The New Christian Right 

For most people outside Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, the “Christian right” is a group of conservative white evangelicals who were reluctant to back Trump when he won the Republican nomination in 2016, and are today a bit reticent about supporting his comeback because of his refusal to prioritize coast-to-coast abortion bans or a rollback of LGBTQ protections. It represents a tale of love hard-won and now perhaps half-lost. 

But it’s important to understand that the old-school Christian right associated with white conservative warhorses from the era of Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed is no longer on the leading edge of conservative Christian political activism. A new breed of very different activists has arisen in conjunction with Trump, and they represent a revolutionary creed within the religious as well as the political world. The Violent Take It by Force, a new book by Matthew Taylor, a religion scholar from an evangelical background who has spent years coming to grips with this new movement, lifts the veil from Independent Charismatics and explains that the self-proclaimed “apostles” and “prophets” aligned with Trump represent a theological challenge to the moralistic issue-oriented denominational titans of the early Christian right. Conservative Christianity is changing, Taylor explains, and that’s why its political expressions are changing as well, and in a dangerous direction. 

While much of the history of Trump’s relationship with the Christian right is written from the perspective of conservative religious leaders reluctant to bless this heathenish pol, Taylor pays most attention to the exceptions, beginning with Paula White, the prosperity gospel preacher to whom Trump reached out long before his political career began, in appreciation of the power over audiences she was showing on cable television. Another relatively early Trump promoter was Lance Wallnau, who first proclaimed that Trump was like King Cyrus of Persia, the nonbeliever who by divine guidance led the children of Israel out of their Babylonian captivity. Wallnau later popularized the Christian dominionist doctrine of the Seven Mountain Mandate, which called on believers to conquer secular society. It wasn’t just theoretical: In Redding, California, Wallnau disciples at the huge Bethel Church and religious complex have taken over local government in their community. 

These and other totally committed Trump supporters populate Taylor’s book, but what makes it important is that he explains the theological revolution that led White and Wallnau and many others to embrace the idea that the 45th president was the central figure in a cosmic battle between good and evil on which human history would pivot. These are people who don’t judge Trump based on his discrete policy positions on abortion or gay rights or anything else, but assume from the get-go that he is their God-appointed chieftain in spiritual warfare against Satan and his earthly minions. 

The theology these MAGA prayer warriors share has been dubbed the “New Apostolic Reformation,” or NAR, by Taylor and others within and beyond this new apocalyptic strain of conservative Christianity. The NAR has four essential features: It grows out of the charismatic/Pentecostal tradition of promoting spiritual “gifts” like healing, prophecy, and speaking in tongues; it is nondenominational, rejecting the discipline exerted in other Christian right circles by doctrines and creeds and misogynistic leadership traditions; it has rapidly exploited 21st-century media models to propagate its views and following beyond traditional church structures; and it promulgates a doctrine of what its adherents call “strategic spiritual warfare” that literally demonizes opponents of conservative Christian policy positions as worthy of destruction. The NAR is arguably the fastest-growing Christian religious tendency in the world. It’s hard to pin down the size of the movement, since it’s nondenominational and has no membership rolls. But the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary estimates that there are roughly 33 million adherents in the U.S., and far more in the Global South, where traditional Catholicism and Protestantism are losing ground to faith healers and ecstatic worship leaders.

If you’re not familiar with the charismatic/Pentecostal world, it is a deeply experiential religious movement that began in the early 20th century in California. It was characterized by such dazzling celebrity leaders as Aimee Semple McPherson and Oral Roberts, and eventually affected both Protestant and Catholic believers eager for a more direct and emotional relationship with God. Until recently, this movement of the Holy Spirit was largely underground or contained within denominations. Now it has sprung free and become hyper-political. 

Taylor’s deeply researched analysis of the NAR movement and its powerful network of largely self-appointed “apostles” (organization leaders of church and para-church networks) and “prophets” (preachers claiming direct revelations from God Almighty) can be difficult reading. But his entire story, beginning with NAR founder C. Peter Wagner and his many acolytes, leads very directly to the nightmare of January 6, 2021, when many Independent Charismatic leaders were on the periphery of the disaster, praying for its success as their followers crashed barriers and attacked the Capitol Police. And as far as we can tell, the religious movement they represented is alive and well in Trump’s campaign to regain the White House in 2024. 

Taylor has a graduate degree from California’s Fuller Theological Seminary, where Wagner taught for many years. So he is fluent in his analysis of the rapidly changing dynamics of the conservative evangelical world. He explains that the Independent Charismatic leaders at the heart of the NAR and the new Christian right of the Trump era are very different from the moralistic Southern Baptists (like Falwell and Reed) and denomination-bound Pentecostals (like Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, and Jim Bakker) of the early Christian right. 

From the beginning, these new leaders were free from any organizational restraints on their teachings, and indeed viewed themselves as part of a new era of direct divine inspiration of “prophets” who were accountable to no one other than their rapidly growing audiences in megachurches and on TV and social media. Feeding on each other’s inspirations, these NAR channelers of divine wisdom became more and more confident that they could identify Satan’s agents in whole institutions of liberal political and cultural influence while making their fellow outsider-insurgent Trump the vehicle for smiting the devil and paving the way to the final conflict of Armageddon. 

Taylor introduces us not just to NAR apostle Wagner (who died in 2016 just as his disciples ushered Trump into the White House), Paula White, and Lance Wallnau, but also to a whole host of collaborators such as the spiritually gifted Cindy Jacobs; the early proto-Trump evangelizers Ché Ahn and Lou Engle; and the Christian musician turned political figure Sean Feucht. All of these people shared the Independent Charismatic tradition of self-announced divine inspiration, and were largely free of the misogyny and racism of the conservative evangelical denominations they displaced in the leadership of the Christian right (White really got her start on Black television networks and was mentored by the Black evangelical superstar T. D. Jakes). This freed the movement of some of the demographic bounds that limited its evangelical cousins. 

