Jacobs does not look like most people’s idea of a prophet. She is a short, well-preserved woman in her seventies with a layered bob haircut and bright red lipstick. But her voice has become a maelstrom, and the hundreds crowded into this auditorium are on their feet and shouting “Yes!” and “Amen!” into the spaces between her words. “Lord, we pray! We push the darkness! The Prince of Persia! And we say that it has to be broken, and that it has to come down, and we thank you, Lord, that it will come down, in the name of Jesus.”
“And, Lord, we say that Planned Parenthood will be stopped! And the Senate parliamentarian that is causing these snags—I’m going to be bold; this is Cindy praying this—she has got to be gone!” Jacobs continues. “And we say the Democratic Socialists candidates will not win! And so we pray, in Jesus’s name: Amen.”
“Their fixation with their own prophecies, and in the way they interpret biblical prophecies, is very influential today,” theologian and religious scholar Matthew D. Taylor told me. “ I wouldn’t necessarily say, ‘Oh, Donald Trump believes in their end-times prophecies,’ but they do, and they are advising Trump.”
That policy-focused Democrats struggle to imagine a movement more concerned with the Second Coming than with improving material conditions is not surprising. But as beliefs about spiritual warfare and God’s covenant with America worm their way deeper into both our government and our culture, as the Trump administration begins enacting Christian supremacist policy and the Department of Justice gears up to prosecute left-wing groups for “domestic terrorism,” that ignorance becomes downright dangerous.
Scholars and journalists alike extensively documented Christian dominionism’s influence on Trump through his first term, its outsize role in the January 6 insurrection, and its elevation to power within Trump’s second Cabinet. Over the past two years, their warnings have been largely borne out. And, despite deep schisms over aid to Israel and the ongoing war in Iran, the beliefs that unite Christian dominionist factions pose an existential threat to American democracy.
In approximately 95 C.E., John of Patmos wrote the Book of Revelation. This, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, has made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
Other Christians believe that the world will grow increasingly sinful until Jesus Christ’s return, followed by a utopian millennium of Christ’s rule. These are the premillennialists, and if you’re old enough to remember the Left Behind series, it’s the version you’re most familiar with. Premillennialists believe that Jesus will remake the world after the Rapture takes them away from all this: no need to do anything but wait.
The New Apostolic Reformation has managed to carve out an improbable fourth position: shrugging its shoulders at the entire exercise. It’s a strategy that movement founder C. Peter Wagner once jokingly described as “panmillennial: believing that everything is going to ‘pan out’ all right in the end.” Whether Christ arrives before or after his thousand-year rule, the NAR believes Christians must bring about the Second Coming by making the world as Christian as possible—and they focus on making disciples of the nations of the world, rather than on individual conversion. “[Jesus] is waiting for us to do our part in bringing restoration to pass in real life. Meanwhile, he is reigning through us,” Wagner wrote in his book, Dominion! Your Role in Bringing Heaven to Earth. “It is our task to become spiritual and social activists until satan’s dominion is ended.”
Whatever the end times may be, the NAR believes we are entering into them, which is also why God has begun to once again anoint biblical prophets and apostles. The NAR maintains that its prophets are able to communicate directly with God and receive revelations of his divine plan, while apostles use their networking and leadership skills to put that plan into action. One might expect such a system to result in conflicting prophecy and internecine strife, but this is not the case; apostles and prophets are not supposed to criticize each other publicly, and they rarely break this rule.
Pivec has been warning fellow believers about the NAR for over two decades. “It was Christians who really started sounding the alarm about this movement, long before the media ever started reporting it,” she told me. “The concern is that people will lose sight of what Jesus’s message was really about,” she said. “If [Christianity] is all about trying to cast out high-ranking demons, and taking dominion of nations, and apostles rising to the top of societal institutions and taking control—if that’s what people think Christianity is all about, people aren’t going to want to become Christians.”
It’s true that a Christian dominionist takeover would be difficult within this democratic society, so the NAR seeks to change it from the inside out through the Seven Mountain Mandate. “That movement is intent on destroying democracy by taking dominion in these seven institutions: education, family, religion, government, business, media, and entertainment,” Matthew Boedy, professor of rhetoric at the University of North Georgia, writes in his recent book, The Seven Mountain Mandate. Their end goal, he says: “bring[ing] the Kingdom of God to America.”
White-Cain is just the tip of the NAR iceberg within Trump’s inner circle. Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin has a long-standing relationship with City Elders, an Oklahoma NAR-affiliated organization. House Speaker Mike Johnson has robust, well-documented ties to the movement. JD Vance does not, but he spoke at a September 2024 event hosted by Lance Wallnau, the apostle who has been most instrumental in popularizing the Seven Mountain Mandate, and who accused Kamala Harris of “witchcraft.”
