BUCKNACKT'S SORDID TAWDRY BLOG
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NORTON META TAG
16 October 2024
Tens of Thousands of People Gathered in DC to Worship Tr—I Mean, Jesus A Growing Movement Seeks to Dominate Not Just Religion, But American Life& 15&12OKT24
BEWARE OF FALSE TEACHERS AND FALSE PROPHETS
SO many people are blinded by their own self-righteousness they are unaware the "christian" sharia the leadership of the new apostolic reformation sees them as expendable pawns in the nar's campaign to destroy our democratic Republic and replace it with a theocratic oligarchy. The nar is nothing more than a cult that blends ignorance, hate, misogyny, racism and greed with perversions of Judaism and Christianity. If successful the nar leadership will turn on these pawns with an Old Testament vengeance that will destroy families. BESURE to listen to the Reveal podcast on the NAR in the second article of this post. Examples of theocratic oligarchies are saudi arabia, yemen, afghanistan, iraq, israel and syria just to name a few. From Mother Jones.....
Amy Nile, of Texas, and Becky, of GeorgiaKiera Butler
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Last Saturday, tens of thousands of Christians gathered under the blazing October sun on the National Mall in Washington, DC, for an all-day prayer rally that organizers called the “Esther Call on the Mall.” While the crowd raised their hands in testimony, waved flags, and sang along with megachurch standards, the speakers paced the stage urgently, speaking, sometimes screaming, about a spiritual war for the soul of the United States. “I pray the fate of America will be given an extension of mercy,” thundered Lance Wallnau, a Texas business strategist turned Christian influencer. “Give us 48 months more mercy and grace that the church may arise.”
It wasn’t hard to figure out who this crowd imagined presiding over those 48 months. Most of the attendees I spoke with, some of them sporting MAGA gear, told me they believed that Trump had been anointed by God to lead the country. “Many people may not agree with his character, but if you look at [the Old Testament king] David, he was a murderer and an adulterer,” Linda Ilias, who had traveled from Florida, told me. “But God saw his potential. God saw that he was true king, and he he called his potential out of him, and he became the king of Israel. And so Donald Trump, I believe the Lord chose him.”
The particular mix of faith and politics on display at the rally is a hallmark of the New Apostolic Reformation, a quickly growing charismatic religious movement led by apostles and prophets who believe Christians are called to take over the government. Many of them say God speaks to them in dreams.
The “Appeal to Heaven” flag, the Israeli flag, and the “Don’t Mess With Our Kids” banner.Kiera Butler/Mother Jones
The day’s speaker lineup was a who’s who of NAR leaders. The master of ceremonies was Lou Engle, the president of Lou Engle Ministries, who has been saying for months that God had put in his mind an image of a million women gathering on the National Mall. He referred to these women as “Esthers,” a reference to the Old Testament character who stood up against the wicked king Haman, who intended to persecute the Jews.
Wallnau, who recently hosted JD Vance at an event in Pennsylvania, called the event “our governmental moment to shift something in the spirit” and bragged about his success in recruiting influential people—Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, British podcaster Russell Brand—to support his movement. “I’m making a new list,” he said. “Red Rover, Red Rover, we called Elon Musk over. We’re calling Joe Rogan over. And I like this guy [Robert F.] Kennedy, [Jr.] I want to see him be a Pentecostal Catholic.”
Also on the stage were NAR leader Dutch Sheets and California pastor Ché Ahn, both of whom were instrumental in promoting the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Not all of the speakers mentioned Trump by name, but Ahn did.
The prayer rally was deliberately held on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement and the holiest day of the year for Jews, and the rally was thick with symbols and rituals borrowed from Judaism. Some attendees wore Jewish prayer shawls and blew shofars, the rams’ horns ancient Israelites used to call armies to battle. Engle, who rocks back and forth as he speaks in a style that resembles the Jewish practice of davening, had called for the crowd to fast, just as observant Jews were doing on Yom Kippur. From a stage draped with Israeli flags, the speakers referred to the Jews as God’s “chosen people.” One speaker said she had dreamed she was “on a 35-day fast, and I’m in the Middle East in the desert alone, and all of a sudden this man comes in full rage and anger, with a turban, and he says ‘Stop praying!’ But he can’t touch me. He wants to choke me out.”
Michele Bachmann, the staunchly conservative former representative from Minnesota, echoed the support for Israel and read a text message she had received from House Speaker Mike Johnson. “He told me, ‘I genuinely wish I could be there with you today because I believe it has never been more important for us to stand together and pray together for the peace and security of Israel, and to speak with moral clarity about the fateful battle we are in between good and evil, light versus darkness.’” The crowd cheered.
