he was referring to undocumented migrants or to only deploying the military in a national security crisis.
Here is the full quote from Trump when Bartiromo asked if he “expected chaos on election day” from “outside agitators,” including “Chinese nationals,” “people on terrorist watch lists,” “murderers,” and “rapists”:
“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within, not even the people who have come in, destroying our country—and by the way, totally destroying our country, the towns, the villages, they’re being inundated.
“But I don’t think they’re the problem in terms of Election Day. I think the bigger problem are the people from within, we have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics.
“And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”
This story is part of an ongoing investigation into disinformation in collaboration with The War Horse, the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and Mother Jones.
Just as former president Donald Trump told Fox News last week that he wanted to use the US military to “handle” what he called the “enemy from within” on Election Day, an obscure military policy was beginning to make the rounds on social media platforms favored by the far right.
The 22-page document governs military intelligence activities and is among more than a thousand different policies that outline Defense Department procedures.
The Pentagon updated it at the end of September. Although military policies are routinely updated and reissued, the timing of this one—just six weeks before the election and the same day Hurricane Helene slammed into the Southeast—struck right-wing misinformation merchants as suspicious.
They latched onto a new reference in the updated directive—“lethal force”—and soon were falsely claiming that the change meant Kamala Harris had authorized the military to kill civilians if there were to be unrest after the election.
That’s flat-out not true, the Pentagon and experts on military policy told The War Horse.
“The provisions in [the directive] are not new, and do not authorize the Secretary of Defense to use lethal force against US citizens, contrary to rumors and rhetoric circulating on social media,” Sue Gough, a Department of Defense spokesperson, said Wednesday night.
But as Trump doubles down on his “enemy from within” rhetoric, DOD Directive 5240.01 continues to gain traction among his supporters as ostensible proof that Harris, not Trump, wants to use the military against American citizens.
By early last week, “5240.01” began to spike on alt-tech platforms such as Rumble, 4chan, and Telegram, as well as on more mainstream platforms like X, according to an analysis by The War Horse and UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center.
On Ron Paul’s Liberty Report, a YouTube show, the former Texas congressman told viewers that the policy meant that the country is now a “police state.” Republican Maryland congressman Andy Harris told Newsmax host Chris Salcedo last Wednesday that he was concerned the Defense Department was pushing through policies without congressional oversight.
“This is exactly what the Democrats said Trump would do. And they’re doing it,” he said. “This means that after an election, they could declare a national emergency and literally call out the Army in the United States.”
“It’s particularly ironic since Biden/Harris have just pushed through DoD Directive 5240.01 giving the Pentagon power—for the first time in history—to use lethal force to kill Americans on US soil who protest government policies.”
By that evening, his post on X had 5.6 million views.
Joseph Nunn, a lawyer with the Liberty & National Security program at the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, and a leading expert on domestic uses of the military, had a clear response to the social media storm.
“There’s nothing here. People like Michael Flynn should know how to read a DOD directive.”
“There’s nothing here,” he said. “People like Michael Flynn should know how to read a DOD directive.”
Contrary to claims online, DOD Directive 5240.01, which last had been updated in 2020, does not grant any new powers to the military. That’s not how military directives work. Like them or not, all military policies are subject to US law; they do not create new legal authorities.
Directive 5240.01 has a narrow focus: It only addresses military intelligence, and the section that has circulated online specifically deals with intelligence assistance to civilian law enforcement.
The paragraph that contains the term “lethal force” refers to a requirement that the Secretary of Defense—the highest level of the Defense Department—must now authorize military intelligence assistance to civilian law enforcement when lethal force might be involved.
“This is not an independent source of authority,” Nunn said. “We really should look at this as an administrative safeguard that is being put in place.”
Military intelligence has long been authorized to provide assistance to federal law enforcement agencies, as well as state and local law enforcement when lives are endangered, under limited circumstances. That could include providing technical expertise or helping with international anti-terrorism or counter-narcotics operations, for instance.
“A reference to lethal force in a directive like this doesn’t mean they’re planning to have snipers on rooftops in covert ops,” said Nunn, who has written on limiting the role of the military in law enforcement. “The nature of law enforcement will sometimes involve the use of lethal force.”
A video on Rumble falsely declares that DOD Directive 5240.01 has authorized the military to use lethal force on American citizens.
In its response to The War Horse, the Pentagon said the directive’s update was “in no way timed in relation to the election or any other event.”
“Reissuing 5240.01 was part of normal business of the Department to periodically update guidance and policy,” the DOD’s Gough said.
The Defense Department has issued or revised 10 other directives and instructions since it updated “5240.01” at the end of September, ranging from a policy on space-related military activities to guidance on public affairs’ officers use of military vehicles.
“It’s not unusual to update DOD regulations,” says Risa Brooks, a political science professor at Marquette University and a former senior fellow at West Point’s Modern War Institute. “It doesn’t signal some nefarious agenda.”
The update to “5240.01” brings the policy in line with other Defense Department directives. One of those is known as DOD Directive 5210.56—an entirely different Defense Department directive than the one updated last month. It lays out rules when troops across the military can use lethal force outside of military operations, limiting it to “imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm” or to protect critical national security assets.
Posts online, including the one that Flynn shared, claim that Directive 5240.01 runs afoul of a legal statute known as posse comitatus. The Posse Comitatus Act, which dates back to Reconstruction, generally forbids military troops from acting as domestic police. Civil liberty experts consider it an important civil rights protection against possible military overreach.
Despite the conspiracy claims spreading online, the directive clearly states that military intelligence units assisting civilian police must consider the Posse Comitatus Act.
“The updated issuance remains consistent with DoD’s adherence to the Posse Comitatus Act, commitment to civil rights, and support of other safeguards in place for the protection of the American people,” Gough said.
Anti-government memes began spreading on alt-tech sites like Gab alongside posts about the updated directive.
Spreading misinformation about the military can be particularly damaging “to the relationship between the military and the public,” Brooks told The War Horse.
“This sort of politicization, this idea of sowing mistrust in the military in order to gain partisan advantage, is really corrosive,” Brooks said. “There’s a motive. There’s something to be gained by spreading these rumors.”
Ironically, however, Rep. Harris, the Republican congressman, was right about one thing when he claimed that if Kamala Harris wins, she “could declare national emergency and literally call out the Army in the United States.” That’s because any president, regardless of party, has the power to mobilize military troops against American citizens in certain circumstances. Only one candidate—Trump—in this year’s presidential election has outright suggested it.
But that presidential power isn’t granted by a random military policy. It’s granted by the Insurrection Act.
A law nearly as old as the country itself, the act gives a president essentially unilateral authority to temporarily suspend the Posse Comitatus Act and call on military troops to suppress domestic rebellions. The law effectively leaves it up to the president to decide what constitutes a rebellion.
“There are essentially zero procedural safeguards in the Insurrection Act,” Nunn says.
During his first administration, Trump and his allies reportedlyconsidered invoking the Insurrection Act both during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and again after he lost his re-election bid. And legal experts say that any follow through on Trump’s increasingly frequent threats to use the military domestically, including against “radical left lunatics,” would likely come through an invocation of the Insurrection Act.
Republicans are saying that the real misinformation is being peddled by Democrats. They claim the Harris-Walz campaign is taking out of context Trump’s comments from his October 13 interview with Fox News Maria Bartiromo, with some suggesting he was referring to undocumented migrants or to only deploying the military in a national security crisis.
Here is the full quote from Trump when Bartiromo asked if he “expected chaos on election day” from “outside agitators,” including “Chinese nationals,” “people on terrorist watch lists,” “murderers,” and “rapists”:
“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within, not even the people who have come in, destroying our country—and by the way, totally destroying our country, the towns, the villages, they’re being inundated.
“But I don’t think they’re the problem in terms of Election Day. I think the bigger problem are the people from within, we have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics.
“And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”
On Monday morning, I drove to Powder Springs, Georgia, a working-class suburb 20 miles northwest of Atlanta, to see former President Donald Trump speak at a palatial Pentecostal church called Worship With Wonders. As I pulled into the 30-acre campus, a gentleman wearing a safety vest and directing traffic motioned for me to roll down my window and handed me a stack of voting guides “for you to hand out to your congregation.” Before I could tell him I didn’t have a congregation, he waved me toward the yawning parking lot, which was filling up fast with a crowd of several thousand attendees.
The organization behind both the day’s event and the voting guide (which assured readers that Trump would say “NO” to “boys competing in girls’ sports” and “YES” to allowing “only US citizens to vote”) was the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a national Christian group that aims to “mobilize and train people of faith to vote and flex their political muscles.” Their flex today turned out to be a four-hour marathon of praise music, speakers, and a lengthy intermission before Trump arrived. The extensive speaker lineup included several superstars of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) a growing charismatic movement led by a loose network of apostles and prophets who believe Christians are called to take over the government. In recent years, Trump has emerged as a key figure in this quest: In 2020, Paula White-Cain, the NAR-affiliated Florida pastor who served as Trump’s lead spiritual adviser during his presidency, warned her followers that Christians who didn’t support Trump will “have to stand accountable before God one day.”
The day’s main attraction was a meandering conversation between White-Cain, and Trump, who described him as a “champion of people of faith.” Trump reciprocated by calling White-Cain “a great person, a great woman,” and then the conversation began. Sometimes Trump answered White-Cain’s questions, but he mainly treated them prompts for what has become his trademark, meandering, stream-of-consciousness responses.
When White-Cain asked about his religious upbringing, Trump described attending his family’s Presbyterian church in Queens. “It made me feel good,” he replied, “but sometimes you couldn’t get out of there fast enough, I have to be honest.” The audience roared with appreciation for his candor. His father, Fred Trump, used to take him to see Billy Graham preach, he recalled. Which made him think of the hymn “How Great Thou Art.” Which made him think of Elvis.
“It made me feel good, but sometimes you couldn’t get out of there fast enough, I have to be honest.”
When White-Cain asked him about his recent work with Billy Graham’s son, Franklin Graham, on relief efforts in hurricane-stricken North Carolina, Trump marveled at how tornadoes destroy some things but leave others untouched. Then he told a story about how Graham-the-younger had once asked him not to swear so much. The response to a question about Trump’s plans for US-Israel relations was the oft-repeated story of moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem in 2018. This time he finished with a flourish, with an anecdote about telling the contractors to build the new embassy out of a material called “Jerusalem stone” because “a very rich guy, a very big Wall Street guy” he knew had always told him he was very proud that his building contained the material. And—score!—it also turned out to the “cheap as hell.” Trump’s most significant line of the event may have been his cryptic promise that his “faith council” would be “directly in the Oval Office.”
While Trump rambled and riffed, the speakers who preceded him, each of whom was allotted only a few minutes, cut right to the chase. Faith and Freedom Coalition president Ralph Reed announced his group had knocked on more than 8 million doors so far this election season, and then described a moment when Harris allegedly told a heckler who yelled “Christ is king” at a Wisconsin event that he was “at the wrong rally.” Reed crowed, “Today you’re at the right rally!” The crowd went wild. Lance Wallnau, a NAR apostle and key player in the “Stop the Steal” campaign promised, “In every state and every county…Christ will be glorified!” Kelly Shackelford, head of the Christian law firm First Liberty Institute, got a standing ovation when he said the “Lemon Test” for the establishment clause, which codifies the separation of church and state, is “reversed everywhere.”
The crowd was fairly diverse, and the speaker lineup, while mostly white, did include some pastors of color. Florida’s Bishop Kelvin Cobaris, the former president of the African American Council of Christian Clergy, said, “I want to tell every African American in here ‘Don’t be a afraid to lose your Black card…vote to defend religious freedom, vote to defend Israel!’” Pastor Sam Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, said the enemy is “trying to kill our children in the classroom.” For a split second, I naively thought he was talking about guns, but then he clarified that the killer was “ideologies and social constructs that are out of alignment with the word of the Lord God.” The group ended the event by gathering around Trump to pray over him.
The attendees I spoke with afterward were jubilant—likely in part because after a program full of shaking their fists against “men in women’s sports” and “transgender surgeries for illegal aliens,” the crowd rocked out to the queer anthem “YMCA” as Trump was leaving the stage. Betsy Jorgensen, a volunteer with the Georgia Faith and Freedom Coalition, told me that she was “very confident we are going to win, barring any other tragedy.” She was from nearby Lumpkin County, which, she said, “is so red we call it Trumpkin County.” There, she had been knocking on doors and registering voters because she believed this election was crucial to right the country. “We are the last bit of a republic, of the free world,” she said. Alayna Martin, also from nearby, said she thought Trump would win “in a landslide” and that she liked him because “he cares about our faith and wants us to be a part of everything.
Sophie McLean, a regular congregant at the church where the event was held, also thought Trump would win, but her friend and fellow congregant, Jennifer Smith, wasn’t so sure. In fact, she still hadn’t yet made up her mind whom she was going to vote for. What would help her choose? I asked. “More time—I’m running out of it, but more time,” she said. “I probably need a little bit more prayer.”
On a blisteringly sunny October day in Washington, DC, tens of thousands of Christians gathered on the National Mall for a day of intense prayer. A self-proclaimed prophet from Colorado named Lou Engle had summoned them for an event he called the “Esther Call on the Mall” because, he said, he had a dream in which the nation’s capital was filled with “a million Esthers,” a reference to the Old Testament queen who stood up for her people against the wicked king Haman. “You’ll say to your children and your grandchildren that you were there when God gathered the Esthers to save a nation,” Engle promised in a trailer video for the event.
Esther’s people, of course, were the imperiled Jews, and not by accident, Engle’s prayer rally took place on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. The speakers, a racially diverse group, praised Jesus, but, on a stage festooned with Israeli flags they also often prayed in Hebrew. Some in the crowd wore Jewish prayer shawls and stars of David and blew shofars, the rams’ horn that ancient Israelites used to call troops to battle. Others told me they were fasting, just as observant Jews do on Yom Kippur. Engle and some of the other speakers bowed back and forth as they spoke looking as if they were engaged in the Jewish prayer practice of davening.
Fundamentalist Christians have long supported Israel because of their belief that the Jews are God’s “chosen people.” The modern Christian Zionist movement goes back to the Messianic Jewish movement of the 1970s, widely known as Jews for Jesus, who aimed to convert Jews to Christianity. Their approach, says Rabbi Jack Moline, the emeritus president of the religious pluralism advocacy group Interfaith Alliance, was, “‘The friendlier I can make Christianity to your Jewish experience, the more likely you are to embrace the one true religion, which is generic Christianity.’” Modern Christian Zionists, on the other hand, mostly aren’t looking to immediately bring any Jews to Jesus. Instead, says Moline, they want to “facilitate the gathering of the exiles back to the Holy Land…which will pave the way for the second coming.” But there’s a catch: In this scenario, most of the Jewish inhabitants of Israel will perish, and the remainder will finally accept Jesus—bringing about both “Armageddon and the elimination of the ‘Jewish problem,’” says Moline.
“‘The friendlier I can make Christianity to your Jewish experience, the more likely you are to embrace the one true religion, which is generic Christianity.’”
In the past few years, at the forefront of Christian Zionism has been a rapidly growing global charismatic movement called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), whose leaders, including Engle and many others who attended the march, believe God has commanded Christians to take over the government, in part because doing so will hasten this particular end-times scenario.
This movement has gained even greater propulsion since the Hamas attack on Israel and the war in Gaza. Prominent NAR pastors have claimed that this conflict is the latest chapter in an existential spiritual war. Damon Berry, a religious studies professor at St. Lawrence University in New York, says NAR leaders believe “that what we’re doing politically on the ground [in Gaza] despite the incredible loss of life, is necessarily a battle raging between the forces of good and evil.” In this battle, NAR leaders see Trump as anointed by God to command the fight for the United States and Israel. Berry adds that they are convinced that “if we don’t support Trump, this is something that America would be judged for.” Some of the most influential Christian Zionist Trump supporters have served as spiritual advisers to the former president and their influence can be seen in some of his foreign policy decisions.
In this election, Christian Zionists’ pleas for their followers to support Israel at any cost are only growing louder. Leaders in this movement, including many of those present at the Esther Call, are working from the top down, leveraging relationships with key GOP leaders, including vice presidential candidate Ohio Sen. JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson.
They are also working from the bottom up, warning their followers that God’s favor for the United States depends on Christians’ support for Israel. The Christian Zionist voting bloc is considerable: Nearly a quarter of Americans identify as evangelical. In a 2020 poll, half of evangelicals said that supporting Israel was “important for fulfilling biblical prophecy.” By back-of-the-napkin math, that’s about 41.5 million people—certainly enough to sway an election. The share of Republicans who support Israel has grown from half in the late ’90s to 80 percent in 2018, a Pew survey found. What’s more, some voters, especially younger ones, have said they plan to protest the Biden administration’s support for Israel by not voting in the election, or even, as NPR reported earlier this month, casting a ballot for Trump—in fact, the former president is now the favored candidate among Arab American voters, an October poll found.
At the Esther Call event, Lou Engle stood before a row of Israeli flags and admonished the crowd. “You can’t listen to what the media is telling you, you’ve got to align with the word of God!” he cried. “If we stand and bless Israel, He may save our nation!”
“You can’t listen to what the media is telling you, you’ve got to align with the word of God! If we stand and bless Israel, He may save our nation!”
For decades, Christian Zionists have been working behind the scenes in Washington to strengthen US support for Israel, mainly through the powerhouse evangelical group Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which was founded in 2006 by Texas minister John Hagee to bring together the patchwork of pro-Israel Christian groups. Another aligned group is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the massive lobbying organization that advocates for pro-Israel policies (and spent aggressively in 2024 to sink progressive candidates who spoke out against the war in Gaza). A major breakthrough for Christian Zionists came in 2017 when the Trump administration answered their calls to officially recognize Jerusalem, a holy city for Christians, as the capital of Israel, and announced plans to relocate the US embassy there the following year. The United Nations criticized the move because Jerusalem is in the occupied territory of the West Bank. But Christian Zionists saw the move as a victory—and a further validation that Trump had been chosen by God to lead the United States in the world.
One prominent NAR leader, a South Carolina–based pastor named Dutch Sheets, said in a broadcast that the embassy move “did something in the spirit realm. It aligned us in a significant way with Israel. I believe God was saying He is going to rain Holy Spirit oil down all over America.” In a 2018 interview on a Christian news show, Paula White-Cain, one of Trump’s major spiritual advisers, recalled telling him shortly after he made the decision, “Sir, you’ve done the right thing.” Lance Wallnau, a Texas-based former business strategist and a leader in the New Apostolic Reformation, said the embassy move fulfilled “a prophecy” in the Bible that the Jews would be able to return to their land, and that Trump had been “stirred by the spirit of God.”
In reality, Trump had likely also been stirred by the spirit of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a fervently pro-Israel Orthodox Jew, as well as the many pro-Israel groups that had been lobbying hard on the issue (and stocking his campaign war chest). One of the main cheerleaders of the move was CUFI’s John Hagee. In 2017, before the embassy was officially moved, Hagee told a group of his supporters, “When I spoke to [Trump] in the White House about this several weeks ago, he said this very emphatically. He said, ‘Other presidents have failed you, but I will not disappoint the Christian community in this issue. I will stand with Israel, and we will at some point in time, move the embassy.’”
Trump’s goodwill with NAR leaders was tested a few years later when his administration tried to broker a peace deal between Israel and Palestine. Christian Zionists have long opposed the idea of a “two-state solution,” which would recognize the existence of both Israel and Palestine. During the Middle East peace talks of 2013, for example, televangelist Pat Robertson warned that if the United States recognized Palestine, God would punish Americans with a “natural disaster.” In 2019, a group of pastors, including Hagee, White, and Wallnau were invited to the White House for a briefing on a possible two-state solution. Afterward, Right Wing Watch reported, in a YouTube broadcast, Wallnau lambasted the plan. “Every time we have given land up of Israel, we have had a curse on our country,” he said. “You watch. Every time a president has taken something away from Israel, the judgment of God inevitably calls down.”
Negotiations for the two-state solution, of course, collapsed—and Christian Zionists seemed eager to forgive the administration’s blunder. During then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s 2019 trip to Jerusalem, a Christian Broadcasting Network journalist asked Pompeo, a devout evangelical Christian, “Could it be that President Trump is being raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from an Iranian menace?” Pompeo responded, grinning, “As a Christian, I certainly believe that that’s possible.”
When Trump lost the 2020 election, some of the same NAR pastors who had praised Trump for moving the embassy—including Lance Wallnau, Dutch Sheets, and Paula White-Cain—emerged as leaders in the “Stop the Steal” campaign claiming that the election was stolen. In a 2022 broadcast, Sheets said that Trump had told him in a dream, “‘God has put the tools in me to tear down, root up, and confront the system.’”
Fast forward to October 7, 2023, when NAR pastors’ commitment to Israel became an all-out obsession. In a forthcoming paper for the religion studies journal Nova Religio, Berry, the St. Lawrence University religion scholar, chronicles how NAR pastors characterized the war in Gaza as part of “a cosmic battle between God and satanic forces.” Berry references a broadcast on Rumble titled “Is This WWIII?” that Wallnau published on October 8, 2023. In it, Wallnau claimed that Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel was the result of God punishing the United States for electing Biden, abandoning Trump, and allowing trans people to serve in the military. Because of these transgressions, Wallnau says, the United States has become “spiritually vulnerable.” In another podcast a few weeks later, Wallnau returned to those themes, warning his 21,000 viewers that the pro-Palestine protests on college campuses aimed “to deconstruct the legitimacy of the United States and Israel.”
Berry also quotes Jonathan Cahn, a rabbi and NAR-aligned charismatic Christian. Cahn, who also spoke at the Esther Call event, has said in the past that even to utter the word “Palestine” was “to take part in a war against the promise of God and the will of God.”
