(Image source: Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

On January 6, 2021, I read post-after-post on social media, reporting that Trump-supporting protestors had stormed the Capitol Building where Congress was certifying the electoral votes that put Joe Biden into the presidency. Given my proximity to what would be a defining moment in America’s history, without taking time to ruminate on the potential consequences of my decision, I put on my shoes and my hat, grabbed my coat, and paced toward the Capitol Building to witness the event for myself.

Upon arriving at the Capitol Building, I was greeted by a “Jesus 2020” sign, as well as a myriad of people—from Proud Boy extremists to seemingly regular teenagers taking selfies, while what sounded like club-music played in the background. I stood on Capitol grounds dumbfounded. But I also felt like I was in an eerie, familial space. The protestors were like people I grew up with, just regular white, blue-collar American folks who professed a love for God and country.

I had moved to the area on January 2. On January 3, I decided to take a stroll through the neighborhood and walk toward the Capitol Building. The weather was cold, gray, and misty, so there weren’t many people around. Upon arriving at the Capitol, I noticed a group of about twelve or so individuals dancing in a ballet-esque fashion, at least one person with a shofar, and the ethereal, heavy-pad drones and repetitive lyrics that exemplify contemporary Christian worship music.

Having grown up Pentecostal myself, I knew what the people were doing: they were conducting “spiritual warfare”—the practice of performing specific religious acts (praying, fasting, singing) to battle demonic forces from the supernatural realm that have real-time effects on our physical realm. For me, the events on January 3 and 6, 2021, tied the connection between “spiritual warfare” with the rise of Trumpism in America, and what propelled certain groups of Trump supporters to storm the Capitol Building that haunting day.

And so, I was immediately intrigued and excited to hear about the release of Matthew D. Taylor’s book, The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy. Taylor is the senior Christian scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore, Maryland, and an expert on American Christianity and religious politics. Taylor’s book covers what’s referred to as the “New Apostolic Reformation” (or NAR for short)—a specific group of Independent Charismatic Christians who operate with a loosely-connected yet semi-hierarchical system run by modern-day “prophets” and “apostles.” The NAR, Taylor argues, was a major instigating force for the insurrection on January 6, and is reshaping the aesthetics, methods, and rules of political engagement within the American right today.

In terms of describing the key players, theologies, and tactics of the NAR movement, this is a primer book. For an outsider wanting to better understand this segment of Christian support for Donald Trump, it highlights a motley crew of individuals—from Trump’s Senior Advisor to the White House Faith Office Paula White-Cain, to the more professorial Peter Wagner (who coined the phrase New Apostolic Reformation). These people and this segment of evangelical Christians became some of the first enthusiastic evangelical supporters of Donald Trump in 2015. At the same time, Taylor makes clear that there’s a specific worldview driving this crew-–one that sees the world as zero-sum and Manichean, where either angels or demons are operating in specific geographic areas or entities, including American politics. Their set of beliefs inspired their involvement in the January 6 insurrection, as well as Trump’s first and second electoral wins.

According to Taylor, the term “Christian nationalism” that’s been used to describe many January 6 insurrectionists doesn’t fully capture the contours of this segment of MAGA Christian Trump supporters. While the book does mention the term “Christian nationalism,” Taylor’s arguments and historical account of NAR visibly mark the deficiencies of the term. Taylor writes, “In truth, there’s no such thing as a generic American Christian nationalist; instead, there are regional varieties, theological subcurrents, sectarian identities, racial prejudices, and potent spiritualities that all feed into the phenomena we label ’Christian nationalism.’”

Quite a few books that attempt to serve as “evangelical whisperers” behind evangelicalism’s support for Donald Trump usually highlight either its patriarchal systems and fixation on hypermasculinity, its innate racism, or the perceived loss of status within a “secularizing” America and the feeling of being “under siege.” But compared to Reformed “Theobros” or the Southern Baptist Convention, the NAR—and, I’d argue, the entire Pentecostal-Charismatic movement—, as Taylor points out, “is highly multiethnic and even transnational in its orientation.” Its leadership model is also more egalitarian vis-à-vis gender than its evangelical Christian counterparts. In other words, as Taylor highlights in this excellent article for The Revealer, we should not assume this is an all-white and mostly male movement. Charismatic Christians are racially diverse with women in positions of power.

This was made clear in February when Trump named Paula-White Cain—the Charismatic televangelist to whom Taylor devotes an entire chapter—as head of the White House Faith Office. This caused a bit of contention among conservative Christian leaders within Trump’s orbit, especially from those who hold traditional gender roles or forbid women from joining the clergy. But this very feature is what drives the growth of the NAR and Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity—its openness for women and people of color to take part in its leadership and missions, especially in places like Central and South America.

Trump’s 2024 reelection saw the Democratic Party’s traditionally wide lead with Black voters decrease by 20% over the last 3 years. Trump also saw a 14% increase of support from Hispanics compared to 2020. The Democratic Party’s loss of Hispanic voters was, in part, due to their shifting of religious beliefs toward Pentecostalism. One conclusion to draw from this past election’s results is that, while identity is an important factor in elections, another important element in determining voter preferences is one’s worldview and the theologies informing it.

