We Need To Talk About The Apocalypse

“I thank you, Lord, for regime change in Iran. Yes, Lord, we cry out to you!” Cindy Jacobs’s Texan drawl arcs into an otherworldly howl as she begins to pace across the stage. “We pray for the president that he will not compromise. Father, we cry out, in the name of Jesus, that we will totally annihilate the regime!”

Jacobs does not look like most people’s idea of a prophet. She is a short, well-preserved woman in her seventies with a layered bob haircut and bright red lipstick. But her voice has become a maelstrom, and the hundreds crowded into this auditorium are on their feet and shouting “Yes!” and “Amen!” into the spaces between her words. “Lord, we pray! We push the darkness! The Prince of Persia! And we say that it has to be broken, and that it has to come down, and we thank you, Lord, that it will come down, in the name of Jesus.”

It is July 4, 2026: the second and final day of the Intercessors for America’s Rededicate America conference at Washington, D.C.’s Museum of the Bible. We have learned that the motto of the American Revolution was “no King but King Jesus”; reclaimed a 400-year-old, irrevocable covenant that binds America to Christ for all subsequent generations; and listened as IFA state leaders described doing battle—against the Masonic spirit in Kentucky and witchcraft in Wilkes-Barre. Now, as the conference draws to a close, the chairman of the Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders is giving us a glimpse into the future.

“And, Lord, we say that Planned Parenthood will be stopped! And the Senate parliamentarian that is causing these snags—I’m going to be bold; this is Cindy praying this—she has got to be gone!” Jacobs continues. “And we say the Democratic Socialists candidates will not win! And so we pray, in Jesus’s name: Amen.”

Jacobs, the IFA, and every keynote speaker at this conference are affiliated with the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, an apocalyptic charismatic movement heaven-bent on transforming America into a Christian nation and thereby kicking off the end times. As Christian dominionists, NAR members believe that God wants Christians to control every aspect of society, and they’re taking concrete action to make that happen. Several members of President Donald Trump’s inner circle are affiliated with this group; other members espouse their ideas.

“Their fixation with their own prophecies, and in the way they interpret biblical prophecies, is very influential today,” theologian and religious scholar Matthew D. Taylor told me. “ I wouldn’t necessarily say, ‘Oh, Donald Trump believes in their end-times prophecies,’ but they do, and they are advising Trump.”

Those who study and write about the New Apostolic Reformation and other Christian dominionist movements mention how difficult it is to get anyone to take these movements seriously. How, with everything else going on, are we to find time to worry about self-described apostles and prophets performing miracles and fighting cosmic battles against geographically bound “territorial spirits” like the Prince of Persia, Jezebel, and Baal? Who cares if they believe they’re waging a spiritual battle against a genuinely demonic Democratic Party? That’s just ancient superstition. Demons aren’t real. Let them sing about Jesus in their megachurches and pray for policy change—what difference does it make?

That policy-focused Democrats struggle to imagine a movement more concerned with the Second Coming than with improving material conditions is not surprising. But as beliefs about spiritual warfare and God’s covenant with America worm their way deeper into both our government and our culture, as the Trump administration begins enacting Christian supremacist policy and the Department of Justice gears up to prosecute left-wing groups for “domestic terrorism,” that ignorance becomes downright dangerous.

Christian dominionist movements began decades before Trump was a twinkle in the GOP’s eye and will continue long after his passing. Earlier this year, a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI, found that fully one-third of all Americans partially or completely agree with Christian nationalist beliefs like “The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation” and “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.” Two-thirds of all white evangelical Protestants hold these views, as do 54 percent of all Hispanic Protestants. People with these beliefs are twice as likely as their nonsupremacist neighbors to support political violence, and they score far higher on the PRRI right-wing authoritarianism scale.

Scholars and journalists alike extensively documented Christian dominionism’s influence on Trump through his first term, its outsize role in the January 6 insurrection, and its elevation to power within Trump’s second Cabinet. Over the past two years, their warnings have been largely borne out. And, despite deep schisms over aid to Israel and the ongoing war in Iran, the beliefs that unite Christian dominionist factions pose an existential threat to American democracy.