To some NAR adherents, paradoxically, the October 7 attack and all the bloodshed that followed was actually good news. NAR pastor Cindy Jacobs, another leader in the “Stop the Steal” campaign, told the crowd on the Mall that God had warned her about Hamas’ attack—but he also told her that “after the dark time, Israel would come into a great revival”—presumably, the prelude to Christ’s return.
What exactly that “great revival” might look like in the near term is a matter of some debate. While many of the NAR leaders make no secret of their disdain for a two-state solution, a new guard of Christian Zionist groups seems to have realized that loudly calling for Palestine’s obliteration doesn’t play well with younger Christians. Take the Philos Project, a decade-old nonprofit with an annual budget of $8 million whose mission is to “promote positive Christian engagement in the Near East.” The group, which in 2020 received a $9.4 million grant from the public charity National Philanthropic Trust, says on its website that it supports “some variant of the two-state solution—ideally a Jewish state with a Palestinian minority and a Palestinian state with a Jewish minority.”
Yet elsewhere, Philos leaders express a different set of beliefs. As the New Republic recently reported, its founder Robert Nicholson appeared last year on a podcast hosted by the pro-life activist Lila Rose during which he warned that Islamist terrorists aligned with Hamas were likely flowing into the United States over the southern border, thanks to lax US immigration policies. On Facebook in January, the organization’s executive director, Luke Moon, posted a photo of himself in Israel proudly signing a bomb that was “bound for Hezbollah.” That summer on Facebook, he posted a photo of himself wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Jesus giving the thumbs-up sign, accompanied by the slogan “Jesus Was a Zionist.” Philos Project leaders devoted a recent podcast episode to debunking what they called a “conspiracy theory” that AIPAC wields political power.
“Jesus was a Zionist.”
Philos Project is platformed by powerful groups and people. In January, Moon spoke at the inaugural event of the National Taskforce to Combat Antisemitism, a post-October 7 initiative of the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation. In addition to the Philos Project, other groups involved in the effort included the MAGA group America First Policy Institute, the conservative Christian organizations the Concerned Women of America, the old guard Christian right Family Research Council, and the Independent Women’s Forum.
On October 7, 2024, the Philos Project hosted an event in Washington, DC. The stated purpose was to recognize the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ attack on Israel, but it also served as a quasi-campaign stop: The event was headlined by vice-presidential candidate JD Vance.
By positioning itself as a thought leader, Philos Project exerts its influence far beyond politicians. One prominent example involves Mike Cosper, an opinion writer for the leading Christian magazine Christianity Today. In 2022, Cosper earned a following among progressive Christians with a wildly popular investigative podcast about a scandal-plagued Seattle megachurch. The following year, Cosper decided to turn his attention to the war in the Middle East. In a podcast series called “It’s Complicated,” Cosper promised to travel to the Middle East to unpack the nuances of the war, to “meet the people whose lives have been shaped by this conflict, this war, and this hope.”
As it turned out, Cosper’s reporting included the voices of only a few Palestinians. Ultimately, in a March 2024 Christianity Todaycover story, he compared Hamas to campus protesters, writing, “Hamas uses an Islamist and nationalist ideology to demonize Jews, and the academic Left uses anticolonial ideology to do the same.” What Christianity Today did not disclose to its 4.5 million online readers was that Cosper’s fact-finding missions to the Middle East was actually a junket organized by the Christian Zionist Philos Project.
After the Esther Call event in DC, Engle’s group sent out an email urging attendees to donate to a consortium of Christian Zionist groups run by an Alabama-based Christian Zionist named Heather Johnston, who also spoke at the Esther Call. On her groups’ websites, Johnston says that her journey progressed from the life of an ordinary Christian mom “to passionately seeking God and the world of international politics.” The flagship program Johnston runs, the US Israel Education Association, has conducted tours to Israel for congressional representatives since 2011. Their promotional materials give off the veneer of neutrality; the website promises, for example, that congresspeople will learn about “efforts to build an integrated economy between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank as a grassroots peace movement.”
In contrast, on social media, Johnston writes about her “risk-taking relationship with Jesus” and waxes hawkish about Israel. Earlier this month in a post about Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the globetrotting chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, she called on Biden to “speed up weapons shipments to Israel, including 2,000-pound bombs,” noting that there had been “delays due to human rights concerns, but McCaul emphasizes their necessity for Israel’s defense as tensions rise in the Middle East.”
In her posts, Johnston regularly mixes her own Christianity with a little folksy Judaism—one mini-essay, for example, explains how New Testament characters showed “chutzpah.” Her connections to power brokers are also fodder, as she regularly posts photos of herself with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom she calls “a dear friend of mine,” “King Bibi,” and a “strategic genius.” House Speaker Mike Johnson, she wrote in a post last November, “is a brilliant leader and God’s favor is resting on Him.”
At the Esther Call event, Johnston read a text message she said she had received from him. “He told me, ‘I genuinely wish I could be there with you today because I believe it has never been more important for us to stand together and pray together for the peace and security of Israel, and to speak with moral clarity about the fateful battle we are in between good and evil, light versus darkness.’”
But her work is not restricted to the US. She also runs an Israel-based group called the National Leadership Center, which trains Israeli youth in leadership skills in partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Education. The group’s headquarters are in the West Bank, which is referred to as “Samaria” on the website. “In the last 13 years there has been a noticeable change in the spiritual climate of the nation,” the group’s promotional materials say. “We believe we are contributing to and seeing the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy that hearts of stone will be turned to hearts of flesh.”
“We believe we are contributing to and seeing the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy that hearts of stone will be turned to hearts of flesh.”
Another prominent Christian Zionist leader is Michele Bachmann, the former Republican representative from Iowa and 2012 presidential hopeful. Bachmann is a board member of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, and earlier this year, she helped found a new institute for studies about Israel at Regent University, a Christian college in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The institute, Bachmann said at its opening, would “help expand national and global understanding of the Jewish state.” Around the same time, Bachmann partnered with Philos Project’s Moon and several other Christian leaders to create the Conference of Presidents of Christian Organizations in Support of Israel. “We’re in a magic moment right now, a very special moment, when I’ve seen more flowering than I’ve ever seen in my life between the Christian community and the Jewish community,” she told the Jewish News Syndicate.
Part of this commitment appears to be a hardline rejection of the rights of Palestinians. Last year, in remarks at a conference hosted by the right-wing student group Turning Point USA, Bachmann said of Palestinians, “They need to be removed from that land. That land needs to be turned into a national park.” In an October 2023 appearance in Los Angeles, Bachmann theorized that “wokeness” in Israel prevented the military from anticipating the attack. “It’s entirely possible that perhaps the intel service in Israel also had wokeness and decided not to pass the information along,” she said. She blamed “a spiritual, demonic presence” for the Hamas attack.
Christian Zionism isn’t just happening at the national level. This summer, while I was reporting a story about the New Apostolic Reformation in Pennsylvania, I attended a service at the Lord’s House of Prayer, a NAR-adjacent church in the city of Lancaster. That morning, a young Christian couple from Jerusalem, Yair and Anna Pinto, stood at the pulpit. (They didn’t respond to requests for comment for this article, nor did the Philos Project, Johnson, and Bachmann.) Yair, a fighter with the Israeli Defense Forces who documents his experiences for the Christian media outlet Trinity Broadcasting Network, told us how God had protected him as he rode in a tank through Gaza. Anna talked about misinformation circulating about Hamas’ October 7 massacre.
“They’re just on social media, TikTok University, saying, ‘Oh, here, this is what happened. My poor Palestinian friends, massacred by this great army, the most inhumane army in the world.’” But that was a distortion of reality, she said. The real enemy was Hamas—the opposite of what young people hear on social media. “My heart goes out to the teens because ours is a world where we have people who define themselves as ‘they’ or ‘it’ or a cat or a dog or a unicorn—I think we’ve got a glimpse of this evil, and it’s just spreading, like a root in a tree.”
Some Jewish people welcome the support of Christian Zionists, and it’s not hard to see one compelling reason why: Pastors are fundraising powerhouses, whose contributions are helping to rebuild areas of Israel that are ravaged by the war. According to the Associated Press, in the weeks immediately following Hamas’ attack, John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel raised $3 million to support Israeli first responders. Sean Feucht, a pastor who has organized a series of prayer rallies on the steps of state capitols, led a pro-Israel rally at New York’s Columbia University. (The Philos Project’s Luke Moon was a fellow organizer.) Jentezen Franklin, a Georgia-based NAR-aligned pastor who served as a spiritual adviser to Trump, recently pledged to donate $15 million to Israel; he has received awards and accolades from Jewish leaders for his efforts to help Israel rebuild after the attacks.
Other Jews bristle at the appropriation of their culture—which, says Moline, of Interfaith Alliance, can feel transactional. For many Christian Zionists, he says “there’s something important in Jewish practice and Jewish belief, and they want to absorb it. They want it to become part of who they are. It increases a sense of legitimacy.” The appropriation can also seem like a bit of a grift: Get your special edition Israeli army shofar here for only $555! Grab a “solidarity mezuzah” to protect your home for just $18! As Moline put it, “It’s like saying to a Catholic, ‘Where can we get some of those communion wafers? They’re so delicious!’”
It can also appear that there is something transactional about Christian Zionists’ support—they need the Jews to hasten the second coming of Christ. Michele Bachmann said in 2015 that she wanted to “convert as many Jews as we can” (though she later apologized). Southern California pastor Jack Hibbs, who presides over the influential Calvary Chapel network of NAR-affiliated churches and was a leader in the Stop the Steal campaign, said on Turning Point CEO Charlie Kirk’s TV show last year that Christians must “look past the sins of Israel and the sins of the Jew and give them the hope of Jesus.” As Mother Jones has reported, Hagee of Christians United for Israel said in 1999, “God sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land.” (He also later apologized.)
Religion historian Daniel Hummel, who leads the Lumen Center religious studies research institute in Madison, Wisconsin, points out that Christian Zionists’ support does not extend to all Jewish people. Christian Zionists, says Hummel, often express scorn for non-religious and cultural Jews. Indeed, even amid all the fetishization of Israel and Judaism at the Esther Call event, some speakers blamed America’s problems on George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist who has become a target of antisemitic conspiracy theories all over the world. “American Jews are really dividing over whether they should even support Israel,” says Hummel. “And Christian Zionists see this as endemic of a deeper problem within secular liberal Judaism.”
Trump himself has expressed that same disdain for liberal Jews. In 2019, he called Jewish people who vote for Democrats “very disloyal to Israel.” Earlier this year, he said, “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion.”
Despite Trump’s seeming ambivalence about American Jews, as the election approaches, NAR pastors seem more convinced than ever that the former president has been divinely to lead the defense of Israel and God’s “chosen people.” Last year, a few weeks after October 7, Engle, the prophet, announced his intention to make Israel “the Goliath” of his crusade (abortion was his “bear,” he said, and the LGBTQ movement was his “lion,” the NAR research X account @SometimesPDX reported.)
This past July, Jentezen Franklin spoke at the prayer breakfast at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, telling the attendees that he believed that God had providentially saved Trump from being assassinated. A month later, at a sermon at the Free Chapel in Gainesville, Georgia, Franklin gave a sermon about godly voting. “Whether we like it or not, [the Jews] are still his chosen people,” he said, holding a Bible up and waving it around emphatically. “God has blessed America because we have blessed and stood with the nation of Israel. And when you vote for anyone who is anti-Israel, you literally are voting against every part of this book, from Genesis to Revelation.”
At the Esther Call, the dozen or so attendees I talked to all told me that supporting Israel was a top issue for them in the presidential election. Toward the end of the day, I met Donna Neiman, a middle-aged woman who had traveled from Pennsylvania to attend the rally. She was carrying a shofar, and wearing lion earrings, which she said represented Jesus as the “lion of Judah.” Jesus, she said, “was born in Israel. He’s coming back in Israel. And if you want to know what’s going on in the world, you’ve got to watch Israel, because Israel is precious to him. It’s the apple of his eye.” Because of this, she said, Israel was a top concern for her in the election, which was why she had decided to cast her vote for Trump. “It’s Trump—he’s the only one, and he literally got on his knees the day when that that attack came on him, when they tried to shoot his ear,” she said, her voice raspy with emotion. “Yes, that is what it is! He will pray for Israel!”
Donald Trump’s rhetoric during his 2024 campaign has been the darkest in modern memory. He has emphasized grievance and demagoguery ever since he first ran for president, most infamously with his build-up to the January 6 insurrection. But in recent months he has gone to new extremes. In numerous speeches and media appearances, he has peddled false conspiracy theories about the two assassination attempts against him and stoked fear and anger nonstop about an alleged “invasion” of murderous migrants, who he claims are “poisoning the blood of” America and “conquering” cities and towns nationwide.
Throughout the election homestretch, Trump has woven these virulent strands into his core message about a supposed grand conspiracy by Democrats to steal the White House from him. Trump and multipletopsurrogates have spent months asserting that his political opponents “even tried to kill him” as part of this plot—a canard Trump further amplified when he returned for a second rally at the site in Butler, Pennsylvania, where a gunman opened fire in mid-July.
During a speech in Atlanta, Trump reiterated lies about Democrats conspiring to use undocumented migrants to transform America. “It’s so sinister,” he said, “but they want to sign these people up to vote, and if they do that, this country is destroyed. We’d become a dumping ground for the entire world.” Trump has drawn on such “Great Replacement” themes—an extremist ideology embraced by multiple mass shooters—ever since he was in the White House. And Trump’s biggest financial backer, Elon Musk, is now also advancing this theme, speaking at Trump rallies and posting with massive reach on his social media platform, X.
Most news media rarely, if ever, frame Trump’s rhetoric for what it is: methodical, sustained incitement. Proving a direct connection between Trump’s incendiary messaging and acts of violence can be all but impossible—a gap of plausible deniability that is central to the method of stochastic terrorism, as it’s known to national security experts. Nonetheless there is a long history of Trump’s rhetoric correlating strongly with subsequent menace and violence: a surge in threats targeting journalists as “the enemy of the people,” a Trump supporter attacking an FBI field office after Trump raged against the raid on Mar-a-Lago, threats to kill FBI agents over a “stolen election” and the Hunter Biden case.
The intensifying demagoguery from Trump this election season has caused high concern among threat assessment and law enforcement experts, as I’ve been reportingsince June. Fortunately, their worst fears about the kind of catastrophic violence it might provoke have yet to be realized. But according to two senior federal law enforcement sources I spoke with in recent weeks, Trump’s extremism has been accompanied by a rise in violent threats reflecting his messaging.
According to these sources, multiple cases of threats have involved individuals citing or parroting Trump’s ongoing claims about violent migrants invading and taking over the country. Trump’s continual focus on that alleged menace has produced a noticeable hardening effect, one source told me: “We see that the longer it’s talked about, the more it becomes perceived as fact.” Other cases have included talk of “payback or revenge” against Trump’s political adversaries for the assassination attempts, including threats focused on elected officials.
“It’s really poisonous, and it’s giving justification to people who are on the edge to take extreme actions.”
Trump’s hyperbole at recent rallies has included macabre descriptions of alleged rape and murder by migrants, such as telling his supporters, “they’ll cut your throat.” After his rally last Saturday in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, most media coverage focused on his lewd comments about golf legend Arnold Palmer’s genitals, but less noted was that Trump also conjured a specter of war against migrants: “We will not be invaded, we will not be occupied, we will not be conquered. That’s what they’re doing. This is an invasion into our country of a foreign military.”
He has continued to blame Vice President Kamala Harris for this non-reality: “She’s letting vicious gangs take over whole communities,” he inveighed at a rally on Monday in Greenville, North Carolina. “She’s bussing and flying them in by the millions.”
A threat assessment expert who consults for federal law enforcement told me that the fear and contempt generated by such rhetoric is potent, and can be interpreted by some people as permission to commit violence. “It’s really poisonous, and it’s giving justification to people who are on the edge to take extreme actions.”
In September, the town of Springfield, Ohio, endured waves of paralyzing bomb threats and other harassment after Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, spread lies about Haitian immigrants supposedly stealing and eating neighbors’ pets. Risk for violence escalated in the southeastern US when Trump and his allies seized on the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, falsely accusing FEMA and the Biden administration of abandoning victims. These repeated lies were debunked by state and local leaders, including Republicans, but that didn’t stop Trump. “They spent their money on illegal migrants,” he declared again at Monday’s rally in Greenville. “They didn’t have any money left for North Carolina.”
Trump has continued to tell this lie in his stump speech—even after a Trump supporter armed with multiple guns was arrested in western North Carolina in mid-October for allegedly threatening to harm FEMA workers. That and other armed threats disrupted the agency’s efforts to help hurricane victims.
Risk for violence around Election Day remains a high concern and a focus for law enforcement, the sources confirmed to me. As one longtime election official in Georgia explained this week to the Wall Street Journal: “People have had four years of just marinating in all sorts of different conspiracy theories, and we worry they’ll come in looking for a problem. Then you got, ‘Hey everyone come down to the polling place,’ and mobs showing up, maybe armed, and it can really snowball very quickly.”
The temperature also has been rising with adversarial partisan crowds, as seen in Pennsylvania on Sunday in the vicinity of a McDonald’s where Trump posed briefly as a fry cook. Concern will extend well beyond Election Day, through a period of uncertainty about voting results that is likely to follow—and that undoubtedly will be further weaponized by Trump and his allies using baseless claims of fraud, sand-in-the-gears litigation, and beyond.
National security and threat assessment experts told me after the January 6 insurrection that quashing the violent extremism unleashed by Trump requires a fundamental change in what political leaders treat as acceptable rhetoric. But through the years of Trump’s continuing grip on the Republican Party, that standard has trended in the wrong direction, with many Republican politicians excusing or even joining in on Trump’s tactics.
With Election Day fast approaching, no Republican member of Congress or high-profile figure in the party is speaking out forcefully against Trump’s dark rhetoric. House Speaker Mike Johnson and others stick to misdirection or feigned ignorance, if they address the matter at all. As one threat assessment source told me: “Silence is its own form of participation.”
Last Saturday, tens of thousands of Christians gathered under the blazing October sun on the National Mall in Washington, DC, for an all-day prayer rally that organizers called the “Esther Call on the Mall.” While the crowd raised their hands in testimony, waved flags, and sang along with megachurch standards, the speakers paced the stage urgently, speaking, sometimes screaming, about a spiritual war for the soul of the United States. “I pray the fate of America will be given an extension of mercy,” thundered Lance Wallnau, a Texas business strategist turned Christian influencer. “Give us 48 months more mercy and grace that the church may arise.”
It wasn’t hard to figure out who this crowd imagined presiding over those 48 months. Most of the attendees I spoke with, some of them sporting MAGA gear, told me they believed that Trump had been anointed by God to lead the country. “Many people may not agree with his character, but if you look at [the Old Testament king] David, he was a murderer and an adulterer,” Linda Ilias, who had traveled from Florida, told me. “But God saw his potential. God saw that he was true king, and he he called his potential out of him, and he became the king of Israel. And so Donald Trump, I believe the Lord chose him.”
The particular mix of faith and politics on display at the rally is a hallmark of the New Apostolic Reformation, a quickly growing charismatic religious movement led by apostles and prophets who believe Christians are called to take over the government. Many of them say God speaks to them in dreams.
The “Appeal to Heaven” flag, the Israeli flag, and the “Don’t Mess With Our Kids” banner.Kiera Butler/Mother Jones
The day’s speaker lineup was a who’s who of NAR leaders. The master of ceremonies was Lou Engle, the president of Lou Engle Ministries, who has been saying for months that God had put in his mind an image of a million women gathering on the National Mall. He referred to these women as “Esthers,” a reference to the Old Testament character who stood up against the wicked king Haman, who intended to persecute the Jews.
Wallnau, who recently hosted JD Vance at an event in Pennsylvania, called the event “our governmental moment to shift something in the spirit” and bragged about his success in recruiting influential people—Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, British podcaster Russell Brand—to support his movement. “I’m making a new list,” he said. “Red Rover, Red Rover, we called Elon Musk over. We’re calling Joe Rogan over. And I like this guy [Robert F.] Kennedy, [Jr.] I want to see him be a Pentecostal Catholic.”
Also on the stage were NAR leader Dutch Sheets and California pastor Ché Ahn, both of whom were instrumental in promoting the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Not all of the speakers mentioned Trump by name, but Ahn did.
The prayer rally was deliberately held on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement and the holiest day of the year for Jews, and the rally was thick with symbols and rituals borrowed from Judaism. Some attendees wore Jewish prayer shawls and blew shofars, the rams’ horns ancient Israelites used to call armies to battle. Engle, who rocks back and forth as he speaks in a style that resembles the Jewish practice of davening, had called for the crowd to fast, just as observant Jews were doing on Yom Kippur. From a stage draped with Israeli flags, the speakers referred to the Jews as God’s “chosen people.” One speaker said she had dreamed she was “on a 35-day fast, and I’m in the Middle East in the desert alone, and all of a sudden this man comes in full rage and anger, with a turban, and he says ‘Stop praying!’ But he can’t touch me. He wants to choke me out.”
Michele Bachmann, the staunchly conservative former representative from Minnesota, echoed the support for Israel and read a text message she had received from House Speaker Mike Johnson. “He told me, ‘I genuinely wish I could be there with you today because I believe it has never been more important for us to stand together and pray together for the peace and security of Israel, and to speak with moral clarity about the fateful battle we are in between good and evil, light versus darkness.’” The crowd cheered.
“I genuinely wish I could be there with you today, because I believe it has never been more important for us to stand together and pray together for the peace and security of Israel, and to speak with moral clarity about the fateful battle we are in between good and evil, light versus darkness.”
