America’s Spiritual Warriors
Matthew D. Taylor September/October 2024What helped fuel the toxic blend of religious and political fervor displayed by some on January 6, 2021? For anyone seeking answers, The New Apostolic Reformation may be the most important movement you’ve never heard of.
Illustrations by Scott Bakal
There’s an insurgent new political force in American Christianity that is bringing about a powerful realignment, a tectonic shift, in the culture and leadership of the Christian right. This change has been under way for at least the past decade, and, at the heart of it, running like a golden thread throughout, is a little-known and even less understood network of Christian leaders called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR).*
In this article, I’ll narrate the NAR’s history, but first we need some scene-setting, because it emerges from a vitally important but off-the-beaten-path sector of Christianity. The NAR leaders operate within the wild and woolly world of Independent Charismatic Christianity. “Independent” here means nondenominational. These are churches and ministries and communities that resist the regulations and bureaucracy of denominations. “Charismatic” refers to a spirituality built around re-creating the supernatural dimensions of the early church through prophecy, speaking in tongues, miracles, and so forth. Just to give you a sense of the numbers here: experts estimate that there were close to 44 million Independent Charismatics in the world in 1970. Fifty years later, by 2020, it was north of 312 million.1 That means that, globally, the population of nondenominational charismatic Christians is consistently doubling in size every two decades.
“Prophetic” Voices
The dramatic story of the NAR and American politics began forty years ago at Fuller Theological Seminary, a flagship evangelical training school in Pasadena, California. Enter stage right—an avuncular Fuller professor named C. Peter Wagner. Wagner was an expert in “church growth,” a faddish evangelical effort to engineer megachurches and mass movements through applied social sciences. He did not come from the charismatic world, but it mesmerized him in the 1980s.
Eager to unlock the secrets of fast-growing Christian movements, Wagner broke ranks from the mainstream evangelical academics and started hanging out with some of the more rough-and-tumble nondenominational charismatic evangelicals. One of these was Cindy Jacobs, a self-described prophet, who met Wagner in 1989. Jacobs claimed to hear directly from God and speak God’s words like the biblical prophets, even intoning an Old Testament-ish “The Lord says” before letting loose a prophecy.2
At their first meeting, Jacobs told Wagner about her work as a prophet coordinating massive prayer campaigns to dislodge high-level demons, and he was hooked. These were the sorts of concepts and strategies that he was hoping to discover out in the charismatic hinterlands.
Jacobs became Wagner’s tour guide through an Independent Charismatic world that was blossoming with talent and energy. One provocative theology rippling through charismatic circles at the time was belief in the modern-day restoration of apostles and prophets, foundational church leadership roles described in the New Testament but that have disappeared in most Christian traditions. Cindy Jacobs and her friends believed God was reconstituting these roles for a great end-times revival, and she began introducing Wagner to various of her apostle and prophet friends.
Always open to new ideas and wild church-growth strategies, Wagner loved this new leadership conception. He even came to believe, through personal prophecies from Jacobs and her prophet friends, that he himself was a modern-day apostle, commissioned to help instigate a massive global revival.
Beginning in 1996, Wagner took to calling this whole spiritual warfare, apostles-and-prophets, global-revival paradigm the “New Apostolic Reformation.” He thought it was a revolution in church governance on the level of the Protestant Reformation,3 and Wagner’s devoted followers sometimes depicted him as a “Martin Luther of our age.”4
Many of the most talented and ambitious young leaders of the charismatic world became mentees of Peter Wagner in the 1990s. Some of these upstart apostles and prophets would go on to become charismatic celebrities: Cindy Jacobs is one of the most celebrated Christian prophets in the world today. A pastor and prophet with the memorable name of Dutch Sheets, a friend of Jacobs’ who linked up with Wagner in the 1990s, is an acclaimed author and speaker today, having sold millions of copies of his books. Ché Ahn, a local Pasadena pastor and Fuller Seminary student who signed on to Wagner’s NAR program, today leads a network of tens of thousands of churches in more than 60 countries.5 Wagner’s inner circle was the hottest ticket in charismatic town.
