The New Apostolic Reformation

The Christian political movement coalescing around Trump's second term differs in some meaningful ways from his religious backers eight years ago

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Donald Trump’s first campaign and presidency drew a lot of commentary about evangelicalism, including a fair number of hot takes. The ensuing years have seen more sophisticated treatments, including Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (which I discussed in an earlier post), and Jon Ward’s Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation (which formed the basis of my interview with him just over a year ago.)

Now that we are on the verge of a second Trump presidency, we will undoubtedly see continued coverage and analysis of his renewed and reinvigorated religious supporters. One of the most helpful recent pieces I have come across in this vein is Stephanie McCrummen’s Atlantic article out last week, “The Army of God Comes Out of the Shadows.”

McCrummen focuses on the rise of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a growing movement within American Christianity that seeks to dismantle the secular state and establish the Kingdom of God on earth. The NAR views the fight for control over social institutions like government, education, and the media as spiritual warfare between God and demonic forces. Its adherents view Trump’s presidency as a key step toward winning this spiritual battle.

The most important—and most chilling—section of McCrummen’s article describes the scope and direction of the NAR:

At this point, tens of millions of believers—about 40 percent of American Christians, including Catholics, according to a recent Denison University survey—are embracing an alluring, charismatic movement that has little use for religious pluralism, individual rights, or constitutional democracy.

To put it even more bluntly, the NAR is fundamentally incompatible with contemporary American society.

Before we sound too big of an alarm, it’s worth digging into McCrummen’s numbers. She estimates that the NAR represents 40 percent of American Christians. McCrummen bases this claim on Paul Djupe’s research. This past May, Djupe reported that 41 percent of self-identified Christians responding to his survey agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “God wants Christians to stand atop the ‘7 mountains of society,’ including the government, education, media, and others.” Djupe explains that the 7 mountain reference in his survey question comes from Bill Johnson and Lance Wallnau’s 2013 book, Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate, which calls Christians “to take by force the 7 mountains of society: education, entertainment, family, business, religion, media, and government.”

Having examined Djupe’s findings, I’m quite skeptical of McCrummen’s claim that 40 percent of American Christians are embracing this antidemocratic movement. As Djupe himself cautions:

Assuming our sample is representative and people understand what they are responding to, then the takeaway here is that charismatic-style religious beliefs about politics are growing among Christians so that a near majority agree with [the NAR’s core teachings] in a recent survey.

I don’t know whether Djupe’s sample is representative, but I’d venture a guess that quite a few of his respondents were not indicating lockstep alignment with the NAR with their answer (or have even heard of the NAR or the 7 Mountain Mandate). My hunch is that many of them read quickly and interpreted the question to mean essentially that “God wants Christians to flourish in major sectors of society.” You might not agree with that view, but it’s a long way from “embracing an alluring, charismatic movement that has little use for religious pluralism, individual rights, or constitutional democracy.”

It’s also highly unlikely that the ideas from a 2013 book that appears to have had modest but not overwhelming sales (based on the number of Amazon and Goodreads reviews) have somehow reached tens of millions of American Christians. I don’t know of any book published in the past ten years that has reached that many Christians.

I’m left wondering how much we can really glean from Djupe’s research, to say nothing of McCrummen’s interpretation. That said, the movement that they’re describing is real and—according to Djupe’s longitudinal data—it’s also growing.

On the assumption that the NAR is real and growing, I have a few tentative observations and intuitions:

1. The NAR cares about power and winning control of political institutions. Commentators will debate whether the NAR’s underlying ideology is more political than religious. That debate may matter in some ways, but regardless of the NAR’s motivation, its goals are power and winning.

2. The NAR will be politically significant. It is well-funded, well-networked, and anchored in established and growing institutions. My hunch is that a deep dive into the NAR’s money and networks would reveal they dwarf the dollars and reach of legacy institutions of mid-twentieth century evangelicalism like Christianity Today, Fuller Seminary, and the National Association of Evangelicals.

3. The NAR will have a broader cultural reach than the related but somewhat distinct white evangelical demographic. As McCrummen notes, the NAR is both transnational and multiracial. Its multiethnicity will be further buttressed by immigrants and working-class non-whites who may have voted Democratic in earlier generations but find themselves increasingly disaffected from the current Democratic Party. And the NAR’s political power will also be strengthened by Trump’s uncanny ability to bring together an eclectic mix of Christians adjacent to the core movement (think, for example, about the alliance Trump has forged between Southern Baptist leader Robert Jeffress and televangelist Paula White).

If I am correct about the preceding observations, here are a few suggestions:

1. If you are concerned about the influence of the NAR but find yourself disconnected from religious people—and especially conservative religious people—you will need to increase your imagination for building contingent alliances with people who don’t necessarily share your politics or goals but who remain committed to pluralism and democratic practices. That means resisting the urge to lump all of your political opponents into the same bucket. (I made this point more extensively in an earlier post that examined ambiguities around the term “Christian nationalism.”)

2. If you are more proximate to the NAR—perhaps you have friends or family members who have moved toward its influence—be smart and realistic about how you respond. The changes we are observing today did not happen overnight—they are the result of years of formation. You don’t undo formation overnight. It requires commitment, intentionality, and counter-formation. Focus on relationships and institutions, not studies and sound bites.

My reflections take as their starting point McCrummen’s analysis, subject to the reservations I expressed earlier. But as I found myself nodding along, I wondered whether and where my own biases and news sources pushed me toward passive agreement rather than critical engagement. If you have experiences or knowledge that call into question other claims she is making, I encourage you to email me or leave them in the comments—I’m happy to revise my thinking if I am wrong about either the premises or their implications. Similarly, I welcome any critiques or challenges to my own observations about the NAR and how to respond to its antidemocratic impulses.