The Other Reason MAGA Is Melting Down Over Iran 27JUN25

 IT is difficult for me to not judge some regarding their claim of being Christian, difficult, but not impossible, so I will leave that to God as He will judge all of us. I do believe the U.S. is not and was not established as a Christian nation, thus the 1st Amendment to our constitution. I also believe the gop / greed over people-republican party is not a Christian political party ( nor is the Democratic party ).I can disagree with and totally reject and oppose some of the beliefs others have about Christianity though, and so can state the only thing I have in common with christian nationalist, christian zionist, new apostolic reformationist (nar), dominionist, and theobros is claiming Christianity as my faith. As a Christian I do believe Christ will return some day to establish His eternal kingdom. I also believe the Holy Trinity, specifically God, does not need our help to expedite Christ's return, He is all powerful and can arrange this on His own when He decides it is time. As Jesus said ( Mark 13:32 NIV ) "But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." This from Mother Jones.....

The Other Reason MAGA Is Melting Down Over Iran

Christian nationalists are fighting over Israel’s role in the “end times.”

Kiera Butler18 hours ago

When President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social on Saturday that the United States had bombed three sites in Iran, he spoke to a MAGA-verse divided. Many of his most ardent supporters—former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, for instance, and far-right political activist Laura Loomer—applauded his decision. But others—including media personality Tucker Carlson, hard-right commentator Candace Owens, and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon—were against the bombing from the beginning. “A bombing campaign against Iran will set off a war, and it will be America’s war,” Carlson warned his 16.4 million followers on X in March. “Don’t let the propagandists lie to you.”

The political fight seemed to boil down to a battle between those who believe the United States has a responsibility to its foreign allies and others who saw Trump’s decision as a betrayal of his “America First” campaign promise.

But there is another dynamic propelling the deepening rift within the MAGA faithful. Underlying the divide over intervention in the Middle East is not geopolitics, but a substantial theological schism within the community of Christian nationalists and their belief about the “end times,” or the imminent end of the world.

Broadly speaking—though there are certainly exceptions—many of the most ardent supporters of Trump’s decision to bomb Iran identify as Christian Zionists, a group that believes that Israel and the Jewish people will play a key role in bringing about the second coming of the Messiah. As Christians, they are called to hasten this scenario, says Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore and author of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy. “The mission, so to speak, is to get the Jews back to Israel and to establish themselves within Israel,” he says. “Then you fulfill the preconditions, or one of the preconditions, for the second coming.”

During his first term, Taylor noted, Trump made strong connections with influential figures in the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, a charismatic Christian movement that teaches followers to take “dominion” over all aspects of society, including government. Over the last decade or so, Christian Zionism has become an important part of NAR theology—so much so that during worship, some adherents now wear Jewish prayer shawls and blow shofars, the ram’s horn instruments that ancient Israelites used to call troops to battle and still features in some Jewish holidays. This is an example of what Taylor refers to as philosemitism—the idea of loving Jewish customs and cultures. But within end-times theology lurks a dark side to Christian Zionists’ fixation on Judaism. Once the Messiah arrives, many Christian Zionists are convinced that Jews will convert en masse to Christianity; in many versions, those who don’t convert will perish. “If you actually read up on antisemitism and philosemitism,” Taylor says, “they really are two sides of the same coin.”

Even before the bombs were dropped Saturday, Christian Zionists were hailing a possible strike as divinely ordained. One of their most prominent and politically powerful adherents is former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who currently serves as the US ambassador to Israel. On a podcast last year, Huckabee described himself as an “unapologetic, unreformed Zionist,” adding, “there really isn’t such a thing” as Palestine. He refers to the West Bank exclusively by its biblical name, “Judea and Samaria.” In the Jerusalem Post’s list of the most influential Christian Zionists, Huckabee comes in second. He follows former Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, who recently helped launch an Israel institute at Regent University, a Christian college in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

On June 17, four days before the United States bombed Iran, Huckabee texted Trump, comparing him to “Truman in 1945,” who faced the existential decision of whether to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. “God spared you in Butler, PA to be the most consequential President in a century—maybe ever,” Huckabee wrote. “I believe you will hear from heaven and that voice is far more important than mine or ANYONE else’s.”

Hours before news of the bombing broke, Lance Wallnau, an influential Texas NAR leader with robust ties to the Trump administration—last year, he hosted a Pennsylvania campaign event for JD Vance—warned his 129,000 followers on X, “Satan would love to crush Israel, humiliate the United States, destroy President Trump’s hope of recovery for America, and plunge the world into war.” But then he reassured them: “That’s not going to happen. Why? I was reminded again just a few moments ago what the Lord told me about Donald Trump in 2015.” He explained that he had received a message from God that Trump was a “modern-day Cyrus,” an Old Testament Persian king whom God used to free the Jews, his chosen people. In a video posted two days after the bombing, Wallnau concluded that the prophecy was coming true. “Jesus is coming back, and I believe this is all part of him setting the stage for his return,” he said.

In Trump’s speech shortly after the bombing, he appeared to give a presidential nod to the Christian Zionist crowd, saying: “I want to thank, in particular, God. I want to just say, ‘We love you, God!’” In those words, some evangelicals thought they heard an affirmation of a common Christian Zionist refrain: “God will bless those who bless Israel.” Eric Metaxas, an evangelical radio host who has collaborated with Wallnau and was present at the rally leading up to the January 6 attack on the Capitol, tweeted to his 240,000 followers, “Trump was obviously choked up & meant it,” he wrote. “No president has ever said anything like that. An extraordinary & historic public declaration of faith. God WILL bless this nation. Hallelujah.”

