Stephanie Gerber Wilson: I'm Stephanie Wilson and you're listening to Freedom Over Fascism. I think for many people who have not dipped a toe into this world and in the segment of Christianity, it sounds like I am, am talking crazy talk. angels and demons and demons stealing elections and spiritual warfare on the national mall and blowing shofars and profit, right? Like all of this sounds like it is coming out of the total fringes of American culture. But Those are the folks who are showing up on January 6th. And I think we should not underestimate the level of access and influence these folks have in Donald Trump's Republican Party. Hi friends, today we have a double whammy on the what's going on at the national level front. First, here's a little bit about the conversation I had with Dr. Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies. He's also creator of the acclaimed audio documentary series, Charismatic Revival Fury, the New Apostolic Reformation, which was on the Straight White American Jesus podcast. During that podcast series, he details how networks of extremist Christian leaders helped instigate the January 6th insurrection. His next book, The Violent Take It By Force, The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy, will be published in fall of 2024. You can find a link to the pre-order in the show notes. All right, this conversation blew my mind. into tiny little pieces. I knew the basics of Christian nationalism, but I had no idea about the independent charismatic movement. I had very little idea of the seven mountains, and I'd only heard of the new apostolic reformation, but not any details. So, briefly, by 2020, there are about 300 million people worldwide who believe in a theology of prophecy of new apostles and new prophecies in the modern day. And this is a spectrum of leadership bound together by belief in prophecy and made more dangerous by their proximity and their access to Donald Trump. In 2015, during the presidential race, Trump brings a woman to be his liaison with evangelicals. This woman has been his personal pastor. I know it sounds really weird that Trump would have a personal pastor. This woman was his personal pastor since 2001. She lived in Trump Tower and she is an independent charismatic televangelist. So what does she do? She gathers independent charismatic leaders to meet in Trump Tower and eventually get in on the Trump campaign on the ground floor. One of the guys who invented the seven mountains mandate is in one of the first of the meetings with Donald Trump in 2015. And he has a prophecy that he bases on Isaiah chapter 45, where he concludes that Donald Trump is a new savior that God wants to be the 45th president and the anointed one. This leader is part of the new apostolic reformation. It's a movement that gathers around Trump with the spiritual warfare idea that Donald Trump was sent by God to deliver them from cultural exile. I really hope you listened to the whole episode because you'll hear just about how far this movement goes and just how close to the halls of power it sits. know it's a long episode. I think it's worth it. The second whammy of the Trump situation are the new things that Trump has been saying on the stump that need to be taken seriously and literally. He said that if he loses the election, there will be a bloodbath. If he wins, he'll be a dictator who will round up and deport anyone who looks like an immigrant. And one last thing that I want to introduce you to, and that is the floor speech by Arizona State Senator Eva Birch, who spoke on the floor of the Senate. about why she needs an abortion and how legislators have no business getting between patients and providers. She's a nurse practitioner. She's pregnant. The embryo is not viable. This is not her first miscarriage or non-viable pregnancy. I'll put a link in the show notes. Listen to what she says and how she says it. It's the kind of honesty and breakthrough courage that we need right now. It's one of those moments that need to go viral. That's a lot. I know. I found this conversation with Matt Taylor to be one of the most informative of my life. And I'm not young. And I hope that you listen to the whole thing so that you can tell the people you know about what Trump's plans are. Because that is the action we need to take out of this. It's that most people don't know what Trump plans to do if he wins or if he loses that go way beyond project 2025. By the way, last week, Victor Orban met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and they met with the Heritage Foundation. Remember the media isn't going to save us. We need to be out there talking to people we know. in unexpected places and letting them know just how dangerous a second Trump presidency will be and all the freedoms he'll take away. Now for my conversation. I'd love to hear what you think after you listen. As usual, I ask for your support by leaving a review or supporting me through the sub stack or at our website. Matt Taylor, welcome to Freedom Over Fascism. Thank you for having me, Stephanie. Well, you know, you are the first scholar of religion that we've had on this podcast. And one of the things you focus on is Christian nationalism. Can you set the table for us in understanding where Christian nationalism has come from and how has it become radicalized? Yeah, absolutely. So if we're talking about Christian nationalism, I think we need to think about the broader spectrum of religious nationalisms, right? This is a global phenomenon or set of phenomena where we have people in the modern world as you have the rise of modern nation states that are making certain claims on people's identity that are saying, okay, you live within these geographical boundaries, you are German, or you are Italian, or you are American. in some ways understandable that people would try to blend together the different layers of their identity and think, well, to be German means to be a certain race or to be German means to be a certain religion, right? And so what we talk about is religious nationalism is the idea that there is some essential relationship between someone's national identity and their religious identity. And where this usually plays out is that the most Nations in the world have an established religion, have a religion that is privileged above others and is even officially recognized. But there's a handful, I think it's around 25 or so nations in the world that do not have an established religion. In fact, the United States, at least historically, was the first nation to have what we would call a separation of religion and state, or as we often put it here, a separation of church and state. And so religious nationalism is sometimes operating within Those nations with established religions sometimes operating in spaces like the United States, is pushing for a more close relationship. Even at the time of the founding, there were arguments among the founding fathers about whether there should be an established church in the United States, whether there should be a ⁓ formal relationship between the US government and Christianity. There was never really another religion on the table. Jefferson is the one who really comes up with this phrase. the separation of church and state. The reason that