A phrase from the book I found stirring:

“If ‘follow the money’ is a good journalistic dictum, ‘follow the theology’ is an important corollary.”

Beliefs and theologies about the world and humanity’s place within it play as much a role in a person’s politics as their identity or economic standing in society. This point becomes more pivotal when looking at Taylor’s framing and understanding of evangelicalism in the United States today (and American society overall): the pitting of “elite” versus “populist.”

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A key populist figure that Taylor describes in one section of the book as “The Most Important Evangelical Political Theologian Of Our Time” is Lance Wallnau. Wallnau, the first person to describe Trump as a “King Cyrus” figure—the Persian King who brought the Ancient Israelites from their imposed exile in Babylon back to the land of Israel.   In American evangelical circles, Wallnau is most noted for his teaching and popularization of the “Seven Mountain Mandate”—the teaching undergirding support for conservative Christians to control key sectors in American society (the media, business, government, etc.). He has over one million followers on Facebook, and he is a key political actor in the GOP. In September 2024, then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance attended a Christian town hall in Pennsylvania organized by Wallnau. And, Wallnau has been welcomed at the White House and has regularly held conferences in Trump’s hotel in DC.

I wouldn’t describe Wallnau as a “theologian” insomuch as he’s an influencer—and a highly influential one at that. He’s not academically trained as a theologian, but he knows how to package and market already deliberated theological ideas to vast swaths of Pentecostal-Charismatics in the United States. Nevertheless, Taylor is correct that Wallnau’s impact is immense. The rise of Wallnau’s star in grassroots evangelical Christianity speaks more about the Pentecostal-Charismatic theological ecosystem—one that creates and derives authority from those who can artfully utilize the latest social platforms—than about Wallnau’s theological gravitas.

Wallanu, according to Taylor, was one of the first prominent evangelicals to endorse Trump in 2015. And, Taylor makes an interesting point that tends to get missed when talking about evangelical support for Trump: the historical “power-centers” of American evangelicalism like Christianity Today (whose editorial in 2019 called for Trump’s 1st impeachment) and the National Association of Evangelicals, “were actually outposts of resistance to Trump early on.” Taylor writes: “Donald Trump exposed a stark divide between the elite establishment evangelicals (the genteel and media-savvy leaders) and grassroots evangelicals. Many of the elite evangelicals, over time, followed suit and came around to tentatively supporting Trump—eventually—but the evangelical alignment around Trump has not not [sic] emanated from elite evangelicalism. No, it came burbling from the evangelical hoi polloi.”

The genius of Trump and the MAGA movement is successfully utilizing populist aesthetics and discourse—an attribute that describes even the earliest days of Pentecostalism—while championing domestic economic policies that are Reaganite at best. This tension is more prevalently seen as the world’s richest billionaire is currently slashing the government on behalf of the President.

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In a sort of eerie, poignant foreshadowing to the second Trump era, Taylor describes the leadership model within the NAR as a form of “spiritual oligarchy.” Taylor devotes an entire chapter to Peter Wagner, a former professor at Fuller Theological Seminary and the founder of several Independent Charismatic organizations that would encapsulate into what’s understood as the New Apostolic Reformation. Wagner, according to Taylor, wanted to create a leadership model that would allow for a structure of control that any movement needs to properly function, but without the institutional barriers and controls that create bureaucracy and would slow down the movement’s velocity. According to Taylor, Wagner envisioned an oligarchy of apostles and prophets who would work together in “seeking revival” and “take over the landscape of churches.” Taylor writes: “Wagner was trying to create relationships and power-sharing agreements among the most talented leaders of the Independent Charismatic world so that they wouldn’t fight with each other over which church belongs to whom. Instead, they would work as partners. Wagner was building an ideology and an infrastructure for this charismatic spiritual oligarchy.”

The term “oligarchy” has taken on new life since former President Joe Biden warned of a rising oligarchy and “tech-industrial complex” threatening American democracy in his farewell address to the nation. Describing the United States in oligarchical terms was usually only found in left-wing parlance that many deemed too radical for the mainstream politician 10-years ago.

Today, the Trump administration has hired the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to lead (in a legally vague capacity) the Department of Government Efficiency to cut certain government spending and, in some cases, completely dismantle government agencies like USAID—the arm of the U.S. government that provides humanitarian aid to countries all around the world.

Whether the most prevalent threat against American democracy is a techno-oligarchy or a NAR-run theocracy (or another iteration of Christian nationalism) depends on if the nexus of power lies with Silicon Valley billionaires or megachurch pastors and religious influencers (or perhaps another loosely formed “power-sharing agreement” between Silicon Valley and MAGA’s religious elite would be in order). Interestingly enough, Silicon Valley is reportedly experiencing a surge in Christianity in recent months; Peter Thiel, the former CEO of PayPal who bankrolled JD Vance’s rise to politics, and a devout Christian, has gone on a speaking tour warning about the coming “Antichrist.” Elon Musk has recently described himself as a “cultural Christian,” a newly adopted moniker that shifted Musk’s beliefs from his reported agnosticism.