The day’s attendance fell far short of the goal of a million people. Each of the four reserved areas could hold 15,000–18,000 people, but only the front section was full. Large contingents from Latino and Asian churches participated, and each lawn section had two Jumbotrons, one with captions in English and the other in Spanish. I spoke with a group that had traveled from Hawaii to attend the rally, and a family of seven who had saved up to make the trip from Northern Ireland. The diversity of the crowd underscored the global nature of the New Apostolic Reformation; as religious extremism researcher Fred Clarkson told me recently, the racial and ethnic diversity of the movement often “doesn’t fit with the narrative and the stereotype of who the Christian right is.”
And then there were the flags, a central feature of the spectacle. Some attendees carried blue and pink banners with the slogan “Don’t mess with our kids,” the name of an ant-trans movement started by a Portland apostle and former multi-level-marketing magnate Jenny Donnelly, who helped organize the rally. Others carried “Appeal to Heaven” flags, which date back to the American Revolution but have recently become associated with Christian nationalism—Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito made headlines when his wife, Martha-Ann, flew one at their vacation home. Many attendees waved Trump and MAGA flags.
For many of the attendees I spoke with, Trump was an almost mystical figure. Amy Nile traveled from Texas to attend the rally and was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase “Spiritual sniper.” I asked her about it. “It just means that whenever we pray as daughters of the King, we do not miss,” she explained. “We hit the target with precision and accuracy under the prompting of the Holy Spirit.” She was praying about “the glory of God coming back to Washington, and back to our nation,” and believed this election would mark the beginning of “a new time” for America. Trump, she said, had been anointed by God to “be back in our capitol, to lead the charge of turning our nation back to God.”
Vicki Kraft of Washington and Stephanie Liu of New YorkKiera Butler/Mother Jones
Vicki Kraft, who traveled from Washington state to attend the rally, wore all white and a bridal veil that, she told me, symbolized the “bride of Christ.” Kraft, who served in the Washington State House of Representatives for the 17th legislative district from 2017 to 2023, said she was “certain” the last election had been stolen from Trump. She worried about “the integrity of our elections—if that degrades and the Lord doesn’t bring that back by his grace and cause people to fear and have integrity again.”
Stephanie Liu had traveled from New York to attend the rally, but it wasn’t her first time in DC. She goes every month with a group from her Chinese American church to visit the January 6 insurrectionists in prison. “We came from a communist country,” she said. “We know Americans should not have political prisoners. But sadly, now they have more than 1,000 political prisoners.” Liu wore a T-shirt that bore the slogan “Jesus is my Savior, Trump is my president.” She explained, “Jesus is my Savior because Jesus is our Lord. He’s the greatest. He’s our strength. He is the master. But President Trump is chosen by God, and he works for we the people.” She added, “I just pray that God will protect America again, and anybody who has common sense, if they truly know the Christian value, they will support Trump.”
In July, formerPresident Donald Trump was nearly assassinated by a 20-year-old man wielding an AR-15-style rifle. That near miss hasn’t stopped the Rod of Iron Ministries from holding a raffle this coming weekend for a special Trump-branded AR-15 at its fifth annual “Freedom Festival.”
Billed as the “largest open carry rally in America,” the festival draws attendees to celebrate the Second Amendment and hear from headliners that will include former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, radio host Sebastian Gorka, former US Rep. Allen West, former Trump ICE Director Tom Homan, and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec. Anyone who registers early for the free tickets can enter the raffle to win the Trump gun.
The Rod of Iron Ministries was founded by Hyung Jin ”Sean” Moon as a militant breakaway from the Unification Church founded by his father, the late Sun Myung Moon. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Pastor Sean Moon’s sermons and social media videos espouse a particular End Times theology that predicts a future overthrow of the American government. He believes the AR-15 is an instrument of God’s divine justice—the “rod of iron” invoked in Revelation 2:27.
Moon often wears a crown of bullets, carries a gold-plated assault weapon, and rides a Harley in a helmet with a creepy skeleton facemask. (Moon also seems to have musical aspirations: He raps under the name King Bullethead and will also perform at this weekend’s Freedom Fest.)
With the help of a $5 million loan from their father, Moon’s brother Justin founded the Kahr Firearms Group in 1995. It started off manufacturing mostly small arms designed to tap into the growing market for American-made concealed weapons as states began to relax their gun laws. It has since expanded, and now Kahr is a sponsor of “Freedom Fest,” which will be held at its TommyGun warehouse in Greeley, Pennsylvania.
Both Moons have cultivated significant MAGA ties, including with the Trump brothers, Eric and Don Jr. Kahr Firearms now offers several Trump-themed weapons, and the company’s products are frequently promoted in Don Jr.’s weapons-themed outdoor magazine, Field Ethos. When the firearms company opened its TommyGun warehouse in 2016, Eric Trump gave a speech.
Given Sean Moon’s obsession with the downfall of the current American government, it’s no surprise that he was involved in the “Stop the Steal” movement to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. He was at the US Capitol on January 6, and while he didn’t go in, he was close enough to get tear-gassed.
The Rod of Iron pastor has never seemed especially concerned with appearances or suggestions that his ministry is a cult. “We’re used to that type of persecution,” Moon told Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson in 2022, noting that followers of his father’s church are known colloquially as “Moonies.”
Under Sun Myung Moon, the Unification Church gained some renown for conducting mass weddings for its believers. (One at Madison Square Garden in 1982 joined 2,075 couples.) In 2018, the Rod of Iron updated this tradition by holding a mass wedding and vow-renewal ceremony in which couples carried (unloaded) assault weapons similar to the one used just days before to mow down dozens of staff and high school students in the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting.
This year won’t be the first time the Freedom Festival has given away a Trump gun. But considering the Rod of Iron’s reverence for Trump, I wondered whether the Freedom Festival organizers might have had second thoughts about raffling off a weapon favored by the former president’s would-be assassin. “That wouldn’t affect the decision to do this, not at all. I don’t think we’d see the connection,” Tim Elder, the church’s director of world missions, told me.“It’s not the AR’s fault. It’s the guy that was pulling the trigger. It’s his fault. We’re not going to blame the AR for that incident.”
But if the AR-15 is an instrument of God’s justice, what does it mean if it’s used to try to assassinate Trump? “We see that God’s hand is on this man,” Elder said simply.
The festival starts Friday, with an appearance by Flynn and a screening of his eponymous new movie.
The role of religion in American politics has changed profoundly since fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell and conservative direct-mail mogul Paul Weyrich co-founded the Moral Majority in 1979. Back then, the failure of Christians to appreciate their power at the ballot box over issues they saw as challenging their faith—abortion topped the list, but also prayer in schools, homosexuality, and women’s rights—was seen as an opportunity to galvanize a voting bloc for conservatives. The Moral Majority’s support of candidates who would represent those interests as elected officials unleashed a powerful resource in the Republican Party. The Moral Majority disbanded in 1989, but by then many offshoots had appeared: the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family, and the Family Research Council. Evangelical and Christian voters had largely made the Republican Party their home.
Donald Trump tapped into and exploited, and was exploited by, this long history of disaffected voters. In him, a radical-right strain foundits voice. Some callthemselves “Christian nationalists” while others reject that label, but the movement, by any name, has a distinctly different character from your grandmother’s Moral Majority.
Our November+December issue investigates the Christian nationalist movement that aspires to take over government at all levels, from school boards and state legislatures to Congress and the Supreme Court. Its prominent influencers, ties to militias, and pervasiveness across civil society reveal a radical movement hiding in plain sight. Read the whole package here:
In July, formerPresident Donald Trump was nearly assassinated by a 20-year-old man wielding an AR-15-style rifle. That near miss hasn’t stopped the Rod of Iron Ministries from holding a raffle this coming weekend for a special Trump-branded AR-15 at its fifth annual “Freedom Festival.”
Billed as the “largest open carry rally in America,” the festival draws attendees to celebrate the Second Amendment and hear from headliners that will include former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, radio host Sebastian Gorka, former US Rep. Allen West, former Trump ICE Director Tom Homan, and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec. Anyone who registers early for the free tickets can enter the raffle to win the Trump gun.
The Rod of Iron Ministries was founded by Hyung Jin ”Sean” Moon as a militant breakaway from the Unification Church founded by his father, the late Sun Myung Moon. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Pastor Sean Moon’s sermons and social media videos espouse a particular End Times theology that predicts a future overthrow of the American government. He believes the AR-15 is an instrument of God’s divine justice—the “rod of iron” invoked in Revelation 2:27.
Moon often wears a crown of bullets, carries a gold-plated assault weapon, and rides a Harley in a helmet with a creepy skeleton facemask. (Moon also seems to have musical aspirations: He raps under the name King Bullethead and will also perform at this weekend’s Freedom Fest.)
With the help of a $5 million loan from their father, Moon’s brother Justin founded the Kahr Firearms Group in 1995. It started off manufacturing mostly small arms designed to tap into the growing market for American-made concealed weapons as states began to relax their gun laws. It has since expanded, and now Kahr is a sponsor of “Freedom Fest,” which will be held at its TommyGun warehouse in Greeley, Pennsylvania.
Both Moons have cultivated significant MAGA ties, including with the Trump brothers, Eric and Don Jr. Kahr Firearms now offers several Trump-themed weapons, and the company’s products are frequently promoted in Don Jr.’s weapons-themed outdoor magazine, Field Ethos. When the firearms company opened its TommyGun warehouse in 2016, Eric Trump gave a speech.
Given Sean Moon’s obsession with the downfall of the current American government, it’s no surprise that he was involved in the “Stop the Steal” movement to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. He was at the US Capitol on January 6, and while he didn’t go in, he was close enough to get tear-gassed.
The Rod of Iron pastor has never seemed especially concerned with appearances or suggestions that his ministry is a cult. “We’re used to that type of persecution,” Moon told Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson in 2022, noting that followers of his father’s church are known colloquially as “Moonies.”
Under Sun Myung Moon, the Unification Church gained some renown for conducting mass weddings for its believers. (One at Madison Square Garden in 1982 joined 2,075 couples.) In 2018, the Rod of Iron updated this tradition by holding a mass wedding and vow-renewal ceremony in which couples carried (unloaded) assault weapons similar to the one used just days before to mow down dozens of staff and high school students in the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting.
This year won’t be the first time the Freedom Festival has given away a Trump gun. But considering the Rod of Iron’s reverence for Trump, I wondered whether the Freedom Festival organizers might have had second thoughts about raffling off a weapon favored by the former president’s would-be assassin. “That wouldn’t affect the decision to do this, not at all. I don’t think we’d see the connection,” Tim Elder, the church’s director of world missions, told me.“It’s not the AR’s fault. It’s the guy that was pulling the trigger. It’s his fault. We’re not going to blame the AR for that incident.”
But if the AR-15 is an instrument of God’s justice, what does it mean if it’s used to try to assassinate Trump? “We see that God’s hand is on this man,” Elder said simply.
The festival starts Friday, with an appearance by Flynn and a screening of his eponymous new movie.
The role of religion in American politics has changed profoundly since fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell and conservative direct-mail mogul Paul Weyrich co-founded the Moral Majority in 1979. Back then, the failure of Christians to appreciate their power at the ballot box over issues they saw as challenging their faith—abortion topped the list, but also prayer in schools, homosexuality, and women’s rights—was seen as an opportunity to galvanize a voting bloc for conservatives. The Moral Majority’s support of candidates who would represent those interests as elected officials unleashed a powerful resource in the Republican Party. The Moral Majority disbanded in 1989, but by then many offshoots had appeared: the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family, and the Family Research Council. Evangelical and Christian voters had largely made the Republican Party their home.
Donald Trump tapped into and exploited, and was exploited by, this long history of disaffected voters. In him, a radical-right strain foundits voice. Some callthemselves “Christian nationalists” while others reject that label, but the movement, by any name, has a distinctly different character from your grandmother’s Moral Majority.
Our November+December issue investigates the Christian nationalist movement that aspires to take over government at all levels, from school boards and state legislatures to Congress and the Supreme Court. Its prominent influencers, ties to militias, and pervasiveness across civil society reveal a radical movement hiding in plain sight. Read the whole package here:
Donald Trump has faced two assassination attempts in the past three months—horrifying events that he has used to spread unfounded conspiracy theories and smear Democratic leaders with false blame. He has been aided in this effort by vice presidential candidate JD Vance, his sons Eric Trump and Don Jr., multiple Republican members of Congress, and backers of Project 2025. Their coordinated messaging—that Democrats supposedly “tried to kill” Trump—has been featured at the Republican National Convention, at Trump’s campaign rallies, and in numerous media appearances, from Fox News to Dr. Phil’s show.
Trump and his surrogates took the effort to the next level when the former president held a large rally on Saturday at the same site in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he was wounded by a would-be assassin during a July 13 appearance. The Trump campaign billed the heavily produced event—which included a live opera singer and an awkward performance by Elon Musk—as a return to “the very same ground where he took a bullet for democracy.”
“They tried to kill him,” Eric Trump said, “and it’s because the Democratic Party, they can’t do anything right.”
Speaking ahead of the former president, Eric Trump highlighted the familiar theme: “They’ve tried to get my father every single second since he went down that golden escalator,” he declared from the podium, standing alongside his wife Lara Trump, currently co-chair of the Republican National Committee. “They tried to smear us, they tried to bankrupt us, they came after us, they impeached him twice, they went after his Supreme Court justices, they weaponized the entire legal system…and it has not worked.”
As the audience cheered, Eric Trump emphasized: “And then guys, they tried to kill him. They tried to kill him, and it’s because the Democratic Party, they can’t do anything right.”
Eric Trump has sought to directly blame Democrats ever since the attack in Butler, including in multiple appearances on Fox News. Trump himself repeated the theme from the podium on Saturday: “Over the past eight years, those who want to stop us from achieving this future have slandered me, impeached me, indicted me, tried to throw me off the ballot, and who knows: maybe even tried to kill me.”
This was a planned element of the former president’s speech; he read the lines from a teleprompter.
Amid multiple investigations by the FBI, Homeland Security, and Congress, no evidence has emerged that either of Trump’s would-be assassins had any connections to Democratic leaders. Neither perpetrator appears to have been driven fundamentally by partisan politics—a common, if somewhat counterintuitive pattern among political assassins, as I documented in previous reporting and in my book, Trigger Points.
The motive of the man charged with targeting Trump in Florida remains unclear; his background indicates that he voted for Trump in 2016 but later turned against him and grew sharply critical of his foreign policy. The FBI has said that the motive of the deceased 20-year-old who shot Trump and others in Butler, who was a registered Republican voter, remains unknown.
Notably, Vance used a slightly modified approach at the Butler rally, four days after conspicuously working to soften his political rhetoric and image during the vice presidential debate with Democratic Gov. Tim Walz.
“Just look at everything they’ve done to President Trump,” Vance said on Saturday. “First, they tried to silence him. When that didn’t work, they tried to bankrupt him. When that didn’t work, they tried to jail him. And with all the hatred they have spewed at President Trump, it was only a matter of time before somebody tried to kill him.”
Vance then reiterated that the assassination attempts had resulted from Democrats calling Trump “a threat to democracy.” No evidence supporting that claim has emerged in either investigation.
Other top GOP leaders continue to play along with this false messaging, which threat assessment and national security experts have told me is fueling potential retaliatory violence. On Sunday, ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos confronted House Speaker Mike Johnson in an interview about the rhetoric from the Butler rally, after Johnson called out Democratic campaign messaging as overheated.
“Eric Trump actually did specifically reference Democrats,” Stephanopoulos said. “He said, ‘They tried to kill him. And it’s because the Democratic Party, they can’t do anything right.’ Do you support those comments or not?”
“I don’t know what Eric was saying because I only heard just a snippet there,” Johnson replied. “I don’t know the context.”
During the vice presidential debate, CBS news moderator Margaret Brennan pressed Ohio Sen. JD Vance about former President Donald Trump’s proposal to seize public lands to use them for housing construction. “Senator, where are you going to seize the federal lands?” she asked. “Can you clarify?”
“Well, what Donald Trump has said is we have a lot of federal lands that aren’t being used for anything,” Vance replied. “They’re not being used for national parks. They’re not being used. And they could be places where we build a lot of housing.”
Vance was referring to an idea Trump floated in 2023 when he announced that his next administration would solve the nation’s housing crisis by holding a contest to charter 10 new “freedom cities” on public land. “These freedom cities will reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hardworking families, a new shot at home ownership and, in fact, the American dream,” he said in a video announcing the proposal. (In the same video, Trump also pledged to solve the country’s transit woes with flying cars.)
Whether he realized it or not, Trump’s ”freedom cities” put a new face on an old pet cause of Western conservatives and Sagebrush Rebellion sympathizers. For years,these anti-government activists have been agitating for the federal government to sell off public lands or place them under state control. But affordable housing has never been part of their agenda. After all, most public land out West is in remote places with little water and infrastructure, and where few people want to live. (Dunn County, North Dakota, anyone?)
The push to sell off public lands has long been backed by big corporations seeking cheap land for grazing, oil and gas drilling, or coal and uranium mines, all free from many federal environmental regulations. Even so, Trump isn’t the first politician to propose using public land for housing. The idea was most recently, and most prominently, brought into circulation by the far-right agitator Ammon Bundy.
He’s the son of rogue Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who engaged in a 2014 armed standoff with the Bureau of Land Management when the agency attempted to impound cows he’d been illegally grazing for years on federal land. Two years later, Ammon Bundy orchestrated the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, a confrontation that ultimately led an FBI agent to fatally shoot one of the occupiers, LaVoy Finicum. Bundy was tried twice for his role in the standoffs. The first case, in Nevada, ended in a mistrial after misconduct by the government. A jury in Oregon ultimately found him not guilty of the Malheur occupation.
The confrontations—and the failure of the Justice Department to punish him—turned Bundy into an outlaw hero to those who oppose federal control of public lands in the West. After instigating protests against Covid restrictions during the pandemic, in 2021, he leveraged his fame into a political campaign and announced he was running as a Republican for governor of Idaho. And that’s when his housing policy came into play. Bundy stumped heavily on using public lands in Idaho to help state residents buy affordable homes. On his campaign website, he wrote:
If we are going to maintain our historic and traditional values, and ultimately Keep Idaho IDAHO, we must spread out and make Idaho’s land available to the people while simultaneously ensuring that necessary land remains public land for multiple use purposes (under local jurisdiction). Then we can enjoy the fruits of prosperity and land ownership while maintaining our culturally conservative identity.
The current affordable housing crisis is caused by a number of complicated factors, many of which have been caused by the Federal Government. Nevertheless, at its core, this crisis is simply a supply-and-demand issue. To lower prices, we simply need more supply. And to have more supply, we need to take our land back.
“I’m not sure if Ammon Bundy pioneered the idea of seizing public lands to create more sprawl, but he definitely leaned hard into it when he was running for governor of Idaho,” says Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the nonprofit Center for Western Priorities, who has followed Bundy’s career for many years. “Sometimes terrible ideas come back around with a fresh coat of lipstick, but it’s still the same old land-seizure movement.”
“Sometimes terrible ideas come back around with a fresh coat of lipstick, but it’s still the same old land seizure movement.”
Bundy’s proposal made news, but it didn’t do much for his campaign. After losing the GOP primary to the current sitting governor, Brad Little, he ran as an independent in the general election in 2022 and lost again. But Bundy seemed fairly sincere about wanting to build housing on public lands. In interviews, he said his own adult daughter was struggling to afford a house in Boise’s overheated housing market. (He’s also not a Trump supporter. He criticized the former president in 2018 for his hateful anti-migrant rhetoric.)
Trump’s housing plan, however, seems much more like cover for the same old agenda pushed by Republicans from Reagan to George W. Bush. It boils down to a simple premise: giving away public lands to fossil fuel companies and other extractive industries that want to plunder them on the cheap. Indeed, people hoping to shape the next Trump administration’s public lands policy have not demonstrated much interest in housing in the past.
Take William Perry Pendley, who served as the acting BLM director during the Trump administration for more than a year despite never getting confirmed by the Senate; he even ignored a ruling from a judge who said he had to leave the job because he was serving illegally. When Trump tapped him as acting BLM director, Pendley released an extensive recusal list of former clients in the oil, gas, and mining industries.
During the 2014 armed standoff at the Bundy ranch in Nevada, Pendley wrote a column in National Review expressing support for the embattled rancher and his fight with the federal government. “Westerners are tired of having Uncle Sam for a landlord,” he complained. Two years later, Pendley wrote again in National Review, “the Founding Fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold.”
More recently, Pendley authored the Interior Department section of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a new Trump administration. It outlines 28 pages of proposals for turning over more public lands to unfettered oil, gas, and mineral development, including in sensitive areas from Alaska to Minnesota. But suddenly, Pendley has become an affordable housing advocate. In July, hewrote an op-ed in the Washington Examiner headlined “Solve the housing crisis by selling government land.”
Strangely enough, using public land for housing is a rare point of agreement between Trump and President Joe Biden—sort of. After all,the Biden administration has already done it. In July, the BLM announced the sale of a small 20-acre parcel in the Las Vegas Valley for the specific purpose of developing affordable housing. The land would be sold cheaply to the Clark County Department of Social Services, with strict requirements about how it can be used. Eighty percent of the housing must be sold to first-time homebuyers with household incomes at or below 80 percent of the Las Vegas area median income, for instance, and the rest will go to first-time buyers at or below 100 percent of the area’s median income.
“The Biden administration just called the bluff of land transfer proponents,” Weiss said in a statement at the time. “The Interior Department is showing how public lands that are already well-suited to development can be part of the housing solution, with appropriate safeguards to make sure the housing is affordable and doesn’t end up as trophy homes for billionaires.”
