The New Apostolic Reformation is waging a holy war against democracy

October 20

“You do not attack the enemy — you attack the enemy’s strategy,” and the strategy of the Christian right “has always been to master the tools of electoral democracy in order to erode and to end it.” That advice, quoting Sun Tzu, came from Frederick Clarkson, a senior researcher at Political Research Associates (and Salon contributor), in a recent webinar, “The New Apostolic Reformation and the Threat to Democracy In Pennsylvania.”

Unlike earlier incarnations of the Christian right, the explicit goal of the widely-discussed but little-understood NAR is to install theocracy with a democratic facade, approximately on the Iranian model. They call it “theonomy.” The movement is led by mutually recognized “apostles” and “prophets” who purport to receive direct guidance from God and see themselves engaged in spiritual warfare — literally, as in fighting actual demons — to gain dominion over the “seven mountains of culture”: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business and government. As in Iran, they wouldn’t just control government but every aspect of society, but would still call it democracy and claim, in the face of America’s “Godless Constitution,” that this was what the founders wanted all along. It’s gaslighting in the name of God.

Understanding the NAR’s goals and strategy is crucial in exposing what the movement really wants, most of which is broadly unpopular. And how they want to get there — boosting turnout among a minority base by demonizing their fellow citizens — is highly corrosive to democracy itself. “The left is loaded with demons,” NAR apostle Lance Wallnau has said (according to Clarkson). “I don’t think it’s people anymore; I think you’re dealing with demons talking through people.”

Pennsylvania plays a key role in the NAR’s plans, and reinventing the state’s eponymous founder, William Penn, as a like-minded forebear — rather than the champion of religious diversity and secular government he actually was — is a core part of their strategy, as advanced by NAR apostle Abby Abildness.

The webinar came three days after Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance appeared at an NAR-sponsored event in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, where he stood the biblical teaching to love the stranger on its head, without even trying to quote scripture. That event was part of the Courage Tour, targeting 19 counties in the Keystone State “where demonic strongholds have corrupt control over the voting,” according to Wallnau, who has recently described Kamala Harris as “the spirit of Jezebel” and “the devil’s choice.”

Wallnau’s partner in planning his tour is the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned think tank. Vance’s appearance was perfectly in keeping with a whole web of NAR-GOP collaboration, high-level examples of which were provided by researcher Peter Montgomery of People for the American Way during the webinar.

The event kicked off with two presentations on how best to understand the NAR, from former PRA researcher Rachel Tabachnick and religion scholar Julie Ingersoll, author of “Building God’s Kingdom” (Salon author interview here), a study of Christian Reconstruction, which informs most of NAR’s theology.

“This movement has been building in Pennsylvania for more than 20 years,” Tabachnick said. “There is the belief that Pennsylvania is key to taking the rest of the country, a theme that has been repeated in campaigns and media for more than a decade.”

Two Pennsylvania researchers provided research under pseudonyms, focusing first on six key NAR figures explaining the state’s significance, and then on NAR power and influence in Lancaster Country, which has seen a dramatic shift away from its historical Anabaptist tradition.

Collectively, these presentations delivered a chilling portrait of a potent but under-recognized threat to democracy that’s MAGA-affiliated but operates on a much longer timeline, and demands a thoughtful strategic response, as outlined by Clarkson in his closing remarks.

Tearing down the religious establishment

The NAR “predates Trump and it will outlast him,” Tabachnick said. It’s a movement dedicated to “tearing down the establishment, not just in D.C., not just in Harrisburg, but also, and perhaps most importantly … tearing down the traditional religious establishment…. This is not just a religious versus secular movement,” she continued, and should not be framed that way. “This is a movement about reorganizing Christendom under their dominance.”

This entails conflict not just with liberal or moderate Christians, but also with evangelicals, Pentecostalists and charismatic Christians who do not share the NAR’s theology or worldview. In fact, both the NAR and its predecessor fringe movements going back to the 1940s have been formally denounced by other Christians, along lines that echo Paul’s denunciation of the Colossian heresies: “Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you. Such a person also goes into great detail about what they have seen; they are puffed up with idle notions by their unspiritual mind.”

