Another Theocracy Scare

The Atlantic spent most of 2024 warning its readers that Donald Trump was a dangerous authoritarian, the second coming of Adolf Hitler. In the February 2025 issue, the magazine shifts gears. America is being threatened by a theocratic takeover of dangerous religious extremists.

In “Army of God,” Stephanie McCrummen purports to document the extensive influence of a movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation. Broadly understood, this vision of Christianity is a combative form of Pentecostalism. It emphasizes the demonic control of world powers, while trusting that God raises up righteous warriors to contest them, which the Almighty is doing even now. With the image-driven shorthand characteristic of populist American Protestantism (a powerful rhetorical tradition that can outdo Madison Avenue in arresting formulations), the battleground is framed as Seven Mountains. They are the crucial spheres of modern life: family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government. Christians are called to restore Christ’s rule over these seven spheres—the Seven Mountain Mandate—at which point Christ will return in glory. 

I’m only vaguely aware of this movement. Some of my Protestant friends tell me not to underestimate the influence of the Seven Mountain Mandate in Pentecostal churches. They express concern that it politicizes the gospel and wrongly theologizes what are prudential judgments about how best to serve God’s kingdom as citizens of a pluralistic, democratic republic. That’s likely to be true. American Protestantism has a long tradition of Bible-only preaching, which means that these communities lack a tradition of natural law to guide political judgment. (Natural law is by no means uniquely Catholic. It is sustained in Protestantism under notions such as common grace and orders of creation.)

But intra-Christian debate about how to frame the Christian vocation of faithful citizenship is not ­McCrummen’s concern. She wants to warn her readers that America is threatened by a movement that “has little use for religious pluralism, individual rights, or constitutional democracy.” She claims that more than 40 percent of Christians in America subscribe to the militant agenda of the New Apostolic Reformation, a number she gets from Denison University political scientist Paul Djupe. Nearly half of American Christians? That sounds as implausible as the recent exaggerated claims made about the extent of nativist Christian nationalism, which ­Kenneth Woodward debunked in our pages (“The Myth of White Christian Nationalism,” May 2024).

McCrummen credits this movement with building a “sprawling political machine” that exercises vast but hidden influence. Such speculations (and fears) are akin to overwrought conservative concerns about the hand of George Soros, which is seen operating everywhere. Church entrepreneur Lance Wallnau, a leading voice for the Seven Mountain Mandate, has an interest in over-selling his influence in delivering votes to Trump’s column in the recent election. McCrummen ought to be skeptical. Furthermore, there’s more than a little journalistic trickery in her essay, as she draws Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, Mike Johnson, and Samuel Alito into the story, implying that they are being influenced by the idiosyncratic biblical schemes promoted by those touting the New Apostolic Reformation.

More significantly, McCrummen fails to recognize the true role Lance Wallnau and other pastors in his movement play in contemporary American politics. At a revival meeting, she tells of a speaker who described the prospect of a Harris presidency as putting “the devil in the White House.” McCrummen goes on to report, “Others cast Democrats as agents of Lucifer, and human history as a struggle between the godless forces of secular humanism and God’s will for humankind.”

This Manichean rhetoric is the photo negative of Atlantic authors such as Anne Applebaum, who warn that Trump is Hitler, Stalin, and Mao rolled into one totalitarian package. They depict our politics as an epochal struggle of liberal democracy—indeed, of all true human values—against the gathering forces of darkness and oppression. In the same issue of The Atlantic that contains McCrummen’s piece, ­Applebaum tells of an increasingly dire battle being waged across the West between enlightened reason and the benighted “new obscurantism.” The conviction that we are engaged in spiritual warfare is by no means exclusive to the religious right.

McCrummen quotes a scholar who warns that the New Apostolic Reformation “poses a profound threat to democracy.” It’s a strange claim, given the fact that the most damning evidence she adduces is the fact that Wallnau and his team worked overtime to get out Christian voters during the last election. Such efforts are a threat to democracy only for those who regard voters with whom they disagree as undeserving of the franchise. And storming the mountains of media and entertainment? This entails wooing audiences away from secular outlets, not organizing protestors to block streets in Hollywood. 

The conviction that world history is charged with an underlying struggle between good and evil is widespread among Christians. And for good reason: It is integral to the Bible’s narrative, as even the most ­casual reader of the Gospel of John will recognize, not to mention those who take a glance at the Book of Revelation. Hans Urs von Balthasar speculated that the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, reveals an ascending spiral of antagonism between God’s redemptive will and ­Satan’s countermeasures. The stronger the offer of grace, the more violent its rejection becomes. This spiritual conflict takes place in every area of life, especially in our own hearts, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn reminds us.

The New Apostolic Reformation may wax in ­influence, but it’s certain to wane at some point, perhaps quite soon. An influential Protestant dispensationalism of earlier decades encouraged disregard for secular affairs. Dwight L. Moody famously warned that worrying about culture is like polishing the brass on a sinking ship. The gospel message took on a more optimistic hue during the 1990s, when the prosperity gospel was ascendant in many non-denominational churches. Perhaps that cheery outlook was a fitting theologized echo of the go-go Clinton years, when partisan politics mattered less than it does today. The Seven Mountain Mandate? The Obama presidency launched a sustained effort to secure progressive control of America’s essential institutions, and it did so with a great deal of success, as the until-recently-powerful DEI regime made manifest. Are we surprised that conservative Christians would formulate a counter-offensive, drawing from the same progressive playbook, now translated into biblical terms and images?

A friend recently argued that “evangelicalism” is a spent label. It gained currency during the postwar era, but cultural changes, not just in American society at large, but within conservative Protestant churches have made the term impossible to define. Better, he said, to speak of “American Christianity,” the free-wheeling, entrepreneurial, and populist form of Bible-only Christianity that has its roots in the Second Great Awakening and was supercharged by the Pentecostal revivals of the twentieth century.

American Christianity has always been deeply embedded in and responsive to the social realities that shape the lives of non-elite Americans. We’re in a populist moment in our politics, because these non-elite Americans have decided to use their votes to fight back. The same thing is happening in our home-grown American Christianity. I may dismiss the reasoning behind the New Apostolic Reformation (not least because it is anti-theological) and rue its blustering political biblicism. But I won’t criticize the activist spirit. Why should the great American tradition of reformist zeal be the sole possession of secular progressives?