If Musk’s adheres to a quasi-form of cultural Christianity—one that also eschews empathy— he practices it through a “First Principles” method of problem solving – a system of breaking things down to the bare fundamentals and rebuilding something new from the ground up; it certainly has driven his management of both X (formally Twitter) and ostensibly DOGE. It gives a sheen of rationality, while ignoring that even science as a knowledge base is built from the work of scientists and their experiments that have come before. The many cuts to research funding as a result of DOGE’s government slashing, in part, led to an unsuccessful effort from thousands in the global scientific community to expel Musk from the prestigious British Royal Society.

Reading Taylor’s book, I thought about Anne Applebaum’s article in The Atlantic, in which she describes the brewing milieu forming with authoritarian governments and societies around the world as a “New Obscurantism.” If the 18th century Enlightenment valued reason and empiricism for better understanding the world, the “old” obscurantism was a set of antithetical values of those Enlightenment ideals – “darkness, obfuscation, [and] irrationality.” As one  example of political leaders who have “veered into the occult,” Applebaum cites Tucker Carlson’s account of being attacked by a demon that left “claw marks” on his body. Importantly, experiences like demonic attacks are not unheard of in spiritual warfare narratives within the Pentecostal-Charismatic world.

Applebaum writes: “But the prophets of what we might now call the New Obscurantism offer exactly those things: magical solutions, an aura of spirituality, superstition, and the cultivation of fear. Among their number are health quacks and influencers who have developed political ambitions; fans of the quasi-religious QAnon movement and its Pizzagate-esque spin-offs; and members of various political parties, all over Europe, that are pro-Russia and anti-vaccine and, in some cases, promoters of mystical nationalism as well.”

If “Christian nationalism” doesn’t fully reflect the Independent Charismatic Christianity covered in Taylor’s book, perhaps we can see it as an extension of Applebaum’s “New Obscurantism.” This is a development occurring within elements of the global “elite,” as well as swaths of vast populations around the world resulting, in part, from a distrust of institutions-–political and religious. And it is precisely this deinstitutionalized atmosphere under which, as Taylor notes, “the apostles and prophets thrive.”

Perhaps one can look at Silicon Valley’s religious explorations as derived, in part, from a campaign to influence media and technology to fulfill their “seven mountain mandate.” Maybe there is a genuine thirst for faith and spirituality to sustain the existential needs that scientific materialism and atheism – value systems traditionally associated with technologists and their ilk – don’t always satisfy. Or, if one’s more cynical, right-wing Silicon Valley billionaires see the value in adopting Christian aesthetics to gain support to devise their own versions of American society. I suspect it’s a mixture of all the above.

It’s hard to discern whether personal interest via lower taxes or heartfelt convictions drive Thiel and Musk toward some sort of religious beliefs. There is one thing that will likely be certain: whatever policies the Trump Administration enacts, Trump’s Pentecostal and Charismatic supporters will decree God’s blessing on them.

A week after the contentious meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Lance Wallnau posted a video on Facebook highlighting the shared values between Putin’s Russia and American conservative Christians. NAR Apostle Che Ahn asserted in an interview that opposition to Trump and his cabinet was opposition to God.

But whether MAGA support is derived from the economic interests of techno-billionaires or social-policy interests of Charismatic prophets, both groups believe they are best carried out in an oligarchy fashioned on Earth as it is in heaven.

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The weather on January 6, 2025, made for a stark contrast from four years prior. Heavy snowfall hit the DC-area, and since it was the day Congress was certifying the electoral votes for Donald Trump’s second presidential win, fences and police lined up along the streets leading to the Capitol Building. As I walked through the six-inches of snow on the National Mall, only a smattering of people assembled in the area. But a small group of older individuals walked toward my direction carrying a shofar, and then stopped to chat with a group of twenty-somethings ahead of me, when one young woman in the group asked them about the instrument they were carrying.

I thought to myself that this younger group was about to have an interesting conversation.

As it turned out, I recognized these “twenty-somethings”—they were my friends from work. I decided to stop and break the ice in case they were uncomfortable and tried to strike up conversation with the shofar-carrying crew. The group explained that they were there to pray for God’s protection over the certifying-process, as well as to prayerfully combat the wiles of the “deep-state.” Perhaps recognizing that they were talking to a group who might not share their politics, one of them explained, “And the deep state is found in both parties.”

A woman in my group decided not to engage with them further and walked away. Concerned, I excused myself to make sure she was okay. Those who stayed to converse recounted that the shofar-carrying crew told them they had received word from God that they were going to be led by an angel to their next destination.

As they were talking, a person in their group spotted a snow angel on the ground a few yards away towards the Capitol Building, which the shofar crowd took as a divine sign to lead them on their way in their holy mission for the United States.

Miguel Petrosky is an essayist, writer, and journalist based in Washington, D.C. and has written for The Revealer, Sojourners, ARC Magazine, and Christianity Today. You can follow him on Bluesky @miguelpetrosky.bsky.social.