On Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump announced that he would nominate Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health, a government agency composed of more than 18,000 employees with an annual budget of $47 billion. Bhattacharya, a professor of economics and health policy at Stanford University, has no leadership experience in either government or large organizations, but, like some other Trump nominees, he is outspoken about what he sees as the tyranny of public health restrictions and censorship on social media platforms. Bhattacharya came into prominence as a strong critic of Covid vaccine mandates, though he has said publicly that he supports some routine childhood vaccinations, including those that prevent polio and measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR).

Bhattacharya, who didn’t respond to a list of questions emailed by Mother Jones, has held several appointments at Stanford, including at the university’s libertarian-leaning Hoover Institution. But it was during the pandemic that he emerged as a high-profile public health iconoclast, criticizing lockdowns, and then mask and vaccine mandates. Bhattacharya was one of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a 2020 document—developed at a meeting of the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian think tank—that recommended that the United States achieve Covid herd immunity by employing a strategy of mass infection. Bhattacharya and his co-authors—biostatistician Martin Kulldorff and epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta—suggested sequestering vulnerable populations, such as the elderly and those with weakened immune systems, while permitting other citizens to go about business as usual.

At a conference hosted by the anti-lockdown group the Brownstone Institute in November 2021, nearly a year after the rollout of the Covid vaccines, Bhattacharya lamented that public health had become a tool “for authoritarian power” and “to enforce the biosecurity state.” He has repeatedly criticized the agency he is now poised to lead, suggesting that it punishes scientists who buck consensus by denying them funding.

Bhattacharya lamented that public health had become a tool “for authoritarian power” and “to enforce the biosecurity state.”

Bhattacharya’s critique of pandemic protocols caught on in right-wing circles, and he became a regular at conservative gatherings. He railed against what he called the stifling of academic freedom at events at the ultra-right-wing Hillsdale College, as well as the rally where then–presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced lawyer and philanthropist Nicole Shanahan as his running mate.

But in other venues, Bhattacharya’s criticisms of pandemic management haven’t gone over as well. The Great Barrington Declaration was panned by the American Public Health Association; in a public letter in the Lancet, a group of 80 scientists called it “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence.” In 2021, as journalist Walker Bragman reported, Bhattacharya testified in a Tennessee court in favor of Gov. Bill Lee’s order to allow parents to send their children to school unmasked. The US district judge, Waverly D. Crenshaw, blocked the order and wrote that Bhattacharya’s “demeanor and tone while testifying suggest that he is advancing a personal agenda.”

Bhattacharya has questioned the effectiveness of masks in preventing the spread of Covid, often citing a 2023 review by the medical database Cochrane Library. “It has been disheartening to watch once reputable experts discount the Cochrane review’s negative verdict on community masking to prevent Covid spread in favor of low-quality evidence,” he posted to his 548,000 followers on X. “Medicine has rejected evidenced-based medicine.” Yet Cochrane itself disagrees with Bhattacharya’s conclusion. “Many commentators have claimed that a recently-updated Cochrane Review shows that ‘masks don’t work’, which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation,” wrote Karla Soares-Weiser, editor-in-chief of the Cochrane Library.

Meanwhile, Bhattacharya’s connections with powerful conservative groups and Silicon Valley titans have increased his status and visibility. PayPal founder and conservative super-donor Peter Thiel praised Bhattacharya and referred to him as his friend at the 2021 National Conservatism conference, WhoWhatWhy’s Allison Neitzel reported. The following year, shortly after Tesla CEO Elon Musk bought Twitter, Musk invited Bhattacharya to the Twitter headquarters, where the two discussed the platform’s alleged “blacklisting” of him for his tweets that criticized public health guidelines around the pandemic.

It will take some time to find out more about what led Twitter 1.0 to act so imperiously, but I am grateful to @elonmusk, who has promised access to help find out. I will report the results on Twitter 2.0, where transparency and free speech rule.
4/4

— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) December 11, 2022

In 2023, a promotional video for Teneo Group, a political strategy organization helmed by the conservative judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo, included a montage that briefly showed Bhattacharya.

Since the start of the pandemic, Bhattacharya has been outspoken about the censorship that he claimed was silencing scientists who, like himself, questioned the wisdom of the government’s approach to pandemic restrictions. He was especially critical of the censorship he saw at his own university—specifically the pandemic disinformation-tracking work at the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Virality Project. Bhattacharya claimed that the group served as “a conduit to launder Biden Administration social media censorship activities” and embedding “within social media companies and pass on gov’t censorship demands.” Renée DiResta, a disinformation scholar who served as the group’s technical research manager, said she was instructed by her bosses not to publicly refute Bhattacharya’s claims—and that the damage he did to the group’s reputation may have contributed to the dissolution of the group earlier this year. Bhattacharya’s criticisms, she told me, “led to continued public pressure and the university deciding that some of the work was not worth continuing to support.” Stanford University didn’t respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.

In 2022, Bhattacharya joined a group of plaintiffs in suing the Biden administration, claiming that the US government had pressured social media companies to suppress posts that criticized pandemic policies. He was represented pro bono by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a legal group that says it aims to “tame the unlawful power of state and federal agencies,” and the case wound its way up to the US Supreme Court, which dismissed it earlier this year because the plaintiffs lacked standing.

As the pandemic increasingly receded from view, Bhattacharya became involved in causes beyond public health. Today, he serves as an adviser to Third Rail, a consulting group that says it helps “neutralize” “self-censoring environments” and “counterproductive DEI initiatives.” The group’s founder is former New York City Community Education Council president Maud Maron, who has crusaded against transgender inclusivity initiatives. Last year, Bhattacharya joined independent journalist Rav Arora in creating a podcast called Illusion of Consensus, in which the two hosts “dissect the misconceptions of consensus in science, from COVID-19 policies to gender-affirming care.” Earlier this year, Neitzel reported, Bhattacharya joined a group of scientists who aim to convince the public that Covid-19 was the result of a lab leak.

If confirmed as the director of NIH, Bhattacharya would be in charge of the agency responsible for allocating government funding for biomedical and public health research in the United States. He would help shape the research goals of the 27 institutes within the agency, including the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the group that Dr. Anthony Fauci led until he retired in 2022.

In a post on X, before he was announced as the official nominee, Bhattacharya vowed to his followers that “no matter what happens, I will do my best in the coming years, in whatever role I have, to help support the reform of the American scientific and public health institutions after the Covid era fiasco so that they work for the benefit of the American people.”

On Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump announced former Fox News host Pete Hegseth was his pick for secretary of defense. The choice is iconoclastic to say the least. Although Hegseth served as an Army National Guard officer, he has no experience in government leadership that could inform the management of the federal government’s largest agency.