Still other Cabinet members not directly affiliated with the NAR nonetheless share its dominionist agenda. The loudest of these is Hegseth, whose spiritual adviser, Doug Wilson, explicitly advocates for repealing the Nineteenth Amendment. And Baptist News Global, an independent news outlet, found that donor funds the National Christian Foundation, Christian Community Foundation, and the Signatry—which contributed a total of $210 million to organizations that helped write Project 2025—also donate millions to NAR-affiliated groups, including $110,000 to the IFA. Meanwhile, the Center for Progressive Reform estimates that the Trump administration has enacted over half the policy suggestions contained within the Project 2025 initiative.
The mountain of family should be restricted to heterosexual nuclear families with plenty of children who all conform to rigid gender norms, and so the administration continues its ongoing efforts to restrict access to mifepristone; has opened investigations into 13 states that require state-regulated insurance plans to cover abortion expenses; slashed Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood; disqualified any clinic offering abortion services from receiving Title X funding; and moved to limit Title X funding for contraception.
On the education front, there have been the well-documented efforts to curtail academic freedom within universities through both frivolous lawsuits and withholding funding from “woke” institutions. Many schools have chosen to settle or alter their curricula rather than to engage in expensive and drawn-out fights—which means students are learning that the most expedient response to authoritarian overreach is to knuckle under.
“When it comes to something like the relationship between the U.S. and Israel, I think they’ve been incredibly influential,” Taylor told me. “American bombs are accomplishing in the physical realm what they are also trying to accomplish in the spiritual realm.”
The NAR’s support of Israel should not be mistaken for support of Jewish people, or even support for a Jewish homeland. According to the NAR’s interpretation of the Book of Revelation, Israel must exist for Jesus to return, at which point the Jewish people will convert to Christianity and live happily ever after. The NAR is very interested in bringing that prophecy to pass, which is why it both advocates for a one-state solution and actively proselytizes Jewish people. When I called into one of the IFA’s weekly Zoom prayer calls for Israel, it was opened with a virtual Communion. “We recognize that you, Jesus, the final and eternal king of the Jewish people, are the hope of Israel,” IFA Montana leader Brian Friess intoned shortly after. “Come and destroy the deep darkness that has clouded the minds and hearts of the Jewish people.”
“They want to see Israel victorious,” Taylor explained, “and so they have tended to support a much more aggressive stance from Netanyahu and the far-right government of Israel, including in its domestic policy [on] the war in Gaza or the way it enforces its settlements in the West Bank.”
Ultimately, the NAR’s project aims to undermine the secular humanist values at the center of American culture and change the way this country sees itself. “The idea of Christianizing the culture isn’t just about policy,” Boedy told me. “There’s policy, and then there’s this kind of—I don’t want to say vaguer, but more widespread attempt from the government to make the government, and therefore the nation, seem Christian.”
“Somewhere along the way, God’s dream for America, which is not only to bless us with freedom and liberty and all the blessings that we have, but also to use us to bless the world—to take the gospel to the ends of the earth—somewhere along the way, his part of the dream was lost,” NAR apostle Sheets told the crowd at IFA’s Rededicate America. “God’s dream for America became the American dream.”
After these initial settlements, Garlow told us, America went through a period of decline. He did not elaborate further. Instead, he skipped forward to the Great Awakening that allegedly saved and forged America.
After a brief Bible reading, IFA president and CEO Kubal stepped up to the podium for the second agenda item: reclaiming America for Christ. Immediately, the reason for Garlow’s emphasis on the 1608 and 1782 cross plantings became clear. “Rabbis teach that, if land is dedicated to God, it permanently alters that land’s legal status, removing it from a family’s hereditary possession and making it holy to God through a binding agreement. This decision is irrevocable,” Kubal told us. “Covenants made by our early Founders became generational because God’s destiny for our nation is generational.”
I attended Rededicate 250 as well. The event featured the same bizarro history, the same rhetoric, and even one of the same speakers as the IFA conference. “Brothers and sisters, this is a hinge of history moment,” Sheets told us, alongside NAR prophet Lou Engle. “What we do right here could shift America.”
America would not need rededication if some malign force had not knocked the nation off course, and you already know what that force is. Back at the IFA’s Rededicate America, Kubal cited the biblical story of Isaac reclaiming the land promised to his father from the villainous Philistines, who had occupied that land and filled in his father’s wells, as proof of his no-takesies-backsies theory of God’s claim on America. “What the Philistines didn’t understand—what the leftists didn’t understand—was that they weren’t just filling a hole, but they were attempting to put an end to the generational blessing put in place by God,” Kubal said. “They weren’t fighting against Isaac; they were fighting against God himself.”
And she was not speaking metaphorically. The NAR believes that the world’s afflictions are tied to demonic “territorial spirits” that occupy and corrupt specific geographic regions, and only intercession—spiritual warfare—can defeat and banish these spirits. According to the IFA’s website, intercession involves more than falling to your knees and asking God for help. It is prayer for the sake of someone else and for the kingdom of God, and it cannot be “wimpy”—intercessors do not ask politely or take no for an answer. “You collide with God violently until His will is released on the earth,” the website explains. The NAR believes that God has limited his limitless power so that humans might worship him of their own free will, which also means that he does not act unilaterally to perform miracles. Instead, apostles, prophets, and intercessors enact God’s will by channeling the Holy Spirit through prayer declarations and decrees.