Jefferson and Madison's vision of this separation, this disestablishment of religion was really fruitful in early America was that there was already so much religious disagreement and they had seen all the problems that these established churches in Europe had caused through wars between different religious nationalisms and the persecution of religious minorities, including Christian minorities in a lot of these European nations, that the founding fathers really decided to to to experiment, and to separate religion and state. But there's always been this alternate perspective, this other voice in American history pushing for more of an established religion or pushing for some integration of Christianity into US policy and US law. So in our present moment, and we've seen this, well, for years in more Republican sections of the country, Christianity and the... ideas of Christianity have made their way into the courts and the schools and lawmaking. I'm less familiar with the rise of Christian nationalism. Can you talk about how it became more radicalized in the United States? Or was it radicalized times in the past and then receded and then became radicalized again? So in terms of how we got to today, up until the 1960s, I'd say, there was a sort of de facto establishment of what we could call Christianity or Anglo Protestantism in the United States. There was a surge in these kind of Christian nationalist sentiments in the 1950s, especially as you have the start of the Cold War and this sense that we need to band together against the godless communists. And this is where this phraseology of Judeo-Christian really gets popularized as a way of drawing Catholics and Jews into a sort of Anglo Protestant establishment in the 1950s and to say well, we're a Judeo-Christian nation, right? I always point out Jews had a very little say in any of that history, right? So that is Christians trying to claim Jews as being a part of their coalition. It is not a true coalition of Jews and Christians building something together. It is an imposition on Jews. to link them into this new kind of revised vision of Christian nationalism. But it is drawing Catholics into that coalition as well and saying, are a Judeo-Christian nation, which is just kind of a rebranding of old school Anglo-Protestant Christian nationalism. From a different perspective, when I hear Judeo-Christian, I'm like, you know, that's actually kind of mutually exclusive. That doesn't go together. I'm gonna continue. As the Judeo folks, how they fared. under Christianity and under Christian rule, right? I mean, this is a very messy and ugly history of the way Christians have treated Jews throughout history. So there's something deeply inappropriate, I think, about Christians just then laying claim to Judaism and saying, ⁓ well, we're all together in this, right? That elides a lot of the real history there. I'm sorry. I keep interrupting. Go back to your story. But in many ways, in the 1960s, there's this shift in American culture. Some of it comes through the sexual revolution. some of it, and there's the kind of cultural shifts that are going on in 1960s. Some of it comes through the civil rights movement and the fact that you have oftentimes black Christians pointing out the ways that other Christians have not treated their fellow Christians well, right? Because of issues of race and highlighting the way that this white Christian establishment, be it Catholic and Protestant or just Protestant, has often operated to the detriment of their fellow African-American Christians. And then you also have in the 1960s a shift in Supreme Court jurisprudence. And then in 1965, you have the Hartzellher Immigration Act, which opens up US immigration to a much wider swath of the world, right? It had been much more narrowly focused on Europe until 65. And so you have new forms of Islam, new Muslim immigrants, new Buddhist immigrants, new Hindu immigrants, right? All coming to the United States and making a place here. in our society. And so the US is much, much more diverse. So that's one of the big shift points is in the 1960s. And it's not coincidental that you have the rise of the religious right in the 1960s, especially start really in the 1970s, culminating in the election of Ronald Reagan and this consolidation of these conservative Christians around the Republican Party because they feel like they are losing their grasp on culture. They're losing their hold on culture and they're trying to shore that up through politics. And then the other demographic reality is starting around 1990, there's a sharp shift in the Christian population in the United States. It's a decline. Up until about 1990, if you said on surveys, if you're asking if people are Christian, about 90 % of Americans would say they were Christian up until 1990. And then it just starts to drop precipitously from that point. Today, it's around 62, 63 % of the US population identifies as Christian. Right? Wow, that's a really sharp decline. In a very short period of time, I mean, almost a decline of about 1 % every year of the US population that is walking away from a Christian identification. You think that's a difference in terminology, whereas before anybody who was even nominally Protestant and has Christmas tree and nothing else would say they were Christian. And then it becomes a new kind of specific identity or is it a real decline in people who identify as even like mainline Protestants? A lot of it is mainline Protestants. mean, the sector of American Christianity that has hemorrhaged the most people has been mainline Protestantism and Catholicism follows a little bit after that. I think it's in some ways a reaction to the rise of the religious right. Like a lot of people who might have been kind of on the fence about whether they're Christian or not and feel kind of comfortable with a kind of vague Christianity, suddenly as you have these assertive evangelicals, assertive fundamentalists, assertive conservative Catholics and conservative Latter-day Saints pushing, it's not that those people are all converting to Islam or converting to Judaism or something or Buddhism. The vast majority of people who leave Christianity in the US just say they are nothing. we sometimes call them the Nones, you know, N-E-S, or the unaffiliated, right? Today it's around 25 to 30%. especially depending on what generation. Younger generations are much less religious today than the older generations. And so I think it just became a more acceptable thing in this more pluralistic environment just to be like, I'm not, I'm none of the above. And I think some of the radicalization that we're seeing today is the reaction to this real decline since 1990 and is following on the heels of this more aggressive and assertive rise of the religious right in the 1980s. This is in some ways kind of a second order rise in the religious right, where the Christians feel that they are losing power. Robert Jones, who leads the Public Religion Research Institute, has a really interesting book came out a few years ago called The End of White Christian America, where he charts how, at least up until the presidency of Barack Obama, the start of his presidency in 2009, white Christians were still the majority in America. It wasn't a