What Hegseth does have are connections to the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial, ultra-conservative men, many of whom proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Among the tenets of their branch of Protestant Christianity—known as Reformed or Reconstructionist—is the idea that the United States should be subject to biblical law.

Last year, the magazine Nashville Christian Family ran a profile of Hegseth, in which he mentioned being a member of a “Bible and book study” that focused on the book My Life for Yours by Doug Wilson, the 71-year-old unofficial patriarch of the TheoBros. Patriarch is the right word: When I interviewed Wilson a few months ago, he said that he, like many other TheoBros, believes women never should have been given the right to vote.

Wilson presides over a small fiefdom in Moscow, Idaho, where he is the head pastor of the flagship church of the denomination he helped found, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). In Moscow, Wilson has also helped to establish a college, a printing press, and a classical Christian school. In addition to his Moscow ventures, Wilson is also extremely online—he blogs, he posts on social media, and he makes slickly produced YouTube videos. Once a fringe figure, famous mostly among reformed Christians, last year Wilson’s star power brightened considerably in an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and a speaking slot at the National Conservatism conference alongside then Ohio senator, now vice president-elect, JD Vance.  

Wilson is also the founder of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, a national network of private K–12 schools that focus on religious education and the Western canon. (I wrote about the classical education movement here.) As it turns out, this is another point of intersection. Hegseth, who did not respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones, has strong connections to the Association of Classical Christian Schools. He told Nashville Christian Family that his family decided to move to Tennessee so his children could attend the Jonathan Edwards Classical Academy, a school in that network he describes as “a small, country, blue-collar classical Christian school.” During a recent appearance on insurance executive Patrick Bet-David’s podcast, Hegseth said he’d never send his kids to Harvard, but he would send them to New Saint Andrews, the college the Wilson helped found in Idaho.

Hegseth’s involvement with Wilson’s schools goes beyond his own children’s education. In 2022, he co-authored Battle for the American Mind, with the group’s president, David Goodwin. In the book, they argue that Americans have “ceded our kids’ minds to the left for far too long” and promise to give “patriotic parents the ammunition to join an insurgency that gives America a fighting chance.”

In a thread on X this week, Matthew Taylor, a religion scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, noted that Hegseth has been a guest on “Reformation Red Pill,” a podcast hosted by pastors at the Doug Wilson-affiliated Tennessee church that Hegseth attends. Hegseth has also appeared on Veritas Vox, a podcast produced by a Pennsylvania-based publisher called Veritas, which is also connected to Wilson’s network of churches. Veritas was the publisher of Hegseth and Goodwin’s book on education.

Then there are his tattoos. First is the prominent Jerusalem cross tattoo that Taylor noted is a nod to the Christian crusades, and an important symbol for TheoBros. (Looked at closely, part of the logo of the real estate and investment firm New Founding, owned and operated by several TheoBros, has a kind of a riff on it.) Reconstructionists believe that Christians are called to expand the territory they control—along the lines of the Crusades of the Middle Ages. “It is about building the kingdom of God on earth and in a way that you can actually draw borders and boundaries around it,” Taylor told me.

Hegseth also has a tattoo of the words “Deus Vult” (“God wills it” in Latin); which, writes Taylor, has come to signify the idea for TheoBros that “God mandated Crusaders’ violence.” Because of the extremist nature of his tattoos, Hegseth wasn’t allowed to participate as a guard in Biden’s inauguration.

In 2020, Hegseth turned his obsession with the Christian Crusades into a book, American Crusade. In a piece this week, Media Matters noted that one of its central themes is the destruction of Muslim holy sites in order to reclaim them for Christianity. Hegseth also rails against Muslims’ “well-documented aversion to assimilation.” Julie Ingersoll, a University of North Florida religious studies professor who has studied the Reconstructionist tradition that the TheoBros are part of, told me she finds Hegseth’s fixation on the Crusades “really troubling—but also it’s completely consistent with the Christian Reconstructionists. That’s particularly troubling for someone who might have the biggest military in the world under his control.”

Taylor, too, said he was concerned about the idea of Hegseth controlling the military. He pointed to Hegseth’s urging Trump to pardon Edward Gallagher, the US Navy SEAL who was accused of killing an Iraqi prisoner and posing for pictures with his dead body. Taylor noted that the US military has recently struggled to control the radicalization of its members. He told me he worried Hegseth’s appointment “will only allow this far-right radicalization in the military to fester and grow unregulated, if not even encouraged.”

Hegseth’s latest book, The War on the Warriors, decries what he sees as the infiltration of the military by the “radical left.” Troops, he complains, are “being harassed by obligatory training…grounded in Critical Race Theory, radical sex theories, gender policy, and ‘domestic extremism’ that are designed to neuter our fighting forces.” As my colleague Stephanie Mencimer has noted, that focus on culture war issues is likely part of what prompted Trump and his advisers to choose him—he’s well-suited to advance the anti-woke agenda laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. When Trump announced Hegseth as his pick for defense secretary, the X account of the podcast CrossPolitics, cohosted by a lead pastor at Wilson’s Moscow, Idaho, church, posted, “HUGE WIN! @PeteHegseth is a godly Christian man. He is a member at a CREC church and classically educates his kids. He’ll get the wokeness out of the military which will unfathomably bless our nation.”

Trump has called Hegseth “tough, smart, and a true believer in America First.” As the AP reported, Trump praised Hegseth’s book about the military at a rally in June. He promised the crowd that if he was reelected, “The woke stuff will be gone within a period of 24 hours. I can tell you.”

On Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump announced former Fox News host Pete Hegseth was his pick for secretary of defense. The choice is iconoclastic to say the least. Although Hegseth served as an Army National Guard officer, he has no experience in government leadership that could inform the management of the federal government’s largest agency.

What Hegseth does have are connections to the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial, ultra-conservative men, many of whom proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Among the tenets of their branch of Protestant Christianity—known as Reformed or Reconstructionist—is the idea that the United States should be subject to biblical law.

Last year, the magazine Nashville Christian Family ran a profile of Hegseth, in which he mentioned being a member of a “Bible and book study” that focused on the book My Life for Yours by Doug Wilson, the 71-year-old unofficial patriarch of the TheoBros. Patriarch is the right word: When I interviewed Wilson a few months ago, he said that he, like many other TheoBros, believes women never should have been given the right to vote.

Wilson presides over a small fiefdom in Moscow, Idaho, where he is the head pastor of the flagship church of the denomination he helped found, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). In Moscow, Wilson has also helped to establish a college, a printing press, and a classical Christian school. In addition to his Moscow ventures, Wilson is also extremely online—he blogs, he posts on social media, and he makes slickly produced YouTube videos. Once a fringe figure, famous mostly among reformed Christians, last year Wilson’s star power brightened considerably in an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and a speaking slot at the National Conservatism conference alongside then Ohio senator, now vice president-elect, JD Vance.  