Taylor noted that another NAR leader, Colorado evangelist Dutch Sheets, had a similar message for his 359,000 YouTube subscribers Monday. “We are entering this time,” he said. “Millions of [Iranians] will come to Christ. Be assured: God is involved in this war.” A key figure in the campaign to overturn the 2020 election and the leadup to January 6, Sheets has long held that Trump is a divinely appointed leader.

The Heritage Foundation, the powerful right-wing think tank that was the driving force behind the Project 2025 roadmap for Trump’s second term, also celebrated the Iran strikes. A particularly vocal Heritage staffer on this issue is Victoria Coates, vice president of the group’s Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy. Coates, a Christian, leads Project Esther, the foundation’s roadmap for quashing the pro-Palestine movement in the United States; the name is a reference to Queen Esther, a biblical heroine who saved the Jews in Persia from slaughter. Coates is also the author of the 2024 book The Battle for the Jewish State: How Israel―And America―Can Win. In a statement the Heritage Foundation released the day after the attack, Coates made the case that by bombing Iran, the United States actually progressed toward ending the age-old conflicts in the Middle East. “Now that Iran’s self-defeating dreams of nuclear military power have been decimated,” she said, “we are closer to peace.”

Unlike the Christian Zionists, some Christian members of the crowd that criticizes Trump’s decision to bomb Iran believe modern-day Israel has little to do with the Holy Land of the Bible. In fact, some hold that the Christian church now plays the role that Israel itself once did in ancient times, explains Taylor, the religion scholar. He describes the dynamic as more of the absorption of Jewish and Gentile Christians into a single church unit, which then becomes “a kind of replacement theology” in which Christianity supersedes Judaism and “replaces it.”

One group that strongly rejects the idea that Israel and the Jewish people are key to the second coming is the TheoBros, mostly millennial, extremely online men who proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Great fans of Trump, in the wake of the US bombing, some of the TheoBros’ comments have veered into the terrain of antisemitism. The day after Trump announced the bombing, Stephen Wolfe, author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism, tweeted to his 31,000 followers, “2% of the population demand 100% of the wars,” presumably an oblique reference to the roughly 2 percent of the American population that identifies as Jewish. (Wolfe did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.)

The same day, Texas pastor Joel Webbon, another Christian nationalist TheoBro, weighed in, tweeting to his 39,000 followers, “Gentile Christians are not second class citizens of heaven, and Jews aren’t special.” On a Monday airing of his podcast, he clarified that his disdain for Israel did not amount to tacit support for Muslims, using slurs as he referred to adherents of that faith. “I’m not a fan of sand demons and the sand people who worship them, and I’m also not a fan of the synagogue of Satan.” Later in the same episode, he said, “My son is not going to go to war and bleed out and die for my country, with its gay rainbow flag, defending Judaism and Christ-rejecting, hating, spitting-on-Christians Israel, no sir.”  

One of the loudest critics of the Iran strikes is right-wing media personality and erstwhile Trump fan Tucker Carlson—and on this issue, he has clashed dramatically with the Christian Zionist crowd that sees Israel and Judaism as one and the same. A few days before the bombing, Carlson interviewed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a Christian Zionist who strongly supports American military action in Iran. The exchange was a microcosm of the broader MAGA divide. Cruz accused Carlson of having an “obsession with Israel,” to which Carlson responded, “Oh, I’m an antisemite now?” and added, “Shame on you for conflating Jews and Israel.”

Cruz was apoplectic. “Give me another reason, if you’re not an antisemite, why the obsession with Israel?”

Carlson mainly sees the Middle East conflict as a geopolitical quagmire, not a spiritual battle for a holy land. This stance is likely influenced by the “America First” anti-interventionist crowd with which he’s long been aligned. But he, too, has strong ties to the TheoBro world. Earlier this year, he hosted Andrew Isker, a podcaster and pastor who is part of a movement to build a Christian nationalist community in Appalachia and regularly tweets about his desire for Jews to convert to Christianity. He also strongly endorses the idea that Jews no longer have any particular claim to Israel.

“You talk a lot about the Old Covenant and this idea of Jews and Gentiles. Is that all done now, are they one?” Tucker asked Isker.

“Absolutely,” Isker replied. “In the New Testament, Paul makes it clear—there is ‘neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free.’ In Christ, we are one true Israel. The old dividing lines are abolished.” Carlson chuckled. “To come to the opposite conclusion does sort of make you wonder—have you actually read the Bible?”

A curious figure in the religious MAGA infighting over Iran is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. While Hegseth currently attends a TheoBro-adjacent church, in the past, he was a devoted Christian Zionist. In 2018, when he was still a Fox News anchor, he gave a speech in Jerusalem at a conference hosted by the right-wing Israeli news site Israel National News. “If you walk the ground today, you understand there is no such thing as the outcome of a two-state solution,” he said. “There is one state.”

In the same speech, he referred to the return of the prophesied Jewish diaspora to Israel, the event that Christian Zionists believe will herald the second coming of the Messiah. “There’s no reason why the miracle of the reestablishment of the Temple on the Temple Mount is not possible,” he said. “I don’t know how it would happen. You don’t know how it would happen. But I know that it could happen.”

Despite his current church’s beliefs, Hegseth appears to be holding fast to his Christian Zionist roots—and his allegiance to Trump. At a Wednesday press conference, the defense secretary railed against the media for reporting on intelligence that found that Iran’s nuclear program has not been completely destroyed. Shortly after, he tweeted, “I will always defend @POTUS leadership, especially our skilled and amazing warfighters.”

To Taylor, the divide between the Christian Zionists and their also-Christian detractors reveals a deeper truth about the theological clashes within the MAGA movement. “Everyone can kind of be pro-Trump and pro-MAGA, but underneath that, there are real theological and ideological disagreements, and especially in around Jews and Judaism,” he says. “The ideological rift, even among the Christian Trump supporters, is very, very real.”

