Do You Wonder Why Evangelicals Support Trump?

Look To the Charismatic Movement and the New Apostolic Reformation

Most people are still baffled by the overwhelming support by evangelicals for Donald Trump. Once again in the 2024 election, around 80% of evangelicals voted for a man who is, if anything, the antithesis of Christian piety. People have been searching, writing, and opining about this strange phenomenon since 2016.

I won’t claim to have solved the puzzle, but since Jan. 6, 2021, I’ve been reading more and more accounts of the influence and involvement by a group of evangelicals known specifically as Independent Charismatic Christians, and the loose affiliation of folks known as the “New Apostolic Reformation.” If these terms are foreign to you, you may want to learn about them as quickly as you can. Over the next four years, these folks will become more and more prominent in the 2^nd Trump Administration. He owes them much.

You are going to hear names like Paula White, Lance Wallnau, Chuck Pierce, Cindy Jacobs, Che Ahn, Dutch Sheets, and others in the coming days who have formed an inner circle of “religious advisors” to Donald Trump. Most if not all of them are Charismatic Christians with associations in the New Apostolic Reformation.

Before I connect these dots, let me go back in time with you to my personal story of experience in the Charismatic movement. Yes, I was “one of them” many, many years ago. Reading about Charismatic Christianity and its new found level of political power, takes me back many years….just out of high school. And the themes rhyme.

In the early to mid- 1970s as a young college student just out of high school, I was swept up in a religious movement called the “Charismatic Renewal.” It was an exciting experience as my evangelical “Jesus-People” religious beliefs from the 1960s entered into a new phase of “spiritual gifts” and a supernatural encounter with God. I witnessed healings, casting out of demons, and the “binding of evil spirits” by Charismatic evangelists who traveled through the Midwest and throughout the country.

I found out I needed to be “baptized in the Holy Spirit” which was something different than my earlier conversion as a “born again” Christian. So, I sought such a new baptism and discovered religious ecstasy. I thought it was a higher level of spirituality, and I gravitated to it like a mosquito to a flood light on a hot August night.

The Bible College that I was attending in 1974 was not too keen on this latest “outpouring of the Holy Spirit” and so I left the college after one year to pursue more and more supernatural manifestations of God’s power. When I returned home after that first year in college, I found that a group of people who had attended my conservative evangelical church had exited and started a home church. It was called “the Fellowship.” Simple…unoffending…inviting. But it was a “fellowship” focused on the Charismatic supernatural gifts and manifestations I was looking for…we had healing services, prophetic messages from key leaders, deliverance meetings to cast out demons and other “blessings” of God’s grace.

It was heady stuff for a twenty some year-old. In many ways it was like any other drug of recreational use of the time. It was a high…an exhilarating moment of feeling alive, without the pharmaceutical nessecities.

Eventually, our little “fellowship” encountered other home churches across the Midwest and began to establish regional conferences and meetings to see “what God was saying to all of us.” We saw ourselves as living in a special dispensation of God’s outpouring of grace and love in an era of turbulence. The Bible talked about a “remnant” of believers who were faithful to God’s commands, and we truly believed we were that remnant.

Soon there was talk of the great “spiritual warfare” taking place across the whole planet. The forces of Satan were unleashing wave after wave of evil influence coming across as secular humanism, gay lifestyles, abortion, and communism…(it was still the cold war era). We considered ourselves the vanguard against such an onslaught and we prayed against all the “principalities and powers of darkness.” We prayed against them often, binding them in “the name of Jesus.”

Spiritual warfare was taken very seriously…it is one of those ideas that will rhyme with the current movement.

Eventually, we also began to hear that the loosely affiliated home church groups were being knit together by emerging “apostles and prophets.” (This is another rhyme) We gladly received these apostles and prophets into our fellowship meetings. They began to tell us what God’s will and intention was for not only us, but the movement as whole. We felt we were part of the end-time outpouring of God’s spirit on the world.