It does not matter whether demonic influence and end-times prophecy are mass delusion or metaphysical reality: If the right people believe hard enough, they might as well be the latter. As the alleged demons in question, we are running out of time to take them seriously. Like it or not, we need to talk about the apocalypse.

In approximately 95 C.E., John of Patmos wrote the Book of Revelation. This, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, has made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

John prophesied the Second Coming, and also that Christ will reign with his faithful for a thousand years. For 2,000 years, Christians have debated which event will happen first—and the order matters more than one might think. Some Christians believe the thousand years is more metaphorical than exact—that we are in the middle of that millennium, no one knows how long it will last, and Christ will get here when he gets here. These are the amillennialists, and we can set them aside for this article.

Other Christians believe that the world will grow increasingly sinful until Jesus Christ’s return, followed by a utopian millennium of Christ’s rule. These are the premillennialists, and if you’re old enough to remember the Left Behind series, it’s the version you’re most familiar with. Premillennialists believe that Jesus will remake the world after the Rapture takes them away from all this: no need to do anything but wait.

The third school of thought, postmillennialism, believes that Christ will return at the end of the thousand years of Christian rule, not before. While premillennialists expect the world to grow steadily worse, postmillennialists anticipate utopia, and many want to do their part to bring it about through traditional evangelism. Starting in the 1960s, some postmillennialists began to take Jesus’s command to “make disciples of all nations” literally and advocate for full theocracy. Doug Wilson, who has served as a spiritual adviser to Pete Hegseth, is this type of postmillennialist—we will talk about him more later.

The New Apostolic Reformation has managed to carve out an improbable fourth position: shrugging its shoulders at the entire exercise. It’s a strategy that movement founder C. Peter Wagner once jokingly described as “panmillennial: believing that everything is going to ‘pan out’ all right in the end.” Whether Christ arrives before or after his thousand-year rule, the NAR believes Christians must bring about the Second Coming by making the world as Christian as possible—and they focus on making disciples of the nations of the world, rather than on individual conversion. “[Jesus] is waiting for us to do our part in bringing restoration to pass in real life. Meanwhile, he is reigning through us,” Wagner wrote in his book, Dominion! Your Role in Bringing Heaven to Earth. “It is our task to become spiritual and social activists until satan’s dominion is ended.”

“They’ve blended, I would argue, the worst elements of premillennialism and postmillennialism together,” Taylor told me: the persecution complex of the Left Behind crowd combined with a postmillennial vision of Christian conquest. “That’s what gives you this kind of chaotic, amorphous style that is obsessed with the end times, but can never quite pin down what they mean by the end times.”

Whatever the end times may be, the NAR believes we are entering into them, which is also why God has begun to once again anoint biblical prophets and apostles. The NAR maintains that its prophets are able to communicate directly with God and receive revelations of his divine plan, while apostles use their networking and leadership skills to put that plan into action. One might expect such a system to result in conflicting prophecy and internecine strife, but this is not the case; apostles and prophets are not supposed to criticize each other publicly, and they rarely break this rule.

“Their authority can’t be challenged or questioned. They answer only to God,” Holly Pivec, an evangelical Christian and an expert on the NAR, told me. “There’s really no way to hold them accountable.”

Pivec has been warning fellow believers about the NAR for over two decades. “It was Christians who really started sounding the alarm about this movement, long before the media ever started reporting it,” she told me. “The concern is that people will lose sight of what Jesus’s message was really about,” she said. “If [Christianity] is all about trying to cast out high-ranking demons, and taking dominion of nations, and apostles rising to the top of societal institutions and taking control—if that’s what people think Christianity is all about, people aren’t going to want to become Christians.”

Yet Pivec also sees the ideology’s political threat as “overblown.” Recent attempts by NAR apostles to win public office have failed, she points out. “Sure, that’s their agenda. But are they actually going to be able to achieve that in a democratic society?”