Bundy doesn’t seem to have weighed in on the Trump “freedom cities” proposal. He’s been a little busy dodging thepayment of a $50 million defamation judgment against him, the result of an armed protest he organized in 2022 against an Idaho hospital he falsely claimed had kidnapped the baby of one of his supporters. (Social workers had taken the baby in for being malnourished.) After the jury verdict last year, Bundy took his family and went into hiding. The hospital seized his house to help pay the judgment. Bundy later resurfaced at an undisclosed location somewhere in Utah.
While he too may need some affordable housing, it’s not clear that he’d be a fan of Trump’s “freedom cities.” After all, Bundy despises cities. “History and human nature demonstrate that if we go down the path we are on now and build up and create dense and congested cities with large populations, traffic, and pollution, we will lose our conservative, traditional values,” he wrote on his campaign website in 2021. “It’s just what happens.”
One August evening, I drove through the cornfields and dairy farms of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to attend a government-themed prayer night at Ephrata Community Church. The sprawling house of worship looks like an office park and houses a cafe and an indoor playground in addition to a large sanctuary. This event, however, was in a converted barn across the parking lot called Gateway House of Prayer. For the last 15 years, it has been open 24 hours a day for the faithful to worship when the main church is closed, with parishioners keeping watch in shifts.
It was a Thursday night. Gradually, about 22 congregants, mostly seniors, all of whom were members of the community, filtered in. Over the next two hours, the group prayed, sometimes quietly and sometimes very loudly, and sometimes in strings of syllables, a charismatic Christian tradition known as speaking in tongues. Of the prayers that I could understand, many were what you’d hear in any church—gratitude for God’s goodness or entreaties for family members going through hard times.
Farmland near Rebecca Branle’s house, in Ephrata, Pennsylvania. She knew her family might stand out because they didn’t attend church.
But interspersed were more unsettling messages: frequent references to the “enemy,” to a battle between good and evil, to a “spiritual war” playing out in our country. One prayer leader encouraged attendees to join a pair of “prophets” who were taking daily Communion for 90 days at exactly 4:14 p.m. Why so precise? The answer can be found in two Old Testament verses: Esther 4:14, which says Christians are called to speak up in the face of persecution, and Nehemiah 4:14, which “is about fighting,” the prayer leader said, “on behalf of our sons, our daughters, our families.”
The devotees she mentioned were leaders in the New Apostolic Reformation, a charismatic evangelical Christian movement led by a loose network of self-appointed prophets and apostles, who claim that God speaks directly to them, often in dreams. They believe that Christians are called to wage a spiritual battle for control of the United States. In the vanguard of an ascendant Christian nationalist movement, they are seeking an explicitly Christian command of public schools, social policy, and all levels of the government, including the courts. Some scholars claim NAR is the fastest-growing spiritual movement in the United States. Evangelical writer C. Peter Wagner described it as the most significant shake-up in Protestantism since the Reformation. Its laser focus on starting a spiritual war to Christianize America has led the Southern Poverty Law Center to call NAR “the greatest threat to US democracy that you have never heard of.”
“It’s the transformation of an entire society…something so transcendentally revolutionary that most people never even thought about something like this.”
Estimates of Christians influenced by NAR vary widely, from 3 million to 33 million. But the number of adherents isn’t the extent of its influence; its main tenets have moved beyond the confines of churches and into the political mainstream, largely thanks to traveling apostles and prophets who preach at evangelical churches all over the world. Fred Clarkson, a senior research analyst with the extremism watchdog group Political Research Associates, described the New Apostolic Reformation as a seismic cultural shift. “It’s the transformation of an entire society with this certain kind of Christo-centric worldview,” he told me. “We’re talking about something so transcendentally revolutionary that most people never even thought about something like this.”
Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Mike Flynn has hosted NAR leaders on his “ReAwaken America” tour, and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has worked with its apostles. Just this past weekend, GOP vice presidential hopeful Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) appeared in Pennsylvania at an event hosted by Lance Wallnau, a Texas business strategist-turned-NAR superstar. Wallnau, who has called Kamala Harris a “Jezebel” and speculated that people on the political left may be controlled by demons, helped develop Project 19, a right-wing political initiative to win 19 key counties in swing states for Trump.
I asked Clarkson for a metaphor to describe how New Apostolic Reformation concepts have spread beyond the confines of the movement. At first, he suggested the cellular process of osmosis, or perhaps a tea infusion, but neither accounts for the intentionality of the movement’s leaders. “How do you infuse your Christian ideas into Babylon?” he asked, referring to an ancient city that rejected God. “That’s the nature of their thinking. It can be deeply subversive. It can also be utterly in your face.”
Parishioners place their hands on each other during a Sunday morning worship service at Ephrata Community Church.
Since 2016, many NAR prophesies have concerned Trump, whom adherents see as having been divinely chosen to lead the country. Trump’s introduction to the movement came in 2002 when he invited Florida apostle Paula White-Cain to be his personal minister after seeing her preach on television. By the time he became president, he had acquired a handful of other NAR spiritual advisers: most notably, a South Carolina–based apostle named Dutch Sheets and prophet Cindy Jacobs, who helms an influential ministry in Texas. Throughout his presidency, Trump’s NAR counselors were mostly ignored by White House reporters, dismissed as latter-day versions of evangelical pastor Billy Graham with Richard Nixon, or Jeremiah Wright with Barack Obama. Yet “these are the key religious people around Donald Trump and the people who brought him the presidency,” Clarkson said. “They’re the people who influenced his presidency and the people who are leading the religious wing of his reelection campaign.”
As the 2020 election drew near, their role became more important. White-Cain warned her followers that Christians who don’t support Trump will “have to stand accountable before God one day.” Shortly after Trump’s defeat, Sheets became an influential figure in the “Stop the Steal” campaign, leading rallies across the country. He warned that the results of the presidential election were “going to be overturned and President Trump is going to be put back in office for four years.” Around the same time, White-Cain gave a speech imploring religious Americans to “strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike until you have victory.”
Eight days before the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021, a group of apostles held a strategy meeting with Trump and his advisers. In a January 1 blog post, Sheets shared a dream from a prophet named Gina Gholston, in which she described “moving toward the Capitol, not at a full gallop, but at a steady, determined, fast trot. As we began, written in white letters on the ground in front of us were the words, ‘DON’T STOP.’” A year after the insurrection, Sheets recounted a dream in which Trump had told him that he would be a “political martyr” because, he had said, loosely quoting the Bible, “‘God has put the tools in me to tear down, root up, and confront the system.’”
NAR leaders have targeted the Supreme Court, too. In 2018, during Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s contentious confirmation hearings, Sheets urged his followers to ask God to grant them “a majority of Justices who are Constitutionalists, literalists (meaning they believe the Constitution is to be taken literally, exactly as it is written), and who are pro-life.” He prayed for “another vacancy on the Court soon,” which he felt was “coming quickly.” In a broadcast, Wallnau, the NAR leader who recently hosted Vance in Pennsylvania, described the accusations of rape against Kavanaugh as a spiritual attack.
The apostles’ visions for the Supreme Court didn’t get much mainstream attention—until the New York Times broke a series of stories about flags displayed at the homes of Justice Samuel Alito. Outside his main residence was an upside-down American flag, a symbol associated with the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. At his vacation home in New Jersey, the Times’ Jodi Kantor later reported, flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag—belonging to Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann—showing a lone pine tree, a Revolutionary War symbol that had been revived and popularized by none other than Sheets. Rolling Stonefound the same flag fluttering outside the Maine vacation home of Leonard Leo, the deep-pocketed conservative judicial kingmaker whose largesse has extended to several justices and their families.
Digital scripture on business signage in Ephrata, where religion is prominent in public life
Meanwhile, NAR apostles have ensured that their teachings have spread into local civil societies. In Redding, California, the 11,000-member Bethel Church now funds the local police force and trains public school teachers. In Pasadena, Korean American apostle Ché Ahn’s Harvest Rock Church bankrolled local candidates, including one for state Senate. The Remnant Alliance, an NAR-affiliated group, teaches Christians across the nation to run for school boards.
And then there is Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a county of 550,000 people spread out over a patchwork of fertile farmland, where I traveled to understand what this kind of local transformation looks like. Since the mid-1600s, Pennsylvania has been known for religious fervor. First came the Quakers, followed shortly after by the Anabaptists, or “plain” people. Ephrata, for example, was a hub for the Brethren, but the area is also known for Mennonites and particularly the Amish. Today, Lancaster also has become an NAR hub. A popular sports event venue hosts far-right Christian conferences. NAR-affiliated churches control the school boards. One local group holds Bible study in public schools; another baptizes students in portable troughs in front of public high schools.
At the prayer night I attended, spiritual warfare rhetoric was on full display. An elderly woman described Lancaster public schools as being “so infiltrated with evil,” she prayed that “school boards would open up their eyes and ears and stop just screaming things that they think are good. If they did their homework, they’d see they’re not good.” Another woman announced that she had a vision of a claw machine. Instead of cheap prizes at the arcade, her claw—which symbolized the demonic influence of secularism—had picked up people’s minds so that they “can’t discern what’s right and wrong.” Her metaphor became an entreaty to God: “And I want to say…drop those minds and take them back for the Lord.” Someone blew a shofar, the ram’s horn that ancient Israelites used to call their armies to battle.
“We declare that this gender confusion would be stopped in the mighty name of Jesus!”
“We declare that this gender confusion would be stopped in the mighty name of Jesus!” cried another man, clad in the iconic Trump campaign T-shirt bearing the mugshot of the former president emblazoned with the word “wanted”—not for a crime but for another term in office. “We say, ‘Fight, fight, fight, hallelujah!’” he said. “We take the example of Donald Trump!” The group broke out in a chorus of “Fight, fight, fight!”
A painting vivid with both Christian and Jewish imagery inside Gateway House of Prayer, in Ephrata
The New Apostolic Reformation may be influential, but it’s also hard to pin down. With no single leader, annual conference, or website outlining statements of belief, it isn’t a distinct Protestant denomination, like Baptists or Presbyterians, but a vast and amorphous network of prophets and apostles who oversee their own ministries, issue prophetic declarations, and journey to churches all over the world to spread their ideology. Though many adherents fit the stereotype of the white, male Christian nationalist, some of the most prominent American apostles are African Americans and women; some of the most powerful global apostles come from African nations. But in Lancaster, the churches are overwhelmingly white.
The term “New Apostolic Reformation” was coined in the 1990s by the influential evangelical writer Wagner, who emphasized that he was not the movement’s leader—because it had none. It was instead a coming together of several smaller sects that shared a belief that God appointed apostles and prophets who possessed special “gifts of the spirit,” like the ability to perform miracles, for instance, or speak in tongues. In what became known as the “fivefold ministry,” NAR churches organized themselves into five areas of leadership: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. Leaders were urged to “use their influence to create an environment in which the blessings and prosperity of the Kingdom of God can permeate all areas of society,” to conquer “the Seven Mountains: Religion, Family, Education, Government, Media, Arts & Entertainment, and Business.”
It was Wallnau who popularized this doctrine of Christian dominion, which is sometimes known as the Seven Mountain Mandate, or 7MM. According to a recent Denison University poll, between March 2023 and January 2024, the percentage of Christian Americans who believed in the Seven Mountain Mandate increased from just under 30 percent to 41 percent. The concept routinely appears in conservative political discourse. Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker, who championed fetal personhood in a February 2024 ruling, said in an interview with a prominent NAR apostle that “God created government” and “that’s why he is calling and equipping people to step back into these mountains.”
Promoting a Christian nation has seeped into some of the Supreme Court justices’ opinions. In the 2019 case American Legion v. American Humanist Association, the court ruled in favor of the American Legion, which had erected a 40-foot cross on public land in Maryland. Alito wrote that taking down the cross would be “aggressively hostile to religion.” In the 2022 Kennedy v. Bremerton School District case, the court ruled 6–3 in favor of a public high school football coach who lost his job for routinely leading prayers during games. Writing for the conservative majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch unilaterally declared that the court had “long ago abandoned” a decades-old precedent that established that government employees can’t advance a particular religious ideology.
After the court declined in February to take up a case filed on behalf of people who had been removed from a jury because of their belief that gay marriage was wrong, Alito wrote in an unusual personal statement that he worried “Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be ‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government.”
“There’s very little question that [Christian nationalist] views are very much reflected in where this Supreme Court majority is on religion and church and state.”
The perception that Christians are being persecuted by the government is a potent rallying cry of the Christian nationalist movement. Elliot Mincberg, a Supreme Court scholar and fellow with the pro-democracy organization People for the American Way, said, “There’s very little question that [Christian nationalist] views are very much reflected in where this Supreme Court majority is on religion and church and state.”
Clarkson has watched as the ideas popularized by NAR—the Seven Mountain Mandate, the fivefold ministry, and the concept of spiritual warfare—have infiltrated churches that aren’t officially connected to the movement. “There are so many Christianities, and they change over time—this is a perfect example,” he said. “People don’t necessarily know where every belief they hold came from.”
NAR also appropriates Jewish imagery. Two days after I heard one shofar at Ephrata, I attended an all-day “prayer burn” at a barn in the countryside where several attendees blew them. Others wore tallitot, or Jewish prayer shawls. A group of tween dancers carried a chuppah, a four-posted canopy often used in Jewish weddings. The group sang in Hebrew as they danced the hora, a standard feature in Jewish celebrations. Then, one of the NAR leaders I recognized from Ephrata took the microphone and began to speak about Jesus. “He’s the Lord of hosts,” she said. A cacophonous roar of shofars came from the crowd.
Lancaster, PennsylvaniaJan Brenneman and his grandson Levi, 11, play their shofars at Lord’s House of Prayer, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. NAR appropriates several Jewish symbols and items used in religious ceremonies.
When I asked an attendee about all the Jewish references, she explained that it was simply a way to acknowledge the shared heritage between Christians and Jews. But that’s not the whole story, as Clarkson later reminded me. Many NAR adherents believe “that they have a special role as Christians in the end-times to deliver Israel”—a time when Jews will finally recognize Jesus as their Savior.
Lancaster has been home for centuries to the plain people, the Amish, the Mennonites, and the Brethren who, to various degrees, eschew machines and other trappings of modernity. But its demographics have shifted markedly over the last few decades. About 7 percent of Lancaster’s senior citizens are people of color, compared with a quarter of the youth. The gap between registered Democrats and Republicans has also narrowed.
Much of this purpling is taking place in the cobblestone streets and stately brick buildings of Lancaster City, which has welcomed 5,000 refugees to its population of 58,000 over the last 20 years. When I visited, I encountered a street festival in full swing. Young people grabbed overflowing plates of chicken tikka from an Indian food truck, and a crowd around the main stage danced to the music of a Liberian hip-hop artist.
“The way that you’re going to heal society is that you’re going to eliminate many government functions.”
City officials may embrace this diversity, but county leaders don’t. In February, the Lancaster City Council passed a law prohibiting police and city employees from asking people about their immigration status; county commissioners promptly declared Lancaster a “non-sanctuary” county. In June, after the City Council passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, County Commissioner Josh Parsons called the move a “propaganda victory for Hamas.” Lancaster’s overwhelmingly Republican state representatives tend to side with the county, even publicly denouncing the city’s efforts to welcome immigrants.
These state representatives regularly interact with NAR leaders. In May, two of them met with Sean Feucht, an NAR-aligned pastor who travels the country holding prayer rallies on the steps of state Capitol buildings. Also present at the meeting was a local self-proclaimed prophet named Abby Abildness, who works with the state’s prayer caucus group inside the Capitol to promote Christian initiatives in government. She has spoken candidly about her desire to blur the boundaries between church and state. “We need them and they need us,” she said, “because we can’t go write those laws.”
NAR influence in Lancaster churches began appearing in the early 2000s, but the Covid culture wars accelerated its spread. Six years ago, when Rebecca Branle, the owner of a local bike shop and mother of three, moved to Ephrata, she knew her family might stand out because they didn’t attend church. “We weren’t religious like everyone else, but I didn’t think it was that big of a deal,” she recalls. But in 2020, the pandemic hit, and once-negligible differences became “flash points.” After Branle posted a rainbow flag and a Black Lives Matter sign on her property, someone shot a bullet through the barn window, and in another incident, someone left a single slab of granite outside; “Look Behind You” was written on it in permanent marker, accompanied by a smiley face with the eyes crossed out. In smaller print appeared “Gays will burn in hell” and “You can repent.” She was scared for her family’s safety, but also confused: “Especially this community of people who say they’re so religious, suddenly this kind of talk is okay with them?”
The pandemic frightened many evangelical church leaders as well, but not because of the illness. Closing churches and mask mandates, which some considered offensive to God, were the real concern. Some pastors called vaccines the “mark of the beast.” To them, the pandemic’s major lesson was that government had become too powerful—and Christians had neglected to exert influence over that mountain.
When the Covid pandemic struck, Pastor Don Lamb from LifeGate church in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, felt his congregation needed to become more involved in politics. He went to Washington, DC, for the January 6 rally outside the Capitol.
Don Lamb, an ebullient, redheaded pastor whose complexion turns ruddier when he gets excited, felt the impact of Covid profoundly. We sat in the basement of LifeGate church in the small Lancaster enclave of Elizabethtown, population 12,000, and Lamb described how once his congregation of 150 “were just doing our things, staying within our four walls, preaching the gospel.” But when mask mandates came into effect, “it was authoritarian into the nth degree, and so that awoke the church to say, ‘We need to be involved here.’” In sermons, Lamb and his brother and co-pastor, Doug, urged their congregation to oppose not only pandemic restrictions but also mail-in ballots, critical race theory, “pronoun protocols,” and other culture war issues. When Joe Biden won the 2020 election, the Lambs believed that his victory was the result of coordinated election interference by the left.
“Who gets to define the vision of society—only the liberals and secularists? That’s what makes us more determined to fight.”
On January 6, 2021, Don Lamb and several parishioners went to the rally outside the US Capitol. What was meant to be a peaceful gathering, he said, became violent only after police “were already throwing or launching flash-bang grenades at the audience.” He believes that the protesters who breached the building were set up and that the chaos could have been avoided. “We could have surrounded the Capitol with 100,000 Christians arm to arm just saying, ‘Grace, Amazing Grace,’” he said, “and there would have been no protesters who would have broken that line.”
Lamb follows Lance Wallnau, and he subscribes to the Seven Mountain Mandate. Trump, he told me, “was providentially given the stage of America.” Yet he doesn’t consider his church to be part of NAR. The term “Christian nationalism” irks him. The real problem with our nation, he says, is “liberal nationalism’s” obsession with cancel culture, identity politics, and elite institutions. “Who gets to define the vision of society—only the liberals and secularists?” he asked me. “That’s what makes us more determined to fight.”
Don and Doug Lamb often refer to the persecution of Christians in their sermons. The previous Sunday, Doug began by urging his congregation to love their neighbors, even those with whom they disagreed. But by hour’s end, he was berating Muslim immigrants in England who have “taken over the entire country” instead of assimilating. When a Muslim visits, he said, “They’re not coming as a guest. They want to take over your house.” He likened this to the futility of seeking peace with those who follow Satan—like gay people who “destroyed the church in America,” he said. “You can’t compromise the truth and have peace with people who are diabolically opposed to what you believe.” Later, Lamb clarified that a better way to phrase this sentiment might have been: “You shouldn’t compromise the truth to be at peace with those who oppose you.”
Ten Commandments tablets outside Don Lamb’s LifeGate church
Some LifeGate congregants appear to be using those messages to inform local politics. In 2021, three church members won seats on the Elizabethtown school board, flipping it to a conservative majority. This past June, the school board voted to work with the Independence Law Center, a Christian law firm that has worked with school boards to ban transgender athletes in the county. A tertiary branch of the Family Research Council—a group that has long advocated against the separation of church and state—the law center has deep ties to NAR and is steeped in Washington’s extreme conservative religious right.
After our conversation, Don took us on a tour of his church. In the cozy, sunlit sanctuary, someone had left a flyer on a pew. The heading read, “Practical areas to prepare to speak out to societal issues.” The fourth item advised Christians, “People don’t care that you are a Christian, a citizen, or even a female…you are the enemy! Note: This would not happen to Muslims, Atheists, or BLM groups.” Lamb later told me that “You are the enemy of their agenda” would have been more accurate.
Branle, the Ephrata resident whose barn was vandalized, understands how it feels to be seen as the enemy. When she emailed local police about veiled threats she had received, an officer responded: “Can you elaborate on specifically what you perceive the threat to be? This appears to be a statement of opinion, which is protected speech.” After reporting a few more incidents to police, “I just stopped talking to them,” she said. “It felt a lot like it wasn’t helping.”
Groups affiliated with NAR are also the quiet heartbeat of institutions serving Lancaster’s neediest residents. TNT Youth Ministry, an evangelical group, provides classroom volunteers and field trip chaperones, and it runs Bible studies in local public schools. Another NAR-adjacent ministry, REAL Life Community Services, boasts that it is the “only full-time social services department” in one town.
Community service is a typical mission of faith groups the world over. But for Christians who believe they are called to influence the government, the objective is not spurred by faith alone. Rachel Tabachnick, an extremism researcher who studies NAR, notes that many of its adherents believe that “the way that you’re going to heal society is that you’re going to eliminate many government functions.” The church, not the government, will decide “whether to feed you or house you or clothe you.”
While in Lancaster, I visited the Blessings of Hope food distribution center, a Walmart-size grocery store that collects surplus food from manufacturers and makes it available to food pantries throughout the region at a deep discount. Rows of shelves filling the cavernous warehouse were crammed with giant bags of nacho cheese, dried chow mein noodles, gefilte fish, and onion ring mix. An army of volunteers, mostly women, many wearing the traditional haube hair covering for married Mennonite women, unloaded pallets of boxes.
A woman reaches for produce at Blessings of Hope food distribution center in Lancaster.David Lapp, the head of Blessings of Hope, grew up Amish but was expelled from the church. He and his eight brothers then explored evangelical Christianity and now follow NAR teachings.