One of the defining characteristics of this movement was its anti-denominational position. The Charismatic movement was a free-wheeling, wild-west of religious experience bound by no real denominational safeguards. This of course led to excesses and extremes of ideas, theologies and even abuses. The apostles and prophets sometime fought among themselves, but by and large, the movement was self-regulating enough that it maintained its own type of safeguards but allowed for the freedom of enterprising evangelists to establish their personal kingdoms and realms of influence.

What “sold” in these spaces was when a person (man or woman) had a special “word from God” or “prophetic message.” Those who could articulate the “mind of God” in a compelling and emotional way were highly respected and sought after. And everyone believed them.

Probably the one teaching that caused me to pull back and out of this movement was when I heard the “prosperity gospel” preachers. They are still around and in fact, that is Paula White’s signature teaching. (She was Trump’s contact and gateway into this movement) But when I began to hear that I needed to give all my money to Mr. or Mrs. Charismatic Evangelist and then God would give me a “double blessing” like compound interest, I could see the scam. The only ones getting richer were the prosperity evangelists who were zooming around in private jets and buying million-dollar homes. Everyone else was still struggling to pay their rent.

By the early 1980s I had gravitated to the safety of the denominational Pentecostal world called the Assemblies of God. They were much more reserved, respectable, and they functioned with some safeguards. But the Charismatic Renewal just kept right on growing as I paid less and less attention to the “signs and wonders” they purported to perform.

I missed the fireworks of the 1990s and early 2000s and the emergence of something called the “New Apostolic Reformation” and I lost track of who the heavy hitters in this marginalized movement were. However, monumental changes and developments had occurred which still have not caught the complete attention of the mainstream media.

Under the leadership of the evangelical, Fuller Seminary professor C. Peter Wagner, a whole new ideology developed that brought together several pieces of the Charismatic Renewal with ideas from an even earlier religious movement called the “Latter Rain” movement and cemented those elements with another theological movement called “Dominion theology.”

Stay with me here…it sounds complicated, but I’ll try and connect the dots for you. Trust me, the dots lead to January 6, 2021.

If you want the deep dive, I highly recommend Matthew D. Taylor’s outstanding expose on these developments in his book, “The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement That is Threatening Our Democracy.” Taylor's unprecedented access to the movement's leaders, archives, internal conference calls, and correspondence gives us an insider account of the connection between charismatic evangelicalism and hard-right movement.

The three ideas that have melded together under the leadership of Peter Wagner and his NAR network of evangelists include many of the same practices and beliefs I remember from the earlier movement. They include:

1) A belief in Satanic and demonic influences in the world that must be countered through prayerful “spiritual warfare.” Wagner added a new dimension to spiritual warfare calling it “strategic level spiritual warfare. This includes fighting against territorial demons that rule geographic locations. Yes, this is a very real thing to Charismatics.

2) A renewed emphasis on the rise of apostles and prophets to direct the spiritual warfare and expand the “kingdom” of God on earth. This idea was born in the 1940s and 50s “Latter Rain” movement and predicted that Christianity was entering a 2^nd Apostolic period, the first being in the first century.

The new idea, and perhaps the most important one is:

3) The acceptance of Dominionism and its emphasis on Christians taking dominion over the “Seven Mountains of Society” which include: the family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government. Lance Wallnau, one of the supposed apostles, packaged it as the Seven Mountain Mandate or 7MM. The idea was also not new and had been around for decades, but when repackaged in combination with the first two ideas it created a powerful elixir of supernatural prophetic images or as Taylor calls them, “prophetic memes.”

These ideas came together at the intersection of Peter Wagner and Lance Wallnau in the 2000s. These three ideas percolated among Charismatic prophets and apostles and gained wider acceptance as more and more books were published on the subject. None was more influential than the 2013 publication of Wallnau's and Bill Johnson's Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate.

As Taylor points out in his book, Invading Babylon was a clarion call to not only Charismatic Christians, but all on the religious right and the political right. Taylor writes,

“The Seven Mountain Mandate is one of the most important prophetic memes in all of global Independent Charismatic Christianity today. It has become the organizing structure for how millions of Christians think about politics and the relationship between the church and the world. If you attend Christian nationalist gatherings or listen to Christian political podcasts, you’ll hear perpetual talk of the Seven Mountains: strategies for taking the government mountain, how to conquer the education mountain, and on and on.”