It’s true that a Christian dominionist takeover would be difficult within this democratic society, so the NAR seeks to change it from the inside out through the Seven Mountain Mandate. “That movement is intent on destroying democracy by taking dominion in these seven institutions: education, family, religion, government, business, media, and entertainment,” Matthew Boedy, professor of rhetoric at the University of North Georgia, writes in his recent book, The Seven Mountain Mandate. Their end goal, he says: “bring[ing] the Kingdom of God to America.”

Individuals affiliated with the NAR and other Christian dominionist sects already occupy top positions within the Trump administration. The most visible of these is Trump’s spiritual adviser, Paula White-Cain, a senior adviser at the White House Faith Office who sits on the Department of Justice’s Religious Liberty Commission. In 2016, she introduced Trump to other movers and shakers within the movement who ultimately delivered the evangelical vote that propelled Trump to victory—81 percent of white evangelicals cast their votes for him. Through White-Cain, the NAR can, and has, gained direct access to the president through both phone calls and in-person meetings. We do not know how often Trump has met with apostles like William “Dutch” Sheets, David Kubal, and John Garlow, but we know he has met with them multiple times during both his first and second term. These apostles had enough pull to score a meeting with White House officials with a single day’s notice on December 29, 2020, days before the January 6 insurrection—more on this later.

White-Cain is just the tip of the NAR iceberg within Trump’s inner circle. Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin has a long-standing relationship with City Elders, an Oklahoma NAR-affiliated organization. House Speaker Mike Johnson has robust, well-documented ties to the movement. JD Vance does not, but he spoke at a September 2024 event hosted by Lance Wallnau, the apostle who has been most instrumental in popularizing the Seven Mountain Mandate, and who accused Kamala Harris of “witchcraft.”

The Trump administration also contains many former employees—76 of them in total, as of June 2025—of the America First Policy Institute, or AFPI, which advocates for the Christianization of America, and whose sister organization, America First Works, has partnered with Jim Garlow’s Well Versed, a group that ministers to members of Congress, the United Nations, and the Israeli government ministries, according to AFPI chief government affairs officer Matthew Henderson. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins was the founding president and CEO of AFPI; others in leadership positions there include White-Cain, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin.

Still other Cabinet members not directly affiliated with the NAR nonetheless share its dominionist agenda. The loudest of these is Hegseth, whose spiritual adviser, Doug Wilson, explicitly advocates for repealing the Nineteenth Amendment. And Baptist News Global, an independent news outlet, found that donor funds the National Christian Foundation, Christian Community Foundation, and the Signatry—which contributed a total of $210 million to organizations that helped write Project 2025—also donate millions to NAR-affiliated groups, including $110,000 to the IFA. Meanwhile, the Center for Progressive Reform estimates that the Trump administration has enacted over half the policy suggestions contained within the Project 2025 initiative.

This powerful coterie of Christian dominionists is using their positions at the summit of government to erode the influence of opposing ideologies across the mountain range in favor of their own, including the mountain of religion itself. Trump’s White House Faith Office is 100 percent Christian, as are a majority of the advisers to Trump’s religious liberty commission. Both the Religious Liberty Commission and the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias have released reports that explicitly undermine the separation of church and state and recommend using federal resources to correct this “misconception.” The Office of Personnel Management issued a memorandum that allows federal workers to proselytize at work, and the IRS has stated it will not revoke tax exempt status from churches that endorse political candidates.

The mountain of family should be restricted to heterosexual nuclear families with plenty of children who all conform to rigid gender norms, and so the administration continues its ongoing efforts to restrict access to mifepristone; has opened investigations into 13 states that require state-regulated insurance plans to cover abortion expenses; slashed Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood; disqualified any clinic offering abortion services from receiving Title X funding; and moved to limit Title X funding for contraception.

Meantime, Trump’s administration has also erased mention of LGBTQ+ people on federal government websites and public monuments; canceled over $800 million in grants and funding from programs that track and improve LGBTQ+ health outcomes; and shut down the LGBTQ+ option on the youth suicide hotline. But the administration’s most vicious attacks focus on trans people, as it coerces hospitals across the country into shutting down gender-affirming care clinics and prosecutes doctors who provide such care. It has also moved to forcibly detransition incarcerated people on hormones and, despite multiple court rulings, to have incarcerated trans women transferred into male facilities, where they are often subject to sexual violence—especially now that the DOJ has barred inspectors from enforcing standards that protect trans people from sexual violence.