Dehumanizing rhetoric can potentially be dangerous. “That’s how you get evangelicals to hate people,” Taylor told me. “You tell them there are demons that you’re allowed to hate that are inside those people, and we just need to get rid of the demons, and then those people will all agree with us.”
The success of intercession is in the eye of the beholder. “When we prayed during 9/11 that crime went down more than anything,” White-Cain told her congregation in 2020. “It is statistically proven because of the power of prayer that crime across this nation and across the world drastically went down.”
The NAR believes that the Prince of Persia is the territorial spirit over Iran, Taylor explained. “They’ll say ‘God wants revival to happen in Iran, but first we have to displace these evil demons.’ They’ll sometimes even speak of the demon of Islam that rules over the region,” he said. The IFA wants the Iran war to continue until these demons are destroyed, a point of view not exactly in line with Trump’s halting and stumbling attempts to negotiate peace.
There’s a line between fostering community and fostering radicalization. In his book on the Capitol insurrection, The Violent Take It by Force, Taylor focused on NAR actions in the days following Trump’s election loss in 2020. Apostles mounted “Jericho marches” in swing state capitals, with “ecstatic prayers, words of prophecy, people blowing shofars, and marching around government buildings.” A movement led by White-Cain from inside Trump’s White House launched a series of massive prayer meetings on Zoom dominated by NAR apostles and prophets that blamed demonic forces for the alleged election theft. Sheets embarked on a tour of the swing states at the suggestion of an unnamed White House adviser, where he hosted “prayer meetings” that featured increasingly incendiary language and incitements to violence.
On January 6, 2021, Jacobs, Wallnau, and several other apostles and prophets affiliated with the NAR stood outside the Capitol building as “Dutch” Sheets prayed via Zoom for the people fighting their way inside. Taylor examined pictures taken on January 6 and found “dozens and potentially hundreds of Appeal to Heaven flags” within the crowd. This flag, which features a pine tree on a white field and the words AN APPEAL TO HEAVEN embroidered above, was one of many carried during the Revolutionary War. In 2013, Sheets prophesied that the flag would become the “symbol of a campaign to restore America to the Christian nation God intended.” On January 6, people carried Appeal to Heaven flags as they tore down barricades. They used flagpoles with Appeal to Heaven flags to break through police lines. At least one person wore an Appeal to Heaven flag draped over his shoulders as he entered the Capitol. To be sure, the NAR did not instigate the January 6 insurrection, but Taylor’s book makes the case that it played an outsize role. And it all started with Jericho marches and the Dems in league with demons.
Believing that people with different political views from yours are working with dark forces is, of course, completely incompatible with our current system of government. Democracy depends on dialogue and persuasion, but there can be no negotiation with pure, hateful evil. The dominionists therefore feel justified in discarding any statistic, study, or argument presented by someone left of center: After all, demons lie; they can’t be trusted. Separation of church and state is not a secular point of view they disagree with; rather, it is a malevolent lie from a force that longs only for destruction. Finally, demons cannot possibly win elections without supernatural coercion—so a Democratic win is fraudulent by definition.
The targeting of liberals and leftists is already underway. A shooting at an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas, led to terrorism charges against what prosecutors described as a “North Texas Antifa Cell” and what was, in actuality, one person who opened fire at a protest and seven unaffiliated people who did not. The seven were found guilty, including one whose only crime was transporting leftist zines; all received sentences of between 30 and 70 years. The DOJ is currently charging 15 anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis with conspiracy on the grounds that they, too, are affiliated with an antifa terror cell.
When people tell you who they are, and then show you who they are: believe them.
The Democrats have reason to be optimistic heading into the midterms, in large part because disagreements over aid to Israel and war in Iran are tearing the GOP apart. “You’re seeing this emerging, factional, ideological civil war,” Taylor said. “ Trump seems to have really, in the second term, basically thrown in with the kind of NAR faction. But that has stirred up a great deal of resentment as well.”
But this battle goes beyond the midterms and the typical contours of right-left politics. We are light-years beyond politics as usual. The central political struggle of our time is not about policy or direction, but about America’s identity itself. Although our history certainly includes a heavy helping of Christian nationalism and authoritarian violence—the dominionists are not completely misguided when they lay claim to that intellectual heritage—America has been many other things, too. Ours has been a utopian project from the start: the dream of a country in which everyone is equal under the eyes of the law, where everyone can make a good living and live life on their own terms. We have never lived up to that ideal, but we have pursued it for the last 250 years with considerable success. We have a long way to go, but we’ve made tremendous progress from where we started. We must recount that legacy of success, reclaim our country from those working overtime to plunge us into a Christofascist nightmare, and rededicate ourselves to achieving the American dream.
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