Of camels’ noses and tents
We’ve warned plenty about the New Apostolic Reformation and the Seven Mountains people. Long before us, Richard Hofstadter warned about the paranoid style in American politics in 1964 in the wake of the McCarthy era. The paranoid style in American religion is closely related.
In the late 1970s, Republican operatives decided on mobilizing useful idiots on the religious right for conservative political purposes. They invited the camel to poke its nose under the tent. And in the fullness of time we got QAnon and Trump and MAGA. ALL ONE, like the pepermint soap.
Of camels’ noses and tents
Axios reports this morning that while Christian nationalism is on the rise, it still remains widely unpopular:
About two-thirds of Americans reject or are skeptical about Christian nationalism despite its rising influence that’s shaping education, immigration and health care policies, a new survey finds.
Why it matters: Some Republicans are openly expressing Christian nationalist views, which have ranged from calls for more religion in public schools to book bans and even suggestions that democracy should die.
- This once-fringe ideology has become prevalent in some deeply red states at a time when the nation overall is increasingly diverse and less religious.
The big picture: The new data from the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Atlas come days after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos should receive legal protections as “unborn life.”
Zoom in: 7 out of 10 Americans said they were rejecters (30%) or skeptics (37%) of Christian nationalism, the PRRI survey said.
How fringe are Christian nationalists? In echoes of Steve Bannon’s nihilistic rhetoric about burning the government to the ground, Fred Clarkson reports that these “prophets” want to burn down religion too:
It is more than paradoxical that an ostensibly Christian university leader would say, “We are here to put a knife to the throat of religion.” But that’s what Apostle Greg Hood, the founder of Kingdom University in Franklin, Tennessee believes so heartily he emblazoned it on a KU t-shirt.
This is not a hoax. In fact, the bloody tee epitomizes the paradoxes of the New Apostolic Reformation—a movement that says it means to bust out of the “demonic prison” of religion, knives out. Religion is, of course, one of the seven mountains of culture that NAR seeks to conquer to achieve Christian dominion (the other six being government, family, education, business, media, and arts & entertainment). The rhetoric they employ when discussing how to do it can be violent, if not always t-shirt worthy. But understanding the paradox of religion killing religion helps us understand this campaign for a paradigmatic change in the direction of American and world Christianity.
There’s a certain tension in the NAR, between the metaphorical and the physical; the hyperbolic and the actual. But most often, these are not mutually exclusive.
Trump played that tension like a violin ahead of Jan. 6. These dudes do the same. Apostle Greg Hood said, “We’re dealing with demonic strongholds that are controlling people, that are using people to keep their agenda.” Spooky much?
He nevertheless claims “we’re not attacking people”—even as he employs military metaphors and scenarios in which people would inevitably be killed in real life, including by nuclear weapons and drone strikes.
“Wicked things… are happening in our nation,” he says, because “wicked people are ruling at the moment.”
You know how this works. Trump did on Jan. 6: “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
It’s a heavenly battle and a real one.
Even as top apostles prime the pump for possible real-world violence, and encourage the Ekklesia to envision themselves as an End Times army, they are, paradoxically, also planning for the future governance of society. While it’s not uncommon for churches to sponsor Christian schools, at least one apostolic center, Impact Church International in Concord, North Carolina, not only hosts a KU campus, but also the K4-12 Daniel Christian Academy, which is explicitly devoted to teaching about the seven mountains of dominion.
What, no blood-drinking pedophiles?
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