Wilson is also the founder of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, a national network of private K–12 schools that focus on religious education and the Western canon. (I wrote about the classical education movement here.) As it turns out, this is another point of intersection. Hegseth, who did not respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones, has strong connections to the Association of Classical Christian Schools. He told Nashville Christian Family that his family decided to move to Tennessee so his children could attend the Jonathan Edwards Classical Academy, a school in that network he describes as “a small, country, blue-collar classical Christian school.” During a recent appearance on insurance executive Patrick Bet-David’s podcast, Hegseth said he’d never send his kids to Harvard, but he would send them to New Saint Andrews, the college the Wilson helped found in Idaho.

Hegseth’s involvement with Wilson’s schools goes beyond his own children’s education. In 2022, he co-authored Battle for the American Mind, with the group’s president, David Goodwin. In the book, they argue that Americans have “ceded our kids’ minds to the left for far too long” and promise to give “patriotic parents the ammunition to join an insurgency that gives America a fighting chance.”

In a thread on X this week, Matthew Taylor, a religion scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, noted that Hegseth has been a guest on “Reformation Red Pill,” a podcast hosted by pastors at the Doug Wilson-affiliated Tennessee church that Hegseth attends. Hegseth has also appeared on Veritas Vox, a podcast produced by a Pennsylvania-based publisher called Veritas, which is also connected to Wilson’s network of churches. Veritas was the publisher of Hegseth and Goodwin’s book on education.

Then there are his tattoos. First is the prominent Jerusalem cross tattoo that Taylor noted is a nod to the Christian crusades, and an important symbol for TheoBros. (Looked at closely, part of the logo of the real estate and investment firm New Founding, owned and operated by several TheoBros, has a kind of a riff on it.) Reconstructionists believe that Christians are called to expand the territory they control—along the lines of the Crusades of the Middle Ages. “It is about building the kingdom of God on earth and in a way that you can actually draw borders and boundaries around it,” Taylor told me.

Hegseth also has a tattoo of the words “Deus Vult” (“God wills it” in Latin); which, writes Taylor, has come to signify the idea for TheoBros that “God mandated Crusaders’ violence.” Because of the extremist nature of his tattoos, Hegseth wasn’t allowed to participate as a guard in Biden’s inauguration.

In 2020, Hegseth turned his obsession with the Christian Crusades into a book, American Crusade. In a piece this week, Media Matters noted that one of its central themes is the destruction of Muslim holy sites in order to reclaim them for Christianity. Hegseth also rails against Muslims’ “well-documented aversion to assimilation.” Julie Ingersoll, a University of North Florida religious studies professor who has studied the Reconstructionist tradition that the TheoBros are part of, told me she finds Hegseth’s fixation on the Crusades “really troubling—but also it’s completely consistent with the Christian Reconstructionists. That’s particularly troubling for someone who might have the biggest military in the world under his control.”

Taylor, too, said he was concerned about the idea of Hegseth controlling the military. He pointed to Hegseth’s urging Trump to pardon Edward Gallagher, the US Navy SEAL who was accused of killing an Iraqi prisoner and posing for pictures with his dead body. Taylor noted that the US military has recently struggled to control the radicalization of its members. He told me he worried Hegseth’s appointment “will only allow this far-right radicalization in the military to fester and grow unregulated, if not even encouraged.”

Hegseth’s latest book, The War on the Warriors, decries what he sees as the infiltration of the military by the “radical left.” Troops, he complains, are “being harassed by obligatory training…grounded in Critical Race Theory, radical sex theories, gender policy, and ‘domestic extremism’ that are designed to neuter our fighting forces.” As my colleague Stephanie Mencimer has noted, that focus on culture war issues is likely part of what prompted Trump and his advisers to choose him—he’s well-suited to advance the anti-woke agenda laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. When Trump announced Hegseth as his pick for defense secretary, the X account of the podcast CrossPolitics, cohosted by a lead pastor at Wilson’s Moscow, Idaho, church, posted, “HUGE WIN! @PeteHegseth is a godly Christian man. He is a member at a CREC church and classically educates his kids. He’ll get the wokeness out of the military which will unfathomably bless our nation.”

Trump has called Hegseth “tough, smart, and a true believer in America First.” As the AP reported, Trump praised Hegseth’s book about the military at a rally in June. He promised the crowd that if he was reelected, “The woke stuff will be gone within a period of 24 hours. I can tell you.”

On Monday, the New York Times reported that President-elect Donald Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. has accepted a job with an investment firm called 1789 Capital. The Times described the firm as focused on “products and companies aimed at conservative audiences.” Indeed, the firm funds right-wing TV host Tucker Carlson’s media company. And its website is larded with right-wing dog whistles: It champions “anti-ESG” and “deglobalization” and firmly opposes “excessive bureaucracy.”

Those values are pretty standard conservative fare, but 1789 Capital also has deep connections to a more extreme faction of conservatism: the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial, hard-line conservatives, many of whom identify as Christian nationalists. The founder of 1789 Capital is Chris Buskirk, who, as the Bucks County Beacon’s Jennifer Cohn reported, once served as the editor and publisher of American Reformer, the unofficial publication of the TheoBros. In the digital pages of American Reformer, TheoBro contributors have fanboyed over the authoritarian Spanish leader Francisco Franco, called Uganda’s criminalization of homosexuality “legitimate civil policy,” and declared that the United States is “not a nation of immigrants.”

Don Jr., who is as online as the TheoBros, though without the fire and brimstone, currently serves as a trustee and executive vice president of the Trump Organization. He isn’t the first person in Trump’s orbit to be connected to Buskirk. JD Vance crossed paths with Buskirk in the Rockbridge Network, a group of powerful Republican donors including Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel.

The name of the firm presumably refers to the year 1789, when the US Constitution was enacted, and, as TheoBro patriarch Doug Wilson explains in a blog post about Christian nationalism, “The Declaration acknowledged our rights are inalienable precisely because they were bestowed on us by our Creator.” Other 1789 Capital execs include Rebekah Mercer, a powerful conservative donor whose father founded the voter-research firm Cambridge Analytica, and Trump fundraiser Omeed Malik. As NewsTRACS’ Wendy Siegelman reported, in 2023, Malik’s investment company acquired Public Square, a business hub that says it “empowers like-minded, patriots to discover and support companies from a wide variety of industries that share their values.”

In addition to his new gig, the Times reports, Don Jr. will likely “still play some role in his father’s political operation.”

