Speaker 1: John and I are on break now who are on
Speaker 1: a secret mission and this before all new Mission Implausible
Speaker 1: episodes come out this fall. But for now, we'll bring
Speaker 1: you one of our favorite past episodes and we'll soon
Speaker 1: be launching our YouTube channel. See you there.
Speaker 2: I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I was a
Speaker 2: CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts
Speaker 2: in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 3: And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
Speaker 3: and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
Speaker 3: our adversaries.
Speaker 2: Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
Speaker 2: theories large and small.
Speaker 4: Could they be true? Or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 2: This is Mission Implausible. Today's guest is Stephanie mccrumman. She's
Speaker 2: a Pulitzer Prize winning writer for the Atlantic and previously
Speaker 2: worked as a journalist of the Washington Post, and we
Speaker 2: look forward to speaking with her about some of her
Speaker 2: recent writing on Christian nationalism and more specifically her recent
Speaker 2: art well in The Atlantic, entitled The Army of God
Speaker 2: Comes out of the Shadows. So, Stephanie, one of the
Speaker 2: people you interviewed called the New Apostolic Reformation, the most
Speaker 2: significant religious movement of the twenty first century and a
Speaker 2: serious threat to democracy. Is it really becoming a more
Speaker 2: dominant form of American Christianity.
Speaker 5: It seems that it is. I should say that overall
Speaker 5: Americans are becoming more secular, so that's the overall trend.
Speaker 5: But within people who identify themselves as Christians, this particular
Speaker 5: segment has been growing very rapidly in recent decades. And
Speaker 5: part of the reason it's flown under the radar a
Speaker 5: bit is because the old categories that have been used
Speaker 5: to measure religiosities are a bit out of date. So
Speaker 5: a lot of polls and surveys and stuff ask people,
Speaker 5: you know, are you Baptists, are you Catholic? Are you
Speaker 5: this that people who identify with these ideas that sort
Speaker 5: of fall under the umbrella of new Apostolic Reformation, they
Speaker 5: don't identify with the denomination. And you know, paradoxically, if
Speaker 5: you ask them if they are religious, they might even
Speaker 5: say no because one of the key beliefs, one of
Speaker 5: the core beliefs, is that denominations are sort of a sin,
Speaker 5: if you will, because they divide the kingdom of God,
Speaker 5: and so the surveys that do exist suggest certainly that
Speaker 5: charismatic Christianity is just growing like crazy, not only in
Speaker 5: the US but around the world. And this particular set
Speaker 5: of ideas that fall into the category of New Apostolic
Speaker 5: Reformation are also just growing by leaps and bounds. So
Speaker 5: people who adopt these ideas, if you ask them, oh,
Speaker 5: are you a follower of the New Apostolic Reformation, they
Speaker 5: would say, I don't know what you're talking about, but
Speaker 5: they if you say, do you believe in God's Kingdom,
Speaker 5: then they would say yes. Or the Seven Mountains mandate,
Speaker 5: which I can explain, they would say yes.
Speaker 3: So I grew up a Catholic and ALTI bore the
Speaker 3: whole thing. And in Catholicism, at least in the past,
Speaker 3: you could be a Democrat or Republican, right, But what
Speaker 3: you're talking about now it's also a political movement.
Speaker 5: The big shift in thinking really is that they believe
Speaker 5: that that is their duty as Christians, their mandate, their
Speaker 5: God given mission, is to establish the Kingdom of God
Speaker 5: on earth. It goes beyond thinking that the US is
Speaker 5: a Christian nation and whatever. The US is more a
Speaker 5: component of this larger thing called the Kingdom of God.
Speaker 5: The Kingdom of God is to the extent that it
Speaker 5: is translatable into a political party, you know, it aligns,
Speaker 5: of course with the conservative agenda, I suppose, not necessarily exclusively.
Speaker 5: So they very much believe that their job is not
Speaker 5: to like sit over in the corner and pray and
Speaker 5: wait for the kingdom to come, you know, in the
Speaker 5: next millennia or whatever, but that they are to establish
Speaker 5: it in the here and now, and that means going
Speaker 5: into politics. It means going it's not just the political realm,
Speaker 5: but every realm of life, to assert God's dominion over
Speaker 5: every sphere of life. So that's what the Seven Mountains
Speaker 5: mandate is. The people of God, you know, their mission
Speaker 5: to exercise dominion over let's see, what are the Seven mountains? Education, family, government,
Speaker 5: That's where politics comes in, media are It's a central
Speaker 5: part of what they believe they are supposed to do.
