The New Apostolic Reformation, Trump, and the Rise of Christian Nationalism

“When fascism comes to America, it will be will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross”

A dedication: I am writing this for the children of God-fearing parents who no longer attend Sunday services, but carry the lessons of scripture with them. The children who took “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers or sisters of mine, you did for me” as undeniable truth, even if their faith in God falters. The ones who saw the chasm this November between the morals we were taught by our elders in Bible school and what those same elders chose at the ballot box. You deserve to know what happened. You deserve to know how it happened.

In Plain Sight

In the early 1980s at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, a professor of Church Growth named C. Peter Wagner noticed something interesting happening. He realized that the churches experiencing the most growth were largely operating outside of a denominational structure. And in that, he identified an opportunity - one that he and many of the people in his circle leveraged to their advantage.

Wagner was an adopter of Charismatic Christianity - which had been riding through a Second Wave of popularity in the 1960s through to the 1980s. Charismatic Christianity can best be summed up as a watered-down version of Pentecostal beliefs, made palatable for the broader Protestant masses. It places a strong emphasis on miracles and spiritual gifts but doesn’t incorporate speaking in tongues upon baptism into its beliefs like the Pentecostals. To call it its own denomination isn’t quite correct. If a church’s denomination is its software, then Charismatic Christianity is like a plug-in. At this point in Christianity’s history, most churches had adopted a Cessationist view of Biblical miracles (that the miracles experienced in the Bible were only available to the original apostles). So the idea that miracles were back and that you too could experience them gained traction in the most devout religious communities, especially the Evangelical community, eager to see the power of the Lord for themselves and harness it to bring more people to Him.

Knowing what he knew now - that non-denominational churches generally were more popular - he started laying the groundwork for what would become the most influential American religious movement you’ve never heard of - The New Apostolic Reformation. A movement so stealthy and pervasive, that most of the people who believe its messaging have never even heard the words “New Apostolic Reformation.” In 2015, it was estimated that 3 million Americans attend openly-affiliated NAR churches with many millions more attending churches influenced by the ideology. Wagner and his spiritual army of apostles - what the leaders of the movement call themselves - have started megachurches across the globe. While most of the heavy-hitters of the movement operate in America, this movement has found its way into at least 45 countries as represented by the International Coalition of Apostolic Leaders (ICAL)’s Annual Global Gathering.

So what do they believe?

Geir Otto Holmås, a religious scholar at the MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society broke it down quite nicely. He says that the movement isn’t a denomination or even a designated organization (although the ICAL comes quite close) with a mission statement we can point to, “but a loose movement which primarily operates through informal or semi-formal channels,” allowing strands of the movement to spread independently from one another and explaining why some adherents don’t even know what they’re adherent to. Below, I’ll break down the broadest strokes of the movement.

They’re like *super* obsessed with Christian Dominion

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“Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” - Genesis 1:26-28

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Christian Dominionism is a political ideology that the NAR borrowed from the Reconstructionists of the 1950s. It takes the Calvinist idea of “The church and state are separate but partners, and both derive their authority from God,” a step further to “and we should seek a nation governed exclusively by Christians and based on their understanding of biblical law.” Most of the time, this refers to theonomy - the implementation of Old Testament laws (although, I don’t see any of them trying to get rid of cheeseburgers or “relaxing all loans every seven years” any time soon).

You might be saying to yourself, “Wait, who would want that?” And I think you’d be right in saying not many people. Most churches don’t talk about dominionism as candidly as I did above because it’s kind of intense and off-putting. What you’ll hear from church-going folks more often than not is “America is a fundamentally Christian nation” or “Our laws are rooted in Christianity because our Founding Fathers were Christian. If we want to stick to what they intended, we need to lean on Christianity for all of our laws.” These, while they conveniently forget the constitutional separation of church and state, do sound way less intense than “we want to implement our own little Christian twist on Sharia law.”

When NAR affiliates talk about dominionism, they usually do so through a cute little thing called the Seven Mountain Mandate or 7M (because it sounds way less terrifying than “we need to take over everything”). The Seven Mountain Mandate, according to its followers, was a message from God delivered to evangelicals Loren Cunningham, Bill Bright, and Francis Schaeffer in 1975 ordering them to invade the "seven spheres” of society - family, religion, education, media, arts & entertainment, business and not least of all, government.

Lance Wallnau an evangelical preacher and NAR apostle is a promoter of 7M. He was quoted in a 2011 roundtable as saying, “If you're talking to a secular audience you don't talk about having dominion over them. This whole idea of taking over and that language of takeover, it doesn't actually help. It's good for preaching to the choir and it's shorthand if we interpret it right, but it's very bad for media.”