In 1999 Wagner decided to retire early from Fuller to pursue this NAR project full-time. What he managed to accomplish before his full retirement in 2010 was nothing short of remarkable. Spurred by his new self-conception of being an apostle with a global mission, C. Peter Wagner built an infrastructure for the NAR—designing peer-to-peer networks of leaders with hundreds of eager and enterprising apostles and prophets joining in.6
Expanding Ambitions
The NAR began as an effort to revolutionize the church, bringing to bear what Wagner called the “Second Apostolic Age” (the first being the early church).7 But a major pivot in focus began in 2001, when Wagner met a pastor/consultant/prophet/motivational speaker named Lance Wallnau. Wallnau had cobbled together some different fragments of prophecies to shape a framework he called the Seven Mountain Mandate (7M).8 In Wallnau’s schema, the Seven Mountains were different arenas of influence in society—government, religion, media, arts and entertainment, education, family, business. The “mandate” was from God for Christians to conquer the tops of all these “mountains” of culture causing Christian dominance to reconfigure society from the top down. 7M was part prophecy, part social-change theory, part strategy for Christian supremacy.
Wagner embraced the whole 7M model, believing it to be a divine blueprint for Christianizing the world. He later exhorted his fellow apostles that the Seven Mountains represented “the most radical paradigm shift at least since I have been in Christian ministry which is well over half a century.”9 Having dedicated his career to growing the church, Wagner adopted Wallnau’s totalizing vision for how Christians could move out of the church (the Religion Mountain) and bring Christian power and charismatic leadership to every segment of society.
In early 2008 Wagner and the NAR cohort rolled out a whole publicity campaign to spread the 7M and apostolic warfare concepts far and wide. Several 7M books were published, including Wagner’s landmark book Dominion! How Kingdom Action Can Change the World. Jacobs, Wallnau, and Sheets were dispatched around the country to preach the gospel of global conquest.
Their hopes were further spurred later that year when one of their most prominent followers was unexpectedly elevated as the Republican vice presidential candidate. Alaska governor Sarah Palin had been mentored by an NAR prophet in Alaska, and the NAR leaders believed Palin’s candidacy was divinely ordained.10 Dutch Sheets even prophetically declared that one day Palin herself would be president.11
Of course, McCain and Palin lost that race to Barack Obama and Joe Biden. An outraged Dutch Sheets prophesied after the election near-apocalyptic calamities (“economic woes . . . more violence . . . disease and death . . . natural disasters . . . terrorism”)12 would befall America for choosing a “Muslim” president.13 The NAR networks entered a season of relative desolation.
To be sure, piggybacking off the prodigious growth of Independent Charismatics worldwide, the NAR’s extensive networks and influence continued to grow apace, encircling the globe with prayer networks and international apostolic alliances that would rival the largest global denominations. But at home they felt powerless, stymied by an American national government dominated by “demonic” forces, with abortions (which NAR leaders view as a form of “blood sacrifice that empowers demons”)14 continuing, and with unconscionable gay rights and religious pluralism ascendant all around them.
From the depths of their outrage, Dutch Sheets issued a new prophecy in 2013, this one attached to a Revolutionary War flag with the phrase “An Appeal to Heaven”—a popular eighteenth-century slogan that roughly translates as “trial by combat”—emblazoned across the top.15 Sheets urged the American church to appeal to heaven and begin a new spiritual revolution to overthrow the encroaching liberal tyranny. He created an NAR-propelled prayer and prophecy campaign to make the Appeal to Heaven flag a ubiquitous symbol of spiritual warfare–driven Christian nationalism and the wholesale re-Christianization of society.16
New Alliances
By the start of the 2016 election cycle, the NAR was primed for political and spiritual combat. Some of them were excited about Ted Cruz, the son of a minor charismatic personality and 7M proponent;17 others were hopeful that Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, or Mike Huckabee—stalwart evangelicals to a man—would become the Republican nominee.
Enter stage left—Donald Trump. When Trump landed in the Republican primary, the Independent Charismatic world perked up. Trump had the endless positivity and unrelenting salesmanship of a televangelist. In a world of charismatic celebrities and prophets whose entire existence is premised on their ability to keep audiences enraptured, Donald Trump was bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh.