Speaker 5: And that's what makes this movement so aggressive politically and
Speaker 5: effective politically. They see their mission is to mobilize people.
Speaker 3: I just have to say, someone who spent a lot
Speaker 3: of time in the Middle East and dealing with Middle easterners,
Speaker 3: it says John, it sounds to me like you could
Speaker 3: substrate Christianity for Islam and you'd have Isis, or you'd
Speaker 3: have Iranian theocracy in there is.
Speaker 4: That is exactly what ISIS preaches that we need.
Speaker 3: To bring in their version of heaven on earth and
Speaker 3: to fulfill the word of God, and they need to
Speaker 3: suppress people who think differently.
Speaker 5: What do you do with the infidels? If you will,
Speaker 5: what is to become of them? Maybe it'll be like,
Speaker 5: you know, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, where if you didn't
Speaker 5: agree and you could exist as long as you didn't
Speaker 5: involve yourself in certain you know, in politics or certain.
Speaker 2: That's nice, of course. Yeah.
Speaker 5: And I should say that there is a very explicitly
Speaker 5: militaristic component of this movement too. But they talk about
Speaker 5: spiritual warfare and there are people who are in this
Speaker 5: movement who have training camps. They speak of the manifest
Speaker 5: Sons of God, which is supposed to be an elite unit,
Speaker 5: if you will, of God's army, that they are supposed
Speaker 5: to be endowed with special powers when the time comes
Speaker 5: to do battle. There very much is they will say,
Speaker 5: a component of warfare in the natural. That's that's their
Speaker 5: language they use.
Speaker 2: So let me get to a little bit of sort
Speaker 2: of that potential conspiracy part of this. Right, So it
Speaker 2: is about dismantling the institutions of secular government to clear
Speaker 2: the way for the Kingdom of God. Right, yes, but
Speaker 2: clearly to them the secular government doesn't include Donald Trump.
Speaker 4: And what we have now?
Speaker 2: How is it democrats and the media became the Satanists?
Speaker 2: Why it is only one part of the government become
Speaker 2: the enemy and the other one not behind it? How
Speaker 2: did it become like so tied to Donald Trump.
Speaker 5: Let's see, let's back up just a few notions. If
Speaker 5: you're a believer in this life, human history, everything is
Speaker 5: a great battle between God and Satan. And history is
Speaker 5: biblical history, and time is biblical time, and Heaven is real,
Speaker 5: and Hell is real, Satan is real, demons are real.
Speaker 5: This is how people think. So the question becomes who
Speaker 5: gets assigned to what? Who is satanic and who's demonic
Speaker 5: and so on and so forth. So Trump comes along,
Speaker 5: and obviously he's in the early days, if you remember,
Speaker 5: he had a problem with evangelical voters.
Speaker 6: Foremost among the myriad Trump supporters put in an awkward
Speaker 6: position by the release of that Access Hollywood tape. On Friday.
Speaker 6: Are Republican evangelicals Christian conservatives who are being forced to
Speaker 6: choose between voting as they almost always do for a
Speaker 6: Republican candidate and on the other hand, seeming to condone
Speaker 6: Donald Trump's screamingly impious behavior.
Speaker 4: Which is what's going to story.
Speaker 2: Going to be.
Speaker 6: Is Trump going to have the normal evangelical turnout or
Speaker 6: does he lose a bunch of them.
Speaker 5: I think he's going to lose a lot of evangelical
Speaker 5: women in the same way that he's going to lose
Speaker 5: a lot of women overall. You know, the evangelical establishment,
Speaker 5: we're supporting other candidates. Trump needed some component of these voters,
Speaker 5: and basically he was introduced to this world. These were
Speaker 5: the low propensity voters, if you will. These were people
Speaker 5: that were sort of that hadn't quite been tapped into
Speaker 5: by the Christian right, you know, when they're searching for
Speaker 5: these low propensity voters. Low and behold, there are all
Speaker 5: these churches, these charismatic Christian churches that haven't really been activated,
Speaker 5: if you will, And they have the benefit of being
Speaker 5: they're not just white. They're also Latino and black and brown,
Speaker 5: and they're more diverse. So Trump hooks up with this woman,
Speaker 5: Paula White, who's very much in this movement. She's an
Speaker 5: apostle in the movement, and she opens the door to
Speaker 5: this world.