Correction, November 12: This post has been updated to reflect the year of the Constitution’s enactment. It was drafted in 1787, ratified in 1788, and enacted in 1789.

Just days after former President Donald Trump won the presidential election, his onetime-opponent turned supporter, the anti-vaccine superstar Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has set up a website to solicit suggestions for key Cabinet roles. Anyone can submit a name and vote for their favorite nominees across 12 areas of government, including health, food and agriculture, education, technology, and more. “Trump has stated that he was not able to ‘drain the swamp’ during his first term, and he’s welcomed Bobby’s expertise in getting the job done in his second term,” the site’s “About” section states. “But Bobby cannot do this alone, so he is now turning to the wisdom and expertise of his supporters.”

In the food and agriculture category, the current leading nominee is Zen Honeycutt, executive director of the anti-GMO group Moms Across America. In September, Honeycutt told me about how her group’s followers have changed over the years—many of them moving from being staunch Democrats to supporting Trump. As she said back then:

“I marched in the parade for gays to be able to get married,” she recalled. But she became disillusioned with what she saw as government overreach around school vaccine requirements. Mostly for that reason, she, her husband, and their three sons relocated a few years ago to a farm in North Carolina. Since then, she said, she has heard from “thousands and thousands” of other parents who had become disillusioned with what she described as “the fascism of the Democratic party,” such as “mandatory vaccines or maybe medication down the road.” she said. “We already have mandatory chemotherapy that kids have to get—you can get your kid taken away from you if you don’t give them chemo if they have cancer.” For these reasons, many former Democrats she has talked to “have found in the Independent party or the Republican party a home they can connect with around their personal health freedoms.” 

Now, with the party she has championed earning a powerful electoral mandate, I checked back in with Honeycutt. She said she has been in touch with Kennedy’s team (which did not immediately respond to my request for comment) about a potential role that would allow her to “make a difference in transforming the food supply and health with the new administration.” In such a position, her goal, she explained, would be to rid the food supply of what she sees as toxins: pesticides—including the ubiquitous weedkiller glyphosate—food dyes, and genetically modified ingredients. She blames these impurities for rising autism and Alzheimer’s disease rates, as well as infertility, which she believes is in some ways a more pressing issue than abortion. Why? Because, she says, it affects 11 percent of women. “The Democrats in this past election made abortion a huge issue,” she said, “but the issue of infertility is actually seven times greater than the abortion issue.”

Honeycutt’s assertions about the direct contribution of food additives to illness aren’t backed by a robust body of high-quality scientific evidence, though some research suggests exposure to pesticides in utero could contribute to autism diagnoses. Some pesticides also have been shown to disrupt the endocrine system, which could in theory affect fertility, but robust studies showing a direct connection don’t exist.

For Honeycutt, however, the prospect of finally eliminating the additives she considers unhealthy is an exciting possibility. She believes that the lifestyle benefits of such a move could bring the fractured nation some peace. “When we do get the poison out of our food, whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, you’re going to sleep better,” she said. “You’re going to lose weight, you’re going to feel better, you have better relationships, you’re going to have better sex.”

Aside from Honeycutt, so far, some of the most popular nominees for other roles on the Kennedy website include:

Dr. Simone Gold for the Department of Health and Human Services. Gold, who founded the Covid-denialist and anti-vaccine group America’s Frontline Doctors, participated in the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021, an offense for which she spent 60 days in prison.

Sherri Tenpenny for the Department of Health and Human Services. Tenpenny is an anti-vaccine activist who promoted the disproven idea that vaccines turn people magnetic. She is currently being sued by the Department of Justice for failing to pay $650,000 in taxes.

Joel Salatin for a job at the Department of Agriculture. Salatin, a libertarian farmer and staunch critic of overregulation of agriculture, has become embroiled in controversies around Covid and remarks about Black Americans, including that “the Black community is in dysfunctional collapse.”

Mike Rowe for the Department of Labor. Rowe, the creator and host of the Discovery Channel show Dirty Jobs, has emerged as a critic of unions and as an anti-vaccine activist.

Tulsi Gabbard for “Peace Abroad.” Gabbard, who represented Hawaii in Congress as a Democrat, has become a registered Independent and a strong supporter of President-elect Trump, endorsing him frequently in the conservative media.

Vivek Ramaswamy for a possible position within the Department of Education. A pharma executive who positioned himself to the right of Trump during his short-lived campaign for president, Ramaswamy in this role would be a leader in an agency that Trump has vowed to destroy.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) is a possibility for secretary of the Department of Agriculture. Massie has advocated for fewer regulations around farm and food issues such as raw milk. Trump criticized him in 2020 for his antics around passing the coronavirus stimulus bill—but Massie found his way back into Trump’s good graces following the 2020 election by voting against reaffirming the peaceful transfer of power.

Honeycutt said she was particularly excited about the prospect of Massie, whom she described as “honest and smart and funny and really cares about people, and has a huge amount of experience with ranching and farmers and politics.” She said she’s aware of several other people who have been talking to the Kennedy team about potential roles, but she declined to name them. She did note that they nearly all had in common “the courage to speak out and speak up for health and be a part of the food movement.”

Over the last few months leading up to the election, I’ve been writing about an ascendant fundamentalist religious movement whose leaders believe that the United States is a Christian nation, that the Constitution is based on the Bible, and that Christians are called to take over the government. These figures have found a powerful ally in President-elect Donald Trump. Just last week, days before the election, I attended one of his campaign events at a church in Georgia, where Trump promised the assembled crowd that he intended to put Christian leaders “directly in the Oval Office.”

He didn’t elaborate on what exactly that would look like, but my past few months of reporting on the Christian right have given me some ideas. Here are a few things I’ll be tracking as Trump’s second term begins.

Erosion of the Establishment Clause

At the Trump event for Christian leaders I attended, one of the most protracted standing ovations came after Kelly Shackelford, head of the Christian law firm First Liberty Institute, proclaimed that the US Supreme Court’s three-part 1971 “Lemon” test for the establishment clause, which codifies the separation of church and state, is “reversed everywhere.”

His hopes may be realized. A few months ago, I wrote about the creeping religiosity of the Supreme Court. In the 2022 Kennedy v. Bremerton School District case, the court ruled that a public high school football coach who lost his job after he prayed during a game had been subject to discrimination. In the 6–3 decision, Justice Neil Gorsuch declared that the court had “long ago abandoned” the Lemon test. In February, Justice Samuel Alito issued an unusual individual statement after the court declined 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 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.” 

The crusade against the establishment clause will continue as myriad cases challenging the separation of church and state work their way through Trump-appointed judges to get to the Supreme Court.