Trump enlisted his personal pastor, the Florida Independent Charismatic televangelist and apostle Paula White-Cain, to “be in charge of reaching out to the evangelicals.”18 White-Cain was an unusual choice for this role as a thrice-married female prosperity gospel preacher viewed as a de facto heretic by many straitlaced evangelical elites, so she didn’t know the evangelical A-listers (the James Dobsons and Ralph Reeds of the world). Instead she drew a whole cohort of entrepreneurial and eccentric Independent Charismatic celebrities (the Lance Wallnaus and Kenneth Copelands of the world) into Trump’s orbit.19
Lance Wallnau, originator of the Seven Mountains Mandate, was in some of the first meetings between Donald Trump and religious leaders at Trump Tower in the fall of 2015, by the invitation of Paula White-Cain. In fact, Wallnau would later claim that a new prophecy came to him when he stood in Trump’s presence. “The forty-fifth president is meant to be an Isaiah 45 Cyrus,” God purportedly said to Lance.20 To translate: Cyrus the Great was the ancient Persian emperor who sent the Jewish people back from exile to rebuild Jerusalem. Through the prophet Isaiah, God calls Cyrus “His anointed,” and that word in Hebrew is mashiach, which is where we get the word “messiah,” as in, the anointed one. Wallnau was prophesying Trump as a sort of secular messiah, a heathen warrior king who would deliver conservative American Christianity from cultural exile.
Trusting the prophetic intuitions of his longtime mentee, C. Peter Wagner, whose health was rapidly declining at the time, also jumped into the fray early in 2016 to endorse Trump, embracing Wallnau’s Cyrus prophecy and arguing that “in the Business Mountain and the Media Mountain Trump has accumulated $8–10 billion. He knows how to influence.” 21 Wagner would die in October 2016, just weeks before the election, but one of his final conscious acts, from his hospice bed, was to cast an absentee ballot for Donald Trump. His followers later attributed this as a final prophecy.
C. Peter Wagner’s endorsement of Trump didn’t make any mainstream news headlines; he was an obscure charismatic apostle, outside the respectable evangelical limelight by then. But of all the Christian endorsements of Trump, Wagner’s was one of the most consequential. His devoted NAR disciples and friends were all watching their mentor, and they followed the path Wagner and Wallnau blazed to become the vanguard of Christian Trumpism.
Over the course of the 2016 campaign and the ensuing Trump presidency, the New Apostolic Reformation leaders, Wagner’s heirs, positioned themselves as the chief Christian propagandists of Trump. Using Wallnau’s catchy new Cyrus prophecy among others and deploying strategic spiritual warfare techniques, the NAR politically gathered and galvanized their fellow Independent Charismatics.22 They became trusted evangelical advisors at the heart of Trump’s outreach to conservative Christians.
By the start of the 2020 campaign, the NAR leaders were Trump campaign insiders and proxies. Indeed, in November 2019 Paula White-Cain launched a prayer and spiritual warfare adjunct to the 2020 Trump campaign called the One Voice Prayer Movement.23 She invited Dutch Sheets, Cindy Jacobs, and other NAR leaders to the White House to help her plan the campaign.24
When Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 race and Trump refused to concede, the NAR leaders ramped up one of the fastest and most far-reaching spiritual warfare crusades in American history. They forcefully told their followers that Trump was to have a prophesied second term as president and that a conspiracy of witchcraft and demonic principalities was stealing the election from God’s anointed.25 Sheets told his followers, “It is God’s will for Trump to win this, not Biden. . . . We have no choice but to continue to fight.”26
In one of the wildest stories of the lead-up to January 6, Dutch Sheets, at the instigation of unnamed Trump Administration officials, took a team of 20 NAR apostles and prophets around to each of the states where the election results were being contested, and they held high-octane prayer and prophecy meetings steeped in violent rhetoric.27 These prophecy services were livestreamed to hundreds of thousands of NAR followers and prayer warriors.28
On December 29, 2020, this same team of apostles and prophets that Sheets was taking around the contested states had a two-hour meeting at the White House with unnamed Trump Administration officials.29 Though the content of and participants in this meeting have yet to fully come to light, members of the group walked out of the meeting saying such things as, “Strategy was given to us from people in the know around there”30 and “Get ready to gallop and get your sword bloody in the spirit of God.”31
Eight days later, on January 6, Ché Ahn, Lance Wallnau, and Cindy Jacobs were all in Washington, D.C., during the Capitol riot. Cindy Jacobs got access to the White House the afternoon of January 5, and she and a team of spiritual warriors walked around the building doing spiritual warfare on Trump’s behalf.32 At the same time that afternoon, Ché Ahn was speaking at the largest Trump rally in D.C. that day. He declared with all his reputed apostolic authority: “We are going to rule and reign through Donald Trump and under the lordship of Jesus Christ.”33 There was real expectation in these charismatic prophecy-believing circles that God was going to miraculously reinstate Trump. This was the spirituality behind January 6.