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Rick Perry's Army of God from THE TEXAS OBSERVER 3AUG11

WHAT I find most interesting about these people, these Christians, is their movement and organizations are based not on the teachings of Jesus Christ but of the prophet Joel. Time after time Christ himself repudiated the perversion of Jewish faith and the hypocrisy of the Jewish theocracy, and brought the world a new path to salvation and a personal relationship with God through his sacrifice on the cross.  Unfortunately the new apostolic reformation (nar) policies lack the compassion and social justice Christ taught in The Beatitudes and Matthew 25. They may end up being successful in getting one of their chosen elected president, but considering their real gods are power and money I wouldn't look for God's blessings to shower down on America.

A little-known movement of radical Christians and self-proclaimed prophets wants to infiltrate government, and Rick Perry might be their man.

by Forrest Wilder

illustration by Mario Zucca

Listen to Forrest Wilder speak with KUT's Jennifer Stayton about this story.
On September 28, 2009, at 1:40 p.m., God’s messengers visited Rick Perry.
On this day, the Lord’s messengers arrived in the form of two Texas pastors, Tom Schlueter of Arlington and Bob Long of San Marcos, who called on Perry in the governor’s office inside the state Capitol. Schlueter and Long both oversee small congregations, but they are more than just pastors. They consider themselves modern-day apostles and prophets, blessed with the same gifts as Old Testament prophets or New Testament apostles.
The pastors told Perry of God’s grand plan for Texas. A chain of powerful prophecies had proclaimed that Texas was “The Prophet State,” anointed by God to lead the United States into revival and Godly government. And the governor would have a special role.
The day before the meeting, Schlueter had received a prophetic message from Chuck Pierce, an influential prophet from Denton, Texas. God had apparently commanded Schlueter—through Pierce—to “pray by lifting the hand of the one I show you that is in the place of civil rule.”
Gov. Perry, it seemed.
Schlueter had prayed before his congregation: “Lord Jesus I bring to you today Gov. Perry. ... I am just bringing you his hand and I pray Lord that he will grasp ahold of it. For if he does you will use him mightily.”
And grasp ahold the governor did. At the end of their meeting, Perry asked the two pastors to pray over him. As the pastors would later recount, the Lord spoke prophetically as Schlueter laid his hands on Perry, their heads bowed before a painting of the Battle of the Alamo. Schlueter “declared over [Perry] that there was a leadership role beyond Texas and that Texas had a role beyond what people understand,” Long later told his congregation.
So you have to wonder: Is Rick Perry God’s man for president?
Schlueter, Long and other prayer warriors in a little-known but increasingly influential movement at the periphery of American Christianity seem to think so. The movement is called the New Apostolic Reformation. Believers fashion themselves modern-day prophets and apostles. They have taken Pentecostalism, with its emphasis on ecstatic worship and the supernatural, and given it an adrenaline shot.
The movement’s top prophets and apostles believe they have a direct line to God. Through them, they say, He communicates specific instructions and warnings. When mankind fails to heed the prophecies, the results can be catastrophic: earthquakes in Japan, terrorist attacks in New York, and economic collapse. On the other hand, they believe their God-given decrees have ended mad cow disease in Germany and produced rain in drought-stricken Texas.
Their beliefs can tend toward the bizarre. Some consider Freemasonry a “demonic stronghold” tantamount to witchcraft. The Democratic Party, one prominent member believes, is controlled by Jezebel and three lesser demons. Some prophets even claim to have seen demons at public meetings. They’ve taken biblical literalism to an extreme. In Texas, they engage in elaborate ceremonies involving branding irons, plumb lines and stakes inscribed with biblical passages driven into the earth of every Texas county.
If they simply professed unusual beliefs, movement leaders wouldn’t be remarkable. But what makes the New Apostolic Reformation movement so potent is its growing fascination with infiltrating politics and government. The new prophets and apostles believe Christians—certain Christians—are destined to not just take “dominion” over government, but stealthily climb to the commanding heights of what they term the “Seven Mountains” of society, including the media and the arts and entertainment world. They believe they’re intended to lord over it all. As a first step, they’re leading an “army of God” to commandeer civilian government.
In Rick Perry, they may have found their vessel. And the interest appears to be mutual.