Increased Funding for “Natural Family Planning”

Over the last few years, Christian anti-abortion groups have spread the false claim that both hormonal birth control and artificial reproduction techniques like in vitro fertilization (IVF) are unhealthy and unnecessary. Instead, they promote what they call an alternative method: “natural family planning.” Essentially, this is a rebranding of rhythm methods, in which women track their menstrual cycles to identify windows of fertility to either prevent or achieve pregnancy. The effectiveness of these methods depends on many factors, including how rigorously the users track their cycles.

During Trump’s last administration, the federal government promoted natural family planning. In 2019, my colleague Stephanie Mencimer wrote about a cycle tracking webinar hosted by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). And just this year, as I wrote, Senate Republicans put forth a bill that would designate federal funds for “restorative reproductive medicine,” a loose group of therapies relying heavily on cycle tracking to help treat infertility without the use of IVF or artificial insemination. A press release about the bill on the website of Mississippi GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith quotes Dr. Patrick Yeung, a St. Louis gynecologist who “supports the legislation, noting that the status quo of offering symptomatic (band-aid) treatment for pain, or IVF (that bypasses the problem) for fertility is not satisfactory for most women.” The press release doesn’t mention that Yeung is a Catholic anti-abortion advocate who has also referred to birth control as an attempt to “disinvite the author of life” from the “marital embrace.”

Over the next four years, watch carefully as anti-abortion groups shy away from explicitly opposing abortion and IVF—which has proven to be a poor political strategy—and instead promote these “natural” alternatives, while Tump’s HHS further champions these options.  

Further Incursion of Religion Into Schools—and Defunding of Public Education as We Know It

Much of the recent press around explicit Christianity in public schools has focused on some states’ efforts to require Bibles and the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. While those initiatives are important to track, there’s another way in which conservative activist Christian leaders are aiming to blur the line between church and state. They tout voucher programs, which have spread over the past two years to 29 states, and redirect public school money to fund private schools—with religious schools receiving upward of 90 percent of that money. As I wrote a few months back:

In 2001, Betsy DeVos, who later became the secretary of education under Trump, framed her advocacy for voucher programs and other school choice programs as an effort to “advance God’s kingdom.” In recent years, a super-PAC run by the American Federation for Children, which is DeVos’ school choice advocacy group, has spent millions of dollars to defeat Republican legislators who oppose private school vouchers, according to reporting by Open Secrets. A prerequisite for students and their families to attend some of the schools that currently receive voucher money is that they accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior. 

Rachel Laser, president of the nonprofit group Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told me about other religious initiatives in the works. One of them is a suite of bills that would allow public schools to employ chaplains. And in Oklahoma, a Catholic school called St. Isidore of Seville is trying become the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school. The overarching goal of these initiatives, she says, is to “bestow a power and privilege on Christians in our country at the expense of all the other religions in America.” Meanwhile, public education is robbed “of the funding that it’s entitled to.”

For years now, conservative Christians, including DeVos when she was in charge, have been calling for the dismantling of the US Department of Education, and Trump has said he intends to heed their advice. In a conversation this week, Laser told me, “We can count on Trump to attempt to seriously undermine, if not destroy, the Department of Education.”

“We should never have permitted gay marriage to be legalized in the United States of America.”

Attack on Same-Sex Marriage

Chief among the Christian right’s values is “biblical marriage,” the idea that any union other than that between a heterosexual biological male and female is against God’s will. Charismatic Christian leaders repeat these ideas often, and they’ve made it into the political mainstream. Christian broadcaster Mario Murillo, who partnered with fundamentalist Christian superstar Lance Wallnau in hosting a series of pro-MAGA religious rallies, said at a Colorado conference of Christian leaders in 2022, “We should never have permitted gay marriage to be legalized in the United States of America.”

In the coming months, watch for an intensification of the campaign by leading right-wing Christian groups to reverse the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized same-sex marriage. The powerful think tank Family Research Council says on its website, “Properly understood, ‘families’ are formed only by ties of blood, marriage, or adoption, and ‘marriage’ is a union of one man and one woman.” Perhaps most significantly, Project 2025—the blueprint for Trump’s second term that Trump supporters finally admit really “is the agenda”—calls for the US government to “proudly state that men and women are biological realities” and that “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” Naturally, another priority for these groups will be a continued attack on transgender rights.

Hawkish Israel Policy

During his campaign, Trump ran on promises to end the war in the Middle East, and exit polls suggest that some voters believed him. In the majority-Arab community in Dearborn, Michigan, 42 percent of residents voted for Trump, while 36 percent voted for Kamala Harris and 18 percent for Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Yet the likelihood that Trump will help Palestinians is low, considering that many of his key spiritual advisers are fervently pro-Israel. Many of these charismatic Christians see Israel as the linchpin in their end-times scenario of choice. As Rabbi Jack Moline, president emeritus of the religious pluralism advocacy group Interfaith Alliance, recently explained to me, they want to “facilitate the gathering of the exiles back to the Holy Land…which will pave the way for the second coming.”

Trump’s spiritual advisers don’t believe that Palestine is part of that plan. In a 2019 YouTube broadcast, Wallnau excoriated the idea of a two-state solution. “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.”

During this election, Wallnau has worked closely with the Trump campaign. In October, for example, he hosted then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance at an event and appeared with Trump a few days before the election in Georgia. In an October 2023 broadcast, Wallnau suggested that Hamas had attacked Israel as a form of retribution for the United States having abandoned Trump. In September, he lit into Harris on X for her support for a two-state solution. “This is why Trump said Israel won’t exist in 3-4 years,” he wrote. “AND that is why the US will be under judgment with President Harris in office.”

This week, the Times of Israel reported, Trump spokesperson Elizabeth Pipko told an Israeli TV interviewer that Trump “wants the wars to end as soon as possible, but he wants it to end with a decisive victory” for Israel.

Meanwhile, you can expect to hear fundamentalist leaders insist that Christian nationalism isn’t real, that it’s a figment of the overwrought progressive imagination. Yet evidence to the contrary abounds. At the event in Georgia, Wallnau elicited whoops of appreciation from the audience when he declared, “In every state and every county…Christ will be glorified!”

Just days after former President Donald Trump won the presidential election, his onetime-opponent turned supporter, the anti-vaccine superstar Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has set up a website to solicit suggestions for key Cabinet roles. Anyone can submit a name and vote for their favorite nominees across 12 areas of government, including health, food and agriculture, education, technology, and more. “Trump has stated that he was not able to ‘drain the swamp’ during his first term, and he’s welcomed Bobby’s expertise in getting the job done in his second term,” the site’s “About” section states. “But Bobby cannot do this alone, so he is now turning to the wisdom and expertise of his supporters.”