All these once-fringe, suddenly central religious figures converged on the 2016 Trump campaign and the subsequent administration as heaven sent, easily identifying, based on their own religious “outsider” status, with his populist message. Several joined White in the official Trump all-evangelical religious advisory council that was often photographed laying hands on the president in the Oval Office. Two Californians (Ahn and Feucht) grew immensely powerful via MAGA-adjacent efforts to resist state and local COVID-19 restrictions, which led to a favorable Supreme Court ruling protecting the “religious liberty” of worshippers defying mask requirements. Many of these leaders came together to bless Trump’s effort to hang on to the presidency before and on January 6, convinced that it was their God-given duty. 

In the very first chapter of the book, Taylor recalls White—at the time a White House employee of Trump’s—calling on angels to keep Trump in the White House even though it appeared he had lost his reelection.

On November 4, 2020, the day after the presidential election but before news outlets had officially called the race for Joe Biden, there was a prayer service at White’s Florida church. White rhythmically intoned prayers, imploring heaven to give Trump victory. She interspersed these prayers with speaking in tongues, a practice in which a charismatic believer utters ecstatic sounds that participants believe to be a heavenly language. White said, among other things, “We break and divide every demonic confederacy against the election, against America, against who you [God] have declared to be in the White House.” 

White was signaling an Independent Charismatic campaign to overturn the election results that steadily gained momentum as the clock ticked down toward the certification in Congress. The signs were there for those who were paying attention. In a series of Jericho Marches in state capitals (particularly those where Trump was challenging the election results), Independent Charismatics surrounded government buildings, blowing shofar horns from the Jewish prophetic tradition, and called on God to force legislators to recognize Trump as the duly and truly elected president. 

It was equally evident in a highly targeted series of spiritual warfare events in the states Trump was contesting led by the Wagner disciple and longtime NAR prophet Dutch Sheets, on orders from the White House:

Sheets was in Washington, DC, on November 20, with Trump officials whispering this idea in his ear, and by the next night, the team had been recruited and assembled from all over the country in Atlanta. It was a frenetic tour: November 21—Georgia, November 22—Michigan, November 23—Arizona, November 24—Wisconsin, November 29—Nevada, November 30—New Mexico, December 1—Pennsylvania, December 13—Georgia again. At every stop, the group of prophetic intercessors would stage a massive prayer meeting at a local church … 

These “prayer meetings” are not what many people imagine when they hear that term. They averaged around three hours, and after an hour of intense worship music, Dutch would get up to give some brief remarks. Then he’d invite up the intercessory team, and these apostles and prophets would take turns prophesying about God’s view of the 2020 election … 

This raging prophesying, full of images of militia and swords and battlefields and decapitations, went on night after night, state after state, live streamed to hundreds of thousands of Christians. It’s hard to overstate how violent this rhetoric became, how frenzied the crowds in the videos get. 

Like a number of other NAR leaders, Dutch Sheets didn’t attend the January 6 protests and riots, but he did cheerlead from the sidelines, and even expressed hopes that divine intervention might yet keep Trump in power. The many manifestations of Christian piety among the insurrectionists owed much more to the NAR movements than to the more traditional conservative evangelical sources, for whom intended insurrection victim Mike Pence remained an icon. 

Though January 6 failed, the idea that Biden’s inauguration represented a temporary losing battle in a long-term spiritual war with progressive demons lived on. As Taylor notes, in July 2022, the NAR stalwarts Sheets and Wellnau cohosted an episode of the wildly popular social media show FlashPoint, with both live and virtual attendees: 

Sheets led the thousands in attendance in collectively reading through a document he’d written titled the “Watchman Decree.” The crowd recited (these are excerpts): 

WHEREAS 

we, the Church, are God’s governing Body on the earth 

we have been given legal power from heaven and now exercise our authority

we are God’s ambassadors and spokespeople over the earth…

…We declare that we stand against wokeness, the occult and every evil attempt against our nation.

…We declare that we take back influence at the local level in our communities.

…We decree that we take back and permanently control positions of influence and leadership in each of the Seven Mountains. 

We will NEVER stop fighting! 

We will NEVER, EVER, EVER give up or give in! 

We WILL take our country back. 

They’ve been true to their word. Independent Charismatics have been highly conspicuous in Trump’s 2024 comeback effort, particularly in the ReAwaken America events that former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn has headed up, and even more pointedly in the Courage Tour, in which Lance Wallnau—the original blesser of Trump as King Cyrus and the great prophet of the dominionist Seven Mountain Mandate ideology—has been a principal convener. Wallnau has doubled down on his belief in Trump’s divinely appointed mission of national salvation, and has described Kamala Harris as a “Jezebel” who practices “witchcraft.” 

Fringy as Wallnau and his activities sound, vice presidential nominee J. D. Vance chose to participate at a Courage Tour event in Pennsylvania in late September. And while many of the old-school Christian right leaders and shock troops have been more than a bit discouraged by the latest incarnation of Trump, the people Taylor introduces in this crucial book are more excited than ever. As Taylor writes, “The NAR leaders and their hyper-politicized Independent Charismatic celebrity colleagues have cornered the market on supernaturally steered Christian rage. They have brought their style of Christianity into the heart of right-wing politics.” 

As if right-wing politics needed more rage! It should be clear by now that if Trump doesn’t win in November, the secular and religious fury he has invoked will live on, perhaps intensified by a second defeat that he and his supporters might again deny. American politics and religion will never be the same.