Dozens of Appeal to Heaven flags punctuated the crowds around the Capitol.34 During the riot itself, Cindy Jacobs and a team of NAR apostles and prophets had a stage set up just yards from the Capitol building, and they were using all their spiritual warfare tactics to battle the demonic “principalities and powers” they believed were hijacking the election from Trump.35
Today, despite their intimate involvement in the organizing for and execution of January 6, none of these NAR leaders have faced prosecution for their involvement. In fact, these leaders, their ideas, and their spiritual warfare practices are more popular today than they were on January 6, and their rhetoric is still filled with that potent mix of rage and optimism: everything is on the line with this next election; it’s heaven or hell, and God is on our side in this holy war.36
Should Trump win in November, the NAR core leaders are positioned to be in the inner circles of administration advisors on many policy issues, working toward their vision of a hegemonically Christian America. Should Trump lose, they are primed to wreak havoc and let slip the dogs of spiritual war.
* Matthew D. Taylor's newly published book, The Violent Take It by Force, provides an in-depth account of the history and growing influence of the New Apostolic Reformation within evangelical Christianity and American politics.
1 “Christianity in its Global Context, 1970–2020: Society, Religion, and Mission,” The Center for the Study of Global Christianity, Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, June 2013.
2 Kyle Mantyla, “Jacobs: God Is Getting Ready to Expose Corruption in the State of Maryland,” Rightwingwatch.org, May 21, 2014.
3 “C. Peter Wagner Lectures on the New Apostolic Reformation,” YouTube video, Aug.12, 2011, https://bit.ly/3LjAlzA.
4 “Apostle Peter Wagner Has Passed Into Glory,” Lamplighter Ministries website, Oct. 22, 2016, https://bit.ly/3LkxUfT.
5 Harvest Ministries International website, “About Us,” www.harvestim.org/who-we-are.
6 “Wagner and the Network,” BTELife Musings, Sept. 14, 2008, https://bit.ly/4bEUieR.
7 C. Peter Wagner, Changing Church: How God Is Leading His Church Into the Future (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004).
8 “The 7 Mountains Mandate—Dr. Lance Wallnau,” YouTube video, Mar. 29, 2013, https://bit.ly/3XXVDdA.
9 C. Peter Wagner, “ICA Presiding Apostle’s Annual Report 2007,” Dec. 7, 2007, box 21, folder 2, C. Peter Wagner Collection, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA.
10 Bruce Wilson, “Palin in My Prayer Group, Says Witchcraft-Fighting ‘Spiritual Warfare’ Leader,” Huffington Post, Nov. 16, 2009.
11 “Election, 2008,” JoySprings.org, Sept. 7, 2008, https://bit.ly/3zEjKnk.
12 “Dutch Sheets’ Response to the 2008 Election,” Nov. 8, 2008, https://bit.ly/3xMO7aL.
13 “Dutch Sheets: ‘The President Is a Muslim,’” YouTube video, Oct. 31, 2011, https://bit.ly/4eZYZTw.
14 “Dutch Sheets’ Response to the 2008 Election.”
15 Dutch Sheets, “Dutch Sheets Tells Story Behind the Appeal to Heaven Flag,” CharismaNews.com, Jan. 28, 2015.
16 “ ‘It Ain’t Over!’ Christians Appeal to Heaven,” CBN News, Nov. 13, 2015, https://bit.ly/460NxD1.