In the food and agriculture category, the current leading nominee is Zen Honeycutt, executive director of the anti-GMO group Moms Across America. In September, Honeycutt told me about how her group’s followers have changed over the years—many of them moving from being staunch Democrats to supporting Trump. As she said back then:

“I marched in the parade for gays to be able to get married,” she recalled. But she became disillusioned with what she saw as government overreach around school vaccine requirements. Mostly for that reason, she, her husband, and their three sons relocated a few years ago to a farm in North Carolina. Since then, she said, she has heard from “thousands and thousands” of other parents who had become disillusioned with what she described as “the fascism of the Democratic party,” such as “mandatory vaccines or maybe medication down the road.” she said. “We already have mandatory chemotherapy that kids have to get—you can get your kid taken away from you if you don’t give them chemo if they have cancer.” For these reasons, many former Democrats she has talked to “have found in the Independent party or the Republican party a home they can connect with around their personal health freedoms.” 

Now, with the party she has championed earning a powerful electoral mandate, I checked back in with Honeycutt. She said she has been in touch with Kennedy’s team (which did not immediately respond to my request for comment) about a potential role that would allow her to “make a difference in transforming the food supply and health with the new administration.” In such a position, her goal, she explained, would be to rid the food supply of what she sees as toxins: pesticides—including the ubiquitous weedkiller glyphosate—food dyes, and genetically modified ingredients. She blames these impurities for rising autism and Alzheimer’s disease rates, as well as infertility, which she believes is in some ways a more pressing issue than abortion. Why? Because, she says, it affects 11 percent of women. “The Democrats in this past election made abortion a huge issue,” she said, “but the issue of infertility is actually seven times greater than the abortion issue.”

Honeycutt’s assertions about the direct contribution of food additives to illness aren’t backed by a robust body of high-quality scientific evidence, though some research suggests exposure to pesticides in utero could contribute to autism diagnoses. Some pesticides also have been shown to disrupt the endocrine system, which could in theory affect fertility, but robust studies showing a direct connection don’t exist.

For Honeycutt, however, the prospect of finally eliminating the additives she considers unhealthy is an exciting possibility. She believes that the lifestyle benefits of such a move could bring the fractured nation some peace. “When we do get the poison out of our food, whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, you’re going to sleep better,” she said. “You’re going to lose weight, you’re going to feel better, you have better relationships, you’re going to have better sex.”

Aside from Honeycutt, so far, some of the most popular nominees for other roles on the Kennedy website include:

Dr. Simone Gold for the Department of Health and Human Services. Gold, who founded the Covid-denialist and anti-vaccine group America’s Frontline Doctors, participated in the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021, an offense for which she spent 60 days in prison.

Sherri Tenpenny for the Department of Health and Human Services. Tenpenny is an anti-vaccine activist who promoted the disproven idea that vaccines turn people magnetic. She is currently being sued by the Department of Justice for failing to pay $650,000 in taxes.

Joel Salatin for a job at the Department of Agriculture. Salatin, a libertarian farmer and staunch critic of overregulation of agriculture, has become embroiled in controversies around Covid and remarks about Black Americans, including that “the Black community is in dysfunctional collapse.”

Mike Rowe for the Department of Labor. Rowe, the creator and host of the Discovery Channel show Dirty Jobs, has emerged as a critic of unions and as an anti-vaccine activist.

Tulsi Gabbard for “Peace Abroad.” Gabbard, who represented Hawaii in Congress as a Democrat, has become a registered Independent and a strong supporter of President-elect Trump, endorsing him frequently in the conservative media.

Vivek Ramaswamy for a possible position within the Department of Education. A pharma executive who positioned himself to the right of Trump during his short-lived campaign for president, Ramaswamy in this role would be a leader in an agency that Trump has vowed to destroy.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) is a possibility for secretary of the Department of Agriculture. Massie has advocated for fewer regulations around farm and food issues such as raw milk. Trump criticized him in 2020 for his antics around passing the coronavirus stimulus bill—but Massie found his way back into Trump’s good graces following the 2020 election by voting against reaffirming the peaceful transfer of power.

Honeycutt said she was particularly excited about the prospect of Massie, whom she described as “honest and smart and funny and really cares about people, and has a huge amount of experience with ranching and farmers and politics.” She said she’s aware of several other people who have been talking to the Kennedy team about potential roles, but she declined to name them. She did note that they nearly all had in common “the courage to speak out and speak up for health and be a part of the food movement.”

Over the last few months leading up to the election, I’ve been writing about an ascendant fundamentalist religious movement whose leaders believe that the United States is a Christian nation, that the Constitution is based on the Bible, and that Christians are called to take over the government. These figures have found a powerful ally in President-elect Donald Trump. Just last week, days before the election, I attended one of his campaign events at a church in Georgia, where Trump promised the assembled crowd that he intended to put Christian leaders “directly in the Oval Office.”

He didn’t elaborate on what exactly that would look like, but my past few months of reporting on the Christian right have given me some ideas. Here are a few things I’ll be tracking as Trump’s second term begins.

Erosion of the Establishment Clause

At the Trump event for Christian leaders I attended, one of the most protracted standing ovations came after Kelly Shackelford, head of the Christian law firm First Liberty Institute, proclaimed that the US Supreme Court’s three-part 1971 “Lemon” test for the establishment clause, which codifies the separation of church and state, is “reversed everywhere.”

His hopes may be realized. A few months ago, I wrote about the creeping religiosity of the Supreme Court. In the 2022 Kennedy v. Bremerton School District case, the court ruled that a public high school football coach who lost his job after he prayed during a game had been subject to discrimination. In the 6–3 decision, Justice Neil Gorsuch declared that the court had “long ago abandoned” the Lemon test. In February, Justice Samuel Alito issued an unusual individual statement after the court declined 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 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.” 

The crusade against the establishment clause will continue as myriad cases challenging the separation of church and state work their way through Trump-appointed judges to get to the Supreme Court.

Increased Funding for “Natural Family Planning”

Over the last few years, Christian anti-abortion groups have spread the false claim that both hormonal birth control and artificial reproduction techniques like in vitro fertilization (IVF) are unhealthy and unnecessary. Instead, they promote what they call an alternative method: “natural family planning.” Essentially, this is a rebranding of rhythm methods, in which women track their menstrual cycles to identify windows of fertility to either prevent or achieve pregnancy. The effectiveness of these methods depends on many factors, including how rigorously the users track their cycles.

