In the three and a half years since Donald Trump incited an insurrection on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Americans have come to learn how much Christian nationalism played a role in the riot. What is less known, however, is how the fringe Christian movement the New Apostolic Reformation dominated and shaped the effort to overturn the 2020 election. The group, once considered extreme even by most white evangelicals, was instrumental in organizing and spurring the crowd that stormed the Capitol that day.
In his book "The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy," religious studies scholar Matthew Taylor explores how this group of self-proclaimed "prophets" and "apostles" became central to the MAGA movement and, eventually, an attempted coup. He spoke with Salon about this poorly understood fringe religious group and why they matter so much to Trump.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
At the end of the book, you emphasize the importance of Christians speaking up against the far-right Christian nationalism that drove the Jan. 6 insurrection. Why do you believe liberal Christians need to speak out more?
To be clear, I'm also calling conservative Christians to be in that mix. I grew up as a conservative Christian. Many members of my family and many of my friends growing up are still conservative Christians. They're also shocked and appalled by a lot of this. There's a principled form of conservative Christianity in the United States that is not in bed with Christian nationalism. Those people need to be speaking up too. It's important for atheists and non-Christians to speak up, because their rights are going to be more infringed upon by Christian supremacists. But it's a duty for Christians to face when our fellow Christians go off the rails and become harmful.
A lot of the dialogue that needs to happen is a theological conversation. Part of the challenge here is that it's not simply politics or power that is driving this dynamic. Theology is also very much in the mix. And Christians are the ones who can talk about Christian theology. We desperately need intra-Christian dialogue and even intra-Christian debate, which can be quite heated at times. I'm OK with that, because the consequences are so dire. There's real peril that some of our fellow Christians are posing to our democracy and we need to challenge them.
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As someone who is outside of the Christian world, I learned a lot from your book about the complexities of it. I had heard of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) but had no idea what it is and how central it was to the Jan. 6 insurrection. Can you briefly explain what it is and why it was so important to the Capitol riot?
The New Apostolic Reformation is a set of leadership networks created by a seminary professor named C. Peter Wagner. He was a professor at my alma mater, the Fuller Theological Seminary, though we never overlapped. He became fixated on the sector of Christianity that emerges from an intersection of nondenominational governance and charismatic spirituality, which focuses on the more supernatural dimensions of Christianity. Wagner became convinced that this was key to a global revival that he was helping to instigate.
"There's real peril that some of our fellow Christians are posing to our democracy and we need to challenge them."
One of the things that is distinct about independent charismatic sector of Christianity is that people believe in modern-day apostles and prophets. This is not something that mainstream denominations recognize. Wagner became convinced that he was an apostle. He surrounded himself with these modern-day prophets. When he talked about the New Apostolic Reformation, he saw a change like the Protestant Reformation that would have a lasting impact and become a new branch of Christianity. By the early 21st century, that group of leaders became increasingly radicalized around American politics, increasingly fixated on visions of taking over society. They embraced a prophecy called the Seven Mountain Mandate. Sarah Palin was mentored by one of these prophets in Wagner's networks. They really believe they're this vanguard that God had placed on Earth to bring about the Kingdom of God. They want a global revival and to take over whole societies and turn them into Christian nations.
The NAR leaders had a theology that was primed for a figure like Trump. They were some of the first Christian leaders to embrace him, to endorse him. They created the theologies and the propaganda that made Trump palatable to broader American evangelicalism. They became some of his closest advisers and helped structure a lot of the policy during the Trump era. They truly believed that God had willed Trump to win the 2020 election. They had hundreds of prophecies about that idea. When Trump refused to concede, all these prophets and apostles decided that it was that their prophecies were not wrong, but that God was going to intervene in a miraculous way to reinstate Donald Trump. They started a mass spiritual warfare campaign, mobilizing charismatic Christians. to pray against the demons that they believed were stealing the election. That spiritual warfare campaign was a major factor in the Christians who showed up on Jan. 6.
You flesh out the story of the Appeal to Heaven flag, which came onto people's radar only after Sam Alito — who is Catholic — flew this outside of his house. It's an old revolutionary flag that had no real meaning until NAR embraced it as a symbol.
