In the early 2000s, I worked for a Christian publishing house that championed “church growth” and marketed books by New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) leaders. I’d like to share some insight and hindsight from my experience with that relatively overlooked movement.
A Quick Primer on the NAR
The NAR is a fast-growing, loosely organized affiliation of independent pentecostal and charismatic churches. Many NAR churches are megachurches with thousands of members.
The NAR bills itself as a “restoration” movement—restoring the church to its original purity and power. In NAR telling, the church had lost its prophetic and apostolic juice until the NAR came along. God supposedly validates the NAR providing “signs and wonders” (miracles) and “gifts of the Spirit” (like faith healing, speaking in tongues, prophesy, and apostleship).
Unlike most Christian fundamentalists and many evangelicals who have a doom-and-gloom end-times emphasis, the NAR has a dominionist emphasis. According to NAR interpretation, Christians are to rule the Earth before Christ returns in the Second Coming.
The NAR is not an inconsequential group. Many of Trump’s council of “evangelical” advisors were active in the NAR. They pushed Trump to nominate three radical right-wing Supreme Court justices. The NAR fawns over Trump. Trump panders to the NAR.
My Contact with the NAR
As an editor, I worked on books for some of the NAR leaders. These included the founder of the movement, Fuller Theological Seminary Professor C. Peter Wagner; Cindy Jacobs of Generals International; and Dutch Sheets, then a pastor of a church in Colorado Springs.
I wish that I had had the foresight then to see where this movement was headed. At the time, the NAR didn’t appear to me as susceptible to conspiracy theories and as power-hungry as it is now. It was “normal” in the sense that charismatic and pentecostal churches can be out of the mainstream, but still relatively normal.
Whatever the NAR was in its early 2000s days, we need to see clearly what the NAR has become.
The Aim of the NAR
And here I must cut to the chase: The NAR oozes spirituality, but it is not primarily a spiritual movement. It is a movement with an overt extreme right-wing Christian nationalist political agenda.
NAR leaders strongly endorse Trump and push Trump’s lies about a stolen 2020 election. They call Trump America’s God-anointed “Cyrus” leader—an allusion to Cyrus, the Persian king who allowed Jews to return to their homeland and rebuild their temple. They believe God raised Trump “for such a time as this”—another allusion to a phrase found in the biblical Book of Esther.
On Jan. 6, 2021, NAR followers turned out in force at the U.S. Capitol. They blew ram’s horns and marched around the Capitol in “Jericho marches”—reenacting a story from the Bible about how Joshua conquered Jericho. They prayed fervent “warfare prayers”—hoping to tear down (literal) demons from their (supposed) places of authority over our nation. They battled for hours to nullify a free and fair election. It was the opposite of a peaceful transfer of power.
We need to understand that Jan. 6 was a Christian riot, and the NAR was right in the middle of it. Not every Jan. 6 rioter was a Christian or a member of the NAR. But if that attempted coup had succeeded, people in the NAR movement would have rejoiced greatly and would have seen Trump’s success as an irrefutable miracle from God.
Fast forward to the fall of 2024: Recently, the prominent NAR leader Lance Wallnau claimed that Kamala Harris used witchcraft against Trump in the presidential debate and that she is the devil’s candidate. This is not the language of peace, coming-together, or moderation. This is shrill demonization. It is the rhetoric of extremism.
The Problem Is Bigger Than Just the NAR
If we were to draw a Venn diagram of the NAR, it would be a smaller circle within the larger circle labeled the Religious Right. Other smaller circles within the Religious Right would be ultra-right-wing conservative Catholics, some Baptists and “dominionists” within the Reformed (Calvinist) tradition.
The term dominionism comes from Genesis Chapter 1. God commands (“mandates”) Adam and Eve to “rule,” “master” or “take dominion” over the Earth, in particular, the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, domestic animals, wild animals and creatures that crawl along the ground. Stretching the meaning, dominionist interpretation morphs into the idea that believers should “dominate” in all spheres of human society.
In the NAR movement, the catchphrase for dominionism is “The Seven Mountains Mandate.” Believers are to work toward taking over the “mountains,” or power centers, of culture—family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business and government.
For both the Religious Right and the NAR, this Christian nationalist mandate to dominate is non-negotiable. If that means falling in line with the wanna-be dictator Trump, so be it. Trump “isn’t perfect” (an exceedingly low bar), but he is God’s choice and therefore we must be loyal to him. This necessity fits cozily with authoritarianism.
Trump channels his followers’ victimhood feelings when he tells his followers, “I am your retribution,” meaning he wants to take revenge on anyone who opposes him politically or doesn’t say nice things about him.
It also fits with the Republican Party’s rightward lurch toward extremism over the past dozen years. Trump is stoking racial fears and hatred when he lies about immigrants’ murdering, raping, destroying and “poisoning the (pure white) blood” of our country—he even accuses them of “eating the dogs and the cats.”
This kind of language doesn’t faze Trump’s Religious Right and NAR supporters. For them, it is only right that white Christians should dominate, even if it means book banning; indiscriminate mass deportations; hating LGBTQ+ people and blaming immigrants for all our social problems; rewriting history books to deceitfully minimize the evils of white supremacy, slavery, and racism; or actually causing the deaths of pregnant women in states where, since Roe v. Wade was struck down, abortion has been criminalized.
NAR leaders want Trump to be president again not despite his dictatorial tendencies but because of them. They want Trump to be a “strongman” and enjoy immunity no matter what he does, even if it means criminally inciting an insurrection after losing the 2020 election. One of JD Vance’s mentors is Curtis Yarvin, who says that Americans need to “get over” our “dictator phobia.”
A Momentus Election
This Nov. 5, the stakes could not be higher. We are being asked to choose between a doddering old man clearly losing his mental acuity, a sewer pipe of lies, an emotionally petulant child, a blatant racist and fascist who nearly broke the Constitution in his four years in office—and a competent, decent, articulate, empathetic human being, Kamala Harris, who by the way has a razor-sharp mind and who actually values the Constitution. It should be no contest.
What will the NAR and the Religious Right do? Unfortunately, NAR churches are theocratic MAGA outposts. Their beliefs have fused with MAGA-Republicanism. The NAR equates spirituality with voting MAGA. You would not be far off in calling them the American Taliban.
The NAR teaches that there should be no separation between religion and state, that the law of the land should be “the law of God” as revealed in our holy book, rather than the “man-made” Constitution.
The MAGA/NAR movement has demonstrated its unwillingness or inability to ditch Trump. It pretends to laud the Constitution, but it is profoundly anti-pluralistic and anti-democratic. Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, who led the effort of House Republicans to refuse to certify the election, has ties to the NAR.
Because of the NAR’s loyalty to Trump, the idea that “no man is above the law” is seen as outmoded. The MAGA/NAR mindset is fundamentally at odds with checks and balances. It is hostile to accepting the “will of the people” as expressed in elections. It is tolerant of violent insurrection when their guy loses.
I don’t think MAGA/NAR people understand how badly they have betrayed the ethics of Jesus and how far they have strayed from the founding principles of this republic.
The NAR/MAGA movement needs to be thoroughly crushed at the ballot box this time around.
