I Went to a Pro-Trump Christian Revival. It Completely Changed My Understanding of Jan. 6.
This was the third stop of the “Courage Tour,” a traveling worship spectacle passing through key battleground states ahead of the upcoming presidential election. Organized by Wallnau, a sixtysomething Texas-based evangelical with a salesman’s persona, the three-day event was a marriage of the religious and the political, a swirl of prophecies and PowerPoints and speaking in tongues. It was a call to arms, a campaign strategy session, and—above all—an honest-to-God old-fashioned Pentecostal tent revival.
It was also a showcase of the power of a rapidly growing, militant right-wing movement in American Christianity.
Wallnau is a major leader in a coalition of Christians who believe that Trump is prophesied to play a critical role in the nation’s spiritual reformation—that the former president is destined to be a catalyst for the next Great Awakening, even. These Christians see Trump as a modern-day Cyrus the Great, the powerful empire builder and nonbeliever who is credited in the Old Testament with returning the Jews to the Holy Land. They believe that under Trump’s protection, American Christians will rise up, defeat their demonic enemies, and take their rightful place of power in the country.
This belief in a Trump prophecy has only grown stronger among the faithful since the former president survived an assassination attempt in July. It is so strong, in fact, that anything that could stand in Trump’s way—democratic or otherwise—is perceived as a force of evil that must be battled on a spiritual plane.
This has already played out once: After Trump lost the 2020 election, Wallnau held nearly daily rants about the stolen election on Facebook Live; he decreed in one online prayer call that God would overturn the election results. He spoke at a major rally for Christian election deniers in Washington on Dec. 12 of that year, warning that there was “a backlash coming” and announcing that it would be the “beginning of a Christian populist uprising.” He and other right-wing Christian leaders circled the Capitol while blowing shofars and praying for the election to be overturned, drawing clear parallels to the biblical story from the Book of Joshua in which the Israelite army marches around the city of Jericho, blowing horns until its walls crumble and the Israelites conquer the city and slaughter its inhabitants. The event, which preceded a night of political violence in the nation’s capital, drew thousands of attendees in what was widely seen as a precursor to the Jan. 6 riot.
Though he later blamed antifa for the violence of Jan. 6—or, alternatively, dismissed negative media coverage of the riot as the works of the “false prophets of Baal”—Wallnau’s political rhetoric today is once again geared toward preventing another Trump loss at all costs. “We have to operate at a level where we can go against the gates of hell,” he told the crowd under the white tent in Michigan. “This is the room that can save the nation.”
For Americans unfamiliar with the evangelical world, it can be hard to grasp how rapidly this right-wing movement is changing Christianity in the U.S. and turning politics, in many Christians’ minds, into a zero-sum war between the forces of evil and the armies of God. Matthew Taylor, a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, told me that in terms of influence, Wallnau may be “the most important political theologian of evangelicalism in this century so far.” Wallnau “has restructured how millions of evangelicals think about their life and their politics,” Taylor said.
Wallnau’s ideas have taken off in particular among a group of Christians often referred to as neo-charismatics, evangelicals who speak in tongues and believe that the Holy Spirit has possessed them with supernatural gifts, including prophecy and healing; this religious cohort is also one of the fastest-growing segments of Christianity in the U.S.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024...tians.html
This was the third stop of the “Courage Tour,” a traveling worship spectacle passing through key battleground states ahead of the upcoming presidential election. Organized by Wallnau, a sixtysomething Texas-based evangelical with a salesman’s persona, the three-day event was a marriage of the religious and the political, a swirl of prophecies and PowerPoints and speaking in tongues. It was a call to arms, a campaign strategy session, and—above all—an honest-to-God old-fashioned Pentecostal tent revival.
It was also a showcase of the power of a rapidly growing, militant right-wing movement in American Christianity.
Wallnau is a major leader in a coalition of Christians who believe that Trump is prophesied to play a critical role in the nation’s spiritual reformation—that the former president is destined to be a catalyst for the next Great Awakening, even. These Christians see Trump as a modern-day Cyrus the Great, the powerful empire builder and nonbeliever who is credited in the Old Testament with returning the Jews to the Holy Land. They believe that under Trump’s protection, American Christians will rise up, defeat their demonic enemies, and take their rightful place of power in the country.
This belief in a Trump prophecy has only grown stronger among the faithful since the former president survived an assassination attempt in July. It is so strong, in fact, that anything that could stand in Trump’s way—democratic or otherwise—is perceived as a force of evil that must be battled on a spiritual plane.
This has already played out once: After Trump lost the 2020 election, Wallnau held nearly daily rants about the stolen election on Facebook Live; he decreed in one online prayer call that God would overturn the election results. He spoke at a major rally for Christian election deniers in Washington on Dec. 12 of that year, warning that there was “a backlash coming” and announcing that it would be the “beginning of a Christian populist uprising.” He and other right-wing Christian leaders circled the Capitol while blowing shofars and praying for the election to be overturned, drawing clear parallels to the biblical story from the Book of Joshua in which the Israelite army marches around the city of Jericho, blowing horns until its walls crumble and the Israelites conquer the city and slaughter its inhabitants. The event, which preceded a night of political violence in the nation’s capital, drew thousands of attendees in what was widely seen as a precursor to the Jan. 6 riot.
Though he later blamed antifa for the violence of Jan. 6—or, alternatively, dismissed negative media coverage of the riot as the works of the “false prophets of Baal”—Wallnau’s political rhetoric today is once again geared toward preventing another Trump loss at all costs. “We have to operate at a level where we can go against the gates of hell,” he told the crowd under the white tent in Michigan. “This is the room that can save the nation.”
For Americans unfamiliar with the evangelical world, it can be hard to grasp how rapidly this right-wing movement is changing Christianity in the U.S. and turning politics, in many Christians’ minds, into a zero-sum war between the forces of evil and the armies of God. Matthew Taylor, a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, told me that in terms of influence, Wallnau may be “the most important political theologian of evangelicalism in this century so far.” Wallnau “has restructured how millions of evangelicals think about their life and their politics,” Taylor said.
Wallnau’s ideas have taken off in particular among a group of Christians often referred to as neo-charismatics, evangelicals who speak in tongues and believe that the Holy Spirit has possessed them with supernatural gifts, including prophecy and healing; this religious cohort is also one of the fastest-growing segments of Christianity in the U.S.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024...tians.html
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"