Matthew Taylor’s timely and disturbing new book, The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy, explores the politicization of America’s independent charismatics and neo-Pentecostals and the resulting “charismaticization of right-wing politics.”
Taylor bids farewell to one generation of Religious Right leaders: Phyllis Schlafly, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and Tony Perkins.
He then introduces readers to a new generation of Holy Spirit activists: Peter Wagner, Paula White, Cindy Jacobs, Lance Wallnau, Dutch Sheets, Sean Feucht and Che Ahn.
Taylor helps readers understand the men and women behind strategic warfare prayer, Trump prophecies, weaponized worship music, Seven Mountains Dominionism, demonization of Democrats, and the Appeal to Heaven flags that waved over the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“Once thought kookie,” they’re now mainstream and “setting the agenda for the Religious Right in America and quickening our polarized, zero-sum political environment,” Taylor writes. “The fringe became the carpet.”
Taylor, a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies, shows how a religious community once thought too otherworldly for their own good now wages an all-too-worldly assault on its perceived enemies.
They’re “setting the agenda for the Religious Right in America and quickening our polarized, zero-sum political environment.”
Taylor profiles leaders who have been radicalized and are now radicalizing millions of their followers by exploiting the unique gifts of Pentecostalism for malign political purposes: “Charismatic experiences and theology — the things that separate charismatic evangelicals from other evangelicals — are accelerants for more extreme political views and behavior.”
Publishers claim many books are “highly anticipated,” but this one really is. Taylor has received significant attention from major media outlets. Copies of the book were sent to journalists early this year. (See him on the CBS Evening News.)
Taylor is concerned about the charismatic leaders he profiles because they have “created an entire vernacular of spiritual violence: of Christian war campaigns against Satan, of literally demonizing their human opponents by accusing them of being possessed by evil spirits, and of advancing a belligerent theological orientation toward the rest of American culture.”
Matthew Taylor
That theological belligerence has real-world effect, he writes: “If your political opponents are, literally, inspired by demons, then there’s no negotiating with them. Demons are not meant to be negotiated with; they are meant to be battled, exorcised and expelled. As we saw on January 6, this rhetoric of spiritual violence stokes real-world violence. You can only proclaim that a group of people or a political party is filled with demons for so long before someone decides that those demonic vessels must actually be physically attacked.”
Taylor takes readers on a journey from the Azusa Street revivals to January 6, starting with former Fuller Seminary professor Peter Wagner, who gave birth to the New Apostolic Reformation, a network of independent charismatic churches and ministries. Wagner fell for Trump before his death in 2016, and the movement he founded now promotes “Christian Trumpism.”
Wagner was an organizational genius who “brought coherence and superstructure to what had previously been fragmentary and disordered,” Taylor explains.
Equally important, Wagner gave the movement two foundational ideas that remain key to the NAR’s DNA, he says:
- “God is reconstituting the early-church roles of apostles and prophets to lead the modern church, giving rise to what we can call the Apostolic and Prophetic movement.”
- Wagner and his disciples are God’s new apostles and prophets, and together they constitute a new governing “spiritual oligarchy” that’s deserving of respect, even while promoting teaching that departs from biblical revelation.
Taylor grounds his examination of the NAR in profiles of movement leaders that both inform and entertain.
Televangelist and personal pastor to Donald Trump, Paula White Cain, speaks during a Trump campaign event courting devout conservatives by combining praise, prayer and patriotism, Thursday, July 23, 2020, in Alpharetta, Ga. (AP Photo/John Amis)
Pastor Paula White, the woman who ushered hundreds of Christian leaders into Trump’s orbit, is “the first female primary spiritual adviser to a U.S. president, the first female clergy member to pray at a presidential inauguration, and the first pastor to officially preside over an American insurrection.”
Cindy Jacobs turned prayer into warfare through her ministry, Generals of Intercession. Jacobs sought out “generals,” strategically oriented believers who “could develop prayer battle plans and strategies to counter the devil’s strategies.” She applied her warfare prayer tactics to Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns.
Lance Wallnau, the serial entrepreneur who prophesied Trump’s election victory in both 2016 and 2020, won his spot in the NAR firmament thanks to his catchy “prophetic memes,” Taylor says. “These prophecies are like internet memes in that they keep getting repurposed and utilized in different ways.”
Wallnau’s biggest meme comes from the way he transformed the idea that believers should influence all areas of society into a divisive new teaching called Seven Mountains Dominionism that fuels Christian activists with “a whole new provocation to conquest and strategy for battle.”
“No Christian leader has done more to personally and theologically bolster the cause of Donald Trump than Lance Wallnau,” Taylor writes.
Lance Wallnau
As BNG previously reported, Wallnau is leading “The Courage Tour,” a road show that features far-right GOP officials and election deniers and is visiting swing states crucial to determining who wins the 2024 election.
Sean Feucht may present himself as “a cheerful golden retriever for the Lord,” but this worship warrior is actually “a Goliath with a David complex,” Taylor writes.
Taylor portrays Feucht as a pied piper for the politicization of Christian music, making it something “less like a joyful worship concert tour and more like a guerrilla warfare campaign.”
Dutch Sheets helped popularize the “Watchman Decree.” Millions of American believers in thousands of churches and auditoriums have raised their hands and recited these words: “We will NEVER stop fighting! We will NEVER, EVER, EVER give up or give in! We WILL take our country back.”
This decree is based on Sheets’ popular but novel teaching on the New Testament word we translate as “church.” As Taylor writes, Sheets teaches that ekklesia “should be translated as ‘a governing body’ and that Jesus employed the term to mean ‘my governing body in the earth.’ He said it was time for the church to move from a ‘congregational mindset to a congressional mindset.’’In other words, the apostles and prophets were supposed to “legislate in the spirit, (then) implement in the natural.’ This is a radically different vision of the church from what most Christians hold.”
Throughout, Taylor warns of what could be ahead for America should these Spirit-fueled zealots gain the expansive powers they lust after: “This is how democracy is imperiled: not only by cynics and scrappers like Donald Trump, Roger Stone and Steve Bannon, who grasp for power and connive to burn everything down around them, but also by true believers. Democracy is jeopardized by people so locked into the narratives of their own righteousness, their own certainty that they know what God wants, that they march right past the deadly conflagration they helped to instigate and never pause to consider the consequences.”
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