On the education front, there have been the well-documented efforts to curtail academic freedom within universities through both frivolous lawsuits and withholding funding from “woke” institutions. Many schools have chosen to settle or alter their curricula rather than to engage in expensive and drawn-out fights—which means students are learning that the most expedient response to authoritarian overreach is to knuckle under.

Ditto the chilling effect that Trump’s frivolous lawsuits are intended to have on the media. Though he has not won a single court case, Disney and Paramount both settled, as have YouTube, Facebook, and X. The administration has also defunded public broadcasting, eliminated Voice of America, and restricted mainstream media access to both the White House and the Pentagon in favor of right-wing outlets. These actions aren’t just about Trump’s narcissism, Boedy says. “They’re using the levers of government policy and bully pulpit and Department of Justice to do things that the [Seven Mountain] mandate calls for: attacking media, creating parallel Christian media that can replace it, [and] trying to kneecap independent journalists, CNN, and CBS.”

“When it comes to something like the relationship between the U.S. and Israel, I think they’ve been incredibly influential,” Taylor told me. “American bombs are accomplishing in the physical realm what they are also trying to accomplish in the spiritual realm.”

But it is in the realm of foreign policy that the NAR truly becomes the 800-pound gorilla of the Trump administration. “When it comes to something like the relationship between the U.S. and Israel, I think they’ve been incredibly influential,” Taylor told me. “American bombs are accomplishing in the physical realm what they are also trying to accomplish in the spiritual realm.”

The NAR’s support of Israel should not be mistaken for support of Jewish people, or even support for a Jewish homeland. According to the NAR’s interpretation of the Book of Revelation, Israel must exist for Jesus to return, at which point the Jewish people will convert to Christianity and live happily ever after. The NAR is very interested in bringing that prophecy to pass, which is why it both advocates for a one-state solution and actively proselytizes Jewish people. When I called into one of the IFA’s weekly Zoom prayer calls for Israel, it was opened with a virtual Communion. “We recognize that you, Jesus, the final and eternal king of the Jewish people, are the hope of Israel,” IFA Montana leader Brian Friess intoned shortly after. “Come and destroy the deep darkness that has clouded the minds and hearts of the Jewish people.”

The other prayer call leader, Tom McGovern, said he’d recently returned from a summit organized by Christians United for Israel, a group that shares the IFA’s attitude toward proselytizing Jewish people and also enjoys a robust partnership with Israel’s Likud party.

“They want to see Israel victorious,” Taylor explained, “and so they have tended to support a much more aggressive stance from Netanyahu and the far-right government of Israel, including in its domestic policy [on] the war in Gaza or the way it enforces its settlements in the West Bank.”

Part of NAR support for Israel involves opposition to Iran, and the movement’s preference for regime change over a peaceful Middle East and open Strait of Hormuz has proved influential as well. On the IFA Israel prayer call, which took place about a week before Trump’s short-lived Memorandum of Understanding crashed and burned in July, the group prayed for Congress to void the proposed $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran. “ We pray that any agreements that are made with nefarious intentions or hidden agendas that would cause the United States to abandon Israel or to divide up their land would be revealed and be known,” McGovern said. “We ask you to keep President Trump from being deceived.”

Ultimately, the NAR’s project aims to undermine the secular humanist values at the center of American culture and change the way this country sees itself. “The idea of Christianizing the culture isn’t just about policy,” Boedy told me. “There’s policy, and then there’s this kind of—I don’t want to say vaguer, but more widespread attempt from the government to make the government, and therefore the nation, seem Christian.”

The greatest obstacle facing the dominionists is that, despite being majority Christian, America has never been a “Christian nation.” Our Constitution is a deeply secular document informed primarily by Enlightenment philosophy that makes no reference to any God, Christian or otherwise, which makes efforts to Christianize this nation feel profoundly un-American. To clear this roadblock, the dominionists must change America’s origin story—and they are doing their very best to make that happen.