huge majority, it was in the like low 50s, but over the course of the Obama presidency over those eight years, that majority disappeared. And so white Christians by the end of the Obama presidency in 2016, 2017 are more like 42, 43 % of the US population, right? And so it's not just the decline of Christianity overall, it's this decline of white Christianity as well that also causes a lot of these white Christians who in 1990 could have felt To be white and to be Christian is to be American. That's what's normal, right? That is not what's normal. That is not, right? That combination of traits and identities is no longer the majority in America. And I think a lot of white Christians, especially, but other Christians as well, feel like they are losing the cultural power and the linkage that they thought was intrinsic between the nation and their religion. And that sense of loss, if we're talking about 62 % of the population is Christian, think majorities are never more dangerous in a democracy than when they fear they are losing power. Right? Because they are still a majority. They still have demographic power, but they're anxious and desperate to hold on to that power. And they can sometimes make these moves that are not aligned with what we would call liberal democracy. Right? They might mobilize and use their majority in ways that are, they're voting, right? They're trying to participate in democracy, but then they are not necessarily allowing always for the respect for religious minorities, for non-religious folks, for other perspectives in the public square. Cause they're, they're again, they're trying to shore up and hold on to power. And I think what we've really seen in the last 15 years or so is I grew up, as an evangelical in Southern California, I was raised in what today we would call a Christian nationalist environment. But the energy of Christian nationalism amidst the rise of the religious right was directed into democratic politics. Like small d democratic politics. was with the Republican Party, but democratic politics in terms of we are the moral majority. We need to assert our majority as the moral majority and change society into our vision of it. What has happened, especially in the last 15 years and really accelerated under the Trump campaign and Trump administration was a more anti-democratic, several anti-democratic styles of Christian nationalism that are not saying, hey, we're really the majority, let's go and vote, but are saying we are in danger of becoming a minority and we need to do everything we can to stop that from happening. Even if it means short circuiting. the machinery of democracy in order to hold on to our power. And that I think is a real danger. And that was a very big factor in what happened on January 6th. So take me through the thinking on these people feeling like they were losing power and are willing to suppress voters who might not agree to the radical extreme of let's stop the peaceful transfer of power. and use violence to do it. And this is where I think we need to start thinking about the different styles of Christian nationals or the different species of American Christian nationals that we see. I'll use the Pew survey data because I think it's maybe most illustrative. On that kind of gateway question, do you think the US should be a Christian nation? They found, this was a 2022 survey, that about 45 % of the US population said yes to that question. Either they agree or strongly agree with that statement, the US should be a Christian nation. But then when they drill down on that and want to say, what does that mean practically, right? Do you think that the federal government should declare US a Christian nation, which implied we need to get rid of the first amendment, right? Which says there will not be an established religion. And the majority of that 45 % say, ⁓ no, no, no, that's not what I'm talking about, right? And when you really focus in on the... a poor group of people who really band together around these ideas, it's about 10 to 15 % who would be in favor of a strong form of Christian establishment, a strong form of Christianity infused into our law and our public policy and a Christianity that's privileged in the public square to the detriment of other worldviews and approaches or philosophies to life, right? And so, That's kind of the spectrum that we're talking about. In some ways, would say Christian nationalism is often hazy and sentimental for a lot of folks, right? These are people who are like, oh, I kind of just want more like what we had in the 1950s. You mean like a de facto white Protestant establishment? And in a sense, that's what they're looking for, right? Where that hardened core is something that is different though. That is what I would call that far end of the Christian national spectrum is what I would call Christian supremacy, right? That Christianity exerts a coercive influence over American culture and American policy. there's a real differentiation between those folks. A lot of the Christian nationalists, these kind of hazy, sentimental, we are a Christian nation in some ethereal sense. It's not theology that's driving it for them. It's other forms of identity, right? For many of them who are white, it's a kind of an ethnocultural, identity that they're affirming and on a policy level if they just existed on their own they would not have a lot of bite right because they're not looking to change the way that the US government operates they just kind of want they're the kind of like ⁓ we should say Merry Christmas kind of Christian nationals right or the like God bless America kind of Christian nationals right where when you really try to drill down on them and say what's the real implication of this yeah I kind of like Trump because he's a little more Christian even the other guys right for the hardcore these Christian supremacists, for them it usually is theological. It usually is their belief system that has a vision of what a Christian nation should be and a policy agenda and an approach to things. And that hardened core, there's different forms of it. There's kind of a Catholic form of it. There are several Protestant forms of it. What my research has really focused in on one particular style. of American Christian nationalism that emerges out of what we would call the independent charismatic segment of American Christianity. So the independent is another word for non-denominational. So these are charismatic, and charismatic here is not in the kind of generic sense of, ⁓ magnetic and compelling in their personality, right? That's how we usually use the word charismatic today. But in the Christian tradition, charismatic means focused on what they would call the supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit. So the term charismatic has its roots in the New Testament, where sometimes the founders of the Christian church, people like the Apostle Paul, are writing about the gifts of the Holy Spirit, these kind of endowments from God that are given to individuals or given to the church, the edification of the church. And some of those gifts are things that are very mundane, things like a gift of administration, right? You're good at paperwork, right? Or a gift of teaching. Right? Things that we would