For many Christians, the NAR’s focus on fighting demons is inherently heretical, since it implies that salvation through Christ is insufficient. Indeed, orthodox critics have accused the NAR and its predecessors of practicing the same sort of pagan ritual magic they claim to be fighting against.

For example, NAR father figure C. Peter Wagner, who first named the movement and did more than anyone to give it coherence, specifically developed and promoted forms of “spiritual warfare,” that have little if any Christian precedent. This began with “spiritual mapping” to identify “demonic strongholds,” which has more in common with the practices of various pagan traditions than anything adjacent to mainstream Christianity.

“This is the same movement that led many of the Jericho Marches around the [state] Capitol building in Harrisburg and other states around the country, and organized and led many of the events in D.C. and on the U.S. Capitol grounds in December 2020 and on Jan. 6,” Tabachnick said, events at least arguably informed by the practice of spiritual mapping.

It’s good to keep this context in mind when confronted with the NAR’s claims to speak for all Christians, much less to have a personal download from God. But while it’s easy to dismiss a movement that blows shofars and talks about spiritual warfare, Tabachnick noted, the NAR “is simultaneously mastering the mundane nuts and bolts work of legislative work,” and as head of the state prayer caucus, Abby Abildness has worked with legislators for years, drawing on the Project Blitz playbook that was exposed by Clarkson and reported here in 2018. It starts out with benign-sounding bills and then works up to attacking reproductive freedom, LGBTQ equality and more.

As with Project 2025, “we have playbooks and we need to expose them,” Tabachnick said. NAR strategy is “not meant for public consumption,” she continued, “and a little sunshine goes a very long way. The American people don’t want this.”

The outraged nationwide response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade is a striking example, but far from the only one. The NAR has long been interested in denying women the vote, as Ingersoll has tracked for more than a decade.

“This is a media-savvy movement, filling the airwaves with claims that those opposed to them are cutural Marxists, communists and, in the words of Wallnau, demons that have to be removed from the high places of culture and society,” Tabachnick said. While it’s impossible to say how many deep NAR support runs, she said research indicates that about 30 percent of adult Christians support the “seven-mountain mandate.”

NAR is one of “two significant sources of dominionism,” having cross-pollinated with Christian reconstructionism, whose founders “produced thousands upon thousands of pages of blueprints for reconstructing the U.S. in accordance with biblical law,” Tabachnick continued. This “Project 2025 for dominion theology” is against taxation, regulation and labor unions, and its theorists “were fellow travelers with states’ righters, the John Birch Society and, later, the Tea Party movement.”

From its neo-Pentecostal roots, the NAR inherits “a strong supernatural component,” including the “belief that individuals receive supernatural gifts, that these apostles and prophets are given direction from God and have been chosen to be God’s government on earth in all the seven mountains.”

While Doug Mastriano’s losing gubernatorial campaign in Pennsylvania in 2022 brought the movement to the surface, Tabachnick said, he wasn’t the first NAR-associated political candidate, only “the first to launch it with blowing a shofar” — a Jewish ritual ram’s horn that Christian Zionist groups have appropriated. It’s an example of how NAR readily gobbles up elements of other faiths. For the NAR, she concluded, Mastriano’s campaign was a major step forward in mastering the tools of electoral democracy than an electoral defeat.

The NAR’s widening influence and long-term goals

Ingersoll’s presentation was largely about understanding the NAR and cutting through the confusion around it. Asking if someone is a member is “actually the wrong question,” she said, “based on a misunderstanding about how ideas and social movements work. The NAR is incredibly diffuse by design.”

In part, that’s because of a problem mentioned above: From a traditional Christian point of view, the NAR and its leaders are ungodly. “There are massive egos involved that don’t want to be in coordination, let alone under the authority of other people,” Ingersoll explained. But they also fail a basic test of democratic leadership: “They like to preserve a level of deniability. They want to be able to make outrageous claims in some contexts, but not be held accountable for them in other contexts,” she said. Some people who clearly fit in with the NAR will “deny the label, because they don’t want to carry around some of the baggage.”

Abstract questions about membership don’t much matter, Ingersoll stressed. What’s important is what people actually do. “People don’t live articulated theological systems,” she said. “They assemble components of the systems that work for them in any given context. … Dominionism in the NAR is a fluid assemblage of ideas, traditions and practices that are invoked as they seem applicable.”