David Lapp, a 42-year-old father of 12 and CEO of Blessings of Hope, was in charge. He grew up Amish and speaks with the German-inflected lilt typical of the plain communities in the region. In the early 2000s, he and his eight brothers began to read more about evangelical Christianity. By 2006, after the Amish officially excommunicated them for straying from the church’s teachings, they began to follow NAR leaders, including prophet Andrew Wommack, who believes there is “a demonic deception that is blinding” those who spoke out against Trump. They have helped convert several Amish people, introducing them to Wommack’s work. Several of the Lapp brothers founded Blessings of Hope in 2006, and it has become a massive operation spread across five warehouses, providing 50,000 meals a day. Their work has drawn national attention: Ivanka Trump toured the distribution center during the 2020 campaign.
Lapp still dresses in the style of the Amish, with a handmade collared shirt, suspenders, and a bowl cut, because “we felt like God asked us to keep the traditional garb more as a bridge back to our people.” He sees his work as a divine calling. His organization’s closest competitor, he said, is the behemoth nonprofit Feeding America, which he described as “more of a government-run, government-funded organization” whose church participants “are not allowed to share the gospel when they’re giving out food.” Lapp, who believes in the Seven Mountain Mandate, sees publicly funded food pantries as a missed opportunity for the church. When government administers social services, he said, “they’re going to miss the hearts of the people.”
A woman prays at LifeGate church in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.An American flag at LifeGate church
Back at Ephrata Community Church, I attended a Saturday evening service in the main building. Toddlers danced in the aisles as the worship band jammed. Some of the congregants had brought shofars in zippered carrying cases. After a somewhat banal sermon, I met executive pastor Jim Ehrman, who told me that he had only recently learned about NAR. Ephrata Community Church, he explained, had long had a “loose affiliation” with apostle Randy Clark, but “we don’t have a reference for it other than a group we care about was accused of being that.” I pressed further. Wasn’t his church about to host John Bevere, an NAR-affiliated pastor who has warned against the practice of tolerance?
“I had no idea he would have been associated with it,” Ehrman said. As far as the Seven Mountain teaching was concerned: “We do agree [the mountains] are there, but we’re very much like, ‘No, it’s who you are and how you carry yourself into those.’ There’s not some…mandate to take over.” When I told him about the prayer night, he seemed bemused. All the talk of spiritual warfare I had seen was “just the frame and the language they pick up,” he said.
Was Ehrman just being coy about his church’s connections to the New Apostolic Reformation, or was he genuinely naive to a movement that was so powerful and pervasive? In a sense, it didn’t matter. Another imperfect metaphor for the influence of NAR is climate change. Like it or not, it’s happening. The question for many pastors is how to steer their congregations through an increasingly chaotic and extreme religious landscape.
For Ehrman, the label was unimportant. What mattered was that armies of angels were indeed battling with the principalities of darkness. “There are literally unseen beings who are at odds with the work of God…on this earth,” he said. “And we believe that they are trying to influence things as well.”
One August evening, I drove through the cornfields and dairy farms of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to attend a government-themed prayer night at Ephrata Community Church. The sprawling house of worship looks like an office park and houses a cafe and an indoor playground in addition to a large sanctuary. This event, however, was in a converted barn across the parking lot called Gateway House of Prayer. For the last 15 years, it has been open 24 hours a day for the faithful to worship when the main church is closed, with parishioners keeping watch in shifts.
It was a Thursday night. Gradually, about 22 congregants, mostly seniors, all of whom were members of the community, filtered in. Over the next two hours, the group prayed, sometimes quietly and sometimes very loudly, and sometimes in strings of syllables, a charismatic Christian tradition known as speaking in tongues. Of the prayers that I could understand, many were what you’d hear in any church—gratitude for God’s goodness or entreaties for family members going through hard times.
Farmland near Rebecca Branle’s house, in Ephrata, Pennsylvania. She knew her family might stand out because they didn’t attend church.
But interspersed were more unsettling messages: frequent references to the “enemy,” to a battle between good and evil, to a “spiritual war” playing out in our country. One prayer leader encouraged attendees to join a pair of “prophets” who were taking daily Communion for 90 days at exactly 4:14 p.m. Why so precise? The answer can be found in two Old Testament verses: Esther 4:14, which says Christians are called to speak up in the face of persecution, and Nehemiah 4:14, which “is about fighting,” the prayer leader said, “on behalf of our sons, our daughters, our families.”
The devotees she mentioned were leaders in the New Apostolic Reformation, a charismatic evangelical Christian movement led by a loose network of self-appointed prophets and apostles, who claim that God speaks directly to them, often in dreams. They believe that Christians are called to wage a spiritual battle for control of the United States. In the vanguard of an ascendant Christian nationalist movement, they are seeking an explicitly Christian command of public schools, social policy, and all levels of the government, including the courts. Some scholars claim NAR is the fastest-growing spiritual movement in the United States. Evangelical writer C. Peter Wagner described it as the most significant shake-up in Protestantism since the Reformation. Its laser focus on starting a spiritual war to Christianize America has led the Southern Poverty Law Center to call NAR “the greatest threat to US democracy that you have never heard of.”
“It’s the transformation of an entire society…something so transcendentally revolutionary that most people never even thought about something like this.”
Estimates of Christians influenced by NAR vary widely, from 3 million to 33 million. But the number of adherents isn’t the extent of its influence; its main tenets have moved beyond the confines of churches and into the political mainstream, largely thanks to traveling apostles and prophets who preach at evangelical churches all over the world. Fred Clarkson, a senior research analyst with the extremism watchdog group Political Research Associates, described the New Apostolic Reformation as a seismic cultural shift. “It’s the transformation of an entire society with this certain kind of Christo-centric worldview,” he told me. “We’re talking about something so transcendentally revolutionary that most people never even thought about something like this.”
Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Mike Flynn has hosted NAR leaders on his “ReAwaken America” tour, and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has worked with its apostles. Just this past weekend, GOP vice presidential hopeful Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) appeared in Pennsylvania at an event hosted by Lance Wallnau, a Texas business strategist-turned-NAR superstar. Wallnau, who has called Kamala Harris a “Jezebel” and speculated that people on the political left may be controlled by demons, helped develop Project 19, a right-wing political initiative to win 19 key counties in swing states for Trump.
I asked Clarkson for a metaphor to describe how New Apostolic Reformation concepts have spread beyond the confines of the movement. At first, he suggested the cellular process of osmosis, or perhaps a tea infusion, but neither accounts for the intentionality of the movement’s leaders. “How do you infuse your Christian ideas into Babylon?” he asked, referring to an ancient city that rejected God. “That’s the nature of their thinking. It can be deeply subversive. It can also be utterly in your face.”
Parishioners place their hands on each other during a Sunday morning worship service at Ephrata Community Church.
Since 2016, many NAR prophesies have concerned Trump, whom adherents see as having been divinely chosen to lead the country. Trump’s introduction to the movement came in 2002 when he invited Florida apostle Paula White-Cain to be his personal minister after seeing her preach on television. By the time he became president, he had acquired a handful of other NAR spiritual advisers: most notably, a South Carolina–based apostle named Dutch Sheets and prophet Cindy Jacobs, who helms an influential ministry in Texas. Throughout his presidency, Trump’s NAR counselors were mostly ignored by White House reporters, dismissed as latter-day versions of evangelical pastor Billy Graham with Richard Nixon, or Jeremiah Wright with Barack Obama. Yet “these are the key religious people around Donald Trump and the people who brought him the presidency,” Clarkson said. “They’re the people who influenced his presidency and the people who are leading the religious wing of his reelection campaign.”
As the 2020 election drew near, their role became more important. White-Cain warned her followers that Christians who don’t support Trump will “have to stand accountable before God one day.” Shortly after Trump’s defeat, Sheets became an influential figure in the “Stop the Steal” campaign, leading rallies across the country. He warned that the results of the presidential election were “going to be overturned and President Trump is going to be put back in office for four years.” Around the same time, White-Cain gave a speech imploring religious Americans to “strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike until you have victory.”
Eight days before the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021, a group of apostles held a strategy meeting with Trump and his advisers. In a January 1 blog post, Sheets shared a dream from a prophet named Gina Gholston, in which she described “moving toward the Capitol, not at a full gallop, but at a steady, determined, fast trot. As we began, written in white letters on the ground in front of us were the words, ‘DON’T STOP.’” A year after the insurrection, Sheets recounted a dream in which Trump had told him that he would be a “political martyr” because, he had said, loosely quoting the Bible, “‘God has put the tools in me to tear down, root up, and confront the system.’”
NAR leaders have targeted the Supreme Court, too. In 2018, during Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s contentious confirmation hearings, Sheets urged his followers to ask God to grant them “a majority of Justices who are Constitutionalists, literalists (meaning they believe the Constitution is to be taken literally, exactly as it is written), and who are pro-life.” He prayed for “another vacancy on the Court soon,” which he felt was “coming quickly.” In a broadcast, Wallnau, the NAR leader who recently hosted Vance in Pennsylvania, described the accusations of rape against Kavanaugh as a spiritual attack.
The apostles’ visions for the Supreme Court didn’t get much mainstream attention—until the New York Times broke a series of stories about flags displayed at the homes of Justice Samuel Alito. Outside his main residence was an upside-down American flag, a symbol associated with the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. At his vacation home in New Jersey, the Times’ Jodi Kantor later reported, flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag—belonging to Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann—showing a lone pine tree, a Revolutionary War symbol that had been revived and popularized by none other than Sheets. Rolling Stonefound the same flag fluttering outside the Maine vacation home of Leonard Leo, the deep-pocketed conservative judicial kingmaker whose largesse has extended to several justices and their families.
Digital scripture on business signage in Ephrata, where religion is prominent in public life
Meanwhile, NAR apostles have ensured that their teachings have spread into local civil societies. In Redding, California, the 11,000-member Bethel Church now funds the local police force and trains public school teachers. In Pasadena, Korean American apostle Ché Ahn’s Harvest Rock Church bankrolled local candidates, including one for state Senate. The Remnant Alliance, an NAR-affiliated group, teaches Christians across the nation to run for school boards.
And then there is Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a county of 550,000 people spread out over a patchwork of fertile farmland, where I traveled to understand what this kind of local transformation looks like. Since the mid-1600s, Pennsylvania has been known for religious fervor. First came the Quakers, followed shortly after by the Anabaptists, or “plain” people. Ephrata, for example, was a hub for the Brethren, but the area is also known for Mennonites and particularly the Amish. Today, Lancaster also has become an NAR hub. A popular sports event venue hosts far-right Christian conferences. NAR-affiliated churches control the school boards. One local group holds Bible study in public schools; another baptizes students in portable troughs in front of public high schools.
At the prayer night I attended, spiritual warfare rhetoric was on full display. An elderly woman described Lancaster public schools as being “so infiltrated with evil,” she prayed that “school boards would open up their eyes and ears and stop just screaming things that they think are good. If they did their homework, they’d see they’re not good.” Another woman announced that she had a vision of a claw machine. Instead of cheap prizes at the arcade, her claw—which symbolized the demonic influence of secularism—had picked up people’s minds so that they “can’t discern what’s right and wrong.” Her metaphor became an entreaty to God: “And I want to say…drop those minds and take them back for the Lord.” Someone blew a shofar, the ram’s horn that ancient Israelites used to call their armies to battle.
“We declare that this gender confusion would be stopped in the mighty name of Jesus!”
“We declare that this gender confusion would be stopped in the mighty name of Jesus!” cried another man, clad in the iconic Trump campaign T-shirt bearing the mugshot of the former president emblazoned with the word “wanted”—not for a crime but for another term in office. “We say, ‘Fight, fight, fight, hallelujah!’” he said. “We take the example of Donald Trump!” The group broke out in a chorus of “Fight, fight, fight!”
A painting vivid with both Christian and Jewish imagery inside Gateway House of Prayer, in Ephrata
The New Apostolic Reformation may be influential, but it’s also hard to pin down. With no single leader, annual conference, or website outlining statements of belief, it isn’t a distinct Protestant denomination, like Baptists or Presbyterians, but a vast and amorphous network of prophets and apostles who oversee their own ministries, issue prophetic declarations, and journey to churches all over the world to spread their ideology. Though many adherents fit the stereotype of the white, male Christian nationalist, some of the most prominent American apostles are African Americans and women; some of the most powerful global apostles come from African nations. But in Lancaster, the churches are overwhelmingly white.
The term “New Apostolic Reformation” was coined in the 1990s by the influential evangelical writer Wagner, who emphasized that he was not the movement’s leader—because it had none. It was instead a coming together of several smaller sects that shared a belief that God appointed apostles and prophets who possessed special “gifts of the spirit,” like the ability to perform miracles, for instance, or speak in tongues. In what became known as the “fivefold ministry,” NAR churches organized themselves into five areas of leadership: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. Leaders were urged to “use their influence to create an environment in which the blessings and prosperity of the Kingdom of God can permeate all areas of society,” to conquer “the Seven Mountains: Religion, Family, Education, Government, Media, Arts & Entertainment, and Business.”
It was Wallnau who popularized this doctrine of Christian dominion, which is sometimes known as the Seven Mountain Mandate, or 7MM. According to a recent Denison University poll, between March 2023 and January 2024, the percentage of Christian Americans who believed in the Seven Mountain Mandate increased from just under 30 percent to 41 percent. The concept routinely appears in conservative political discourse. Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker, who championed fetal personhood in a February 2024 ruling, said in an interview with a prominent NAR apostle that “God created government” and “that’s why he is calling and equipping people to step back into these mountains.”
Promoting a Christian nation has seeped into some of the Supreme Court justices’ opinions. In the 2019 case American Legion v. American Humanist Association, the court ruled in favor of the American Legion, which had erected a 40-foot cross on public land in Maryland. Alito wrote that taking down the cross would be “aggressively hostile to religion.” In the 2022 Kennedy v. Bremerton School District case, the court ruled 6–3 in favor of a public high school football coach who lost his job for routinely leading prayers during games. Writing for the conservative majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch unilaterally declared that the court had “long ago abandoned” a decades-old precedent that established that government employees can’t advance a particular religious ideology.
After the court declined in February to take up a case filed on behalf of people who had been removed from a jury because of their belief that gay marriage was wrong, Alito wrote in an unusual personal statement that he worried “Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be ‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government.”
“There’s very little question that [Christian nationalist] views are very much reflected in where this Supreme Court majority is on religion and church and state.”
The perception that Christians are being persecuted by the government is a potent rallying cry of the Christian nationalist movement. Elliot Mincberg, a Supreme Court scholar and fellow with the pro-democracy organization People for the American Way, said, “There’s very little question that [Christian nationalist] views are very much reflected in where this Supreme Court majority is on religion and church and state.”
Clarkson has watched as the ideas popularized by NAR—the Seven Mountain Mandate, the fivefold ministry, and the concept of spiritual warfare—have infiltrated churches that aren’t officially connected to the movement. “There are so many Christianities, and they change over time—this is a perfect example,” he said. “People don’t necessarily know where every belief they hold came from.”
NAR also appropriates Jewish imagery. Two days after I heard one shofar at Ephrata, I attended an all-day “prayer burn” at a barn in the countryside where several attendees blew them. Others wore tallitot, or Jewish prayer shawls. A group of tween dancers carried a chuppah, a four-posted canopy often used in Jewish weddings. The group sang in Hebrew as they danced the hora, a standard feature in Jewish celebrations. Then, one of the NAR leaders I recognized from Ephrata took the microphone and began to speak about Jesus. “He’s the Lord of hosts,” she said. A cacophonous roar of shofars came from the crowd.
Lancaster, PennsylvaniaJan Brenneman and his grandson Levi, 11, play their shofars at Lord’s House of Prayer, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. NAR appropriates several Jewish symbols and items used in religious ceremonies.
When I asked an attendee about all the Jewish references, she explained that it was simply a way to acknowledge the shared heritage between Christians and Jews. But that’s not the whole story, as Clarkson later reminded me. Many NAR adherents believe “that they have a special role as Christians in the end-times to deliver Israel”—a time when Jews will finally recognize Jesus as their Savior.
Lancaster has been home for centuries to the plain people, the Amish, the Mennonites, and the Brethren who, to various degrees, eschew machines and other trappings of modernity. But its demographics have shifted markedly over the last few decades. About 7 percent of Lancaster’s senior citizens are people of color, compared with a quarter of the youth. The gap between registered Democrats and Republicans has also narrowed.
Much of this purpling is taking place in the cobblestone streets and stately brick buildings of Lancaster City, which has welcomed 5,000 refugees to its population of 58,000 over the last 20 years. When I visited, I encountered a street festival in full swing. Young people grabbed overflowing plates of chicken tikka from an Indian food truck, and a crowd around the main stage danced to the music of a Liberian hip-hop artist.
“The way that you’re going to heal society is that you’re going to eliminate many government functions.”
City officials may embrace this diversity, but county leaders don’t. In February, the Lancaster City Council passed a law prohibiting police and city employees from asking people about their immigration status; county commissioners promptly declared Lancaster a “non-sanctuary” county. In June, after the City Council passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, County Commissioner Josh Parsons called the move a “propaganda victory for Hamas.” Lancaster’s overwhelmingly Republican state representatives tend to side with the county, even publicly denouncing the city’s efforts to welcome immigrants.
These state representatives regularly interact with NAR leaders. In May, two of them met with Sean Feucht, an NAR-aligned pastor who travels the country holding prayer rallies on the steps of state Capitol buildings. Also present at the meeting was a local self-proclaimed prophet named Abby Abildness, who works with the state’s prayer caucus group inside the Capitol to promote Christian initiatives in government. She has spoken candidly about her desire to blur the boundaries between church and state. “We need them and they need us,” she said, “because we can’t go write those laws.”
NAR influence in Lancaster churches began appearing in the early 2000s, but the Covid culture wars accelerated its spread. Six years ago, when Rebecca Branle, the owner of a local bike shop and mother of three, moved to Ephrata, she knew her family might stand out because they didn’t attend church. “We weren’t religious like everyone else, but I didn’t think it was that big of a deal,” she recalls. But in 2020, the pandemic hit, and once-negligible differences became “flash points.” After Branle posted a rainbow flag and a Black Lives Matter sign on her property, someone shot a bullet through the barn window, and in another incident, someone left a single slab of granite outside; “Look Behind You” was written on it in permanent marker, accompanied by a smiley face with the eyes crossed out. In smaller print appeared “Gays will burn in hell” and “You can repent.” She was scared for her family’s safety, but also confused: “Especially this community of people who say they’re so religious, suddenly this kind of talk is okay with them?”
The pandemic frightened many evangelical church leaders as well, but not because of the illness. Closing churches and mask mandates, which some considered offensive to God, were the real concern. Some pastors called vaccines the “mark of the beast.” To them, the pandemic’s major lesson was that government had become too powerful—and Christians had neglected to exert influence over that mountain.
When the Covid pandemic struck, Pastor Don Lamb from LifeGate church in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, felt his congregation needed to become more involved in politics. He went to Washington, DC, for the January 6 rally outside the Capitol.
Don Lamb, an ebullient, redheaded pastor whose complexion turns ruddier when he gets excited, felt the impact of Covid profoundly. We sat in the basement of LifeGate church in the small Lancaster enclave of Elizabethtown, population 12,000, and Lamb described how once his congregation of 150 “were just doing our things, staying within our four walls, preaching the gospel.” But when mask mandates came into effect, “it was authoritarian into the nth degree, and so that awoke the church to say, ‘We need to be involved here.’” In sermons, Lamb and his brother and co-pastor, Doug, urged their congregation to oppose not only pandemic restrictions but also mail-in ballots, critical race theory, “pronoun protocols,” and other culture war issues. When Joe Biden won the 2020 election, the Lambs believed that his victory was the result of coordinated election interference by the left.
“Who gets to define the vision of society—only the liberals and secularists? That’s what makes us more determined to fight.”
On January 6, 2021, Don Lamb and several parishioners went to the rally outside the US Capitol. What was meant to be a peaceful gathering, he said, became violent only after police “were already throwing or launching flash-bang grenades at the audience.” He believes that the protesters who breached the building were set up and that the chaos could have been avoided. “We could have surrounded the Capitol with 100,000 Christians arm to arm just saying, ‘Grace, Amazing Grace,’” he said, “and there would have been no protesters who would have broken that line.”
Lamb follows Lance Wallnau, and he subscribes to the Seven Mountain Mandate. Trump, he told me, “was providentially given the stage of America.” Yet he doesn’t consider his church to be part of NAR. The term “Christian nationalism” irks him. The real problem with our nation, he says, is “liberal nationalism’s” obsession with cancel culture, identity politics, and elite institutions. “Who gets to define the vision of society—only the liberals and secularists?” he asked me. “That’s what makes us more determined to fight.”
Don and Doug Lamb often refer to the persecution of Christians in their sermons. The previous Sunday, Doug began by urging his congregation to love their neighbors, even those with whom they disagreed. But by hour’s end, he was berating Muslim immigrants in England who have “taken over the entire country” instead of assimilating. When a Muslim visits, he said, “They’re not coming as a guest. They want to take over your house.” He likened this to the futility of seeking peace with those who follow Satan—like gay people who “destroyed the church in America,” he said. “You can’t compromise the truth and have peace with people who are diabolically opposed to what you believe.” Later, Lamb clarified that a better way to phrase this sentiment might have been: “You shouldn’t compromise the truth to be at peace with those who oppose you.”
Ten Commandments tablets outside Don Lamb’s LifeGate church
Some LifeGate congregants appear to be using those messages to inform local politics. In 2021, three church members won seats on the Elizabethtown school board, flipping it to a conservative majority. This past June, the school board voted to work with the Independence Law Center, a Christian law firm that has worked with school boards to ban transgender athletes in the county. A tertiary branch of the Family Research Council—a group that has long advocated against the separation of church and state—the law center has deep ties to NAR and is steeped in Washington’s extreme conservative religious right.