During Trump’s last administration, the federal government promoted natural family planning. In 2019, my colleague Stephanie Mencimer wrote about a cycle tracking webinar hosted by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). And just this year, as I wrote, Senate Republicans put forth a bill that would designate federal funds for “restorative reproductive medicine,” a loose group of therapies relying heavily on cycle tracking to help treat infertility without the use of IVF or artificial insemination. A press release about the bill on the website of Mississippi GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith quotes Dr. Patrick Yeung, a St. Louis gynecologist who “supports the legislation, noting that the status quo of offering symptomatic (band-aid) treatment for pain, or IVF (that bypasses the problem) for fertility is not satisfactory for most women.” The press release doesn’t mention that Yeung is a Catholic anti-abortion advocate who has also referred to birth control as an attempt to “disinvite the author of life” from the “marital embrace.”

Over the next four years, watch carefully as anti-abortion groups shy away from explicitly opposing abortion and IVF—which has proven to be a poor political strategy—and instead promote these “natural” alternatives, while Tump’s HHS further champions these options.  

Further Incursion of Religion Into Schools—and Defunding of Public Education as We Know It

Much of the recent press around explicit Christianity in public schools has focused on some states’ efforts to require Bibles and the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. While those initiatives are important to track, there’s another way in which conservative activist Christian leaders are aiming to blur the line between church and state. They tout voucher programs, which have spread over the past two years to 29 states, and redirect public school money to fund private schools—with religious schools receiving upward of 90 percent of that money. As I wrote a few months back:

In 2001, Betsy DeVos, who later became the secretary of education under Trump, framed her advocacy for voucher programs and other school choice programs as an effort to “advance God’s kingdom.” In recent years, a super-PAC run by the American Federation for Children, which is DeVos’ school choice advocacy group, has spent millions of dollars to defeat Republican legislators who oppose private school vouchers, according to reporting by Open Secrets. A prerequisite for students and their families to attend some of the schools that currently receive voucher money is that they accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior. 

Rachel Laser, president of the nonprofit group Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told me about other religious initiatives in the works. One of them is a suite of bills that would allow public schools to employ chaplains. And in Oklahoma, a Catholic school called St. Isidore of Seville is trying become the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school. The overarching goal of these initiatives, she says, is to “bestow a power and privilege on Christians in our country at the expense of all the other religions in America.” Meanwhile, public education is robbed “of the funding that it’s entitled to.”

For years now, conservative Christians, including DeVos when she was in charge, have been calling for the dismantling of the US Department of Education, and Trump has said he intends to heed their advice. In a conversation this week, Laser told me, “We can count on Trump to attempt to seriously undermine, if not destroy, the Department of Education.”

“We should never have permitted gay marriage to be legalized in the United States of America.”

Attack on Same-Sex Marriage

Chief among the Christian right’s values is “biblical marriage,” the idea that any union other than that between a heterosexual biological male and female is against God’s will. Charismatic Christian leaders repeat these ideas often, and they’ve made it into the political mainstream. Christian broadcaster Mario Murillo, who partnered with fundamentalist Christian superstar Lance Wallnau in hosting a series of pro-MAGA religious rallies, said at a Colorado conference of Christian leaders in 2022, “We should never have permitted gay marriage to be legalized in the United States of America.”

In the coming months, watch for an intensification of the campaign by leading right-wing Christian groups to reverse the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized same-sex marriage. The powerful think tank Family Research Council says on its website, “Properly understood, ‘families’ are formed only by ties of blood, marriage, or adoption, and ‘marriage’ is a union of one man and one woman.” Perhaps most significantly, Project 2025—the blueprint for Trump’s second term that Trump supporters finally admit really “is the agenda”—calls for the US government to “proudly state that men and women are biological realities” and that “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” Naturally, another priority for these groups will be a continued attack on transgender rights.

Hawkish Israel Policy

During his campaign, Trump ran on promises to end the war in the Middle East, and exit polls suggest that some voters believed him. In the majority-Arab community in Dearborn, Michigan, 42 percent of residents voted for Trump, while 36 percent voted for Kamala Harris and 18 percent for Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Yet the likelihood that Trump will help Palestinians is low, considering that many of his key spiritual advisers are fervently pro-Israel. Many of these charismatic Christians see Israel as the linchpin in their end-times scenario of choice. As Rabbi Jack Moline, president emeritus of the religious pluralism advocacy group Interfaith Alliance, recently explained to me, they want to “facilitate the gathering of the exiles back to the Holy Land…which will pave the way for the second coming.”

Trump’s spiritual advisers don’t believe that Palestine is part of that plan. In a 2019 YouTube broadcast, Wallnau excoriated the idea of a two-state solution. “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.”

During this election, Wallnau has worked closely with the Trump campaign. In October, for example, he hosted then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance at an event and appeared with Trump a few days before the election in Georgia. In an October 2023 broadcast, Wallnau suggested that Hamas had attacked Israel as a form of retribution for the United States having abandoned Trump. In September, he lit into Harris on X for her support for a two-state solution. “This is why Trump said Israel won’t exist in 3-4 years,” he wrote. “AND that is why the US will be under judgment with President Harris in office.”

This week, the Times of Israel reported, Trump spokesperson Elizabeth Pipko told an Israeli TV interviewer that Trump “wants the wars to end as soon as possible, but he wants it to end with a decisive victory” for Israel.

Meanwhile, you can expect to hear fundamentalist leaders insist that Christian nationalism isn’t real, that it’s a figment of the overwrought progressive imagination. Yet evidence to the contrary abounds. At the event in Georgia, Wallnau elicited whoops of appreciation from the audience when he declared, “In every state and every county…Christ will be glorified!”

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 Today cover 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!”

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 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, 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.”

More than a week after Hurricane Helene decimated the rural mountain communities of Western North Carolina, residents are still searching for missing loved ones and grappling with the destruction of their homes and businesses. On social media, meanwhile, powerful accounts are turning the disaster into the latest vehicle for politically coded conspiracy theories about the failures of the Biden administration—and the righteousness of the Trump campaign.

One group that has picked up this narrative is composed of Christian influencers, many of whom are part of the quickly growing New Apostolic Reformation, which I wrote about last week. Followers of NAR believe that God is calling Christians to take dominion over the government. They are led by a loose network of apostles and prophets who claim that God speaks directly to them. Many NAR leaders also believe that former President Donald Trump has been anointed by God to lead the country. In recent weeks, some have claimed that the political left, including the Kamala Harris presidential campaign, is controlled by witchcraft and demonic forces. As Right Wing Watch reported, on October 1, NAR-affiliated pastor Hank Kunneman turned a request for prayer about the hurricane into a prayer that the storm would show Americans that Trump was the better choice for president.

Lance Wallnau, a powerful NAR apostle and self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, recently hosted vice presidential hopeful Sen. JD Vance at a Pennsylvania rally. Wallnau claimed that Vance was supposed to be campaigning in North Carolina, but the gathering storm forced him to divert to Pennsylvania. This demonstrated that an “act of God” had made Vance’s appearance possible.