The Appeal to Heaven flag was commissioned in 1775, to fly over the Massachusetts navy. It was one of many flags flown by American forces during the Revolutionary War. It was an obscure piece of Americana. In 2013, an NAR prophet named Dutch Sheets encountered this flag. He believed he received a prophecy that this flag was a sign of a new spiritual revolution. It was a low point for Christian supremacist groups. They felt they were battling against a demonic Obama administration. The Appeal to Heaven flag was embraced as a sign of a Christian revolution that would transform America into a nation centered on Christianity and built around conservative Christian morality. Sheets left his job to promote the symbol of the flag. He wrote a book about it that came out in 2015. NAR networks with hundreds of leaders pressed followers to fly this flag. The flag functions as a visual prayer.
By 2020, the flag had become entwined with the cause of Donald Trump. It also symbolized anti-abortion activism, anti-LGBTQ activism. It was a coded symbol in these Christian nationalist circles. It's a double entendre. It signals support for spiritual revolution, but if they're called out on it, they can say they just love American history. It has a secret handshake quality. About two weeks before the 2020 election, Donald Trump was campaigning in Nevada and an NAR pastor presented Trump with an Appeal to Heaven flag. He said it is a symbol of Trump's victory. A photo of Trump with the flag went viral on charismatic social media. Dutch Sheets was one of most influential, most bombastic, most hyperbolic leaders pressing for Christians to support Trump. He backed the lies about the 2020 election and encouraged Christians to be in the streets to fight back against the legitimacy of the election.
That's why, on Jan. 6 you can see dozens of these Appeal to Heaven flags in the crowd. It's one of the most ubiquitous symbols of the Capitol riot. It's this Appeal to Heaven flag and reporters were interviewing people who are flying these flags on Jan. 6. The symbolism was quite clear, but many people were not paying close attention to those flags or just wrote them off as another generic right-wing symbol. But now, House Speaker Mike Johnson flies an Appeal to Heaven flag. We saw Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito and his wife fly an Appeal to Heaven flag. Republican leaders have embraced this symbol. It signals how far-reaching these Christian supremacist networks are, and how much traction these ideas have found in the Republican Party under Donald Trump.
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Most white evangelicals voted for Trump, but you argue that even in that world, the New Apostolic Reformation is a fringe Christian movement. How so?
The main thing would be their theology. They embrace Christian supremacy, this idea that Christians are supposed to be in charge of society and are mandated by God to take over societies and transform them into conservative Christian utopias. We might use the term theocracy, although it's a little more complicated than that. But they want Christians at the top of every part of society. They want to create a new vanguard of Christian leadership that will take over every nation in the world. And they've especially targeted the United States right now.
"It was a coded symbol in these Christian nationalist circles. It's a double entendre. It signals support for a spiritual revolution, but if they're called out on it, they can say they just love American history."
This is not entirely historically unprecedented. In the past, we've seen the crusades and pogroms and imperialism and colonialism and racism in Christian history. But in the modern world, NAR theology is very much a departure from the mainstream, even mainstream evangelical theology. It's troubling to see a movement that 10 to 15 years ago would have been seen as quite extreme now being mainstreamed in Republican politics. It's also moving into the center of American evangelicalism and the assumed leadership of the religious right in America.
One reason this has happened is these NAR leaders ingratiated themselves with Donald Trump, giving them power and influence beyond their numbers or representation in the larger evangelical world. How did they do that?
Some of it was a historical accident. Since 2002, Trump has been close to this megachurch pastor from Florida named Paula White Kane. When Trump entered the presidential race in the summer of 2015, he asked Paul White Kane to be his liaison to evangelicals. The problem is that Paula White Kane herself is not a conventional evangelical. She's a female preacher. She's charismatic. She's a prosperity gospel preacher. She's a televangelist and doesn't know a lot of the mainstream evangelical leaders. So she starts reaching out to the people that she does know. A number of them are NAR leaders.
It parallels the way that Trump revolutionized the Republican Party. Trump came as an outsider and brought with him this whole wave of fringe characters. People like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, people who were very much on the margins of the Republican Party. And Trump brought those people into the center of Republican politics. Traditional Republicans are disdained and scorned by the vast majority of self-identified Republicans. A similar revolution has occurred within American evangelicalism. Figures willing to embrace Trump — willing to support and propagandize him — he elevated them and their ideas and moved them into the middle of the conversation in American evangelicalism.
It's one of the fastest shifts in evangelical thought in American history. Ideas that would have been mocked in mainstream Republican circles even 15 years ago are now getting more than 50% approval among American evangelicals. We are living through a tectonic shift in both the culture and theology. It's reflected in the extremism we see every day in evangelical and Republican politics.
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