After our conversation, Don took us on a tour of his church. In the cozy, sunlit sanctuary, someone had left a flyer on a pew. The heading read, “Practical areas to prepare to speak out to societal issues.” The fourth item advised Christians, “People don’t care that you are a Christian, a citizen, or even a female…you are the enemy! Note: This would not happen to Muslims, Atheists, or BLM groups.” Lamb later told me that “You are the enemy of their agenda” would have been more accurate.
Branle, the Ephrata resident whose barn was vandalized, understands how it feels to be seen as the enemy. When she emailed local police about veiled threats she had received, an officer responded: “Can you elaborate on specifically what you perceive the threat to be? This appears to be a statement of opinion, which is protected speech.” After reporting a few more incidents to police, “I just stopped talking to them,” she said. “It felt a lot like it wasn’t helping.”
Groups affiliated with NAR are also the quiet heartbeat of institutions serving Lancaster’s neediest residents. TNT Youth Ministry, an evangelical group, provides classroom volunteers and field trip chaperones, and it runs Bible studies in local public schools. Another NAR-adjacent ministry, REAL Life Community Services, boasts that it is the “only full-time social services department” in one town.
Community service is a typical mission of faith groups the world over. But for Christians who believe they are called to influence the government, the objective is not spurred by faith alone. Rachel Tabachnick, an extremism researcher who studies NAR, notes that many of its adherents believe that “the way that you’re going to heal society is that you’re going to eliminate many government functions.” The church, not the government, will decide “whether to feed you or house you or clothe you.”
While in Lancaster, I visited the Blessings of Hope food distribution center, a Walmart-size grocery store that collects surplus food from manufacturers and makes it available to food pantries throughout the region at a deep discount. Rows of shelves filling the cavernous warehouse were crammed with giant bags of nacho cheese, dried chow mein noodles, gefilte fish, and onion ring mix. An army of volunteers, mostly women, many wearing the traditional haube hair covering for married Mennonite women, unloaded pallets of boxes.
A woman reaches for produce at Blessings of Hope food distribution center in Lancaster.David Lapp, the head of Blessings of Hope, grew up Amish but was expelled from the church. He and his eight brothers then explored evangelical Christianity and now follow NAR teachings.
David Lapp, a 42-year-old father of 12 and CEO of Blessings of Hope, was in charge. He grew up Amish and speaks with the German-inflected lilt typical of the plain communities in the region. In the early 2000s, he and his eight brothers began to read more about evangelical Christianity. By 2006, after the Amish officially excommunicated them for straying from the church’s teachings, they began to follow NAR leaders, including prophet Andrew Wommack, who believes there is “a demonic deception that is blinding” those who spoke out against Trump. They have helped convert several Amish people, introducing them to Wommack’s work. Several of the Lapp brothers founded Blessings of Hope in 2006, and it has become a massive operation spread across five warehouses, providing 50,000 meals a day. Their work has drawn national attention: Ivanka Trump toured the distribution center during the 2020 campaign.
Lapp still dresses in the style of the Amish, with a handmade collared shirt, suspenders, and a bowl cut, because “we felt like God asked us to keep the traditional garb more as a bridge back to our people.” He sees his work as a divine calling. His organization’s closest competitor, he said, is the behemoth nonprofit Feeding America, which he described as “more of a government-run, government-funded organization” whose church participants “are not allowed to share the gospel when they’re giving out food.” Lapp, who believes in the Seven Mountain Mandate, sees publicly funded food pantries as a missed opportunity for the church. When government administers social services, he said, “they’re going to miss the hearts of the people.”
A woman prays at LifeGate church in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.An American flag at LifeGate church
Back at Ephrata Community Church, I attended a Saturday evening service in the main building. Toddlers danced in the aisles as the worship band jammed. Some of the congregants had brought shofars in zippered carrying cases. After a somewhat banal sermon, I met executive pastor Jim Ehrman, who told me that he had only recently learned about NAR. Ephrata Community Church, he explained, had long had a “loose affiliation” with apostle Randy Clark, but “we don’t have a reference for it other than a group we care about was accused of being that.” I pressed further. Wasn’t his church about to host John Bevere, an NAR-affiliated pastor who has warned against the practice of tolerance?
“I had no idea he would have been associated with it,” Ehrman said. As far as the Seven Mountain teaching was concerned: “We do agree [the mountains] are there, but we’re very much like, ‘No, it’s who you are and how you carry yourself into those.’ There’s not some…mandate to take over.” When I told him about the prayer night, he seemed bemused. All the talk of spiritual warfare I had seen was “just the frame and the language they pick up,” he said.
Was Ehrman just being coy about his church’s connections to the New Apostolic Reformation, or was he genuinely naive to a movement that was so powerful and pervasive? In a sense, it didn’t matter. Another imperfect metaphor for the influence of NAR is climate change. Like it or not, it’s happening. The question for many pastors is how to steer their congregations through an increasingly chaotic and extreme religious landscape.
For Ehrman, the label was unimportant. What mattered was that armies of angels were indeed battling with the principalities of darkness. “There are literally unseen beings who are at odds with the work of God…on this earth,” he said. “And we believe that they are trying to influence things as well.”
One August evening, I drove through the cornfields and dairy farms of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to attend a government-themed prayer night at Ephrata Community Church. The sprawling house of worship looks like an office park and houses a cafe and an indoor playground in addition to a large sanctuary. This event, however, was in a converted barn across the parking lot called Gateway House of Prayer. For the last 15 years, it has been open 24 hours a day for the faithful to worship when the main church is closed, with parishioners keeping watch in shifts.
It was a Thursday night. Gradually, about 22 congregants, mostly seniors, all of whom were members of the community, filtered in. Over the next two hours, the group prayed, sometimes quietly and sometimes very loudly, and sometimes in strings of syllables, a charismatic Christian tradition known as speaking in tongues. Of the prayers that I could understand, many were what you’d hear in any church—gratitude for God’s goodness or entreaties for family members going through hard times.
Farmland near Rebecca Branle’s house, in Ephrata, Pennsylvania. She knew her family might stand out because they didn’t attend church.
But interspersed were more unsettling messages: frequent references to the “enemy,” to a battle between good and evil, to a “spiritual war” playing out in our country. One prayer leader encouraged attendees to join a pair of “prophets” who were taking daily Communion for 90 days at exactly 4:14 p.m. Why so precise? The answer can be found in two Old Testament verses: Esther 4:14, which says Christians are called to speak up in the face of persecution, and Nehemiah 4:14, which “is about fighting,” the prayer leader said, “on behalf of our sons, our daughters, our families.”
The devotees she mentioned were leaders in the New Apostolic Reformation, a charismatic evangelical Christian movement led by a loose network of self-appointed prophets and apostles, who claim that God speaks directly to them, often in dreams. They believe that Christians are called to wage a spiritual battle for control of the United States. In the vanguard of an ascendant Christian nationalist movement, they are seeking an explicitly Christian command of public schools, social policy, and all levels of the government, including the courts. Some scholars claim NAR is the fastest-growing spiritual movement in the United States. Evangelical writer C. Peter Wagner described it as the most significant shake-up in Protestantism since the Reformation. Its laser focus on starting a spiritual war to Christianize America has led the Southern Poverty Law Center to call NAR “the greatest threat to US democracy that you have never heard of.”
“It’s the transformation of an entire society…something so transcendentally revolutionary that most people never even thought about something like this.”
Estimates of Christians influenced by NAR vary widely, from 3 million to 33 million. But the number of adherents isn’t the extent of its influence; its main tenets have moved beyond the confines of churches and into the political mainstream, largely thanks to traveling apostles and prophets who preach at evangelical churches all over the world. Fred Clarkson, a senior research analyst with the extremism watchdog group Political Research Associates, described the New Apostolic Reformation as a seismic cultural shift. “It’s the transformation of an entire society with this certain kind of Christo-centric worldview,” he told me. “We’re talking about something so transcendentally revolutionary that most people never even thought about something like this.”
Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Mike Flynn has hosted NAR leaders on his “ReAwaken America” tour, and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has worked with its apostles. Just this past weekend, GOP vice presidential hopeful Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) appeared in Pennsylvania at an event hosted by Lance Wallnau, a Texas business strategist-turned-NAR superstar. Wallnau, who has called Kamala Harris a “Jezebel” and speculated that people on the political left may be controlled by demons, helped develop Project 19, a right-wing political initiative to win 19 key counties in swing states for Trump.
I asked Clarkson for a metaphor to describe how New Apostolic Reformation concepts have spread beyond the confines of the movement. At first, he suggested the cellular process of osmosis, or perhaps a tea infusion, but neither accounts for the intentionality of the movement’s leaders. “How do you infuse your Christian ideas into Babylon?” he asked, referring to an ancient city that rejected God. “That’s the nature of their thinking. It can be deeply subversive. It can also be utterly in your face.”
Parishioners place their hands on each other during a Sunday morning worship service at Ephrata Community Church.
Since 2016, many NAR prophesies have concerned Trump, whom adherents see as having been divinely chosen to lead the country. Trump’s introduction to the movement came in 2002 when he invited Florida apostle Paula White-Cain to be his personal minister after seeing her preach on television. By the time he became president, he had acquired a handful of other NAR spiritual advisers: most notably, a South Carolina–based apostle named Dutch Sheets and prophet Cindy Jacobs, who helms an influential ministry in Texas. Throughout his presidency, Trump’s NAR counselors were mostly ignored by White House reporters, dismissed as latter-day versions of evangelical pastor Billy Graham with Richard Nixon, or Jeremiah Wright with Barack Obama. Yet “these are the key religious people around Donald Trump and the people who brought him the presidency,” Clarkson said. “They’re the people who influenced his presidency and the people who are leading the religious wing of his reelection campaign.”
As the 2020 election drew near, their role became more important. White-Cain warned her followers that Christians who don’t support Trump will “have to stand accountable before God one day.” Shortly after Trump’s defeat, Sheets became an influential figure in the “Stop the Steal” campaign, leading rallies across the country. He warned that the results of the presidential election were “going to be overturned and President Trump is going to be put back in office for four years.” Around the same time, White-Cain gave a speech imploring religious Americans to “strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike until you have victory.”
Eight days before the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021, a group of apostles held a strategy meeting with Trump and his advisers. In a January 1 blog post, Sheets shared a dream from a prophet named Gina Gholston, in which she described “moving toward the Capitol, not at a full gallop, but at a steady, determined, fast trot. As we began, written in white letters on the ground in front of us were the words, ‘DON’T STOP.’” A year after the insurrection, Sheets recounted a dream in which Trump had told him that he would be a “political martyr” because, he had said, loosely quoting the Bible, “‘God has put the tools in me to tear down, root up, and confront the system.’”
NAR leaders have targeted the Supreme Court, too. In 2018, during Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s contentious confirmation hearings, Sheets urged his followers to ask God to grant them “a majority of Justices who are Constitutionalists, literalists (meaning they believe the Constitution is to be taken literally, exactly as it is written), and who are pro-life.” He prayed for “another vacancy on the Court soon,” which he felt was “coming quickly.” In a broadcast, Wallnau, the NAR leader who recently hosted Vance in Pennsylvania, described the accusations of rape against Kavanaugh as a spiritual attack.
The apostles’ visions for the Supreme Court didn’t get much mainstream attention—until the New York Times broke a series of stories about flags displayed at the homes of Justice Samuel Alito. Outside his main residence was an upside-down American flag, a symbol associated with the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. At his vacation home in New Jersey, the Times’ Jodi Kantor later reported, flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag—belonging to Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann—showing a lone pine tree, a Revolutionary War symbol that had been revived and popularized by none other than Sheets. Rolling Stonefound the same flag fluttering outside the Maine vacation home of Leonard Leo, the deep-pocketed conservative judicial kingmaker whose largesse has extended to several justices and their families.
Digital scripture on business signage in Ephrata, where religion is prominent in public life
Meanwhile, NAR apostles have ensured that their teachings have spread into local civil societies. In Redding, California, the 11,000-member Bethel Church now funds the local police force and trains public school teachers. In Pasadena, Korean American apostle Ché Ahn’s Harvest Rock Church bankrolled local candidates, including one for state Senate. The Remnant Alliance, an NAR-affiliated group, teaches Christians across the nation to run for school boards.
And then there is Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a county of 550,000 people spread out over a patchwork of fertile farmland, where I traveled to understand what this kind of local transformation looks like. Since the mid-1600s, Pennsylvania has been known for religious fervor. First came the Quakers, followed shortly after by the Anabaptists, or “plain” people. Ephrata, for example, was a hub for the Brethren, but the area is also known for Mennonites and particularly the Amish. Today, Lancaster also has become an NAR hub. A popular sports event venue hosts far-right Christian conferences. NAR-affiliated churches control the school boards. One local group holds Bible study in public schools; another baptizes students in portable troughs in front of public high schools.
At the prayer night I attended, spiritual warfare rhetoric was on full display. An elderly woman described Lancaster public schools as being “so infiltrated with evil,” she prayed that “school boards would open up their eyes and ears and stop just screaming things that they think are good. If they did their homework, they’d see they’re not good.” Another woman announced that she had a vision of a claw machine. Instead of cheap prizes at the arcade, her claw—which symbolized the demonic influence of secularism—had picked up people’s minds so that they “can’t discern what’s right and wrong.” Her metaphor became an entreaty to God: “And I want to say…drop those minds and take them back for the Lord.” Someone blew a shofar, the ram’s horn that ancient Israelites used to call their armies to battle.
“We declare that this gender confusion would be stopped in the mighty name of Jesus!”
“We declare that this gender confusion would be stopped in the mighty name of Jesus!” cried another man, clad in the iconic Trump campaign T-shirt bearing the mugshot of the former president emblazoned with the word “wanted”—not for a crime but for another term in office. “We say, ‘Fight, fight, fight, hallelujah!’” he said. “We take the example of Donald Trump!” The group broke out in a chorus of “Fight, fight, fight!”
A painting vivid with both Christian and Jewish imagery inside Gateway House of Prayer, in Ephrata
The New Apostolic Reformation may be influential, but it’s also hard to pin down. With no single leader, annual conference, or website outlining statements of belief, it isn’t a distinct Protestant denomination, like Baptists or Presbyterians, but a vast and amorphous network of prophets and apostles who oversee their own ministries, issue prophetic declarations, and journey to churches all over the world to spread their ideology. Though many adherents fit the stereotype of the white, male Christian nationalist, some of the most prominent American apostles are African Americans and women; some of the most powerful global apostles come from African nations. But in Lancaster, the churches are overwhelmingly white.
The term “New Apostolic Reformation” was coined in the 1990s by the influential evangelical writer Wagner, who emphasized that he was not the movement’s leader—because it had none. It was instead a coming together of several smaller sects that shared a belief that God appointed apostles and prophets who possessed special “gifts of the spirit,” like the ability to perform miracles, for instance, or speak in tongues. In what became known as the “fivefold ministry,” NAR churches organized themselves into five areas of leadership: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. Leaders were urged to “use their influence to create an environment in which the blessings and prosperity of the Kingdom of God can permeate all areas of society,” to conquer “the Seven Mountains: Religion, Family, Education, Government, Media, Arts & Entertainment, and Business.”
It was Wallnau who popularized this doctrine of Christian dominion, which is sometimes known as the Seven Mountain Mandate, or 7MM. According to a recent Denison University poll, between March 2023 and January 2024, the percentage of Christian Americans who believed in the Seven Mountain Mandate increased from just under 30 percent to 41 percent. The concept routinely appears in conservative political discourse. Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker, who championed fetal personhood in a February 2024 ruling, said in an interview with a prominent NAR apostle that “God created government” and “that’s why he is calling and equipping people to step back into these mountains.”
Promoting a Christian nation has seeped into some of the Supreme Court justices’ opinions. In the 2019 case American Legion v. American Humanist Association, the court ruled in favor of the American Legion, which had erected a 40-foot cross on public land in Maryland. Alito wrote that taking down the cross would be “aggressively hostile to religion.” In the 2022 Kennedy v. Bremerton School District case, the court ruled 6–3 in favor of a public high school football coach who lost his job for routinely leading prayers during games. Writing for the conservative majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch unilaterally declared that the court had “long ago abandoned” a decades-old precedent that established that government employees can’t advance a particular religious ideology.
After the court declined in February to take up a case filed on behalf of people who had been removed from a jury because of their belief that gay marriage was wrong, Alito wrote in an unusual personal statement that he worried “Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be ‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government.”
“There’s very little question that [Christian nationalist] views are very much reflected in where this Supreme Court majority is on religion and church and state.”
The perception that Christians are being persecuted by the government is a potent rallying cry of the Christian nationalist movement. Elliot Mincberg, a Supreme Court scholar and fellow with the pro-democracy organization People for the American Way, said, “There’s very little question that [Christian nationalist] views are very much reflected in where this Supreme Court majority is on religion and church and state.”
Clarkson has watched as the ideas popularized by NAR—the Seven Mountain Mandate, the fivefold ministry, and the concept of spiritual warfare—have infiltrated churches that aren’t officially connected to the movement. “There are so many Christianities, and they change over time—this is a perfect example,” he said. “People don’t necessarily know where every belief they hold came from.”
NAR also appropriates Jewish imagery. Two days after I heard one shofar at Ephrata, I attended an all-day “prayer burn” at a barn in the countryside where several attendees blew them. Others wore tallitot, or Jewish prayer shawls. A group of tween dancers carried a chuppah, a four-posted canopy often used in Jewish weddings. The group sang in Hebrew as they danced the hora, a standard feature in Jewish celebrations. Then, one of the NAR leaders I recognized from Ephrata took the microphone and began to speak about Jesus. “He’s the Lord of hosts,” she said. A cacophonous roar of shofars came from the crowd.
Lancaster, PennsylvaniaJan Brenneman and his grandson Levi, 11, play their shofars at Lord’s House of Prayer, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. NAR appropriates several Jewish symbols and items used in religious ceremonies.
When I asked an attendee about all the Jewish references, she explained that it was simply a way to acknowledge the shared heritage between Christians and Jews. But that’s not the whole story, as Clarkson later reminded me. Many NAR adherents believe “that they have a special role as Christians in the end-times to deliver Israel”—a time when Jews will finally recognize Jesus as their Savior.
Lancaster has been home for centuries to the plain people, the Amish, the Mennonites, and the Brethren who, to various degrees, eschew machines and other trappings of modernity. But its demographics have shifted markedly over the last few decades. About 7 percent of Lancaster’s senior citizens are people of color, compared with a quarter of the youth. The gap between registered Democrats and Republicans has also narrowed.
Much of this purpling is taking place in the cobblestone streets and stately brick buildings of Lancaster City, which has welcomed 5,000 refugees to its population of 58,000 over the last 20 years. When I visited, I encountered a street festival in full swing. Young people grabbed overflowing plates of chicken tikka from an Indian food truck, and a crowd around the main stage danced to the music of a Liberian hip-hop artist.
“The way that you’re going to heal society is that you’re going to eliminate many government functions.”
City officials may embrace this diversity, but county leaders don’t. In February, the Lancaster City Council passed a law prohibiting police and city employees from asking people about their immigration status; county commissioners promptly declared Lancaster a “non-sanctuary” county. In June, after the City Council passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, County Commissioner Josh Parsons called the move a “propaganda victory for Hamas.” Lancaster’s overwhelmingly Republican state representatives tend to side with the county, even publicly denouncing the city’s efforts to welcome immigrants.
These state representatives regularly interact with NAR leaders. In May, two of them met with Sean Feucht, an NAR-aligned pastor who travels the country holding prayer rallies on the steps of state Capitol buildings. Also present at the meeting was a local self-proclaimed prophet named Abby Abildness, who works with the state’s prayer caucus group inside the Capitol to promote Christian initiatives in government. She has spoken candidly about her desire to blur the boundaries between church and state. “We need them and they need us,” she said, “because we can’t go write those laws.”
NAR influence in Lancaster churches began appearing in the early 2000s, but the Covid culture wars accelerated its spread. Six years ago, when Rebecca Branle, the owner of a local bike shop and mother of three, moved to Ephrata, she knew her family might stand out because they didn’t attend church. “We weren’t religious like everyone else, but I didn’t think it was that big of a deal,” she recalls. But in 2020, the pandemic hit, and once-negligible differences became “flash points.” After Branle posted a rainbow flag and a Black Lives Matter sign on her property, someone shot a bullet through the barn window, and in another incident, someone left a single slab of granite outside; “Look Behind You” was written on it in permanent marker, accompanied by a smiley face with the eyes crossed out. In smaller print appeared “Gays will burn in hell” and “You can repent.” She was scared for her family’s safety, but also confused: “Especially this community of people who say they’re so religious, suddenly this kind of talk is okay with them?”
The pandemic frightened many evangelical church leaders as well, but not because of the illness. Closing churches and mask mandates, which some considered offensive to God, were the real concern. Some pastors called vaccines the “mark of the beast.” To them, the pandemic’s major lesson was that government had become too powerful—and Christians had neglected to exert influence over that mountain.
When the Covid pandemic struck, Pastor Don Lamb from LifeGate church in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, felt his congregation needed to become more involved in politics. He went to Washington, DC, for the January 6 rally outside the Capitol.
Don Lamb, an ebullient, redheaded pastor whose complexion turns ruddier when he gets excited, felt the impact of Covid profoundly. We sat in the basement of LifeGate church in the small Lancaster enclave of Elizabethtown, population 12,000, and Lamb described how once his congregation of 150 “were just doing our things, staying within our four walls, preaching the gospel.” But when mask mandates came into effect, “it was authoritarian into the nth degree, and so that awoke the church to say, ‘We need to be involved here.’” In sermons, Lamb and his brother and co-pastor, Doug, urged their congregation to oppose not only pandemic restrictions but also mail-in ballots, critical race theory, “pronoun protocols,” and other culture war issues. When Joe Biden won the 2020 election, the Lambs believed that his victory was the result of coordinated election interference by the left.