But now that the devastation from the storm has become apparent, Wallnau seems to have changed his mind about Helene’s divine origins. Wallnau, who is an organizer of the Project 19 election strategy campaign that aims to mobilize Christian voters in 19 key counties in swing states, has been sharing his concerns about the hurricane on X. “Is the government trying to learn how to manipulate weather?” he asked on Sunday. “If they succeeded do you trust them not to use this ability to stop Trump (a threat who says he will expose them and prosecute) from being elected?” The same day he posted, “Does the government have the ability to manipulate hurricanes? Thought it was a crazy conspiracy idea till I read a government report!” (He linked to a report that discussed the government’s failed campaign from 1962 to 1983 to break up hurricanes using silver iodide.)

Sean Feucht, an NAR leader who has been organizing a tour of prayer rallies at Capitol buildings in major US cities, has been posting about how the Federal Emergency Management Agency supposedly bungled its hurricane response. On October 4, he tweeted that FEMA was “inept, corrupt, and broke!” In a video, he assured people in the hardest hit areas, “Help is on the way—not by bureaucrats in DC, but by rednecks, hillbillies, and everyday Americans.”

In recent weeks, Feucht has been urging followers to join the culmination of his tour at a prayer rally at the Capitol in DC. “October 25th we bring the HARP OF DAVID inside the US Capitol,” he tweeted last week, an apparent reference to an Old Testament story in which the warrior David played a harp to soothe a king who was possessed by an evil spirit.

Dutch Sheets, an NAR leader who advanced the stolen election narrative in broadcasts before the January 6 Capitol insurrection, also posted a video to his 349,000 YouTube subscribers criticizing the government’s hurricane response. He quoted an op-ed from the far-right platform Blaze Media alleging that the government couldn’t afford to adequately help hurricane victims because it had spent too much money providing services for undocumented immigrants. (Though that narrative has been debunked, it has gained traction in far-right enclaves of social media.) The silver lining, Sheets said, is that because of Helene, “Millions of Americans have awakened from their stupor. They see the corruption, are aware of the deep state.”

As Hurricane Milton bears down on Florida, Kat Kerr, a prophet based in Jacksonville, is assuring her 118,000 followers on Facebook that she will “take authority” over the storm to protect people in its path. “We are over the weather, not under the weather,” she said (without evidence). “We also command that no tornadoes be formed.”

She made the same claim before Hurricane Helene.

More than a week after Hurricane Helene decimated the rural mountain communities of Western North Carolina, residents are still searching for missing loved ones and grappling with the destruction of their homes and businesses. On social media, meanwhile, powerful accounts are turning the disaster into the latest vehicle for politically coded conspiracy theories about the failures of the Biden administration—and the righteousness of the Trump campaign.

One group that has picked up this narrative is composed of Christian influencers, many of whom are part of the quickly growing New Apostolic Reformation, which I wrote about last week. Followers of NAR believe that God is calling Christians to take dominion over the government. They are led by a loose network of apostles and prophets who claim that God speaks directly to them. Many NAR leaders also believe that former President Donald Trump has been anointed by God to lead the country. In recent weeks, some have claimed that the political left, including the Kamala Harris presidential campaign, is controlled by witchcraft and demonic forces. As Right Wing Watch reported, on October 1, NAR-affiliated pastor Hank Kunneman turned a request for prayer about the hurricane into a prayer that the storm would show Americans that Trump was the better choice for president.

Lance Wallnau, a powerful NAR apostle and self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, recently hosted vice presidential hopeful Sen. JD Vance at a Pennsylvania rally. Wallnau claimed that Vance was supposed to be campaigning in North Carolina, but the gathering storm forced him to divert to Pennsylvania. This demonstrated that an “act of God” had made Vance’s appearance possible.

But now that the devastation from the storm has become apparent, Wallnau seems to have changed his mind about Helene’s divine origins. Wallnau, who is an organizer of the Project 19 election strategy campaign that aims to mobilize Christian voters in 19 key counties in swing states, has been sharing his concerns about the hurricane on X. “Is the government trying to learn how to manipulate weather?” he asked on Sunday. “If they succeeded do you trust them not to use this ability to stop Trump (a threat who says he will expose them and prosecute) from being elected?” The same day he posted, “Does the government have the ability to manipulate hurricanes? Thought it was a crazy conspiracy idea till I read a government report!” (He linked to a report that discussed the government’s failed campaign from 1962 to 1983 to break up hurricanes using silver iodide.)

Sean Feucht, an NAR leader who has been organizing a tour of prayer rallies at Capitol buildings in major US cities, has been posting about how the Federal Emergency Management Agency supposedly bungled its hurricane response. On October 4, he tweeted that FEMA was “inept, corrupt, and broke!” In a video, he assured people in the hardest hit areas, “Help is on the way—not by bureaucrats in DC, but by rednecks, hillbillies, and everyday Americans.”

In recent weeks, Feucht has been urging followers to join the culmination of his tour at a prayer rally at the Capitol in DC. “October 25th we bring the HARP OF DAVID inside the US Capitol,” he tweeted last week, an apparent reference to an Old Testament story in which the warrior David played a harp to soothe a king who was possessed by an evil spirit.

Dutch Sheets, an NAR leader who advanced the stolen election narrative in broadcasts before the January 6 Capitol insurrection, also posted a video to his 349,000 YouTube subscribers criticizing the government’s hurricane response. He quoted an op-ed from the far-right platform Blaze Media alleging that the government couldn’t afford to adequately help hurricane victims because it had spent too much money providing services for undocumented immigrants. (Though that narrative has been debunked, it has gained traction in far-right enclaves of social media.) The silver lining, Sheets said, is that because of Helene, “Millions of Americans have awakened from their stupor. They see the corruption, are aware of the deep state.”

As Hurricane Milton bears down on Florida, Kat Kerr, a prophet based in Jacksonville, is assuring her 118,000 followers on Facebook that she will “take authority” over the storm to protect people in its path. “We are over the weather, not under the weather,” she said (without evidence). “We also command that no tornadoes be formed.”

She made the same claim before Hurricane Helene.

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.

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.”

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 Stone found 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.

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!”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

Additional reporting by the Lancaster Examiner.

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.

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.”

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 Stone found 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.

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!”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

Additional reporting by the Lancaster Examiner.

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.

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.”

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 Stone found 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.

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!”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

Additional reporting by the Lancaster Examiner.

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.” 

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 Vice exposé, 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.’”

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 Beacon uncovered 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.

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 Vice exposé, 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.’”

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 American Reformer was funded in part by venture capitalist Chris Buskirk. 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 Beacon uncovered 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.”