say, ⁓ that makes sense to me. But some of them are more supernatural. Things like speaking in tongues. Things like healing. Things like prophecy. Right? And so to be charismatic today is to pursue a style of Christianity, a spirituality built around these more supernatural and miraculous manifestations that they believe need to be retrieved in the Christian tradition. so it's that combination of a non-denominational style of church governance with this kind of charismatic spirituality that I think has given rise to a new and I would say a very dangerous form of Christian nationalism and even Christian supremacy. So we've got a small percentage-wise core of extreme belief and behavior. What are the beliefs and behaviors that make up this political movement? That's a great question. Because again, For the hazy sentimental Christian nationalists that like 30 % of the American population who will say we are or we should be a Christian nation, but that they don't really have much of an agenda beyond that, it's not really theological for them, right? It's not really beliefs. It's kind of emerging out of a vision of America that is kind of nostalgic. For the Christian supremacists, by and large, it is theological. It is proceeding from and emerging from the way that they think about Christianity and the way that they think about the relationship between church and state. For this independent charismatic world, some of the major underlying beliefs around this is that it's an amorphous world. It's not a world of what we would call systematic theology. They aren't sitting down and writing new creeds. They aren't sitting down and writing long statements of faith where they correlate all the different parts of their faith. It's a world that believes in prophecy. It's a world that believes that there are modern prophets, that there are people who are endowed with a gift, there are Christians who are endowed with a gift of prophecy, that God speaks directly to them. It's also a world that believes in one of these prophecies that emerges around the year 2000 is something called the Seven Mountain Mandate. And the Seven Mountain Mandate is an idea that it's a prophecy that is in some ways an outlined strategy for Christian supremacy. that they believe comes to the prophets from God. And the idea is that you can separate out every society into seven different arenas of influence. These are things like family, government, education, business, arts and entertainment, media, right? When you differentiate these spheres of authority or spheres of influence, they would say that they believe that there really are demons. They believe that there are even hierarchies of demons that are exercising influence on our world. And so they participate in what they would call spiritual warfare, where they pray or they have other practices or they prophesy or speak against these demons that they would say have power in society. And so in the Seven Mountains vision, the tops of every one of those mountains, right? The top of the government, the top of the family mountain, the top of the education mountain, is either controlled by Satan and demons, or it's controlled by Christians and the kingdom of God. And so the idea of the Seven Mountain Mandate is the mandate is for Christians to go and conquer the tops of every one of those mountains through spiritual warfare, but also through real world activity, where they go into government, they go into education and try to attain as much influence in that area as possible and claim the top of the mountain, take over the high places. so that Christian influence will flow down into the rest of society. So again, if we're differentiating the forms of Christian nationalism I was raised in, in the 1980s and 1990s, the idea was you change society from the grassroots, from the ground up, right? You mobilize the majority, you mobilize Christian voters, they assert their democratic will, and that will change society. This is a top-down vision of conquest, right? It's a vision of, it's a sort of, a vanguard model of societal transformation that says if we take over the positions of influence, then we can restructure society using those positions of influence. And the Seven Mountain Mandate became very, very popular in the independent charismatic world and has almost become a sort of political theology that structures how many independent charismatics think about not just American society, because independent charismatics It's a segment of global Christianity is growing incredibly rapidly. 1970, experts estimate that there were maybe around 40 million non-denominational Charismatics in the world. By 2020, it's over 300 million. ⁓ my gosh. So these are the parts of Christianity that are growing rapidly. It fits under the broader heading of what we would call Pentecostal and Charismatic movements. Pentecostalism, at least in the US, is usually denominational. So these are like the non-denominational cousins of the Pentecostals, right? They build their spirituality around these supernatural experiences, but then because they are also believing in prophecies, these prophecies like Seven Mountains Mandate can come in and structure how they think about these church and society questions and become very, very popular. And so part of what has shifted in American politics in the Trump era, was there's always, there's other forms of Christian supremacy. There's a lot of other forms of Christian nationalism, but these independent Charismatics were in many ways on the outside of the religious establishment, that kind of religious right leadership. The elites of the religious right were not very interested in the independent Charismatics. The independent Charismatic world is where there's a lot of the televangelists you see on TV are independent Charismatics. They are non-denominational and Charismatic in their orientation. There, a lot of the like prosperity gospel preachers, the people who are kind of speaking about health and wealth and God wants you to be healthy and wealthy, that largely comes out of the independent Charismatics. Messianic Judaism is an independent Charismatic movement. And then more recently, there's been this rise of what we call the Apostolic and Prophetic movement, which is an idea in the independent Charismatic world that God is commissioning new apostles and new prophets to lead the church. And The apostles, going back to the early church, are the kind of fundamental leaders. They're the foundational leaders of the church, the original disciples of Jesus who found the Christian church. And then you find these mentions both in the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament and the New Testament of prophets. And so the idea is those were forms of church leadership that existed in the early church that disappeared and are now being reconstituted and emerging through this new anointing of the Holy Spirit. So now we have new apostles and prophets. that the kind of elite tier of the independent charismatic world is people who call themselves messianic rabbis, people who call themselves revivalists, people who call themselves televangelists, apostles, prophets. I mean, it's a real spectrum of different forms of leadership, but they're bound together by these beliefs and