In all the media attention surrounding Perry’s flirtation with a run for the presidency, the governor’s budding relationship with the leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation movement has largely escaped notice. But perhaps not for long. Perry has given self-proclaimed prophets and apostles leading roles in The Response, a much-publicized Christians-only prayer rally that Perry is organizing at Houston’s Reliant Stadium on Aug. 6.
The Response has engendered widespread criticism of its deliberate blurring of church and state and for the involvement of the American Family Association, labeled a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its leadership’s homophobic and anti-Muslim statements. But it’s the involvement of New Apostolic leaders that’s more telling about Perry’s convictions and campaign strategy.
Eight members of The Response “leadership team” are affiliated with the New Apostolic Reformation movement. They’re employed or associated with groups like TheCall or the International House of Prayer (IHOP), Kansas City-based organizations at the forefront of the movement. The long list of The Response’s official endorsers—posted on the event’s website—reads like a Who’s Who of the apostolic-prophetic crowd, including movement founder C. Peter Wagner.
In a recent interview with the Observer, Schlueter explained that The Response is divinely inspired. “The government of our nation was basically founded on biblical principles,” he says. “When you have a governmental leader call a time of fasting and prayer, I believe that there has been a significant shift in our understanding as far as who is ultimately in charge of our nation—which we believe God is.”
Perry certainly knows how to speak the language of the new apostles. The genesis of The Response, Perry says, comes from the Book of Joel, an obscure slice of the Old Testament that’s popular with the apostolic crowd.
“With the economy in trouble, communities in crisis and people adrift in a sea of moral relativism, we need God's help,” Perry says in a video message on The Response website. “That's why I'm calling on Americans to pray and fast like Jesus did and as God called the Israelites to do in the Book of Joel.”
The reference to Joel likely wasn’t lost on Perry’s target audience. Prominent movement leaders strike the same note. Lou Engle, who runs TheCall, told a Dallas-area Assemblies of God congregation in April that “His answer in times of crisis is Joel 2.”
Mike Bickle, a jock-turned-pastor who runs the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, a sort of command headquarters and university for young End Times enthusiasts, taught a 12-part series on Joel last year.
The Book of Joel describes a crippling drought and economic crisis—sound familiar?—in the land of Judah. The calamities, in Joel’s time and ours, are “sent by God to cause a wicked, oppressive, and rebellious nation to repent,” Bickle told his students.
To secure God's blessing, Joel commands the people to gather in “sacred assembly” to pray, fast, and repent.
More ominously, Bickle teaches that Joel is an “instruction manual” for the imminent End Times. It is “essential to help equip people to be prepared for the unique dynamics occurring in the years leading up to Jesus’ return,” he has said.
The views espoused by Bickle, Engle and other movement leaders occupy the radical fringe of Christian fundamentalism. Their beliefs may seem bizarre even to many conservative evangelicals. Yet Perry has a knack for finding the forefront of conservative grassroots. Prayer warriors, apostles and prophets are filled with righteous energy and an increasing appetite for power in the secular political world. Their zeal and affiliation with charismatic independent churches, the fastest-growing subset of American Christianity, offers obvious benefits for Perry if he runs for president.
There are enormous political risks, too. Mainstream voters may be put off by the movement’s extreme views or discomfited by talk of self-proclaimed prophets “infiltrating” government.
Catherine Frazier, a spokesperson for the governor’s office, wouldn’t respond to specific questions but wrote in an email, “The Response event is about coming together in prayer to seek wisdom and guidance from God to the challenges that confront our nation. That is where the governor's focus is, and he welcomes those that wish to join him in this common cause.”
For the moment, Perry’s relationship with the New Apostles is little known. Few in Texas GOP circles say they’ve ever heard of them. “I wish I could help you,” said Steve Munisteri, the state Republican Party chair. “I’ve never even heard of that movement.”
“For the most part I don't know them,” said Cathie Adams, former head of the Texas Eagle Forum and a veteran conservative activist.
Nonetheless, Perry may be counting on apostles and prophets to help propel him to the White House. And they hope Perry will lead them out of the wilderness into the promised land.
Listen closely to Perry’s recent public statements and you’ll occasionally hear him uttering New Apostle code words. In June, Perry defended himself against Texas critics on Fox News, telling host Neil Cavuto that “a prophet is generally not loved in their hometown.”
It seemed an odd comment. It’s the rare politician who compares himself to a prophet, and many viewers likely passed it off as a flub. But to the members of a radical new Christian movement, the remark made perfect sense.

The phrase “New Apostolic Reformation” comes from the movement’s intellectual godfather, C. Peter Wagner, who has called it, a bit vaingloriously, “the most radical change in the way of doing Christianity since the Protestant Reformation.”
Boasting aside, Wagner is an important figure in evangelical circles. He helped formulate the “church growth” model, a blueprint for worship that helped spawn modern mega-churches and international missions. In the 1990s, he turned away from the humdrum business of “harvesting souls” in mega-churches and embarked on a more revolutionary project.
He began promoting the notion that God is raising up modern-day prophets and apostles vested with extraordinary authority to bring about social transformation and usher in the Kingdom of God.
In 2006, Wagner published Apostles Today: Biblical Government for Biblical Power, in which he declared a “Second Apostolic Age.” The first age had occurred after Jesus’ biblical resurrection, when his apostles traveled Christendom spreading the gospel. Commissioned by Jesus himself, the 12 apostles acted as His agents. The second apostolic age, Wagner announced, began “around the year 2001.”
“Apostles,” he wrote, “are the generals in the army of God.”
One of the primary tasks of the new prophets and apostles is to hear God’s will and then act on it. Sometimes this means changing the world supernaturally. Wagner tells of the time in October 2001 when, at a huge prayer conference in Germany, he “decreed that mad cow disease would come to an end in Europe and the UK.” As it turned out, the last reported case of human mad cow disease had occurred the day before. “I am not implying that I have any inherent supernatural power,” Wagner wrote. “I am implying that when apostles hear the word of God clearly and when they decree His will, history can change.”
Claims of such powers are rife among Wagner’s followers. Cindy Jacobs—a self-described “respected prophet” and Wagner protégée who runs a Dallas-area group called Generals International—claims to have predicted the recent earthquakes in Japan. “God had warned us that shaking was coming,” she wrote in Charisma magazine, an organ for the movement. “This doesn’t mean that it was His desire for it to happen, but more of the biblical fulfillment that He doesn’t do anything without first warning through His servants.”
There is, of course, a corollary to these predictive abilities: Horrible things happen when advice goes unheeded.
Last year Jacobs warned that if America didn’t return to biblical values and support Israel, God would cause a “tumbling of the economy and dark days will come,” according to Charisma. To drive the point home, Jacobs and other right-wing allies—including The Response organizers Lou Engle and California pastor Jim Garlow—organized a 40-day “Pray and Act” effort in the lead-up to the 2010 elections.
Unlike other radical religious groups, the New Apostles believe political activism is part of their divine mission. “Whereas their spiritual forefathers in the Pentecostal movement would have eschewed involvement in politics, the New Apostles believe they have a divine mandate to rescue a decaying American society,” said Margaret Poloma, a practicing Pentecostal and professor of sociology at the University of Akron. “Their apostolic vision is to usher in the Kingdom of God.”
“Where does God stop and they begin?” she asks. “I don't think they know the difference.”
Poloma is one of the few academics who has closely studied the apostolic movement. It’s largely escaped notice, in part, because it lacks the traditional structures of either politics or religion, says Rachel Tabachnick, a researcher who has covered the movement extensively for Talk2Action.org, a left-leaning site that covers the religious right.
“It’s fairly recent and it just doesn’t fit into people’s pre-conceived notions,” she says. “They can’t get their head around something that isn’t denominational.”
The movement operates through a loose but interlocking array of churches, ministries, councils and seminaries—many of them in Texas. But mostly it holds together through the friendships and alliances of its prophets and apostles.
The Response itself seems patterned on TheCall, day-long worship and prayer rallies usually laced with anti-gay and anti-abortion messages.  TheCall—also the name of a Kansas City-based organization—is led by Lou Engle, an apostle who looks a bit like Mr. Magoo and has the unnerving habit of rocking back and forth while shouting at his audience in a raspy voice. (Engle is also closely associated with the International House of Prayer—, Mike Bickle’s 24/7 prayer center in Kansas City.) Engle frequently mobilizes his followers in the service of earthly causes, holding raucous prayer events in California to help pass Prop 8, the anti-gay marriage initiative, and making an appearance in Uganda last year to lend aid to those trying to pass a law that would have imposed the death penalty on homosexuals. But Engle's larger aim is Christian control of government.
“The church’s vocation is to rule history with God,” he has said. “We are called into the very image of the Trinity himself, that we are to be His friends and partners for world dominion.”
“It sounds so fringe but yet it’s not fringe,” Tabachnick says. “They’ve been working with Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Sam Brownback, and now Rick Perry. ... They are becoming much more politically noticeable.”
Some of the fiercest critics of the New Apostolic Reformation come from within the Pentecostal and charismatic world. The Assemblies of God Church, the largest organized Pentecostal denomination, specifically repudiated self-proclaimed prophets and apostles in 2000, calling their creed a “deviant teaching” that could rapidly “become dictatorial, presumptuous, and carnal.”
Assemblies authorities also rejected the notion that the church is supposed to assume dominion over earthly institutions, labeling it “unscriptural triumphalism.”
The New Apostles talk about taking dominion over American society in pastoral terms. They refer to the “Seven Mountains” of society: family, religion, arts and entertainment, media, government, education, and business. These are the nerve centers of society that God (or his people) must control.
Asked about the meaning of the Seven Mountains, Schlueter says, “God's kingdom just can’t be expressed on Sunday morning for two hours. God’s kingdom has to be expressed in media and government and education. It’s not like our goal is to have a Bible on every child’s desk. That’s not the goal. The goal is to hopefully have everyone acknowledge that God’s in charge of us regardless.”
But climbing those mountains sounds a little more specific on Sunday mornings. Schlueter has bragged to his congregation of meetings with Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, state Sen. Brian Birdwell, and the Arlington City Council. He recently told a church in Victoria that state Rep. Phil King, a conservative Republican from Weatherford, had allowed him to use King’s office at the Capitol to make calls and organize.
“We’re going to influence it,” Schlueter told his congregation. “We’re going to infiltrate it, not run from it. I know why God’s doing what he’s doing ... He’s just simply saying, ‘Tom I’ve given you authority in a governmental authority, and I need you to infiltrate the governmental mountain. Just do it, it’s no big deal.’ I was talking with [a member of the congregation] the other day. She’s going to start infiltrating. A very simple process. She’s going to join the Republican Party, start going to all their meetings. Some [members] are already doing that.”

Doug Stringer, a relatively low-profile apostle, is one of the movement’s more complex figures—and one of the few people associated with The Response who returned my calls. His assignment for The Response: mobilizing the faithful from around the nation. Though he's friendly with the governor and spoke at the state GOP convention, Stringer says he’s a political independent, “morally conservative” but with a “heart for social justice.”
Stringer runs Somebody Cares America, a nonprofit combining evangelism with charitable assistance to the indigent and victims of natural disasters. In 2009, Perry recognized Stringer in his State of the State address for his role in providing aid to Texans devastated by Hurricane Ike.
Stringer’s message is that The Response will be apolitical, non-partisan, even ecumenical. The goal, he says, is to “pray for personal repentance and corporate repentance on behalf of the church, not against anybody else.”
I ask him about his involvement with the Texas Apostolic Prayer Network, which is overseen by Schlueter. Six of the nine people listed as network “advisors” are involved in The Response, including Stringer, Cindy Jacobs and Waco pastor Ramiro Peña. The Texas group is part of a larger 50-state network of prophets, apostles and prayer intercessors called the Heartland Apostolic Network, which itself overlaps with the Reformation Prayer Network run by Jacobs. The Texas Apostolic Prayer Network is further subdivided into sixteen regions, each with its own director.
Some of these groups’ beliefs and activities will be startling, even to many conservative evangelicals. For example, in 2010 Texas prayer warriors visited every Masonic lodge in the state attempting to cast out the demon Baal, whom they believe controls Freemasonry. At each site, the warriors read a decree—written in legalese—divorcing Baal from the “People of God” and recited a lengthy prayer referring to Freemasonry as “witchcraft.”
Asked whether he shares these views, Stringer launches into a long treatise about secrecy during which he manages to lump together Mormonism, Freemasonry and college fraternities.
“I think there has been a lot of damage and polarization over decades because of the influence of some areas of Freemasonry that have been corrupted,” he says. “In fact, if you look at the original founder of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith, he had a huge influence by Masonry. Bottom-line, anything that is so secretive that has to be hidden in darkness ... is not biblical. The Bible says that everything needs to be brought to the light. That’s why I would never be part of a fraternity, like on campus.”

Why would Perry throw in with this crowd?
One possible answer is that he’s an opportunistic politician running for president who’s trying to get right, if not with Jesus, with a particular slice of the GOP base.
Perry himself may have the gift of foresight. He seems preternaturally capable of spotting The Next Big Thing and positioning himself as an authentic leader of grassroots movements before they overtake other politicians. Think of the prescient way he hitched his political future to the Tea Party. In 2009 Perry spoke at a Tax Day protest and infamously flirted with Texas secession. At the time it seemed crazy. In retrospect it seems brilliant.
Now, he’s made common cause with increasingly influential fundamentalists from the bleeding fringe of American Christianity at a time when the political influence of mainstream evangelicals seems to be fading.
For decades evangelicals have been key to Republican presidential victories, but much has changed since George W. Bush named Jesus as his favorite philosopher at an Iowa debate during the 2000 presidential campaign. There is much turbulence among evangelicals. There’s no undisputed leader, a Jerry Falwell or a Pat Robertson, to bring the “tribes”—to use Stringer’s phrase—together. So you go where the momentum is. There is palpable excitement in the prayer movement and among the New Apostles that the nation is on the cusp of a major spiritual and political revival.
“On an exciting note, we are in the beginning stages of the Third Great Awakening,” Jacobs told Trinity Church in Cedar Hill earlier this year. (Trinity’s pastor, Jim Hennesy, is also an apostle and endorser of The Response. Trinity is probably best known for its annual Halloween “Hell House” that tries to scare teens into accepting Jesus.) “We are seeing revivals pop up all over the United States. ... Fires are breaking out all over the place. And we are going to see great things happening.”
Moreover, various media outlets have documented a possible coalescing of religious-right leaders around Perry’s candidacy. Time magazine reported on a June conference call among major evangelical leaders, including religious historian David Barton and San Antonio pastor John Hagee, in which they “agreed that Rick Perry would be their preferred candidate if he entered the race,” according to the magazine.
Journalist Tabachnick says politicians are attracted to the apostolic movement because of the valuable organizational structure and databases the leadership has built.
“I believe it’s because they’ve built such a tremendous communication network,” she says, pointing to the 50-state prayer networks plugged into churches and ministries. “They found ways to work that didn’t involve the institutional structures that many denominations have. They don’t have big offices, headquarters. They work more like a political campaign.”
But if the apostles present a broad organizing opportunity, the political risks for Perry are equally large.
In 2008 GOP nominee John McCain was forced to reject Hagee’s endorsement after media scrutiny of the pastor’s anti-Catholic comments. Similarly, Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign nearly fell apart when voters saw video of controversial sermons by the candidate’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright. If anything, Perry is venturing even further into the spiritual wilderness. The faith of the New Apostles will be unfamiliar, strange, and scary to many Americans.
Consider Alice Patterson. She’s in charge of mobilizing churches in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma for The Response. A field director for the Texas Christian Coalition in the 1990s, she’s now a significant figure in apostolic circles and runs a San Antonio-based organization called Justice at the Gate.
Patterson, citing teachings by Cindy Jacobs, Chuck Pierce and Lou Engle, has written that the Democratic Party is controlled by “an invisible network of evil comprising an unholy structure” unleashed by the biblical figure Jezebel.
Patterson claims to have seen demons with her own eyes. In 2009, at a prophetic meeting in Houston, Patterson says she saw the figure of Jezebel and “saw Jezebel’s skirt lifted to expose tiny Baal, Asherah, and a few other spirits. There they were—small, cowering, trembling little spirits that were only ankle high on Jezebel’s skinny legs.”
Those revelations are contained in Patterson’s 2010 book Bridging the Racial and Political Divide: How Godly Politics Can Transform a Nation. Patterson’s aim, as she makes clear in her book, is getting black and brown evangelicals to vote Republican and support conservative causes. A major emphasis among the New Apostles is racial reconciliation and recruitment of minorities and women. The apostolic prayer networks often perform elaborate ceremonies in which participants dress up in historical garb and repent for racial sins.
The formula—overcoming racism to achieve multiracial fundamentalism—has caught on in the apostolic movement. Some term the approach the “Rainbow Right,” and in fact The Response has a high quotient of African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans in leadership positions.
Lou Engle, for example, is making a big push to recruit black activists into the anti-abortion ranks. “We’re looking for the new breed of black prophets to arise and forgive us our baggage,” he said at Trinity Assemblies of God, “and then lead us out of victimization and into the healing of a nation, to stop the shedding of innocent blood.”
Rick Perry is a white southern conservative male who may end up running against a black president. It doesn’t take a prophet to see that he could use friends like these.
There’s one other possible reason for Perry’s flirtation with the apostles, and it has nothing to do with politics. He could be a true believer.
Perry has never been shy about proclaiming his faith. He was raised a Methodist and still occasionally attends Austin’s genteel Tarrytown United Methodist Church. But according to an October 2010 story in the Austin American-Statesman, he now spends more Sundays at West Austin’s Lake Hills Church, a non-denominational evangelical church that features a rock band and pop-culture references. The more effusive approach to religion clearly appealed to Perry. “They dunk,” Perry told the American-Statesman. “Methodists sprinkle.”
Still, attending an evangelical church is a long way from believing in modern-day apostles and demons in plain sight. Could Perry actually buy into this stuff?
He’s certainly convinced the movement’s leaders. “He’s a very deep man of faith and I know that sometimes causes problems for people because they think he’s making decisions based on his faith,” Schlueter says. He pauses a beat. “Well, I hope so.”
But the danger of associating with extremists is apparent even to Schlueter, the man who took God’s message to Perry in September 2009. “It could be political suicide to do what he’s doing,” Schlueter says. “Man, this is the last thing he’d want to do if it were concerning a presidential bid. It could be very risky.”

WATCH Rachel Maddow’s coverage of The Response.

Forrest Wilder

Forrest Wilder, a native of Wimberley, Texas, joined the Observer as a staff writer in April 2005. Forrest specializes in environmental reporting and runs the “Forrest for the Trees” blog. Forrest graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in December 2003 with a degree in Anthropology.
Website: www.texasobserver.org/forrestforthetrees E-mail: wilder@texasobserver.org

New Exposé Reveals Rick Perry's Close Ties to Radical Evangelicals and Self-Proclaimed Prophets from ALTERNET 12AUG11

gov rick perry r TX is another hack from the Lone Star State that is an expert in deception and manipulation. His use of religion is frightening, the symbolism and "scriptural" propaganda to spread fear among voters is similar to other notorious right wing regimes of the not so distant past. He is on a very dangerous path, one this country will come regret if he would be elected president. If his faith actually guided his administration there would be no distortion of his governing record in Texas, no manipulation of the numbers concerning job creation and the state budget. Social justice and morality would guide his decision making, not the greed and lust for power and money that has prevailed during his terms in office. Compare the welfare the least among us as described in Matthew 25 and the policies of the perry governorship and then you can decide what kind of Christian he really is. From AlterNet....

A group of radical Christians and self-proclaimed prophets from a little-known movement called the New Apostolic Reformation have been quietly pushing for Perry.

August 12, 2011  |  

AMY GOODMAN: Republican Governor Rick Perry of Texas is expected to announce Saturday he’ll be entering the presidential race. Perry will make the announcement at a conference in South Carolina organized by Erick Erickson’s RedState.com. Perry is then scheduled to travel to New Hampshire, site of the first 2012 presidential primary, and then on to Iowa.

In 2000, Perry succeeded then-Governor George W. Bush, who resigned to become president. Perry went on to win three gubernatorial terms, in 2002, 2006 and 2010. Early Perry backers, at least presidential backers, have heralded him as being behind the so-called Texas economic miracle. This TV ad has already begun airing in Iowa.

JOBS FOR IOWA AD: What if we had a candidate for president with a real record of creating jobs, a conservative with proven leadership in tough times, the leader of a state that created more jobs in the past two years than the other 49 states combined, with no state income tax and no deficit, a decade of balanced budgets? What if we had a better option for president? We do. Rick Perry. Jobs for Iowa is responsible for the content of this advertising.

AMY GOODMAN: But many have questioned Governor Perry’s economic claims in Texas. The Pulitzer Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman pointed out recent economic data suggest the Texas budget gap is worse than New York’s, about as bad as California’s, not quite up to New Jersey levels.

Questions have also arisen over Governor Perry’s close ties to the radical wing of the Christian evangelical movement. On Saturday, Perry helped organize and spoke at a controversial seven-hour Christian prayer rally in Houston called "The Response: A Call to Prayer for a Nation in Crisis."

GOV. RICK PERRY: Father, our heart breaks for America. We see discord at home. We see fear in the marketplace. We see anger in the halls of government. And as a nation, we have forgotten who made us, who protects us, who blesses us. And for that, we cry out for Your forgiveness.

AMY GOODMAN: Governor Perry, leading the prayer session. It drew 30,000 participants, received national press. Little attention was paid to the Christian evangelicals Perry worked with to organize the event.

The Texas Observer has just published an explosive new article titled "Rick Perry’s Army of God." It exposes how a group of radical Christians and self-proclaimed prophets from a little-known movement known as New Apostolic Reformation have been quietly pushing for Perry to run for president. The author of the article, Forrest Wilder, is a staff reporter at theTexas Observer. He’s joining us from Austin.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Forrest. Talk about this event that took place. And you were there. Describe what it was like.

FORREST WILDER: Well, the response was patterned after what’s "TheCall," and TheCall are events that are put on by a group by the same name out of Kansas City. They’re day-long events of prayer and fasting. They’re usually laced with pretty hardcore anti-abortion and anti-gay messages. There was a call recently where the leader of it, Lou Engle, called for a generation of martyrs. So, The Response, in its programming and its feel, was very similar to TheCall, and that’s largely because the folks that were organizing The Response, some of the primary organizers work for TheCall. So it was an explicitly not just Christian, but explicitly evangelical or fundamentalist-type rally—same kind of music, same sort of tone, same kind of themes that ran throughout the event, and a lot of, really, the same people that move in a certain circle on the religious right.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the people that Perry organized this event with, who they were, what they said. This was characterized in the mainstream media as very much a non-political event. You had a very different take on it.

FORREST WILDER: Well, as I write about in the article, the organizers and the endorsers of the event largely come out of what’s called the New Apostolic Reformation movement. And the founder of this movement, the sort of intellectual godfather, is a guy named Peter Wagner, and he’s termed it "the most radical change in the way of doing Christianity since the Protestant Reformation." Little bit of a grandiose statement, but it is really this movement that’s happening at the bleeding edge of evangelical Christianity in this country. And it wasn’t—it’s not really widely known, although it does have growing influence.

And I think one of the defining characteristics of it is this idea that there are modern-day prophets and apostles, that the prophets and apostles didn’t end in the Bible, and we have them now walking amongst us. And so, the leadership of the movement are self-proclaimed prophets and apostles. They hold themselves out as such, and they’re recognized as such by their followers. So this was, by and large, the set of individuals and organizations that were running The Response.

And, you know, another aspect of their sort of theology is this idea of the "Seven Mountains," and it’s a form of Christian dominionism. They’re not the only sort of tendency or movement within American Christianity that has a form of dominionism, but this one—this doctrine is kind of a little unusual. The Seven Mountains are basically the power centers of society, so government, family, media, arts and entertainment, education, and so on and so forth. And they believe that Christians, or a certain type of Christian, are to take control of the Seven Mountains and initiate, you know, godly government, biblical values, inject them into these institutions in preparation for the installation of the Kingdom of God on earth and Jesus’ return. So that’s kind of who Perry has thrown in with in this event.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to play another clip from the event. One official endorser of the Response prayer gathering was Cindy Jacobs, the self-declared Christian prophet. Earlier this year, she made headlines when she recorded a video declaring a connection between the repeal of "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" and the sudden death of thousands of blackbirds in Arkansas.

CINDY JACOBS: According to biblical principles, a marriage is between a man and a woman. So, we have to say, what happens when a nation makes a decision that is against God’s principles? Well, often what happens is the nature itself will begin to talk to us. For instance, violent storms, flooding. There’s something interesting we have been watching. Let’s talk about this Arkansas pattern and say, could it be a pattern? We’re going to watch and see. But the blackbirds fell to the ground in Beebe, Arkansas. Well, the governor of Arkansas’s name is Beebe. And also, there was something put out of Arkansas called "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell," by a former governor, this was proposed, Bill Clinton.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Cindy Jacobs. Who is she?

FORREST WILDER: Cindy Jacobs is sort of one of the kind of leading prophets within the movement. She’s based out of Dallas. She frequently issues these type of prophecies. And they’re taken very seriously by those who follow her and admire her. I mean, she is sort of, you know, a rock star in this sort of prophetic circuit. She endorsed—she was an endorser of The Response, although I did not see her appear on stage. She certainly didn’t say anything. I don’t know if she was actually there, though some of the other prophets and apostles were.

And some of their prophecies are very specific. I mean, she has also said that she predicted the tsunamis in Japan, and not just that, but that that happened because the Japanese hadn’t sufficiently come to Christianity, so, in essence, God was punishing them. Peter Wagner, the founder of the movement, for example, when he was in Germany in 2001, God acted through him to end mad cow disease in Germany. So they actually think that they have some supernatural abilities, at least as God works through them, to do things in what they call "the natural." The natural is basically the real world. So they—the supernatural and the natural, for them, are constantly interacting, and they’re kind of the bridge between the two.

AMY GOODMAN: Forrest Wilder, let me play another clip. It’s Governor Rick Perry speaking at The Response prayer gathering in Houston. And talk about, afterwards, the significance of Perry’s use of language.

GOV. RICK PERRY: Blow the trumpet in Zion. Declare a holy fast. Call a sacred assembly. Gather the people. Consecrate the assembly. Bring together the elders. Gather the children. Gather the mothers, nurturing their children at the breast.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Governor Rick Perry, who will be announcing for president, we expect, on Saturday. Forrest Wilder, what exactly is he saying?

FORREST WILDER: He’s reading from the Book of Joel, and it’s a part of the Bible, Old Testament, that is very important to the New Apostolic Reformation movement. In fact, the basis for The Response comes straight out of Joel chapter 2. And the fundamental idea here is that, just as in—was described in the Book of Joel, they have an agricultural collapse, they have drought, they have economic woes. They have—they’re having all sorts of problems as a society, and the solution to that is to get on one’s knees and repent to God, who, if your repentance is sufficient enough, will act and, you know, restore the natural good order of things.

There’s a lot of things actually going on in that particular clip that you played, of—one, note that people are, you know, sort of cheering, cheering it on, just this reading of Scripture, very energetically, because there’s all sorts of meaning that’s loaded up into that, into Joel and those particular verses. For example, "Blow the trumpet in Zion." This is a Christian Zionist—a phrase that’s very important to them. For example, John Hagee—he’s one of the leading Christian Zionists, he has a megachurch down in San Antonio—is very involved in, you know, sort of right-wing foreign policy stuff around Israel. That’s a verse that you hear a lot at their events, at their church services, at their political events. And it’s also a popular song. It’s kind of the main—I don’t know if it’s the name of the song, but that’s the theme that runs throughout the song, "Blow the trumpet in Zion." And it’s about—you know, it’s about the role that Israel plays in their End Times eschatology and the role that the Jews play in fulfilling biblical prophecy and ultimately the return of Christ and a thousand-year reign. So, you know—

AMY GOODMAN: We just have—we just have a minute, and I just wanted to get to Don Finto, and this fits right in with what you were talking about, also the issue, when talking about Jews, of the conversion of Jews. 

FORREST WILDER: Yeah, Don Finto, he’s an evangelist who works in Israel, and his—basically what he does is try to bring Jews to Jesus. And again, this fits in with this notion that there must be a believing majority in Israel so that Jesus can come back. And so, at The Response, he was on stage basically calling for a mass conversion of Jews. And at one point he brought up a Messianic Jewish rabbi from Dallas, a guy named Marty Waldman. Waldman didn’t say anything. He was sort of there as a prop, as a signal, to sort of underscore and reinforce this idea that Jews in Israel are coming to Christ and that they will spur a global revival of Christianity, and then, ultimately, you know, start fulfilling some of the biblical prophecy for this End Times scenario that they have. That was totally missed, and I didn’t see any mention of that in the media, but it was an important thing that was happening there.

AMY GOODMAN: Forrest Wilder, we’re going to have to leave it there. Thanks so much for being with us. We’ll link to your piece in the Texas Observer, "Rick Perry’s Army of God."