“Somewhere along the way, God’s dream for America, which is not only to bless us with freedom and liberty and all the blessings that we have, but also to use us to bless the world—to take the gospel to the ends of the earth—somewhere along the way, his part of the dream was lost,” NAR apostle Sheets told the crowd at IFA’s Rededicate America. “God’s dream for America became the American dream.”

Recount, reclaim, rededicate was the IFA’s three-word agenda for the conference—and also for the country. Recounting came to us courtesy of Jim Garlow, former senior pastor of Skyline Church in La Mesa, California, and founder and CEO of Well Versed. His presentation, entitled “American Christianity, 1607 ff.; Recounting our Nation’s Glorious Founding under God,” began with the Reverend Robert Hunt arriving with the Jamestown expedition, then allegedly cutting the mast of one of the expedition’s ships into the shape of a cross and driving it into the ground (the cross story is accurate; the mast detail appears apocryphal). Later, Garlow said, St. Junípero Serra planted a cross in California. (He did not mention that Serra was a Spanish missionary, nor that “later” meant 1782.) The important thing was that “the East Coast and the West Coast had crosses staked into the ground claiming this land for our God, for our Savior: Jesus Christ.” The presentation moved quickly to the establishment of the 13 Colonies by different sects of Christians. This, Garlow said, was what America’s Framers meant by religious pluralism: the freedom to worship any version of Jesus that you want to.

After these initial settlements, Garlow told us, America went through a period of decline. He did not elaborate further. Instead, he skipped forward to the Great Awakening that allegedly saved and forged America.

At this point, the slideshow deck broke. Perhaps it contained more history—disagreements with the British Crown, maybe, or the hard-fought Revolution that followed. Instead, Garlow jumped to the Constitution, which he claimed the Framers modeled on the Book of Exodus—nary a mention of Locke, Montesquieu, or Rousseau. “We are called Judeo-Christian. Why? Because our Founding Fathers saw themselves as tied to the Sinai covenant,” Garlow told us. The theologian wrapped up his lecture with a claim that America’s Framers quoted the Bible in their writings more than any other source, and with an exhortation to pray in the lead-up to the midterms. Thus concluded the history portion of Rededicate America.

After a brief Bible reading, IFA president and CEO Kubal stepped up to the podium for the second agenda item: reclaiming America for Christ. Immediately, the reason for Garlow’s emphasis on the 1608 and 1782 cross plantings became clear. “Rabbis teach that, if land is dedicated to God, it permanently alters that land’s legal status, removing it from a family’s hereditary possession and making it holy to God through a binding agreement. This decision is irrevocable,” Kubal told us. “Covenants made by our early Founders became generational because God’s destiny for our nation is generational.”

The Museum of the Bible auditorium holds fewer than 500 people, and one could be forgiven for refusing to take this relatively small gathering devoted to biblical rules-lawyering seriously. But the IFA conference was not the only event devoted to rededication in Washington this summer. Several weeks before the conference, on May 17, the Trump administration itself sponsored Rededicate 250: a seven-hour prayer revival on the National Mall (shortly before the Reflecting Pool became a slurry of paint chips and algae). The event was not exclusively NAR—dominionists from other sects also spoke, as did a few non-dominionist Protestants, two Roman Catholic priests, and one rabbi—but to those who follow the NAR, the whole thing felt very familiar. “They’ve been doing these big events on the National Mall for more than a quarter-century now,” Taylor told me. “Rededicate 250 was the first time it was official. It was the first time they had government sponsorship.”

I attended Rededicate 250 as well. The event featured the same bizarro history, the same rhetoric, and even one of the same speakers as the IFA conference. “Brothers and sisters, this is a hinge of history moment,” Sheets told us, alongside NAR prophet Lou Engle. “What we do right here could shift America.”