prophecy. And part of what happened in the Trump campaign in 2016, so Donald Trump declares his candidacy in June of 2015 for president. And he's very close to a woman named Paula White. Her married name now is Paula White Kane. And she is an independent charismatic televangelist, from, comes out of Florida. And she has been Trump's personal pastor since 2001. And has, she wound up buying an apartment in Trump Tower in New York, a very long standing relationship. And so Trump asks Paula White to be his liaison to evangelical voters. Problem is she is a charismatic televangelist. She doesn't know the James Dobson kind of establishment type of religious right leaders in evangelicalism. She knows televangelists. She knows apostles and prophets and messianic rabbis. And so in the fall of 2015, she starts gathering the Christian leaders that she knows, bringing them to Trump Tower, having them meet with Donald Trump. And this is a time in the 2016 campaign when respectable evangelicals don't want to touch Donald Trump, right? He is this reprobate. ⁓ real estate marketer and playboy and television star, right? He is not the profile of the old school religious right. But these independent charismatic celebrity types, they really glob on to Donald Trump. They get in at the ground floor of the Trump campaign. And Donald Trump is very popular from the start with grassroots evangelicals, right? So it's this weird divide between the evangelical elites who don't want Trump. and the grassroots that love Trump. And then these independent charismatic celebrities kind of slot themselves in and say, we are the evangelical elites who will endorse Trump, who will back him, who will use theology to support him. And the Seven Mountain Mandate idea, and the guy who originates it is a guy named Lance Wallnau in 2000. And he is one of the guys who's in these first meetings with Donald Trump in the fall of 2015. And he claims that he receives a new prophecy in these meetings with Trump that says that Donald Trump is a type of a Cyrus. And Cyrus, if you know your biblical history, is the emperor of the Persians, right? So the Jewish people get taken away into exile by the Babylonians in the sixth century BCE. And so the Jewish leaders are in exile in Babylon. And then the Persians conquer the Babylonian empire. And Cyrus is the Persian emperor who sends the Jewish exiles back to rebuild Jerusalem and rebuild the temple. Right? And because of that, he's spoken very highly of in the Hebrew Bible, especially in Isaiah chapter 45, where it talks about Cyrus being anointed by God. He is, he's not Jewish. He's not a person of God, but he has a special anointing on his life according to Isaiah 45, that God is using him as an instrument to redeem God's people. Again, for Lance Wall now, this is prophecy, right? Just to give you an illustration of of the way that he thinks about the Bible. Part of the reason he makes this association between Trump and Cyrus is that he says God tells him to go and read Isaiah 45, because I want the 45th president to be an Isaiah 45 president, right? So he's reading the chapters, which are not like the chapters in the Bible are not part of the revelatory text in anyone's interpretation, right? This is not. Like the 45 just got thrown in there as a chapter heading, but for Wallnau, that is the prophetic connection he makes between Trump and Cyrus. And so using this Cyrus anointing idea, using the Seven Mountains idea, using other kind of prophecies, these folks gather around Trump and become the evangelicals who are vouching for Trump in the campaign. And Wallnau is part of a of a movement, an independent charismatic movement called the New Apostolic Reformation. And these New Apostolic Reformation leaders become, in many ways, the tip of the spear of Christian Trumpism. And they gather around these prophecies and they gather around Trump and they use these spiritual warfare ideas to say, God has a special purpose for Donald Trump. We Christians are in cultural exile in the United States now, and Donald Trump has been sent by God to deliver us from our cultural exile. And as Donald Trump wins these primaries into the spring of 2016. Suddenly that old power dynamic of the conventional religious right, where you had kind of these establishment evangelicals and Catholics at the center of the action, and these independent charismatic types on the fringes, that gets inverted. And suddenly you have Paula White and the New Apostolic Reformation and people like Lance Wallnau at the center of the action, and the gatekeepers of access to Donald Trump. And the conventional religious right is coming to them hat in hand to say, hey, we want to get access because we want, have our agenda too. Right. And that has precipitated, I would say a tectonic shift in the internal leadership and stylings of the religious right in America. And it's taken it into this much more prophecy and spiritual warfare driven and also anti-democratic style today. And this is a new factor. American politics that I would argue we've never really dealt with before. Because when we think about democracy, there's all kinds of different reasons that voters vote the way that they do. Right? And democracy, at least at a philosophical level, is not about policing people's motives for how they vote. Right? People bring religious motives, people bring secular motives, people bring personal motives. bring other forms of their identity, right? If somebody's LGBTQ, they're like, I want more LGBTQ rights, right? And nobody's like, ⁓ well, you're not LGBTQ, so you can't vote for that, right? Like, everyone has different reasons for why they vote. And democracy is about having a system to manage our disagreements and to formalize our disagreements so that then we can have a conversation about power and we can then create policies that are adjusted to the interests. of the majority, but are sensitive to the needs of minorities. That's liberal democracy at a philosophical level. What happens when you have people entering the public square, entering the public conversation and saying not, hey, we should vote for Donald Trump because he agrees with our vision on abortion and we like his view of taxation, right? That's a conventional democratic argument. What happens when you have people entering the public square and saying, I have a prophecy that Donald Trump is the one that God wants to be president. And so people like Lance Wall now, there's a handful of these charismatic prophets in 2016 who start issuing these prophecies like the Cyrus anointing and saying that God has his hand on Donald Trump. God wants Donald Trump to be president. And it's risky, it's a risky endeavor in 2016 because everyone thinks that Trump's going to lose. And then Trump wins. And all these prophets. this kind of handful of prophets who said that Donald Trump was destined to win or God wanted Donald Trump to win, suddenly looked pretty spiffy. And so by 2020, over the course of the Trump administration, more and more of these prophets emerged saying, I have a prophecy about Donald Trump. And by 2020, you had hundreds of charismatic prophets all saying in chorus, I have an individual prophecy from God that says Donald Trump is anointed to have a second term. And was the chorus. It