Speaker 2: And so the.
Speaker 7: Bigle says that Martha random meet him, but Mary sat still.
Speaker 2: She lost her praise.
Speaker 6: And when the enemy gets your praise, then he's got
Speaker 6: your weapon, because your praise is a weapon that you
Speaker 6: go to war with.
Speaker 5: Another figure in the movement, I think he considers himself
Speaker 5: to be an apostle. Lance Walno, a very charismatic figure
Speaker 5: in this movement. He writes a book casting Trump as
Speaker 5: God's chaos candidate and develops this whole idea that Trump
Speaker 5: is being used by God and he's a modern day Cyrus,
Speaker 5: you know, the imperfect instrument, but who nonetheless is part
Speaker 5: of God's plan.
Speaker 8: Christians building sodalities is what shifted America. Spannon's war room,
Speaker 8: Charlie Kirk turning point our work that we did courage tour,
Speaker 8: going to the five of the seven swing stats, having
Speaker 8: raped well, he's one thousand signs, wonders and miracles of
Speaker 8: the night. Daytime me talking to the remnants about election integrity.
Speaker 8: We were able to purge one million fake votes out
Speaker 8: of the system in America. That's how come you've got
Speaker 8: your million popular vote. We eliminated the fake ones nobody
Speaker 8: knows about. That was our job.
Speaker 5: And so this idea gets disseminated and eventually takes hold,
Speaker 5: and pretty soon every kind of profit, big and small,
Speaker 5: they're all buying into this idea.
Speaker 4: I also wanted to think of the conspiracy theory part of.
Speaker 3: It, and also the latent anti Semitism that's in it.
Speaker 3: Why Hackabee is now the ambassador in Israel. He's close
Speaker 3: to Pastor John Hagey, who I think.
Speaker 4: Is also a part of this.
Speaker 3: And Hagey is famous for saying that in two thousand
Speaker 3: and six that God punished New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina
Speaker 3: because of homosexuality. Another part of this, and my understanding
Speaker 3: of is that we need to support Israel, at least
Speaker 3: the right wing politics of Israel, because it has to
Speaker 3: rebuild the Temple and take back the West Bank in
Speaker 3: order for the end times to come. And of course
Speaker 3: the end times, and I've worked in Israel, and I
Speaker 3: actually worked on a kibbutz very close to mcgido with
Speaker 3: it and the final Battle of Armaged it's supposed to
Speaker 3: happen is that, yeah, that God's army wins and the
Speaker 3: Jews they either have to convert.
Speaker 4: Or they go to Hell.
Speaker 3: And I always have trouble with Israeli politicians hugging these
Speaker 3: guys who know at the same time they think that
Speaker 3: their whole purpose in history is to bring about the
Speaker 3: end of the state of Israel and the end of
Speaker 3: the Jewish people and.
Speaker 4: To send them all the hell.
Speaker 5: What's interesting to me is to see how Natanyahu and
Speaker 5: his crowd was very much dealing with these people. And
Speaker 5: as this movement has not been written about very much,
Speaker 5: and it seemed as just I think for people who
Speaker 5: aren't in it, they think it's just what, it's just
Speaker 5: spiritual warfare demons. But net yaou takes it very seriously.
Speaker 5: And these people have a show, which I've written about
Speaker 5: before called Flashpoint. It's a streaming show, and net ya
Speaker 5: You've probably never heard of it. Most people aren't in
Speaker 5: this movement haven't heard of it. It's very popular. It's
Speaker 5: like CNN for the apostles and prophets, and instead of guests,
Speaker 5: they have profits come on and they talk about the
Speaker 5: news and how that fits with various prophecies and whatever.
Speaker 5: You know, and that often involves what's happening in Gaza,
Speaker 5: and it's happening in Israel and nettyaw who's been on
Speaker 5: there at least twice. If these people, if evangelical Christians
Speaker 5: are an important political constituency in the world of right
Speaker 5: more right wing Israeli politics, then like this is the
Speaker 5: future of the evangelical world, arguably in the US.