In other words, these ideas have now reached the broader evangelical grassroots, political class and others interested in “taking dominion” over not just the government, but all of society, and all the world.

We can now connect these dots to 2016. It was the prophets and apostles of the NAR who were some of the first to endorse Donald Trump’s insurgent candidacy. Many traditional elite evangelicals were supporting other more acceptable evangelical candidates such as Mike Huckabee or Ben Carson whose lives comported more closely with Biblical teaching. But Lance Wallnau and Peter Wagner both early on saw an emerging chaos candidate who would serve their purposes very well; the disruption of political norms and conventions which would allow them to insert their own influence.

Trump was already a confidante of Paul White, and she introduced Trump to many in this fringe Charismatic movement. Many of Trump’s evangelical advisory committee in his first adminsitration were of the NAR movement. In Donald Trump, they saw their ladder to the Mountain of Government.

And, if anyone can be credited with giving Trump credibility among the broader evangelical arena, it was Lance Wallnau who “prophesized” that Trump was destined to be “God’s Cyrus Candidate.” This proclamation was crucial for Trump’s acceptance in the wider evangelical community.

This is in reference to the Old Testament story of the Persian King Cyrus who was used by God to liberate the captive Jews who had been taken to Babylon. Cyrus, although a pagan, set them free to return to Jerusalem to rebuild their temple.

Applied to Trump, it meant that Trump didn’t have to even be a practicing Christian, and his personal character flaws were irrelevant, just like King Cyrus. God had chosen him to be the “Cyrus President,” to liberate Christians and allow them to ascend the Mountain of Politics and Government to gain dominion. The prophetic word was spoken and by the election, 80% of evangelicals voted for the King Cyrus-Trump candidate.

By the election of 2020, the NAR prophets and apostles were all in for Trump’s re-election. God had told them he would win and when he didn’t, instead of accepting the results and admit their prophesy was wrong, the Charismatic leaders fell back on another one of their main pillar ideas…spiritual warfare. Certainly, God wanted Trump to be a second term President so it was a stolen election by the demons of hell.

So, what to do? Here is another dot!

Many of these leaders organized “Jericho Marches” not only in Washington D.C. but in many capitol cities around the nation. This references another Old Testament story where God’s people marched around the city of Jericho singing and blowing shofar horns until the walls of the city fell down and God’s people entered and took the city. For these folks, this is real…it is spiritual warfare on steroids.

That brings us to the next dot…January 6^th. We all know the story because we witnessed it with horror. But what may not be well known is that both the day before and on January 6^th, many well-known NAR prophets and apostles were in Washington D.C. holding their own rallies and prayer vigils. One of the most notable was Cindy Jacobs who is one of the best-known prophets of the movement. (Just google her name) She was stationed on the Capitol grounds that day holding a prayer vigil for the protesters just yards away, as they marched on the Capitol.

Though Jacobs never approached the Capitol and eschewed violence, much of the energy and violence of the day was stoked by the spiritual energy of this movement. The line between “spiritual warfare” and violence against God’s enemies in the Capitol was erased that day. Spiritual warfare imagery transformed very quickly into sacred violence, a crusade, and several were killed and many more injured. Many of the images and symbols of that day were of crosses, the appeal to heaven flags, and other paraphernalia of Charismatic Christianity.

As Peter Manseau, curator of American Religious History at the Smithsonian, put it, religion was not a piece of the story of that day; it was “the story of what happened” on January 6. This element of Charismatic Christianity goes well beyond simple Christian Nationalism. It is important to make some distinctions. Not all who call themselves Christian Nationalists would approve of the violence. But the violence was none-the-less religiously inspired.

The people in this movement who now have full access to the levers of political power through Donald Trump are not going anywhere. They will be around even after Trump leaves office…their prophets are likely already looking for their next Cyrus-candidate. Stand by friends…democracy is teetering. Many from my associations with this movement from the 1970s and 80s are now in positions of power. I can tell you from experience…that is a frightening possibility.

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