was a total mind meld among these charismatic prophets. They were all aligned around Trump. And so this is what fuels the Christian mobilization for January 6th, right? Because when Donald Trump loses the 2020 election and refuses to concede, almost all of these prophets say, I'm not retracting my prophecy because it came from God. And so God is going to have to intervene in American politics to put Donald Trump back in office, to reinstate him as president. Because that's the prophecy. And Donald Trump is kind of going along with this, right? Because he's saying, I am not conceding this election. I'm not accepting that I lost. It was stolen from me, or it was lies, or it's voter fraud, and all of the litany of lies that Trump tells, these people are amplifying those lies and saying, yes, and God's going to intervene. And so you saw all these manifestations of independent, charismatic, spirituality, and spiritual warfare building towards January 6th. Things like Jericho marches. Remember back to the late 2020, you had these in-state capitals, you had Christians marching around the legislative buildings or the court buildings, blowing shofars, right? Doing spiritual warfare, praying, singing songs, because they believed that they were doing spiritual warfare against the demons that were trying to steal the election from Donald Trump. And the major Jericho march happened on December 12th, 2020 on the National Mall. Lance Wall now was a speaker at the Jericho March where he talked about these Cyrus ideas and the Seven Mountains ideas again. the Jericho March again, they go and march around the Supreme Court because there was still fighting in the courts about Donald Trump's election lies at that point. And they believed that they could change the spiritual atmosphere in the United States through spiritual warfare to swing the courts in Trump's direction. Of course, that didn't work. And then when Donald Trump declares that January 6th is going to be this confrontation over the election. All of these folks start to mobilize and say, that is the real battle. That is the real place where we will see the prophecies fulfilled. And so you had all these independent charismatic, I've tracked about 60 independent charismatic leaders down from like kind of local well-known pastors up to international celebrities like Lance Wallnau who were there on January 6th who show up in DC. Again, because they believe that they need to be, and this is the phrase they would use, they need be boots on the ground to do spiritual warfare, to displace the demonic forces that they believe are behind these Democrats and disloyal Republicans who are stealing the election from Donald Trump because they don't believe that it's just a human conspiracy. They believe it's a demonic conspiracy with human actors being manipulated by the demons. And I did an entire podcast series called Charismatic Revival Fury that really tracks both the emergence of this New Absolute Reformation idea and this set of leaders, and then how they became the principal Christian instigators of January 6th. And a number of the core New Absolute Reformation leaders actually do show up around the Capitol on January 6th. They don't necessarily go in, because again, they think the battle is spiritual, but they are instigating the crowds using violent rhetoric. about spiritual warfare to say the demons have taken over and we need to stop the demons because the demons are trying to prevent God's will from being fulfilled and Donald Trump becoming president again. this angelic demonic language is pretty central to their worldview. Absolutely. And so shows a bigger shift in its power dynamics and how they believe God and Satan are involved in American. I think for many people who have not dipped a toe into this world and in the segment of Christianity, it sounds like I am talking crazy talk. Like angels and demons and demons stealing elections and spiritual warfare on the National Mall and blowing shofars and profit, right? Like all of this sounds like it is coming out of the total fringes of American culture. Those are the folks who are showing up on January 6th. And I think we should not underestimate the level of access and influence these folks have in Donald Trump's Republican Party. Let me give a few illustrations. One of the major New York Soc Reformation leaders, a close friend and associate of Lance Walnau, is a guy named Dutch Sheets. Again, very influential in this prophecy and spiritual warfare world. very important commentator and kind of celebrity in that world. And in 2013, somebody gave Dutch Sheets a flag. It's a white flag with a green pine tree in the middle of it. And the phrase across the top is an appeal to heaven. This is actually a revolutionary war flag. It was commissioned by George Washington to fly over the Massachusetts Navy. And the phrase, an appeal to heaven, actually comes from the philosopher John Locke, who was very popular among the founding fathers. And the idea of an appeal to heaven in Locke's treatise about it is that we as citizens in nations make our appeals to unjust governments. And we make our appeal after appeal after appeal. And when those governments are not responsive, at some point we make our appeal to heaven, which means we go to war. We have a revolution and let God sort it out. Right. And so for the founding fathers, this became a slogan for them of what they were doing. Right? We are fighting against British tyranny. We are making our appeal to heaven. Now, so it's an interesting piece of Americana that is given to Dutch Sheets in 2013. But Dutch Sheets believes that he receives a prophecy about this flag, that it is a sign of a prophetic revolution, a spiritual warfare revolution that will transform the United States. And so he begins popularizing this. I call it a prophetic meme, right? It travels like a meme. Like other people start picking this up and sharing it. in right-wing circles. If you watch the footage on January 6th, there are dozens, maybe even hundreds of these appeal to heaven flags that are there on January 6th. And this flag did not have these right-wing or Christian nationalist connotations before Sheets started talking about this in 2013. And yet, less than a decade later, you're seeing them all over. They become very well integrated into right-wing, especially right-wing Christian politics. But many of the people who are carrying those flags on January 6th get interviewed by reporters and they say, Well, I'm here because of Dutch Sheets. I'm here because I believe the prophecies, right? That flag today flies outside the office of Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House. Mike Johnson, who has traveled in these Christian nationalist circles, he's not an NAR person. He's a Southern Baptist, but he hangs out with a lot of NAR people like Dutch Sheets. And he's very close friends with one of Dutch Sheets' disciples. In fact, he was given the flag by an NAR leader. And So Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, second in line for the presidency, has an appealed of heaven flag that was one of the central symbols of January 6th, flying outside his congressional office. colleague of mine, Bradley Onishi and I wrote an article in Rolling Stone where we exposed that this