“Who gets to define the vision of society—only the liberals and secularists? That’s what makes us more determined to fight.”
On January 6, 2021, Don Lamb and several parishioners went to the rally outside the US Capitol. What was meant to be a peaceful gathering, he said, became violent only after police “were already throwing or launching flash-bang grenades at the audience.” He believes that the protesters who breached the building were set up and that the chaos could have been avoided. “We could have surrounded the Capitol with 100,000 Christians arm to arm just saying, ‘Grace, Amazing Grace,’” he said, “and there would have been no protesters who would have broken that line.”
Lamb follows Lance Wallnau, and he subscribes to the Seven Mountain Mandate. Trump, he told me, “was providentially given the stage of America.” Yet he doesn’t consider his church to be part of NAR. The term “Christian nationalism” irks him. The real problem with our nation, he says, is “liberal nationalism’s” obsession with cancel culture, identity politics, and elite institutions. “Who gets to define the vision of society—only the liberals and secularists?” he asked me. “That’s what makes us more determined to fight.”
Don and Doug Lamb often refer to the persecution of Christians in their sermons. The previous Sunday, Doug began by urging his congregation to love their neighbors, even those with whom they disagreed. But by hour’s end, he was berating Muslim immigrants in England who have “taken over the entire country” instead of assimilating. When a Muslim visits, he said, “They’re not coming as a guest. They want to take over your house.” He likened this to the futility of seeking peace with those who follow Satan—like gay people who “destroyed the church in America,” he said. “You can’t compromise the truth and have peace with people who are diabolically opposed to what you believe.” Later, Lamb clarified that a better way to phrase this sentiment might have been: “You shouldn’t compromise the truth to be at peace with those who oppose you.”
Ten Commandments tablets outside Don Lamb’s LifeGate church
Some LifeGate congregants appear to be using those messages to inform local politics. In 2021, three church members won seats on the Elizabethtown school board, flipping it to a conservative majority. This past June, the school board voted to work with the Independence Law Center, a Christian law firm that has worked with school boards to ban transgender athletes in the county. A tertiary branch of the Family Research Council—a group that has long advocated against the separation of church and state—the law center has deep ties to NAR and is steeped in Washington’s extreme conservative religious right.
After our conversation, Don took us on a tour of his church. In the cozy, sunlit sanctuary, someone had left a flyer on a pew. The heading read, “Practical areas to prepare to speak out to societal issues.” The fourth item advised Christians, “People don’t care that you are a Christian, a citizen, or even a female…you are the enemy! Note: This would not happen to Muslims, Atheists, or BLM groups.” Lamb later told me that “You are the enemy of their agenda” would have been more accurate.
Branle, the Ephrata resident whose barn was vandalized, understands how it feels to be seen as the enemy. When she emailed local police about veiled threats she had received, an officer responded: “Can you elaborate on specifically what you perceive the threat to be? This appears to be a statement of opinion, which is protected speech.” After reporting a few more incidents to police, “I just stopped talking to them,” she said. “It felt a lot like it wasn’t helping.”
Groups affiliated with NAR are also the quiet heartbeat of institutions serving Lancaster’s neediest residents. TNT Youth Ministry, an evangelical group, provides classroom volunteers and field trip chaperones, and it runs Bible studies in local public schools. Another NAR-adjacent ministry, REAL Life Community Services, boasts that it is the “only full-time social services department” in one town.
Community service is a typical mission of faith groups the world over. But for Christians who believe they are called to influence the government, the objective is not spurred by faith alone. Rachel Tabachnick, an extremism researcher who studies NAR, notes that many of its adherents believe that “the way that you’re going to heal society is that you’re going to eliminate many government functions.” The church, not the government, will decide “whether to feed you or house you or clothe you.”
While in Lancaster, I visited the Blessings of Hope food distribution center, a Walmart-size grocery store that collects surplus food from manufacturers and makes it available to food pantries throughout the region at a deep discount. Rows of shelves filling the cavernous warehouse were crammed with giant bags of nacho cheese, dried chow mein noodles, gefilte fish, and onion ring mix. An army of volunteers, mostly women, many wearing the traditional haube hair covering for married Mennonite women, unloaded pallets of boxes.
A woman reaches for produce at Blessings of Hope food distribution center in Lancaster.David Lapp, the head of Blessings of Hope, grew up Amish but was expelled from the church. He and his eight brothers then explored evangelical Christianity and now follow NAR teachings.
David Lapp, a 42-year-old father of 12 and CEO of Blessings of Hope, was in charge. He grew up Amish and speaks with the German-inflected lilt typical of the plain communities in the region. In the early 2000s, he and his eight brothers began to read more about evangelical Christianity. By 2006, after the Amish officially excommunicated them for straying from the church’s teachings, they began to follow NAR leaders, including prophet Andrew Wommack, who believes there is “a demonic deception that is blinding” those who spoke out against Trump. They have helped convert several Amish people, introducing them to Wommack’s work. Several of the Lapp brothers founded Blessings of Hope in 2006, and it has become a massive operation spread across five warehouses, providing 50,000 meals a day. Their work has drawn national attention: Ivanka Trump toured the distribution center during the 2020 campaign.
Lapp still dresses in the style of the Amish, with a handmade collared shirt, suspenders, and a bowl cut, because “we felt like God asked us to keep the traditional garb more as a bridge back to our people.” He sees his work as a divine calling. His organization’s closest competitor, he said, is the behemoth nonprofit Feeding America, which he described as “more of a government-run, government-funded organization” whose church participants “are not allowed to share the gospel when they’re giving out food.” Lapp, who believes in the Seven Mountain Mandate, sees publicly funded food pantries as a missed opportunity for the church. When government administers social services, he said, “they’re going to miss the hearts of the people.”
A woman prays at LifeGate church in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.An American flag at LifeGate church
Back at Ephrata Community Church, I attended a Saturday evening service in the main building. Toddlers danced in the aisles as the worship band jammed. Some of the congregants had brought shofars in zippered carrying cases. After a somewhat banal sermon, I met executive pastor Jim Ehrman, who told me that he had only recently learned about NAR. Ephrata Community Church, he explained, had long had a “loose affiliation” with apostle Randy Clark, but “we don’t have a reference for it other than a group we care about was accused of being that.” I pressed further. Wasn’t his church about to host John Bevere, an NAR-affiliated pastor who has warned against the practice of tolerance?
“I had no idea he would have been associated with it,” Ehrman said. As far as the Seven Mountain teaching was concerned: “We do agree [the mountains] are there, but we’re very much like, ‘No, it’s who you are and how you carry yourself into those.’ There’s not some…mandate to take over.” When I told him about the prayer night, he seemed bemused. All the talk of spiritual warfare I had seen was “just the frame and the language they pick up,” he said.
Was Ehrman just being coy about his church’s connections to the New Apostolic Reformation, or was he genuinely naive to a movement that was so powerful and pervasive? In a sense, it didn’t matter. Another imperfect metaphor for the influence of NAR is climate change. Like it or not, it’s happening. The question for many pastors is how to steer their congregations through an increasingly chaotic and extreme religious landscape.
For Ehrman, the label was unimportant. What mattered was that armies of angels were indeed battling with the principalities of darkness. “There are literally unseen beings who are at odds with the work of God…on this earth,” he said. “And we believe that they are trying to influence things as well.”
Last Saturday, vice presidential candidate JD Vance appeared at an event in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, hosted by Lance Wallnau, a self-proclaimed “apostle,” which means he’s a leader in a rapidly growing religious movement called the New Apostolic Reformation. NAR is a loose network of evangelical Christians, who believe that they are called to take over all aspects of society, including the government. They also believe that God speaks directly to certain Christians, whom they call prophets, often in dreams.
Lance Wallnau, a former businessman who hails from Texas, has been an influential leader in NAR circles for some time. He popularized one of its most popular concepts, the idea that there are seven “mountains” that Christians must conquer: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government. That last one has become a centerpiece of his mission. He has said he believes that the political left is possessed by demons, that there is “witchcraft” controlling the presidential election, and that Vice President Kamala Harris is a Jezebel—a reference to a prostitute in the Bible. As he put it in a recent broadcast, “When you’ve got somebody operating in manipulation, intimidation, and domination—especially when it’s in a female role trying to emasculate a man who is standing up for truth—you’re dealing with the Jezebel spirit.”
But for Wallnau, politics are more than just material for fire-and-brimstone sermons, because he has an ambitious plan for the 2024 presidential election. It’s called Project 19, a reference to the 19 counties in swing states that could determine the outcome.
Fred Clarkson, a researcher with the religious extremism watchdog group Political Research Associates, has reported that Wallnau sometimes says swing states aren’t fully red because people aren’t praying hard enough. Wallnau said earlier this year, “If we don’t have apostles and prophets in the territory, then demons control the territory and the minds of people are under the influence of devils.” As my colleague David Corn wrote this week, Wallnau has been promoting Project 19 on what he has called the Courage Tour—a multi-stop traveling road show through swing states to energize evangelical voters and encourage voter registration. The Pennsylvania event last weekend that featured JD Vance took place after visits to Arizona, Michigan, and Georgia.
“If we don’t have apostles and prophets in the territory, then demons control the territory and the minds of people are under the influence of devils.”
The specifics of Project 19 are hard to come by, but one key detail is that Wallnau’s partner on the project is the America First Policy Institute, a right-wing political activism group helmed by a cadre of former Trump administration officials, including Brooke Rollins, who was acting director of the United States Domestic Policy Council under Trump, and Larry Kudlow, the former director of the National Economic Council. After he lost the 2020 election, Trump donated $1 million to AFPI.
AFPI hasn’t said much about Project 19 in recent months. But there are some signs that the initiative is quietly mobilizing for a final electoral push.
It turns out that over the past several weeks, America First Works,the political action arm of the America First Policy Institute, has posted several listings on Red Balloon, a right-wing job board. The posts, which have separate entries for each swing state, solicit applications for “county coordinators,” who “will lead and implement Project 19’s strategic vision in their region, providing boots on the ground and hands-on experience. This includes managing local research, content creation, coalition building, grassroots contact, and educational initiatives focused on America First messaging.”
Like its parent organization, America First Works is helmed by right-wing power players. Texas billionaire Tim Dunn serves as chairman, and Linda McMahon, a former pro-wrestler who led the Small Business Administration under Trump, serves on its board. The group has partnered with other conservative and Christian organizations around political organizing; last July, for example, it teamed up with Turning Point Action on a voter mobilization initiative.
Back in April, America First Works’ executive director, Ashley Hayek, appeared on Fox News. She explained that Project 19, which Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) leads, is about “messaging and data, it’s unifying the movement, it’s project 19, focusing on the counties that we believe will ultimately determine the next election, it’s our ballot harvesting and voter mobilization, and then, of course, day one of what a new administration looks like.”
How successful this initiative will be remains to be seen—evangelicals themselves point out that as a group, they are famously under-registered as voters. But getting out the vote is only part of the strategy. As independent journalist Judd Legum reported, Wallnau’s rally with Vance in Pennsylvania also featured Joshua Standifer, founder of the Christian political activism group Lion of Judah. Standifer described what he called a “Trojan horse” strategy: having evangelicals sign up to become poll workers. A guide that can be downloaded for free at the Lion of Judah’s website tells readers that by becoming poll workers, they can “bring light into darkness and influence the communities around them by running for office and actively seeking to bring Jesus’ Kingdom on Earth as it is in Heaven.”
It continues: “Simply put, our goal is to elevate as many Christian Patriots as possible to become Election Workers. Having Believers in key positions of influence in government like Election Workers is the first step on the path to victory this Fall.”
For much of 2024, Donald Trump has used demagoguery against migrants to campaign for the White House. In numerous recent speeches and media appearances, he has continued to inveigh about an alleged “invasion” coming across America’s southern border. He has falsely claimed that hordes of violent and “insane” foreigners have been taking over “hundreds” of cities and raping and killing “thousands of Americans.” His repeated vows to deport millions of undocumented immigrants draw roars of approval at his rallies.
Inflaming Americans’ fears about immigration and border security was a hallmark of Trump’s presidency and previous campaigns—and his extreme rhetoric, as I’ve previously reported, has marked spasms of violence, including a horrific mass shooting in 2019 in El Paso, Texas. Earlier this month, he and his running mate, JD Vance, magnified racist lies about Haitian immigrants supposedly stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio—provoking a wave of fear, bomb threats, and major disruption in that community.
Now, in the final weeks of the presidential campaign, Trump’s rhetoric about migrants has grown even darker and more foreboding. In three campaign speeches since Friday, he conjured disturbing images of mayhem and death and spoke of the nation as if it’s on the brink of destruction. With no basis in reality, he blamed this cartoonishly grim portrait of American carnage on his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
“She let our American sons and daughters be raped and murdered at the hands of vicious monsters. She let American communities be conquered,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan on Friday, emphasizing, “They’re conquering your communities.”
“They’ll walk into your kitchen,” Trump said of migrants. “They’ll cut your throat.”
“These migrants,” Trump said the following day in Wisconsin, “they make our criminals look like babies. These are stone-cold killers. They’ll walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.”
In a lengthy diatribe that followed, he falsely claimed that Harris had “let in 425,431 people convicted of the worst crimes.” (This was one of several ways in which Trump wildly distorted data recently released by US Homeland Security that covers a 40-year period.) He declared that these were legions of criminals who “Kamala set loose to rape, pillage, thieve, plunder and kill the people of the United States of America.”
“Lock her up!” shouted someone in the crowd.
Trump further railed against Harris as being “mentally disabled” and supposedly responsible for tens of thousands of murderers pouring into the country. “I’ve been saying this for three years,” he went on, soon adding: “She’s letting in people who are going to walk into your house, break into your door, and they’ll do anything they want. These people are animals.”
Later in the speech, he again highlighted alleged violence by “illegal aliens” and declared: “I will liberate Wisconsin from this mass migrant invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs, and vicious gang members. I will liberate our nation.”
Trump even used an impromptu moment to dehumanize migrants in ugly terms. He claimed that English was fast disappearing from the schools in Springfield, Ohio, and warned that if Harris is elected president, towns in Wisconsin and all over America “will be transformed into a third-world hellhole.” As he continued, a fly apparently landed on the podium.
“Oh, there’s a fly,” he said, shooing it away, his tone turning sardonic. “I wonder where the fly came from.”
The crowd erupted with laughter.
“See, two years ago I wouldn’t have had a fly up here,” he said, grinning. “You’re changing rapidly.”
He delivered more of the same on Sunday in Pennsylvania: “The massive number of savage criminal aliens that Kamala Harris has allowed to invade our country, this is an invasion.” He further claimed, “Last week a lot of people came in from the Congo, a big prison in the Congo in Africa. Welcome to the United States.”
“Send ’em back!” a person in the crowd yelled angrily.
This was all building to a specter of national demise—an invasion, Trump claimed, that will be larger than half the size of the current US population.
“Wait till you see what’s going to happen,” he said. “Oh, and if I don’t get in, it’s going to be the worst thing that this country has ever suffered…you’ll have 150, 200 million coming, you will have, this country will no longer be recognizable.”
That rhetoric is indistinguishable from the “Great Replacement” ideology that motivated the mass shooter who attacked in El Paso when Trump was in the White House.
“Dehumanizing a population—whether it’s Trump smearing migrants for spreading flies, ‘eating the dogs,’ or ‘poisoning the blood of our country’—increases the likelihood of violence.”
As I have reported previously, dehumanizing a population by instigating feelings of contempt and disgust—whether it’s Trump smearing migrants for spreading flies, “eating the dogs,” or “poisoning the blood of our country”—increases the likelihood that his extremist followers will be inspired to commit acts of violence. The danger from this type of incitement, documented in behavioral science research, has been rising with Trump’s rhetoric, according to threat assessment and national security experts I’ve spoken with in recent weeks. “There’s nothing normal about any of this,” as one source put it. “We’ve already seen where this goes, and it can easily go there again.”
While America faces profound challenges with immigration, a top issue for voters, Trump’s depictions are as demonstrably false as they are deeply troubling. Immigrants commit crime at lower rates than native-born Americans, extensive research shows. The nation has experienced a sharp decline in violent crime under the Biden-Harris administration, according to FBI data. And in recent months, migrant encounters at the border dropped to the lowest level in four years.
It is important to recognize that Trump’s demonizing rhetoric is clearly by design. He is well known for improvising and wandering off on long tangents that turn bizarre and incoherent. But much of the incendiary rhetoric above was written into Trump’s speeches. He read most of it from a teleprompter.
When I reported in August on this demagoguery from Trump, I contacted three of his senior campaign advisors separately, asking them for comment about experts’ concerns that the ex-president’s rhetoric could provoke further violence. None of those Trump advisors responded, nor did they reply to my follow-up inquiries for this story.
For much of 2024, Donald Trump has used demagoguery against migrants to campaign for the White House. In numerous recent speeches and media appearances, he has continued to inveigh about an alleged “invasion” coming across America’s southern border. He has falsely claimed that hordes of violent and “insane” foreigners have been taking over “hundreds” of cities and raping and killing “thousands of Americans.” His repeated vows to deport millions of undocumented immigrants draw roars of approval at his rallies.
Inflaming Americans’ fears about immigration and border security was a hallmark of Trump’s presidency and previous campaigns—and his extreme rhetoric, as I’ve previously reported, has marked spasms of violence, including a horrific mass shooting in 2019 in El Paso, Texas. Earlier this month, he and his running mate, JD Vance, magnified racist lies about Haitian immigrants supposedly stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio—provoking a wave of fear, bomb threats, and major disruption in that community.
Now, in the final weeks of the presidential campaign, Trump’s rhetoric about migrants has grown even darker and more foreboding. In three campaign speeches since Friday, he conjured disturbing images of mayhem and death and spoke of the nation as if it’s on the brink of destruction. With no basis in reality, he blamed this cartoonishly grim portrait of American carnage on his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
“She let our American sons and daughters be raped and murdered at the hands of vicious monsters. She let American communities be conquered,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan on Friday, emphasizing, “They’re conquering your communities.”
“They’ll walk into your kitchen,” Trump said of migrants. “They’ll cut your throat.”
“These migrants,” Trump said the following day in Wisconsin, “they make our criminals look like babies. These are stone-cold killers. They’ll walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.”
In a lengthy diatribe that followed, he falsely claimed that Harris had “let in 425,431 people convicted of the worst crimes.” (This was one of several ways in which Trump wildly distorted recently released data from US Homeland Security covering a 40-year period.) He declared that these were legions of criminals who “Kamala set loose to rape, pillage, thieve, plunder and kill the people of the United States of America.”
“Lock her up!” shouted someone in the crowd.
Trump further railed against Harris as being “mentally disabled” and supposedly responsible for tens of thousands of murderers pouring into the country. “I’ve been saying this for three years,” he went on, soon adding: “She’s letting in people who are going to walk into your house, break into your door, and they’ll do anything they want. These people are animals.”
Later in the speech, he again highlighted alleged violence by “illegal aliens” and declared: “I will liberate Wisconsin from this mass migrant invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs, and vicious gang members. I will liberate our nation.”
Trump even used an impromptu moment to dehumanize migrants in ugly terms. He claimed that English was fast disappearing from the schools in Springfield, Ohio, and warned that if Harris is elected president, towns in Wisconsin and all over America “will be transformed into a third-world hellhole.” As he continued, a fly apparently landed on the podium.
“Oh, there’s a fly,” he said, shooing it away, his tone turning sardonic. “I wonder where the fly came from.”
The crowd erupted with laughter.
“See, two years ago I wouldn’t have had a fly up here,” he said, grinning. “You’re changing rapidly.”
He delivered more of the same on Sunday in Pennsylvania: “The massive number of savage criminal aliens that Kamala Harris has allowed to invade our country, this is an invasion.” He further claimed, “Last week a lot of people came in from the Congo, a big prison in the Congo in Africa. Welcome to the United States.”
“Send ’em back!” a person in the crowd yelled angrily.
This was all building to a specter of national demise—an invasion, Trump claimed, that will be larger than half the size of the current US population.
“Wait till you see what’s going to happen,” he said. “Oh, and if I don’t get in, it’s going to be the worst thing that this country has ever suffered…you’ll have 150, 200 million coming, you will have, this country will no longer be recognizable.”
That rhetoric is indistinguishable from the “Great Replacement” ideology that motivated the mass shooter who attacked in El Paso when Trump was in the White House.
“Dehumanizing a population—whether it’s Trump smearing migrants for spreading flies, ‘eating the dogs,’ or ‘poisoning the blood of our country’—increases the likelihood of violence.”
As I have reported previously, dehumanizing a population by provoking feelings of contempt and disgust—whether it’s Trump smearing migrants for spreading flies, “eating the dogs,” or “poisoning the blood of our country”—increases the likelihood that his extremist followers will commit acts of violence. The danger from this type of incitement, documented in behavioral science research, has been rising with Trump’s rhetoric, according to threat assessment and national security experts I’ve spoken with in recent weeks. As one source put it, “We’ve already seen where this goes, and it can easily go there again.”
While America faces profound challenges with immigration, a top issue with voters, Trump’s depictions are as demonstrably false as they are deeply troubling. Immigrants commit crime at lower rates than native-born Americans, extensive research shows. The nation has experienced a sharp decline in violent crime under the Biden-Harris administration, according to FBI data. And recently, migrant encounters at the border dropped to the lowest level in four years.