They want to invade the seven spheres using spiritual warfare.

Spiritual warfare is the (mostly Neo-Charismatic) Christian belief that literal demons are intervening in human affairs and that we must wage war on them. There are various methodologies for waging spiritual warfare - including anointing, worship, prayer, and exorcism. Traditionally the demon entities in the church have revolved around an individual (a 1:1 human to demon ratio, if you will). In C. Peter Wagner’s interpretation, however, demons are territorial. Instead of a demon controlling a specific person, they control a whole region. Some examples of demonic territories as identified by Wagner include:

• Abortion clinics

• Buddhist temples

• Masonic temples

• Indigenous communities

• Detroit (because of its large Muslim population)

• The entire State of Utah (because of its large Mormon population)

• Mt. Everest (this man literally had someone climb Mt. Everest to expel a demon named the Queen of Heaven, who he claimed was also the Mother Mary, and then wrote a book about it)

• The 10/40 Window (which is basically all of the Middle East and Asia)

Something to note about Wagner is that he believed the entire United States of America was experiencing its own demonic possession - specifically of the federal government and the Democratic Party.

They have really different ideas about the end-times.

Unlike in Pentecostalism where the prevailing belief is that the end-times prophecies in the Book of Revelations have not yet been fulfilled, the NAR thinks most of those prophecies were fulfilled in the early church. This foundational belief, which basically writes off the entirety of Revelations as irrelevant, allows the leaders of the NAR movement (self-proclaimed prophets and apostles) to elevate their prophecies above scripture. Through these prophecies, the NAR has painted a much different picture of the end-times. They don’t see it as the apocalyptic hellscape of Revelations (full of plague, war, & famine), but more like a golden age where the Kingdom of God is established through the seizure of the Seven Mountains by obedient Christians, thus bringing about the Second Coming of Christ.

Where does Trump come in?

Although an adulterous felon with too many pedophilic friends for comfort doesn’t exactly scream “Christ-like,” the authoritarian and oligarchical style of this movement really vibes with Trump’s whole style. In 2016, C. Peter Wagner himself endorsed Trump a few months before dropping dead. In 2020, his apostle Lance Wallnau joined Michael Flynn (yes, that Michael Flynn) on the ReAwaken America Tour which NPR described as “Part conservative Christian revival, part QAnon expo, part political rally.” Flynn was quoted in San Antonio, TX as saying “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God and one religion under God, right?” into a crowd of cheering supporters.

For Trump’s 2024 run, Wallnau went on The Courage Tour through many battleground states rallying the Christian Right in support of Trump (while also decrying the demonic Left, cultural Marxists, queer people, and globalization). And honestly, they have every reason to continue their support of Trump. In his first term, they saw one of their apostles, Paula White, named the Spiritual Advisor to the President and many of their followers rose to national prominence on his coattails. People like Mike Johnson, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Charlie Kirk, and everyone’s favorite Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker. Their symbolism has found its way onto the flagpoles of Supreme Court Justices. They don’t pretend Trump is a godly man either - often rationalizing their support of him as a modern-day King Cyrus, a leader of chaos but an unwitting agent of God. They know that Trump favors and rewards unquestioning loyalty and praise, and they are willing to provide that in exchange for the chance to exert dominion over the most coveted and fickle mountain - government. With followers JD Vance and Russel Vought assuming some of the highest positions in the federal government after Trump’s election, I’d say it was a successful strategy.

Where does that leave us now?

Honestly, I’m not sure. PRRI conducted a survey in 2023 that found 4 in 10 residents of red states are Christian Nationalists (either adherents or sympathizers). In that same study, they found that 52% of regular church attendants (those attending at least once a week) considered themselves Christian Nationalists (either adherents or sympathizers). The NAR has a firm stranglehold on modern American Christianity and, unless an equally powerful rejection of its teachings starts brewing, I don’t see them losing traction there in the foreseeable future.

What I do know is that by staying nameless, disorganized, and in the shadows, the New Apostolic Reformation has been able to infect evangelical congregations with a brand of persecutory and vitriolic Christianity that Jesus would struggle to see any of his teachings in today. They aren’t concerned with loving thy neighbor. They are happy to align themselves with a man who fits the description of Anti-Christ more than he does President so long as it means they get what they want - dominion.

So, because they have thrived in the dark corners of the church, I think we need to take every opportunity now to shine a light on them and the imminent threat they pose to the separation of church and state. I think we need to all be weary of any movement that asserts one type of person (be they white or Christian or Hindu) should have exclusive rule over everyone. I’m going to keep writing about them and talking about them. I think you should too. We need to make NAR a household name - like arsenic or Hitler.