was happening. And Rolling Stone reaches out to Mike Johnson about this flag, and why are you flying this flag? And he says, ⁓ I got it from this pastor and I like the history of it. Which is the koi dodge, because this is a coded symbol now. It has a double entendre. You can say, ⁓ I'm just referencing American history. It's a revolutionary war. It's a symbol for American history. It is that, but it doesn't mean that today. The connotation of the flag has shifted because of Dutch Sheets influence. Dutch Sheets, he's been coy in terms of what he's revealed you for listening to Freedom Over Fascism. Kudos to our editor, Benji Wilson. Please join our Patreon. He met with people in the Trump administration who encouraged him to go on a prophecy tour of the contested states, the swing states where Donald Trump is fighting these legal battles about the election. This is November, December of 2020. And she gathers a group of 15 to 20 of these New Absolute Reformation apostles and prophets to go to every one of the swing states. hold these mass rallies in charismatic churches and mega churches. with hundreds of people in attendance, and they're being live streamed to over 100,000 people every one of these gatherings. And these prophets are getting up and issuing the most violent prophecies you've ever heard about, they're talking about, are mobilizing malicious for the kingdom of God. They talk about cutting the heads off their enemies. They are talking about displacing the government of the United States. That same group of prophets centered around Dutch sheets goes to Washington, DC. on December 29th, 2020, and they have a two hour meeting inside the White House with unnamed Trump administration officials. This is eight days before January 6th. They never are transparent about what they talk about or who they meet with, but they come out of this meeting speaking to their churches and saying, we were there getting strategy from people in the know at the highest levels of our government. Some of those exact same leaders show up outside the Capitol on January 6th doing spiritual warfare. So the level of access. Here's another mind blowing fact that just in, I guess it was early February, the Alabama State Supreme Court came down with this ruling on in vitro fertilization, saying that embryos count as children, right? Fertilized embryos count as children. It's still, even today, we're still trying to figure out what does this even mean policy wise in the state of Alabama? What does this mean in abortion policy? The chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, man named Tom Parker, writes a concurring opinion to the majority opinion where he lays out his theology for why he is in agreement with this ruling, for why embryos count as children. And he's citing the Bible, he's citing Christian theologians. The same day that this ruling drops, he goes on a podcast with a new Upsalic Reformation prophet named Johnny Inlow. He's one of the chief proponents of the Seven Mountains idea. Johnny Inlow wrote the first book on the seven mountains. was Lance Wallen who coined the idea. Inlow wrote the first book called the seven mountain prophecy. And Tom Parker in conversation with Johnny Inlow is saying, I am doing my best to conquer my mountain. It's the government mountain and I'm doing my best and I'm trying to enlist my fellow judges in conquering the government mountain for the kingdom of God. And I found a ⁓ recording of a call, a new apostolic reformation spiritual warfare call that Tom Parker joined. in 2023, just less than a year before he issues this ruling where he is referencing Dutch sheets and other new episode of Reference and Prophets saying he is doing his part to fulfill these prophecies. So here you have a state Supreme Court Chief Justice who saying he is on a first name basis with Dutch sheets, the same guy who was at the White House on December 29th, eight days before January 6th, saying that he is a believer in these prophecies. And that those prophecies are shaping the way that he thinks about his role in the judiciary. And the same guy, the same networks have sway or have at least influence with the Speaker of the House today. Right? That is how integrated some of these independent Charismatic networks of Christian supremacists have become, both at the state level and the national level with the Republican Party today. From an independent Charismatic worldview, they don't think of a spiritual realm. that is separate from the physical realm. They, especially for these New obstacle reformation folks, they believe that demons control literal territory. Peter Wagner, who was the one who founded the New obstacle reformation really coined some of this terminology. And he was the mentor to Lance Wallnau and Dutch Sheets. He was very fond of the phrase territorial spirits, by which he meant high level commander demons that have control over literal physical territory or literal human institutions. And so when these new upstalk Reformation leaders show up at the Capitol on January 6th, they are praying against, and they're using this phrase, they're praying against the territorial spirits that have taken over the US Capitol that they believe are blocking Donald Trump from winning this election or being reinstated as president. They don't think that they are anti-democratic. In fact, they would say, ⁓ well, we are fulfilling democracy because they would say, well, a, Donald Trump did win the election. It was then stolen by this demonic conspiracy. But then the challenge of this, and again, this is where it's introduced ⁓ a new factor, a new dynamic into American politics is you say, well, what evidence do you have that Donald Trump, that this election was stolen from Donald Trump by this demonic conspiracy? And they say, well, we have prophecies. Right. Right. And it's like, Can you give me any factual evidence? Can you give me any legal evidence? Can you show how that happened? Like, well, no, it's just a demonic conspiracy. And at that point, again, their epistemology, right? How they know what they know is shaped by prophecy. there's a famous Charismatic Evangelist named Littered Ravenhill, who ⁓ is very much an inspiration to these folks. And he once wrote, ⁓ with an experience of God has nothing to fear from a man with an argument. So again, that tells you something. How do you know what you know? Well, charismatic spirituality is built around spiritual experiences. It's built around having these kind of miraculous encounters, but that's happening internal, right? And so they're saying, I have prophecies that say that Donald Trump won, and you can't convince them otherwise. There's no argument. There's no democratic contestation. They're like, ⁓ yeah, sure there were legal battles about it. But of course those came out against Trump because the demons were conspiring. ⁓ yeah, Congress had a whole investigation into January 6th and of course they blamed Trump because the demons are behind it. And at some point, how do you adjudicate that democratically? How do you have a democratic conversation about prophecy? It's very, very confusing. And yet for a ⁓ very large portion of Americans, this has become the way that they think and the way they participate in politics. And it fuels this