It is important to recognize that Trump’s demonizing rhetoric is clearly by design. He is well known for improvising as he talks and wandering off on long tangents that turn bizarre and incoherent. But much of the incendiary rhetoric above was written into Trump’s speeches. He read it from a teleprompter.
When I reported in August on this demagoguery from Trump, I contacted three of his senior campaign advisors separately, asking them for comment about experts’ concerns that Trump’s rhetoric could provoke further violence. None of the them responded, nor did they reply to my follow-up requests for this story.
On July 15, when former President Donald Trump first appeared at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, he brought along two new accessories. One was a large bandage covering his ear, which had been nicked by a would-be assassin’s bullet. The other was Ohio’s first-term senator and Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance, who was about to debut as the GOP vice presidential hopeful.
Two days later, after paying tribute to his wife, Usha—the child of immigrants from India—and their three biracial kids, Vance portrayed a vision of America that resonated deeply with Trump voters. “America is not just an idea,” he said solemnly. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”
To many viewers at home, this seemed like the stuff of a boilerplate, patriotic stump speech. But the words “shared history” lit up a far-right evangelical corner of social media. “America is a particular place with a particular people,” Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor and podcaster, wrote on X. “This is one of the most important political questions facing America right now,” posted former Trump administration official William Wolfe. “Answer it wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born populations are being utterly displaced by third world migrants and Muslims. Answer it right, and we can renew America once more.”
Vance was embracing one of their most cherished beliefs: America should belong to Christians, and, more specifically, white ones. “The American nation is an actual historical people,” says Stephen Wolfe (no relation to William), the author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism, “not just a hodgepodge of various ethnicities, but actually a place of settlement and rootedness.” For this group of evangelical leaders, Vance, a 40-year-old former Marine who waxes rapturous about masculinity and women’s revered role as mothers, was the perfect tribune to spread their gospel of patriarchal Christian nationalism.
For years, graying, khaki-clad evangelists have faithfully made the rounds at conservative events. However, as Wolfe, a 41-year-old former Princeton postdoc, writes in his book, these “men in wrinkled, short-sleeve golf shirts, sitting plump in their seats” are yesterday’s Christians. Among younger activists, they inspire the rolling of eyes—they are the embodiment of an ineffective boomer approach to taking over the United States for Jesus.
In their place, a group of young pastors hope to spearhead a Christian nationalist glow-up as they eagerly await a “Christian prince” to rule America. These often bearded thirty- and fortysomethings have suits that actually fit. They are extremely online, constantly posting on myriad platforms, broadcasting their YouTube shows from mancaves, and convening an endless stream of conferences for likeminded followers. Let’s call them, as one scholar I spoke with did, the TheoBros.
For all their youthful modishness, this group is actually more conservative than their older counterparts. Many TheoBros, for example, don’t think women belong in the pulpit or the voting booth—and even want to repeal the 19th Amendment. For some, prison reform would involve replacing incarceration with public flogging. Unlike more mainstream Christian nationalists, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who are obsessed with the US Constitution, many TheoBros believe that the Constitution is dead and that we should be governed by the Ten Commandments.
In American Reformer, their unofficial magazine, hagiographies of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco appear alongside full-throated defenses of countries that execute gay people. On podcasts, the TheoBros unpack “the perils of multiculturalism,” expose “Burning Man’s wicked agenda,” and peel back the nefarious feminist plot of Taylor Swift. In Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism, one of their seminal texts, he writes that in an ideal Christian nation, heretics could be executed.
The rise of the TheoBros worries more mainstream religious conservatives. Janet Mefferd, a former Christian radio host and journalist who tracks their ascendancy, says her community is alarmed to see an extremist movement gaining traction. “I’m not sure what the endgame is, other than they want to advance Christian nationalism,” she says. “But a lot of us find that terrifying.”
“I’m not sure what the endgame is, other than they want to advance Christian nationalism—but a lot of us find that terrifying.”
The TheoBros’ strategy is bottom-up: They aim to convert small American towns into Christian enclaves. But it is also top-down: Some are working to position themselves close to the locus of federal power. Vance, a Catholic convert married to a Hindu, would seem an unlikely hero for a movement of devout Protestants who believe in a homogeneous America. But over the last few years, his political orbit has increasingly overlapped with that of the TheoBros—so much so that to careful observers, his public echoes of their ideas are beginning to sound less like coincidence and more like dog whistles.
And those dog whistles signal the major themes of this election: hypermasculinity, declining birthrates, ethnonationalism—and no small measure of carefully curated misogyny. If you want to know some of the actors who red-pilled Vance, or at least those who flock to him, you need to meet the TheoBros.
With no meetings, website, or an explicit statement of faith that unifies their beliefs, the TheoBros are not an official organization. They identify with 16th-century French theologian John Calvin, who spawned a rigid and deterministic form of Protestantism. Julie Ingersoll, a University of North Florida religion scholar, traces the current movement back to R.J. Rushdoony, an Armenian American philosopher who popularized the idea of Christian nationalism (and homeschooling) in the early 1970s.
Out of Rushdoony’s movement emerged two camps: the charismatic Christians, now known as the New Apostolic Reformation, and the reformed Protestants, which include the TheoBros. They share the goal of creating a Christian nation, says Ingersoll, but differ on a key point of theology: Adherents of the New Apostolic Reformation believe that God is still speaking directly to people through pastors who have declared themselves apostles and prophets. The TheoBros, meanwhile, believe that God said all he needed to say in the Bible.
Many TheoBros are also proponents of postmillennialism, the idea that believers can hasten Jesus’ return by fighting against the satanic forces of liberal excess. TheoBro Aaron Renn, an Accenture consultant turned Christian pundit, has described our current era as a “negative world,” where Christians are persecuted for their beliefs. Andrew Isker, another Bro, calls it “trashworld.”
Like all self-respecting millennials, the TheoBros have little tolerance for boomers, with the exception of their patriarch, Douglas Wilson, a 71-year-old pastor in Moscow, Idaho. When he was younger, Wilson imagined himself going into the family business—Christian bookstores—but after a stint in the military, he moved to Moscow in 1975 to study philosophy at the University of Idaho, where he became involved with the Jesus People, a kind of mashup of evangelical and hippie culture. He helped found Christ Church, the congregation over which he still presides and that regularly draws crowds of 1,300.
Wilson has since turned the college town into his own Christian kingdom. He helped found New Saint Andrews College, the Canon Press publishing house, and Logos School, one of the nation’s first classical Christian schools, where students exclusively study the Western canon. Wilson embraced Calvinism in 1988 and remade his church from the freewheeling Jesus People hub into something far more sober and buttoned-up, where women couldn’t be church leaders and the only music allowed was hymns and psalms. In the early 1990s, Wilson helped launch the Association of Classical Christian Schools, which had 502 member institutions across the United States as of March 2023.
“The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”
His influence over Moscow has not been without controversy. In a 2021 Viceexposé, former members of Christ Church alleged that ministers had encouraged them to stay in abusive relationships. That tracks with Wilson’s 1999 book, Fidelity: How to Be a One-Woman Man, in which he wrote, “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” For that reason, Wilson wrote, the dynamic of a dominant man and a submissive woman is “an erotic necessity.” (Wilson called allegations of the church urging women to stay in abusive relationships “categorically false.”)
Wilson has also promoted another form of dominance. In the 1996 book Southern Slavery: As It Was, Wilson and his co-author argued that the master-slave dynamic was “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence,” and “there has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world” as that of the antebellum South. (In a 2020 blog post, Wilson said he now allows that while “the benevolent master is not a myth, the idea of the horrific taskmaster is no abolitionist myth either.”) When I asked Wilson about his controversial statements, he likened himself to a chef who strategically deploys jalapeno peppers: “Then some of my enemies online have combed through my writings, have gathered up all the jalapenos and put them on one Ritz cracker.”
In July, at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC, Wilson shared the stage with Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah), as well as Vance, who auditioned his “America is a people” bit a week before his star turn at the GOP convention. Wilson agrees with Vance’s suggestion that children should be allotted votes, managed by their parents. “I would like to see elections where households vote,” he told me. Men, as the heads of households, would actually cast the votes. Though he believes that women’s suffrage was “a mistake,” he would allow a special exception for single mothers.
Wilson offered the crowd a few one-liners (“I’m a Presbyterian, not a Lesbyterian”), but mostly, he talked about the persecution of Christians. “It used to be that the sexually troubled had to keep their kinks hidden away in the closet,” he mused. “Now it is the conservative Christian who needs to keep his virtues hidden in the recesses of the closet.” After the National Conservatism Conference, Wilson appeared at the Believers’ Summit, which was headlined by Trump and hosted by the conservative political group Turning Point USA.
But it’s not just conferences and interviews with the likes of Tucker Carlson where Wilson promotes his ideas. He has a blog, a podcast, and a YouTube channel, thanks mostly to the urging of his children and younger colleagues. One example is that every year since 2018, Wilson has been celebrating what he calls No Quarter November: “The month where we say out loud what everyone is thinking.” In a 2023 video, which was the brainchild of one of his sons, Wilson sits at a sumptuously appointed Thanksgiving table, surrounded by his children and grandchildren, and addresses the camera. “If you think of my blog as a shotgun,” he says, “this is the month when I saw off all my typical, careful qualifications and blast away with a double-barreled shorty.” His wife, clad in an apron, brings out a turkey and places it in front of him, and then the tranquil scene is interrupted by a blaring alarm and a glowing red “perimeter breach” sign. Wilson excuses himself, heads to his garage, and straps on a flamethrower. After using it to light a cigar, he aims the fire at cardboard cutouts of Disney princesses Elsa and Ariel, and the logos of Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Netflix.
Wilson’s willingness to make campy content sets him apart, says Rachel Tabachnick, an extremism researcher who has been studying Christian nationalism for decades. “Instead of a crotchety old guy talking about stoning people, he’s like, super cool,” she says. “He’s witty.”
In subsequent videos, Wilson tackled women’s culpability in rape, the dark side of empathy, and the virtues of “something called the patriarchy—that which, according to our soi-disant and lisping political theorists, must be smashed. Only they say something like ‘thmasth.’”
Melek Zertal
Wilson has used his platforms to anoint the next generation of ultraconservative reformed Christian pastors, all of whom happened to be men. Mefferd, the conservative Christian journalist, told me that Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism got traction in mainstream Christian circles in part “because Doug Wilson endorsed.” Another Wilson protégé is Joel Webbon, a 38-year-old pastor who hosts a podcast and YouTube show, which he films from a wingback leather chair in a book-lined room.
Webbon wasn’t always reformed—he is an alumnus of a Bible school run by a New Apostolic Reformation affiliated outfit, which he now considers “straight-up heretical.” In his 20s, he broke from the group, moved to Texas, and started his own church. In a video from a few years ago, Webbon credited Wilson with emboldening him to say whatever he wanted—like telling a guest that the Founding Fathers weren’t responsible for the slave trade because Africans had done the actual kidnapping and enslaving.
“Kamala sees happy, large families and hates them. She wants them destroyed. She wants you to never be able to have this. She is a nasty, bitter harridan who hates all that is true, good, and beautiful.”
For Webbon, it was intensely liberating to watch Wilson speak in public without worrying about being canceled. “You stay in your little corner, you stay on your little leash, because you’re like, I don’t know what will happen,” Webbon said. “But when you see some other guy do it, and you’re like—that’s the worst thing that can happen? Vice writes an article about you? [Christianity Today editor-in-chief] Russell Moore won’t invite you to his birthday party anymore? Like, that’s it.” At a recent conference, he registered dismay over immigrants in his community. “It’s like full, straight-up Hindu garb at our neighborhood swimming pool, that my daughter is asking [about and] I’m trying to explain.”
In August, he remarked on his show that “a lot of people are gonna be surprised” when “you’re spending eternity worshipping Christ next to Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee and Jonathan Edwards, and, you know, George Whitefield and Martin Luther King Jr.’s in hell.”
Webbon is so impressed by his own audacity that he maintains an online list of all the controversies in which he’s become embroiled. There, he explains why he called Christian men living in California “stupid” (they could just move to a red state); why he once ordered his wife to stop reading a book on theology (he didn’t want her exposed to beliefs that were different from his own); and why he believes in a patriarchal household structure (the Bible says so). Webbon, who is planning to host a conference in Texas next spring called “Christ Is King: How to Defeat Trashworld!” maintains that a “return to the Constitution is impossible” and that the only viable alternative is the Ten Commandments.
Some of Wilson’s other acolytes are attempting to create their own versions of Moscow, Idaho. Take Brian Sauvé, a 33-year-old Christian recording artist, podcaster, and pastor of Refuge Church in Ogden, Utah. Like Webbon, Sauvé wasn’t always reformed—Refuge began as a charismatic Christian church. After the lead pastor resigned in a scandal, the then-24-year-old Sauvé ascended to take his place, immersed himself in reformed theology, and moved the church in a new direction. Today, he presides over a Moscow-esque ecosystem: a publishing house called New Christendom Press, as well as St. Brendan’s Classical Christian Academy, modeled after those in Wilson’s network. “Can you feel it in the sails?” reads St. Brendan’s website. “The stiff breeze out of Moscow, Idaho? We can.”
On his three podcasts and to his more than 53,000 followers on X, Sauvé regularly states that women’s primary function is to bear children. In July, after Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies who are miserable” began widely circulating, he posted: “It is desperately sad to think of all the intentionally barren women who will find themselves totally alone in their 50s, realizing their irreversible mistake. They will wish they could trade it all—money, vacations, independence, all of it—for children they can now never have.”
But unlike more mainstream conservatives, Sauvé does not even pretend to champion the idea of a Judeo-Christian nation. He posted in July, “[O]ur political system is heavily influenced by Jews who reject Christ and embrace all manner of evils.”
An even more well-connected Wilson emulator is Josh Abbotoy, executive director of American Reformer and managing partner of a venture capital fund and real estate firm called New Founding. A former fellow of the right-wing think tank the Claremont Institute, Abbotoy reported that he recently participated in a Project 2025 presidential transition “strategic planning session” hosted by the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation. Bucks County Beacon reporter Jennifer Cohn revealed venture capitalist Chris Buskirk was listed as the editor and publisher. In 2022, Buskirk co-founded the Rockbridge Network, a collection of powerful Trump donors including Catholic judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Another co-founder of the Rockbridge Network? None other than JD Vance.
Thiel, Vance’s mentor and former employer, is also a major funder of the National Conservatism movement. Obsessed with global birthrates, Thiel spent $10 million on his protégé’s successful 2022 Senate campaign. In July, shortly after Trump had announced Vance as his running mate, Cohn surfaced a tweet by New Founding’s network director, Josh Clemans: a photo of Vance with several New Founding staffers. The caption read “Our guy.”
New Founding lists as a partner the Society for American Civic Renewal, a secretive fraternal order founded by Indiana shampoo baron Charles Haywood, who describes himself as an aspiring Christian “warlord.” According to founder Nate Fischer, New Founding wants to “form the backbone of a renewed American regime” and that its members “understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise.” But its main public-facing project appears to be turning tracts of land in Appalachia into Christian communities. Promotional materials describe a community of “unmatched seclusion” where “simple country faith” protects local culture from rainbow flags and crime. Potential buyers, he advises, should not delay. “Who’s going to grab the land? Is it going to be good, based people who want to build something inspiring, something authentic to the region’s history, or is it going to be Bill Gates and BlackRock and hippies from California?”
One eager customer is 38-year-old TheoBro Andrew Isker—the pastor who interned at Wilson’s church, studied divinity at New Saint Andrews, and co-wrote a book on Christian nationalism with Andrew Torba, the openly antisemitic CEO of the social media platform Gab. In July, Isker announced on X that he planned to move his family of seven to lead a church in a New Founding community in Tennessee. Life in his native Minnesota, he said, had become untenable because of permissive laws around trans rights and abortion, not to mention how hospitable the state has been to refugees. “Minnesota is one of the top destinations for resettling foreign people hostile to our way of life,” he said.
That month, Isker spoke at a Texas conference about the “war on white America” alongside Paul Gottfried, the mentor of prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer. The conference was hosted by the True Texas Project, a far-right group with ties to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Like many TheoBros, Isker sees much to like in Vance. In early July, before Trump announced his running mate, Isker referred to him as “Senator JD Vance (R-Heritage America).” In late July, he posted a video of Vance and told his 29,000 followers, “You need to double down on childless cat lady discourse. Kamala sees happy, large families and hates them. She wants them destroyed. She wants you to never be able to have this. She is a nasty, bitter harridan who hates all that is true, good, and beautiful.”
One problem is that there simply are not enough TheoBros to populate Christian communities like the one Isker plans to move to. Enter William Wolfe, the founder of the Center for Baptist Leadership, which aims to persuade members of the Southern Baptist Convention that it, the largest of all Protestant denominations in the United States, has fallen prey to the corrupting forces of liberalism. Baptists are only the beginning. Wolfe wants to win over the entire evangelical mainstream, which he and other TheoBros refer to as “Big Eva.” In August, he posted on X, “Once you realize that Big Eva thinks it’s a bigger sin to desire to preserve the customs, heritage, values, and cultural homogeneity of your own nation than to kill the unborn in the womb, you can better understand their moral framework.”
Wolfe served in the Trump administration both as the deputy assistant secretary of defense and as director of House affairs at the Department of State. He is also an alumnus of Heritage Action, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, the arch-conservative think tank behind Project 2025, whose chief architect, Russell Vought, posted on X that he was “proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism.” A few months later, the Bucks County Beaconuncovered a lengthy online manifesto on the goals of Christian nationalists. The document, which listed Wolfe and Joel Webbon as contributing editors and Oklahoma Sen. Dusty Deevers as a co-author, called for “civil magistrates” to usher in “the establishment of the Ten Commandments as the foundational law of the nation.”
The manifesto doesn’t specify exactly how Christian nationalists should achieve these goals. As Tabachnick, the extremism researcher, interprets it, the TheoBros are imagining a utopia where “they are going to be free to be entrepreneurs in all different senses, including the tech world that they’re mixing with so freely.” The key, she said, is that authoritarianism “is required to have the utopian vision.”
Last year, the extremism watchdog group Right Wing Watch posted a video of Wolfe quoting a scripture passage. There are times when “even the God of peace proclaims by his providence, ‘to arms!’” he says. “If we have ever lived in a point of time in American history since then that we could argue that now is a time ‘to arms’ again, I think we are getting close.”
William Wolfe’s Christian nationalism manifesto made the rounds on social media, but in mainstream conservative outlets, it was Stephen Wolfe who brought TheoBro ideas to the wider world. In his book, which was praised by editors at the Federalist and the American Conservative, Wolfe paints America as a “gynocracy” whose government and culture have been feminized by unhappy women leaders. (Sound familiar?) He has stated on X that women should not have the right to vote, and that “interethnic” marriage can be “sinful.”
Wolfe grew up in Napa, California, and his father was an admirer of the right-wing pundit and erstwhile GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. After attending West Point and serving in the Army, Wolfe earned advanced degrees before leaving academia to “do the Wendell Berry thing” in North Carolina with his wife and four kids.
Over the summer, Wolfe, 41, agreed to speak with me on the condition that I refer to him as “Dr. Wolfe” and call him an “expert on Christian nationalism.” The Dr. Wolfe I spoke with was a more muted version of the firebrand I’d watched online. He said his ideal version of America would be led by a Caesar figure. Gay marriage would be strictly prohibited. Women would not be allowed to vote—instead, men would vote for their households.
When I brought up the bit from his book about heretics being killed, he grew annoyed. “I do think it’s permissible, in principle, for a state to suppress theological heresy, but that doesn’t mean that it’s prudent or proper, suitable in every circumstance or every tradition or way of life.” The Founding Fathers, he added, had encouraged religious liberty, so killing heretics would not be appropriate in the United States that we inhabit.
We turned to remarks he had made at a recent conference convened by Brian Sauvé: “I think we need to reflect on this idea of Judeo-Christianity, or Judeo-Christian worldview, or Judeo-Christian whatever, and really eradicate that from our thinking. Because if we say that America is a Judeo-Christian country, then it can’t be a Christian country, okay?” What role, I asked him, would Jews play? After a deep sigh, he told me that they would be allowed to “exercise their religion freely.”
“We need to reflect on this idea of Judeo-Christianity, or Judeo-Christian worldview, or Judeo-Christian whatever, and really eradicate that from our thinking. Because if we say that America is a Judeo-Christian country, then it can’t be a Christian country, okay?”
We spoke a week before Vance’s RNC speech, and Wolfe’s remarks helped me understand what the TheoBros heard in Vance’s phrase about America as a people. The founders, Wolfe noted, intended for their country to be “Anglo-Protestant with an American inflection.” America, he continued, is “a place of settlement and rootedness, but it’s an open ethnicity in which people can become one of us.” Which is to say that, like some others, Wolfe is not necessarily opposed to the idea of nonwhite people in America—as long as they agree to assimilate to the Anglo-Protestant dominant culture.
In this telling, America is not a pluralistic society at all, but rather one in which there exists an uneasy truce between Christians and those they reluctantly tolerate. Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Wolfe what motivated him. “I want Christians to be more assertive and to recognize the Christian heritage of the American way of life, and to seek to restore that,” he said. “This is a Christian country, and we’ve got to work to restore it to what it once was.”
In his keynote address at Sauvé’s conference, titled “Why Multicultural Pluralism Fails and What to Build Instead,” Wolfe called the concept of America as a melting pot “an early 20th-century idea cooked up by a Jew in New York who despised the confident Anglo-Protestant establishment.” WASPs were the “distinct ethnicity” of America, he insisted, and America should only welcome those who aspired to assimilate. As he put it, “This is our homeland, and we welcome you on the condition of conformity.” Or, in the words of JD Vance, America “is a group of people.”
Correction, September 19: An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Chris Buskirk’s role at American Reformer.
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