17 John Fea, “Ted Cruz’s Campaign Is Fueled by a Dominionist Vision for America,” The Washington Post, Feb. 4, 2016.
18 Paul White-Cain, Something Greater: Finding Triumph Over Trials (New York: FaithWords, 2019); Jeremy Diamond and Kirsten Appleton, “Paula White: Trump’s Televangelist in the White House,” CNN.org, Nov. 8, 2019; “ ‘Season of Apostolic Reformation,’ part 1- Pastor Paula White,” YouTube video, Jan. 21, 2012, https://bit.ly/4eY5cit.
19 Ben Schreckinger, “Donald Trump’s Saving Grace: Televangelists,” Politico.com, Sept. 30, 2015.
20 Lance Wallnau, “Why I Believe Trump Is the Prophesied President,” CharismaNews.com, Oct. 5, 2016.
21 Facebook post on the page of C. Peter Wagner (www.facebook.com/cpeter.wagner), Feb. 24, 2016; C. Peter Wagner, “I Like Donald Trump,” CharismaNews.com, June 10, 2016.
22 See POTUS Shield website www.potusshield.com; see archived As One Movement website https://bit.ly/4cBZqlh.
23 Peter Montgomery, “Paula White’s One Voice Prayer Movement: A Thinly Disguised Political Operation for Trump,” RightWingWatch.org, May 15, 2020.
24 James Goll, “Cindy Jacobs, Paula White Cain, Dutch Sheets Launching Governmental Prayer Initiative,” CharismaNews.com, Nov. 4, 2019.
25 Dutch Sheets, “The Victory Channel Is Live,” Facebook video, https://bit.ly/3zDF6RU.
26 YouTube video: “Why We Won’t Give Up. Conversations With Dutch S1EP27,” https://bit.ly/4616vcw.
27 Dutch Sheets Ministries fundraising email dated Dec. 20, 2020, https://bit.ly/462Bipx.
28 “Dutch Sheets. Pray for the Nation From Pennsylvania,” YouTube video, Dec. 1, 2020, https://bit.ly/3WfNobk.
29 Matthew D. Taylor and Bradley Onishi, “Evidence Strongly Suggests Trump Was Collaborating With Christian Nationalist Leaders Before January 6,” ReligionDispatches.org, Jan. 6, 2023.
30 “Air Raid Sirens. Tim Sheets,” YouTube video, Jan. 3, 2021, https://bit.ly/4bEeOft.
31 “Freedom House: Recorded Live Remanent Ministries,” Facebook video, Dec. 31, 2020, https://bit.ly/3LkrFJ5.
32 Taylor and Onishi.
33 “Pastor Ché Ahn in Freedom Plaza at a Prayer Rally for President Trump,” UgeTube video, Jan. 6, 2021, https://bit.ly/3VXSebT.
34 Ishaan Jhaveri, “The Pine Tree Flag: How One Symbol at the Capitol Riot Connects Far-Right Extremism to Christianity,” TowCenter.Medium.com, Feb. 24, 2021.
35 “Women for a Great America Was Live,” Facebook video, Jan. 6, 2021, https://bit.ly/4cBlBrB.
36 Matthew D. Taylor and Paul A. Djupe, “How Trumpism Has Pushed a Fringe Charismatic Theology Into the Mainstream,” Religion News Service, May 6, 2024; Matthew D. Taylor, “Mike Johnson Is Mainstreaming the Spirituality That Gave Us the Capitol Riot,” TheBulwark.com, Feb. 6, 2024; Peter Montgomery, “Lance Wallnau Says His 2024 Battleground State Tour Is Part of God’s End-Times Plan,” RightWingWatch.org, June 18, 2024.
Article Author: Matthew D. Taylor
Matthew D. Taylor, Ph.D., is a senior scholar and the Protestant scholar at the Institute for Christian, Jewish, Islamic Studies, where he specializes in Muslim-Christian dialogue, Evangelical and Pentecostal movements, religious politics in the United States, and American Islam. His most recent book is The Violent Take It by Force.