larger epistemic crisis that we have in the U.S. Some colleagues of mine have done surveys on some of these questions about belief in modern prophecy. And especially a colleague of mine, Paul Jupe at Denison University has done some really interesting surveys on this. And what he finds is if you ask evangelicals, do you believe in modern day prophecy? And then correlate that with support for Donald Trump's election lies. There's a shocking connection between those things. Such that prophecy believing evangelicals are almost twice as likely to believe Donald Trump's won the 2020 election than non-prophecy believing evangelicals. And these are the same people who are believing in these seven mountains ideas, in the appeal to heaven campaign. And so all of these things have synced up around Donald Trump and around this ardent devotion to Donald Trump. an almost messianic devotion to Donald Trump, believing that he has a special anointing from God, a prophetic anointing from God to transform American society. And these folks are not backing off of it. I was reading Dutch Sheets' blog in the fall of 2022. He has this daily podcast that he does every day for 15 minutes. It's called Give Him 15. It's kind of one of his main propaganda tools. And in September of 2022, he was writing and he said, and to his audience, says, I believe that 8 slash 8 was a pivotal moment in American history. We've never experienced anything, ⁓ aggression like this in American society against the interests of Christianity. We've never seen anything like it in all of American history. What is 8-8? It's almost like a 9-11 reference, he's like, just giving the date, right? I'm like, what happened on 8-8? What is 8-8, right? August 8th, 2022 was the date of the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago. That is the level of identification these folks have with Donald Trump. They see his prosecution, his indictments, his every claim of persecution, every lie as evidence of their righteousness and that he is suffering on their behalf. Lance Wallnau, just last month, compared Donald Trump to Joe from the Bible and said, only reason, the only reason all these prosecutors have not successfully gotten Trump convicted is because like Joe, God has this protective hand around Donald Trump and is allowing these demonic forces to attack Donald Trump. But God is protecting Trump and God will vindicate Donald Trump in the end, just like Job. Well, that's inspiring. I have learned so much from you today. And maybe it's because I was not paying attention rather willfully to this, but I want to thank you for pulling it all together. And I feel like our conversation isn't done. I know that you have a book coming out called The Violent Take It By Force, the Christian movement that is threatening our democracy. When's that coming out? It's available for pre-order now. The official publication date is September 24th, but if you pre-order it, you should be getting it in August of this year. It's a history of the New York Stock Reformation that culminates in January 6th. How much do you think they actually believe it and how much of it is transactional power? Or is that impossible to know? I get that question a lot. And I've interviewed a lot of these folks, the ones who are willing to talk to me, I've interviewed them. And I draw a line in assessing the spirituality of somebody like Donald Trump, right? And really most politicians, politicians have all kinds of reasons for doing what they do. They have all kinds of constituencies, all kinds of cross-cutting motivations for why they make the choices they make. And I think assessing what is real spirituality and what is real belief for many of them is very, very difficult. For these leaders, people like Lance Walnau and Dutch Sheets, Peter Wagner, they really believe this. It is not casual. I have seen their correspondence with each other. I have interviewed them. I've interviewed people who know them. This is really their belief system. They really believe in territorial spirits that hijack American elections. They really believe in demons that are ⁓ trying to avert the prophetic will of God in American politics. And I would say in some ways, if they were all cynics and hucksters and it was all transactional, I would feel a little more optimistic at this moment, right? Because if people are cynics, if it's all just a game for them, if they're just ginning up these sentiments because it serves their material interests, well, there's a certain way that you can You can predict how they'll react to things. And they are rational actors in a certain sense. What happens when you have true believers? Right. Who believe in prophecy, who believe these things and who have access inside the White House. Right. Paula White became an official White House employee in November of 2019 and was running charismatic political prayer movements. out of the White House, right? Talk about separation of religion and state, right? And these people had access into the Trump administration. They had the ears of Trump administration officials. In fact, many of Trump's advisors, both formal and informal advisors, people like Roger Stone, people like Michael Flynn have cultivated more relationship with New Upsalic Reformation and independent charismatic leaders after January 6th. Roger Stone. Right? Who, again, I'm not saying that he's a sincere in this at all, but he now goes on these NAR and Independent Charismatic podcasts. And he's been saying, you know, I had a vision of a demonic portal that opened over Joe Biden's White House and demons were coming and going through this portal. And all these prophecy believers say, wow, Roger Stone has a prophecy. Michael Flynn is leading something called the Reawaken America Tour. There's predominantly these independent charismatic prophets mixing with anti-vaxxers. and COVID denialists and other conspiracy theorists, but they have charismatic worship sessions there. They have prophets prophesying from on stage. are baptizing people into this independent charismatic style of Christian nationalism. Michael Flynn is Roman Catholic, right? And he sees the advantage in the ardency of these folks and their deep beliefs in these things. He might actually believe it. I don't know, but he sees the advantage of enlisting these conspiracy believers in this I would go so far as to say the Reo American tour is almost openly fascist in its approach to power. I would maybe take out the word almost. Yeah, it is shocking. Well, I think it's really important for us to have our eyes open. And a lot of what we do here is trying to do action to make us feel more hopeful. But I think knowing what is going on more clearly is really important. So thank you for joining us. And I would love to talk to you again sometime. I'd love that because I don't feel like this conversation is done. Well, we even gotten to 2024. Exactly. maybe maybe this fall we can, you know, come back together and talk about how it's playing out. Thank you for listening to Freedom Over Fascism. Kudos to our editor, Benji Wilson. Please join our Patreon at patreon.com slash freedom over fascism. Subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts and please drop us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts.