BUCKNACKT'S SORDID TAWDRY BLOG
We should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive & well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate, bier or wein in hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WHOO-HOO, WHAT A RIDE!!!!!!"
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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VOLUNTARY IGNORANCE, hatred, bigotry, name-your-ophobia, cults, apostate religion, and guns. More and more this is the face of rural Pennsylvania which is not the rural Pennsylvania I grew up in. These things existed when I was a kid in PA, but the practitioners were generally not accepted by society at large and were often publicly challenged and condemned. Many people had long guns for hunting and competitive shooting, many had pistols, the police and PA National Guard had the military assault weapons. Politicians did not seek the endorsements of these extremist, these living on the fringe of society. How things have changed, and this is why scott wagner and too many other Pennsylvania republicans seek out the voluntarily ignorant, the hate groups, bigots, homophobes, islamophobes, misogynist, sexist, cultist, religious apostates (right wing religious hypocritical fanatics) and gun owner extremist. It is no wonder the drumpf/trump-pence administration is in power. REMEMBER, THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS ARE ON TUESDAY, 6 NOV 18. VOTE, BECAUSE THE FUTURE OF OUR NATION WILL BE DETERMINED BY THE RESULTS. GO TO ROCK THE VOTEor VOTE.ORG to make sure you are registered to vote or to register to vote as well as information about voting in your state. GO TO Ballotpedia for information on candidates for office and ballot issues in your state. From Daily Kos and Vox..... Pennsylvania Republican to anti-gaycult: '98 percent of what you believe in, I believe in'
Wednesday July 11, 2018·5:44 PM EDT
State Sen. Scott Wagner, the Republican nominee in Pennsylvania’s race for governor this fall, has suddenly found himself busy trying to disavow a local cult leader who gave the invocation at a campaign event over the weekend. But Wagner's efforts to squirm away from Hyung Jin Moon, whom the Pittsburgh Tribune-Reviewhas described as "the 'second king' of an assault rifle-wielding Christian sect headquartered in Eastern Pennsylvania," are gonna require some extra Vaseline: The dedicated trackers at American Bridge captured audio of Wagner at the gathering telling a Moon acolyte (who made his affiliation crystal clear), "Ninety-eight percent of what you believe in, I believe in."
And what does Moon’s cult believe in? We actually know because, amazingly enough, this isn't the first time Moon has come up during this race. Back in January, Wagner's GOP primary opponent, Paul Mango, appeared on Moon's radio show and received intense criticism for doing so. During that interview, Mango nodded along as Moon declared that public school students are "getting indoctrinated into the homosexual political agenda—they're getting indoctrinated in the transgender agenda." Among those who slammed Mango at the time? Scott Wagner.
Wagner's campaign claims that it had no idea Moon would be attending the meet-and-greet, but the event took place at a gun shop owned by none other than Moon's brother. And we know Moon loooves guns: In video of Mango's interview with Moon, a heavy-duty AR-15 sat propped in front of the host, who also wore a crown that appeared to be made out of bullets. (Not kidding.) It shouldn't be that hard to notassociate with gun-worshipping anti-gay cults and tell them you agree with what they say, but apparently, for Pennsylvania Republicans, it is.
Controversial Rev. Sean Moon encouraged couples to bring AR-15 rifles to worship as part of a commitment ceremony.Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Newfoundland
Newfoundland's Location within Pennsylvania.
As the debate over gun control raged across America in the wake of last month’s school shooting in Florida, a group of worshippers wearing bullet crowns and toting AR-15 rifles gathered in a Pennsylvania church this week to hold a “commitment ceremony” for about 250 couples.
The ceremony was held at the World Peace and Unification Sanctuary in Newfoundland, Pennsylvania. The weapons, which Reuters reported were unloaded, were meant to represent the biblical “rod of iron” referenced in the Book of Revelation, used by God’s representative to dominate his enemies.
As the nearby Wallenpaupack Area School District moved its students to another school over concerns about the armed celebrants, church leaders argued for the power of guns to do God’s will — and protect the innocent.“Each of us is called to use the power of the ‘rod of iron’ not to arm or oppress as has been done in satanic kingdoms of this world, but to protect God’s children,” said the church leader, Rev. Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon, in a statement. “If the football coach who rushed into the building to defend students from the shooter with his own body had been allowed to carry a firearm, many lives, including his own, could have been saved.”
While the ceremony itself had been planned long before the February 14 shooting in Parkland, Florida, in which a man with an AR-15 rifle killed 17 students and staff members, participants in the blessing nevertheless celebrated the power of guns to stop potential future shootings.
The ceremony, which was held by an offshoot of a controversial Christian group that critics call a cult, seemed to perfectly encapsulate the anxieties of the current political climate: a conflation of pro-Trump and Christian nationalist rhetoric, fervently pro-gun sentiments, and multibillion-dollar business interests in the arms trade.
The Unification Church has a controversial history
Now there’s Sean Moon’s World Peace and Unification Sanctuary, but the story begins in Korea with the Moon family, which has run spiritual organizations since 1954. The family has been deeply controversial in religious circles, and its organizations have often been denounced by Christians and secular critics alike as “cults.”
Sun Myung Moon, Sean’s father, came to widespread prominence in America in the 1970s with his Unification Church, an ostensibly Christian organization that reveres both the traditional Bible and the Moon-authored Divine Principle as sacred texts. His teachings stress that true enlightenment, like that achieved by Jesus, can be achieved in part through marriage (often arranged) to other church members.
The elder Moon’s Unification Church — which worshipped Moon as a messianic figure — became popular in America. By 1976, the elder Moon was preaching to estimated crowds of 25,000 or more at a series of rallies across the country. Moon’s followers, who were often derogatorily referred to in the media as “Moonies,” became known for their public mass weddings for thousands of couples, who were often total strangers.
The church became extraordinary financially successful, bringing in millions of dollars a year from the US and abroad, a venture Moon ultimately parlayed into a series of successful businesses including a cable TV network, a shipbuilding studio, and a seafood empire. That cash was often used to fund political lobbying, including advocating for Korean unification and pro-South Korean causes and foreign policy. Today, Moon’s business empire is known as the Tongil Group, a multibillion-dollar conglomerate that supports Unification Church goals.
The connection between Moon’s religious and financial activities bordered, at times, on the illegal. Moon served 11 months in prison during the 1980s for income tax evasion, and a 1976 investigation found links between the church and the Korean military intelligence apparatus, suggesting that the church may have been, at least in part, a tool for Korean government interests.
The Unification Church also became closely involved with right-wing and GOP party politics. As Mariah Blake wrote in 2013 for the New Republic, Moon amassed “extraordinary political influence, building a vast network of powerful right-wing organizations and forging alliances with every Republican presidential administration since Ronald Reagan’s.” As late as 2004, Republican lawmakers were attending Unification Church ceremonies in which Moon was ceremonially “crowned.”
Sean Moon’s church is not part of the Unification Church proper, but is a splinter of his father’s organization (after Moon died in 2012, rivalries between his children have resulted in them largely operating independently of one another). But the Moon family more broadly has, in recent years, made pro-gun rhetoric a major part of their religious and financial activities. Among the Tongil Group’s holdings is Kahr Arms: a small-arms company founded by another of Moon’s sons, Justin Moon.
The company has long received attention from politically connected public figures. In 2016, Eric Trump attended the opening of one Tongil-affiliated gun store, as Blake pointed out on Twitter Wednesday:
Here's a 2016 video of Eric Trump speaking at the opening of a gun store affiliated with the Unification Sanctuary, which is featured in the insane photos below. (Sean Moon, the head of the Unification Sanctuary, appears at 0:55.)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTVng0ZTywk …
This week’s ceremony is firmly tied into the political arena: its liturgy and celebration capturing a quintessentially American blend of Christian nationalism and corporate pro-gun sponsorship. A few days prior to Wednesday’s ceremony, Sean Moon’s church hosted a pro-gun rights “Thank You Trump” dinner. The dinner’s sponsor? Kahr Arms.
The Moons reveal a broader alliance between faith and finance in American political culture
Despite the Moon family’s controversial religious beliefs, they’re nevertheless financially and, to an extent, structurally part of the American political fabric. Their business and political interests, which include promoting gun ownership, align neatly with the religious rhetoric they espouse. Their Bible-inflected fetishization of guns may differ in degree from the pro-gun rhetoric found across the religious right, but it — and the Moon’s family churches more widely — does not differ in kind.
And many of the techniques that the Unification Church used to proliferate in America — such as the focus on worshipping in fragmented “home churches” outside of the aegis of an official church organization or building — have been embraced by the mainstream evangelical community.
The Unification Church and its offshoots are, of course, hardly representative of the religious right as a whole; it’s debatable whether we should consider them “Christian” at all.
But the intensity with which its members have embraced guns as a deeply religious weapon, an instrument of divine protection, should tell us something about gun culture in America more widely. Sean Moon is tapping into an existing truth of gun culture: that they have become fetishized and imbued with a wider cultural ritualistic significance.
Not everyone may literally worship guns, but — for the 77 percent of white evangelicals who feel safer with a gun around, a percentage unmatched by any other religious group — it’s worth investigating how close gun ownership and religious identity really are.
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