White House faith leader Paula White-Cain echoed Garlow’s claim that the Great Awakening led directly to the American Revolution. Southern Baptist pastor and televangelist Robert Jeffress told the crowd that America’s Framers “would be called Christian nationalists today, and it is a title they would have gladly embraced.” Speaker Mike Johnson’s speech consisted entirely of prayer: “In recent years, we’ve seen sinister ideologies sow confusion and discord among our people. We’ve witnessed attacks on our history, on our heroes, and the cherished moral and spiritual identity of this great nation … but Father, we reject that. We rebuke it in your name,” said Johnson.

America would not need rededication if some malign force had not knocked the nation off course, and you already know what that force is. Back at the IFA’s Rededicate America, Kubal cited the biblical story of Isaac reclaiming the land promised to his father from the villainous Philistines, who had occupied that land and filled in his father’s wells, as proof of his no-takesies-backsies theory of God’s claim on America. “What the Philistines didn’t understand—what the leftists didn’t understand—was that they weren’t just filling a hole, but they were attempting to put an end to the generational blessing put in place by God,” Kubal said. “They weren’t fighting against Isaac; they were fighting against God himself.”

In other words, dominionists do not see liberals and leftists as merely misguided or mistaken, but as enemies in the cosmic struggle between good and evil, God and the devil. “The challenges of our generation,” IFA’s chief program officer Kris Kubal (David’s wife) told the conference, are simply the latest incarnation of the “evil, demonic power” behind Adolf Hitler. “Democratic socialism [is] really just a repackaged way of saying communism, which is a repackaged way of saying demonic influence and control,” she explained. “This is a spiritual war. None of it can happen without intercession.”

And she was not speaking metaphorically. The NAR believes that the world’s afflictions are tied to demonic “territorial spirits” that occupy and corrupt specific geographic regions, and only intercession—spiritual warfare—can defeat and banish these spirits. According to the IFA’s website, intercession involves more than falling to your knees and asking God for help. It is prayer for the sake of someone else and for the kingdom of God, and it cannot be “wimpy”—intercessors do not ask politely or take no for an answer. “You collide with God violently until His will is released on the earth,” the website explains. The NAR believes that God has limited his limitless power so that humans might worship him of their own free will, which also means that he does not act unilaterally to perform miracles. Instead, apostles, prophets, and intercessors enact God’s will by channeling the Holy Spirit through prayer declarations and decrees.

Sometimes, NAR leaders describe liberals and leftists as victims of demonic forces; increasingly, they are seen as active allies of these dark forces. “The left is loaded with demons,” Wallnau declared on an episode of the NAR videocast FlashPoint. “I don’t think it’s people anymore. I think you’re dealing with demons talking through people.”

Dehumanizing rhetoric can potentially be dangerous. “That’s how you get evangelicals to hate people,” Taylor told me. “You tell them there are demons that you’re allowed to hate that are inside those people, and we just need to get rid of the demons, and then those people will all agree with us.”

Some forms of spiritual warfare seem harmless, if a bit silly, at first glance. Because territorial spirits are geographically bound, intercessors must physically travel to where these spirits are in order to do battle with them, which can be as simple as a prayer walk through one’s community, but it scales up rapidly from there. One of the NAR’s more infamous intercessions took place in 1997, when Jacobs and Wagner helped organize “Operation Ice Castle,” an expedition of 26 intercessors to the foot of Mount Everest to do battle with “The Queen of Heaven,” a demonic spirit that prevents unbelievers from finding God. The global fight against territorial spirits continues to this day, both at home and overseas. “They are interceding in Mecca, walking around there in the Kabbalah [sic]. God is going everywhere!” Jacobs declared during her conference speech.

The success of intercession is in the eye of the beholder. “When we prayed during 9/11 that crime went down more than anything,” White-Cain told her congregation in 2020. “It is statistically proven because of the power of prayer that crime across this nation and across the world drastically went down.”