“I genuinely wish I could be there with you today, because I believe it has never been more important for us to stand together and pray together for the peace and security of Israel, and to speak with moral clarity about the fateful battle we are in between good and evil, light versus darkness.”
The day’s attendance fell far short of the goal of a million people. Each of the four reserved areas could hold 15,000–18,000 people, but only the front section was full. Large contingents from Latino and Asian churches participated, and each lawn section had two Jumbotrons, one with captions in English and the other in Spanish. I spoke with a group that had traveled from Hawaii to attend the rally, and a family of seven who had saved up to make the trip from Northern Ireland. The diversity of the crowd underscored the global nature of the New Apostolic Reformation; as religious extremism researcher Fred Clarkson told me recently, the racial and ethnic diversity of the movement often “doesn’t fit with the narrative and the stereotype of who the Christian right is.”
And then there were the flags, a central feature of the spectacle. Some attendees carried blue and pink banners with the slogan “Don’t mess with our kids,” the name of an ant-trans movement started by a Portland apostle and former multi-level-marketing magnate Jenny Donnelly, who helped organize the rally. Others carried “Appeal to Heaven” flags, which date back to the American Revolution but have recently become associated with Christian nationalism—Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito made headlines when his wife, Martha-Ann, flew one at their vacation home. Many attendees waved Trump and MAGA flags.
For many of the attendees I spoke with, Trump was an almost mystical figure. Amy Nile traveled from Texas to attend the rally and was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase “Spiritual sniper.” I asked her about it. “It just means that whenever we pray as daughters of the King, we do not miss,” she explained. “We hit the target with precision and accuracy under the prompting of the Holy Spirit.” She was praying about “the glory of God coming back to Washington, and back to our nation,” and believed this election would mark the beginning of “a new time” for America. Trump, she said, had been anointed by God to “be back in our capitol, to lead the charge of turning our nation back to God.”
Vicki Kraft of Washington and Stephanie Liu of New YorkKiera Butler/Mother Jones
Vicki Kraft, who traveled from Washington state to attend the rally, wore all white and a bridal veil that, she told me, symbolized the “bride of Christ.” Kraft, who served in the Washington State House of Representatives for the 17th legislative district from 2017 to 2023, said she was “certain” the last election had been stolen from Trump. She worried about “the integrity of our elections—if that degrades and the Lord doesn’t bring that back by his grace and cause people to fear and have integrity again.”
Stephanie Liu had traveled from New York to attend the rally, but it wasn’t her first time in DC. She goes every month with a group from her Chinese American church to visit the January 6 insurrectionists in prison. “We came from a communist country,” she said. “We know Americans should not have political prisoners. But sadly, now they have more than 1,000 political prisoners.” Liu wore a T-shirt that bore the slogan “Jesus is my Savior, Trump is my president.” She explained, “Jesus is my Savior because Jesus is our Lord. He’s the greatest. He’s our strength. He is the master. But President Trump is chosen by God, and he works for we the people.” She added, “I just pray that God will protect America again, and anybody who has common sense, if they truly know the Christian value, they will support Trump.”
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There’s a quickly growing religious movement whose followers believe Christians are called to wage a spiritual battle for control of the United States. The New Apostolic Reformation, as it’s known, seeks an explicitly Christian command of the highest levels of the government, including the presidency and the Supreme Court—but its leaders are working on the hyper-local level, too.
In the latest episode of Reveal, my colleagues traveled to a church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to see how these Christian nationalists have inserted their ideology into the very fabric of local civic life rather than merely be the “head-in-the-sand, Jesus-loves-you kind of Christians.”
To Pastor Don Lamb, this is not a Christian takeover. Yet his congregation is influenced by the elusive, hard-to-pin-down New Apostolic Reformation movement whose followers believe that Christians are called to control the government and that former President Donald Trump was chosen by God.
There are prophets and apostles, and a spiritual war is underway, not just in Pennsylvania. “Estimates of Christians influenced by NAR vary widely, from 3 million to 33 million,” wrote Mother Jones reporter Kiera Butler in her feature story on the movement in our latest magazine issue. As Butler noted, “Its laser focus on starting a spiritual war to Christianize America has led the Southern Poverty Law Center to call NAR ‘the greatest threat to US democracy that you have never heard of.'”
This week, Reveal’s Najib Aminy and Butler explain what the New Apostolic Reformation is and what happens when it seeps into small-town churches like Lamb’s.
DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY
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