For example, the movement simultaneously embraces two incompatible eschatologies, to use the theological term. On one hand, there’s the pre-millennial interpretation of the Book of Revelation shared by most evangelical Christians: The world gets worse and worse until the day of Rapture and the last judgment. On the other is the Christian Reconstructionist post-millennial interpretation: “The kingdom of God was actually reestablished at the resurrection [of Christ], and it’s the job of Christians to build it.” (Hence the title of Ingersoll’s book.) Logically, you can’t believe both at once, but situationally, Christians of the NAR variety choose to believe whichever one seems to fit the moment.

One result is NAR’s long time-horizon. “They think in a thousand years,” Ingersoll said. One home-school movement has developed a package for families to build “a 200-year plan for family dominion.” When she began writing about the push to roll back women’s right to vote about 15 years ago, “People would say, ‘That’s crazy. That could never happen.’ I don’t know that it can’t happen, and among Christian nationalists there is a big discussion now about whether or not it’s biblical for women to have the right to vote. If we don’t think in the long term, we miss where they’re going with all these things.

“When we’re thinking in terms of the election or a current crisis or one particular leader, we are missing the long-term horizon with which these these efforts are made,” she continued. One way to shift focus, Ingersoll argues, is to track the use of terms that circulate in NAR circles, many of which (thanks to her) appeared in the glossary Salon published in May. These include “dominion,” ”biblical worldview,” “patriarchy” (as a positive), “government schools” instead of public schools, “civil government” instead of just government, “lesser magistrates,” “biblical spheres of authority” and “covenant marriage.”

Another complementary focus is to track known pro-NAR individuals and their associates, as Peter Montgomery did in his presentation. He began with high-level examples such as House Speaker Mike Johnson “and a couple dozen members of Congress” who have “gathered with NAR leaders for prayer and spiritual warfare.” His second example cited this year’s Republican convention in Milwaukee, where “spiritual warfare rhetoric was everywhere,” specifically “the idea that the American political scene is not about right or left … but an actual spiritual battle between good and evil, between the forces of God and the agents of Satan.”

The NAR’s reinvention of William Penn

“Each state has a specific NAR name and NAR purpose,” explained the researcher introduced under the pseudonym Kira Resistance. “Pennsylvania is not only ‘seed of a nation’ state, but it’s also the ‘government-shift state.’” NAR leaders see Pennsylvania as “the holy seed of a government,” not just for the United States but “a holy governmental example to the entire world,” which is one reason, Kira said, why she avoids the term “Christian nationalism.”

Kira discussed six key Pennsylvania figures, beginning not with Doug Mastriano but Abby Abildness, who has been a leader in developing, articulating and spreading the vision of Pennsylvania’s special role, with a reverse-engineered, NAR-friendly version of William Penn at its core. To carry out the vision of this imaginary Penn, “You have to elect righteous leaders,” which of course means those who share NAR’s vision.

Abildness once said that God had told her that he wanted to claim the state capital of Harrisburg, Kira recounted, after which Abildness released a video “showing dozens of people on a hill right before the Harrisburg Capitol, bending the knee.”

This kind of ritual performance is typical of the ways NAR seeks to rewrite history and redraw boundaries to suit its vision, sweeping aside inconvenient facts or counter-arguments. In terms of actual history, William Penn’s vision was almost exactly the opposite of the NAR fantasy. As noted on the website of Penn’s country estate, his “belief that ‘Religion and Policy … are two distinct things, have two different ends, and may be fully prosecuted without respect one to the other’ took hold and became one of America’s most important ideals.” In that sense, Penn’s vision really can be seen as the “seed of a nation” in which religious diversity, rather than unanimity, was a hallmark from the beginning.

Like many early colonial leaders and many of America’s founders, Penn was a slaveowner, a fact that has led liberal Quakers to expunge him “from our Friendly pantheon,” as Quaker activist Chuck Fager wrote in 2022. But as he continued, if liberal Quakers didn’t want Penn anymore, Doug Mastriano and his allies surely did:

[I]n Penn there are 340 years worth of — in plain worldly language — overwhelmingly positive branding for Quakers and the liberating aspects of our testimonies.

Christian nationalists now want to turn him and them into their opposite….

Penn had his faults; but a theocrat he never ever was.

Doug Mastriano and his wife, Rebbe, are often referred to as “spiritual parents of the state” in NAR-world, Kira continued. At Mastriano’s 2022 campaign kickoff, Abildness said “that Penn’s heart was bringing forth the godly foundation to our nation” and that “Mastriano’s heart is like Penn’s heart.”

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Rebbe Mastriano stirred up the faithful with fighting words: “When the Israelites came into their promised land, they didn’t just march in and take it. God had to move in mighty ways to remove their enemies. Our promised land is Pennsylvania, and we’re taking it back.”

After Mastriano’s defeat, Kira noted, he literally compared himself to Abraham Lincoln, saying, “We are in it for the long haul. We often hear about Lincoln losing important races in his time. In the end God gave him the great victory because of perseverance. This movement is going to stay influential in this state.”

Lancaster County: Microcosm, harbinger or bellwether?

The next pseudonymous presenter, who called himself the Lancaster Examiner, took a hyper-local focus on how NAR power gets built from the ground up. First, the apostolic networks are present in the county, then they attract “big-name visitors” for special events, and then “the local growth of these communities and networks” begins to impact local politics.

At least five or six apostolic networks have been active in Lancaster County and devoted to the mission of “taking over churches,” mostly within “historically Anabaptist communities” such as the Mennonites, the Amish, the Brethren, the Hutterites and similar Christian traditions.

In a follow-up email, the Examiner explained that as with “the NAR’s retelling of the William Penn narrative, local Anabaptist-turned-NAR churches have massaged their own history,” citing one sermon in which a local pastor “twists the narrative a quarter-turn or so to frame south central Pennsylvania’s NAR community as uniquely called by God for such a time as this.”

It’s quite a historical twist, since “religious freedom is absolutely a core value of Anabaptists,” the Examiner wrote. “But as you’ve seen, the NAR and similar charismatic evangelical movements engage in the language of diversity and ‘come as you are,’ but all of that is in dissonance with what comes next in their agenda.”

For several decades, he continued, “Local leaders have cultivated communities that are involved in dominionist activities and behavior, knowingly and not. What’s noteworthy is arguably not that it’s happened but that such incredible growth has gone unnoticed. So while Mastriano lost, this movement predates him and will outlive his moment in the spotlight.”

Lancaster County should be seen as a harbinger of sorts, he suggested. “The number of networks that have emerged here feels atypical and significant to me in comparison to other parts of the state,” the Examiner said, adding that “Lancastrians have a penchant for reinventing the wheel — or even inventing the same wheel by different people at the same time.”

His county is “different from the rest of the country only in degree,” he suggested. “Dominionist Christians have worked for decades to establish a beachhead in culture, whether you’re thinking in terms of reconstructionists or the NAR. In some places they’ve been more successful than others, and they have particularly targeted Pennsylvania because it’s such a key state in the election.”

Fighting back: “A quiet call to action”

In the final presentation, Clarkson laid out a broad overview of one key aspect of the NAR strategy “to master the tools of electoral democracy in order to erode and to end it.” The group seeks to “embolden reluctant conservative evangelicals in blue suburbs and make them feel part of a religious and political cause far greater than themselves,” he said.

“Beyond their efforts at electoral mobilization and possible monkey-wrenching is something far more concerning,” Clarkson continued. “NAR leaders are increasingly teaching that normal religious, political and gender differences are to be seen as supernatural evil, as demonic.” Such demonization, as we should know by now, can readily lead to violence.

Clarkson ended with what he called “a quiet call to action,” but “not a call to do things we have done before that haven’t worked, but this time with more energy.” Instead, activists who hope to battle the NAR’s political influence “need to know more than we do now about who they are and what they are about. If knowledge is power, we need more knowledge — and we need to spread it more widely.”

Along with that, Clarkson concluded, NAR opponents “need some agreed-upon vocabulary in order to be able to discuss the knowledge we acquire. This is how good strategy is made. We also need to deepen our knowledge of the rules and practices of electoral democracy. We should not be content to leave these things to political professionals. Democracy belongs to all of us, and we need to act like it.” That was what the real William Penn, flaws and all, actually believed. He wasn’t interested in fighting demons.

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