Spiritual warfare can also include prophetic acts. “Just like our words have the power to create reality, they think there’s certain actions you can do … that allegedly release God’s power,” Pivec told me. After making his case for America’s irrevocable covenant with God, David Kubal listed several such actions that could fit Pivec’s description. “We reclaim these covenants every time an official takes an oath of office and they place their hand on the Bible,” he said. “When the Congress opens itself in prayer every day.” Other acts of reclamation include Thanksgiving celebrations and recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance. But spiritual warfare can go well beyond symbolism, especially when it has the power of government behind it. The NAR sees the war in Iran as a form of spiritual warfare against the evil territorial spirits currently ruling that country. “I was on a prayer leaders’ gathering with the White House, and [Sheets] said: ‘I believe that the issue with Iran and the Prince of Persia is the most important thing in the world to be praying,’” prophet Engle said in an August 5 Facebook Reel, before asking intercessors to join him on August 14 “for the war to free Iran from the Prince of Persia.”

The NAR believes that the Prince of Persia is the territorial spirit over Iran, Taylor explained. “They’ll say ‘God wants revival to happen in Iran, but first we have to displace these evil demons.’ They’ll sometimes even speak of the demon of Islam that rules over the region,” he said. The IFA wants the Iran war to continue until these demons are destroyed, a point of view not exactly in line with Trump’s halting and stumbling attempts to negotiate peace.

Spiritual warfare also serves as a marketing strategy that increases engagement and opens the door for larger calls to action in the future. Prayer walks and regular phone calls build community and forge connection. “There’s nothing more precious than battle buddies,” Kris Kubal told the IFA conference. “I’ve never been in the military, OK? But this is as close as I’m going to get—my girlfriends and guys that are fighting for something bigger than ourselves.”

There’s a line between fostering community and fostering radicalization. In his book on the Capitol insurrection, The Violent Take It by Force, Taylor focused on NAR actions in the days following Trump’s election loss in 2020. Apostles mounted “Jericho marches” in swing state capitals, with “ecstatic prayers, words of prophecy, people blowing shofars, and marching around government buildings.” A movement led by White-Cain from inside Trump’s White House launched a series of massive prayer meetings on Zoom dominated by NAR apostles and prophets that blamed demonic forces for the alleged election theft. Sheets embarked on a tour of the swing states at the suggestion of an unnamed White House adviser, where he hosted “prayer meetings” that featured increasingly incendiary language and incitements to violence.

This spiritual warfare did not overturn the election or have any obvious metaphysical effects on the situation. What happened next, however, did. As mentioned earlier, apostles and prophets (including “Dutch” Sheets and his brother, Tim) managed to get a White House meeting on December 29, 2020—days before the insurrection. We cannot know for sure what happened at this meeting, but Taylor’s book quotes a sermon delivered by Tim Sheets the following Sunday. “We had a two-hour time to pray at the White House and make some decrees that God had given us,” he told his congregation. They then traveled to an undisclosed secure location, where “strategy was given to us from people in the know around there that I cannot really talk about.”

On January 6, 2021, Jacobs, Wallnau, and several other apostles and prophets affiliated with the NAR stood outside the Capitol building as “Dutch” Sheets prayed via Zoom for the people fighting their way inside. Taylor examined pictures taken on January 6 and found “dozens and potentially hundreds of Appeal to Heaven flags” within the crowd. This flag, which features a pine tree on a white field and the words AN APPEAL TO HEAVEN embroidered above, was one of many carried during the Revolutionary War. In 2013, Sheets prophesied that the flag would become the “symbol of a campaign to restore America to the Christian nation God intended.” On January 6, people carried Appeal to Heaven flags as they tore down barricades. They used flagpoles with Appeal to Heaven flags to break through police lines. At least one person wore an Appeal to Heaven flag draped over his shoulders as he entered the Capitol. To be sure, the NAR did not instigate the January 6 insurrection, but Taylor’s book makes the case that it played an outsize role. And it all started with Jericho marches and the Dems in league with demons.

Democracy depends on dialogue and persuasion, but there can be no negotiation with pure, hateful evil. So, the dominionists feel justified in discarding any statistic, study, or argument presented by someone left of center: After all, demons lie; they can’t be trusted.

