Of late, we have witnessed an explosion of books reporting on, analyzing, and critiquing Christian Nationalism.* In the past six years, since the publication of Katherine Stewart’s The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (2019), I count at least fifteen books on the subject, written by investigative journalists, political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, historians, legal scholars, and theologians – plus an excellent documentary film, God and Country, produced by Rob Reiner.
Michael D. Taylor’s book, The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy is among the most recent of these, hot off the presses last fall. It is an important book, combining careful research, insightful analysis, and brisk, clear writing. The story that Taylor uncovers is one that should be deeply concerning to readers of the Reformed Journal.
Taylor was raised within the evangelical subculture of southern California. He attended a Christian college, worked as a youth pastor and earned an M.A. in theology from Fuller Theological Seminary, before pursuing a Ph.D. in religious studies from Georgetown University. He is currently a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore. This background gives him both religious “insider” knowledge and scholarly tools of analysis that help him to understand the particular strand of Christian Nationalism that is his focus: the “Seven Mountains Dominionism” propagated by leaders of the so-called New Apostolic Reformation (NAR).
His thesis, in brief, is that this vector of the Christian Nationalist movement, characterized by apostolic networks, prophetic decrees, and spiritual warfare rhetoric, is uniquely potent. He shows that NAR-aligned leaders were deeply involved in the effort to deny Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020 and to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory by Congress on January 6, 2021. Their ostensible failure on that dark day was not the end of the movement, but only a temporary setback, from which they learned tactical lessons and emerged stronger and more determined than ever.
Who are these self-designated prophets and apostles? The names Taylor highlights – Paula White, C. Peter Wagner, Cindy Jacobs, Ché Ahn, Lance Wallnau, Sean Feucht, Dutch Sheets – would hardly qualify as A-list evangelical leaders. They have none of the visibility of such figures as James Dobson, Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell, or Tony Perkins; their ideas lack even the pretensions of intellectual heft found in Francis Schaeffer, Christian Reconstructionism, or David Barton’s pseudo-history of the American Founding; they are not to be found among the policy-wonk authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. So, what makes them such formidable promoters of Christian Nationalism?
To answer that question, Taylor delves into American religious history, charting the emergence and explosive growth since the 1950’s of a sector of evangelicalism he calls the Independent (or non-denominational) Charismatics. Ideas and practices were fostered there, outside the limelight, in movements like the “Word of Faith” and the “Latter Rain,” that gave immense authority to networks of individual “apostles” and divinely inspired “prophets.” This re-awakening of Pentecostal fervor was understood as a spiritual revival heralding the end-times.
This movement took a giant step toward the mainstream when a professor of missiology at Fuller Theological Seminary, C. Peter Wagner (1930-2016), began to appropriate and implement concepts from this movement, such as apostolic and prophetic gifting, spiritual warfare, and apocalyptic revival. Eventually, Wagner branded the movement as the New Apostolic Reformation. Although Wagner was always controversial at Fuller, the seminary gave him a respectable platform to spread his ideas, and to develop a network of structured relationships that he called “apostolic ministries.” The NAR became the hub for the rapid growth of Independent Charismatic Christianity worldwide.
An additional piece fell into place at the outset of the twenty-first century, when a young pastor shaped by the Latter Rain movement, Lance Wallnau, picked up an idea that had been floating around in Independent Charismatic circles since the mid-1970’s, according to which Christians were to “disciple the nations” by being active in seven crucial “spheres” of culture: home, church, schools, politics and government, the media, arts and entertainment, and business and technology. Wallnau replaced the idea of spheres with that of mountains, and he asserted that Christians were called not just to participate, but to conquer and dominate each of the mountains. Thus was born the “Seven Mountains Mandate.”
When Wagner heard Wallnau speak on the subject at a prophecy conference, he set out to draw the younger man into his network, and to publicize what Taylor provocatively refers to as Wallnau’s “prophetic meme.” The new meme combined well with Reconstructionist ideas about Christian dominion, and it seemed to be confirmed by Pentecostal Sarah Palin’s elevation as vice-presidential candidate in 2008. The defeat of the McCain-Palin ticket by Barack Obama that year only served to sharpen the movement’s allegiance to Republicans and antagonism toward Democrats. By 2015, leaders in the NAR were primed to find a Republican presidential candidate who would help them execute the conquest of the governmental mountain.
That NAR activists settled on Donald Trump, of all people, to represent their hopes has everything to do, once again, with a prophetic meme created by Lance Wallnau. He described Trump’s inexorable rise to the nomination and the presidency as evidence of a “Cyrus Anointing,” thus creating another powerful prophetic meme, one that accounted for Trump’s obvious moral and religious deficiencies by invoking the example of the Persian king Cyrus, who freed God’s people from captivity while remaining a pagan himself. Complete loyalty to Donald Trump is now demanded, based not on our experience of his character, but on God’s revelation of his anointing.
Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020 created a crisis for NAR-aligned activists. As they saw it, recognized prophets had guaranteed his victory, and genuine prophecy cannot be wrong. Therefore, Trump must have won in reality, no matter the decisions of news media, election officials, judges, or Congress. But the spiritual warfare paradigm acknowledges that God’s decree may (at least in the short run) be resisted by demonic forces. It then becomes the duty of Christians to do battle with those demons. That battle is spiritual, but it can be prosecuted in the physical world as well. This helps us to make sense of the presence of so many NAR prophets and apostles speaking and praying at the rallies preceding the Capitol march on January 6, and even outside the Capitol during the insurrection itself.
In the four years since the 2020 election, Lance Wallnau and his NAR compatriots have only refined their strategies and deepened their influence within evangelicalism. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump’s vice-presidential candidate JD Vance appeared onstage at a Pennsylvania religious rally organized by Wallnau, who recently described Kamala Harris as channeling the “spirit of Jezebel,” and attributed her debate success to witchcraft. In an already dangerously polarized political atmosphere, this sacralization of one candidate and demonization of the other does not bode well for America.
Donald Trump’s Christian Nationalist allies are back in power. Pete Hegseth (Secretary of Defense) and Russell Vought (Office of Management and Budget) are two of the most powerfully placed among them, although they are not directly linked to Seven Mountains Dominionism. But the appointment of Paula White-Cain to once again head Trump’s “White House Faith Office” is just as concerning. White-Cain is a long-time player in the Independent Charismatic realm who has served to bring Wallnau and his allies into Trump’s orbit. She is even more powerfully positioned to fling that door open over the next four years.
But that makes Taylor’s superb book all the more important. For Christians, there are two values at stake now in America: pluralistic democracy, and the integrity of Christian political witness. We can only defend what we treasure when we comprehend the threats against it.
*[“Christian Nationalism,” as commonly used today, refers to a movement that seeks to make (or re-make) the United States as a Christian nation, meaning a nation where Christian values have presumptive authority in society, Christian teaching is supported by state institutions, and Christian leaders have privileged access to political power. The “Christianity” in question is conservative, both theologically and politically; it is focused culturally on traditional “family values”; and it is largely shaped by an evangelical Protestant ethos (although there is also a Catholic “Integralist” version on offer these days).]
6 Responses
Enlightening. I wonder how this intersects with the Young, Restless and Reformed group and the New Calvinists movement? This review rings true for the friends I know that have been involved in this movement, particularly in the prayer movement that is heavily focused on spiritual warfare. I’m all for prayer and I believe the spiritual battle is biblical, but it has seemed out of balance. I appreciate your review of this book. Thanks!
Thanks for this reply. I’m not familiar with the “spiritual warfare” movement within YR&R, but I’d be interested in following up on that. Do you have some sources I could start with?
Thanks for this good analysis. I’m glad the charismatics that I was involved with as a young Christian were not into this Christian Nationalist version. One time I met a pastor who was espousing these ideas around dinner tables at the the RCA General Synod. He insisted that according to charismatic prophets that “trump” means “victory” and so Donald Trump would prevail. I thought instead that the word “trump” was also related to “trumpery,” which means “worthless nonsense.”
The leadership of RCA Church Multiplication during recent decades was (at the very least) NAR-adjacent, so it’s not surprising that such ideas worked their way down from Wagner’s writings to pastors. I don’t have direct evidence on this. Does anybody else?
Thanks, David, We Reformed people need to grapple with all of this, just as you urge. I first encountered Wagner while his student at Fuller and I first encountered Walnau in the early Pinnacle Forum meetings in Phoenix. Walnau is a gifted communicator. What strikes me is the similarities between the “Seven Mountains Dominionism” and the “Sphere Sovereignty” of some of our Reformed philosophers (Dooyeweerd and his followers). Sphere Sovereignty was a thing when I was at Calvin College and Seminary in the early 70’s, via Wolterstorff and Evan Runner. Does this philosophy lend itself to the extremes that you are describing?
There are certainly Christian Nationalists who capitalize on certain ideas and catch-phrases in the Kuyper-Dooyweerd tradition to move it in that direction. In the “Reconstructionist” wing of the movement, Rousas J. Rushdoony and Douglas Wilson would be clear examples, and David Barton is known to cite Kuyper as a forebear. I think that they are gravely misinterpreting neo-Calvinism on this point, but slogans like “Every Square Inch” do lend themselves to such weaponization.