Believing that people with different political views from yours are working with dark forces is, of course, completely incompatible with our current system of government. Democracy depends on dialogue and persuasion, but there can be no negotiation with pure, hateful evil. The dominionists therefore feel justified in discarding any statistic, study, or argument presented by someone left of center: After all, demons lie; they can’t be trusted. Separation of church and state is not a secular point of view they disagree with; rather, it is a malevolent lie from a force that longs only for destruction. Finally, demons cannot possibly win elections without supernatural coercion—so a Democratic win is fraudulent by definition.

Nearly six years after the Capitol insurrection, Christian dominionism no longer needs to break into the building: Some adherents are now inside, and they have spent the last two years preparing to purge their opponents. Shortly after designating antifa a “domestic terrorist organization” last year, the Trump administration issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, which directs federal law enforcement to target those with “anti-fascist” ideologies likely to engage in domestic terror—ideologies including anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, and “extremism” on gender. Deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller made it clear in July that the administration plans to use NSPM-7 to go after the scourge of people and organizations that disagree with him. “One of the hallmarks of left-wing violence and terrorism is its completely pretextual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties in an effort to shield its own violence,” he said. “When the leftist, who does not believe in freedom, who does not believe in civil rights, who does not believe in any ordered notion of justice, protests that we are violating his rights, understand that he is lying.”

The targeting of liberals and leftists is already underway. A shooting at an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas, led to terrorism charges against what prosecutors described as a “North Texas Antifa Cell” and what was, in actuality, one person who opened fire at a protest and seven unaffiliated people who did not. The seven were found guilty, including one whose only crime was transporting leftist zines; all received sentences of between 30 and 70 years. The DOJ is currently charging 15 anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis with conspiracy on the grounds that they, too, are affiliated with an antifa terror cell.

In August, The Wall Street Journal revealed that ICE is scraping social media platforms for posts that criticize their mission, then hiring third-party contractors to identify the posters’ personal information. Agents then track these posters down and intimidate them into silence. To summarize: A paramilitary force that abducts people off the streets and indefinitely detains them in concentration camps with no due process or recourse—an agency that, according to the Trump administration, has “absolute immunity”—is compiling lists of dissidents.

When people tell you who they are, and then show you who they are: believe them.

There is a one-panel cartoon from 2021 by @9mmballpoint that I keep in my quick-access folder so I can rapidly use it in my social media responses. A donkey in a button-down and tie with glasses and a clipboard addresses a man in a MAGA hat. “Let’s say we were to reduce the proposed spending for this bill by 15%. Hypothetically, could that be enough to earn your vote?” The MAGA voter replies, “I literally believe you rape babies to death and drink their blood to live forever.” “I see,” the donkey replies. “How about 20%?”

The Democrats have reason to be optimistic heading into the midterms, in large part because disagreements over aid to Israel and war in Iran are tearing the GOP apart. “You’re seeing this emerging, factional, ideological civil war,” Taylor said. “ Trump seems to have really, in the second term, basically thrown in with the kind of NAR faction. But that has stirred up a great deal of resentment as well.”

Yet language that links the Democrats and demons has spread far beyond the NAR—and disillusioned far-right voters are still more apt to look to the right than to the left long-term. “People who care about American democracy, who care about pluralism, who care about the rule of law—they imagine that Trump is increasingly unpopular, and therefore people are going to run to them,” Taylor said. “Democrats are also extremely unpopular. And there are other forces in American politics that people might run to instead—the Tucker Carlson and the America First crowd.”

But this battle goes beyond the midterms and the typical contours of right-left politics. We are light-years beyond politics as usual. The central political struggle of our time is not about policy or direction, but about America’s identity itself. Although our history certainly includes a heavy helping of Christian nationalism and authoritarian violence—the dominionists are not completely misguided when they lay claim to that intellectual heritage—America has been many other things, too. Ours has been a utopian project from the start: the dream of a country in which everyone is equal under the eyes of the law, where everyone can make a good living and live life on their own terms. We have never lived up to that ideal, but we have pursued it for the last 250 years with considerable success. We have a long way to go, but we’ve made tremendous progress from where we started. We must recount that legacy of success, reclaim our country from those working overtime to plunge us into a Christofascist nightmare, and rededicate ourselves to achieving the American dream.