Speaker 3: So this is a broad movement, and as far as
Speaker 3: I can tell, there doesn't seem to be like a
Speaker 3: leader behind it. If everybody can be a prophet, why
Speaker 3: can't I say I'm a prophet and then say President
Speaker 3: Biden was actually sent by God and Donald Trump is
Speaker 3: the He's the airti Christ, which is I think you
Speaker 3: can make a better argument on that.
Speaker 5: You could just say, hey, I'm a prophet. But you
Speaker 5: also have to be recognized and have a following, and
Speaker 5: people have to agree that, hey, Jerry's hitting them out
Speaker 5: of the park here. So there's for example, a guy
Speaker 5: again like these people are very powerful in this world,
Speaker 5: but you may have never heard their names. A guy
Speaker 5: named che An in California is a very important apostle
Speaker 5: and has probably hundreds of churches under his spiritual authority,
Speaker 5: and he has authority over these churches. It's a very
Speaker 5: top down, not democratic structure. There's a guid named dutch Sheets.
Speaker 5: He's the one who popularized the pine tree flag. This
Speaker 5: is a white flag with the green pine tree that
Speaker 5: says appealed to Heaven. That appeared January sixth at the insurrection.
Speaker 5: But dutch Sheets has his own ministry. He's actually sort
Speaker 5: of a prophet and an apostle, has hundreds of thousands
Speaker 5: of followers, a minor sort of publishing empire. It's paradoxical.
Speaker 5: Is so much about this thing as paradoxical. It's authoritarian
Speaker 5: and yet it's decentralized at the same time.
Speaker 2: I was just going to say, to what extent is
Speaker 2: it a rural or regional phenomenon? Is it in cities
Speaker 2: the place?
Speaker 5: It's everywhere. It's everywhere. Like the church that Elon Musk
Speaker 5: spoke at. It's a big naar church in Harrisburg called
Speaker 5: Life Center. There's a profit in Brooklyn. Joseph Mattera is
Speaker 5: very important. You know, not everyone who follows this goes
Speaker 5: to a church. A lot of them just follow these
Speaker 5: profits online. But you'll find little storefront churches in rural areas.
Speaker 5: You'll find big churches in cities. They're all over Texas.
Speaker 5: You'll find old Baptist churches that maybe have been overtaken
Speaker 5: by people who are embracing these ideas. Really, it's just
Speaker 5: I've noticed them all over the place in my reporting.
Speaker 4: Let's pause for a second. We'll be right back.
Speaker 3: Part of the conspiracy theory, part of this is that
Speaker 3: some of the people and organizations who they pose by
Speaker 3: the Naar, now they are controlled by Satanists, their demons.
Speaker 5: I may be wrong about this, but I feel like
Speaker 5: Peter Wagner, he wrote a lot about spiritual warfare and
Speaker 5: demons and stuff. And I've been to churches where like
Speaker 5: the pastor will demon map the city because you know,
Speaker 5: people this movement believe that demonic forces not only can
Speaker 5: control people, but also territories. So like whole city may
Speaker 5: be infested with demons.
Speaker 4: Like their jersey.
Speaker 2: I think we could all agree on that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the Middle East, obviously, you know, any place is
Speaker 5: not Christian, it's you know, demonic strongholded whatever territories. Washington,
Speaker 5: d C.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 5: Roger Stone caught onto this lingo and was like, oh,
Speaker 5: there's a demon portal over the White house and whatever,
Speaker 5: and there's a whole thing in this world, you know, demonology,
Speaker 5: And so I think that there's like higher level demons
Speaker 5: and lower level demons, like I may just be as
Speaker 5: a reporter working for a secular publication that questioned Trump
Speaker 5: et cetera, et cetera in God's plan, Like I may
Speaker 5: just be a dupe. I may just be my mind
Speaker 5: may have been taken over by Satan. But other people
Speaker 5: may be more devoted to the mission, you know what
Speaker 5: I mean. So I think that there's gradations.
Speaker 3: So what I spend a lot of time in Afghanistan
Speaker 3: and interrupt dealing with ISIS and ISIS is a very
Speaker 3: clear answer to that. The answer is that you knowingly
Speaker 3: stand against God. Whether you're controlled by a demon or not.
Speaker 3: They don't get into that, but you knowingly stand against
Speaker 3: what they believe is God's plan, and therefore you, your family,
Speaker 3: anybody who stands with you can and should be killed
Speaker 3: or at least suppressed. So I find what you're saying
Speaker 3: very scary because we've seen it actually in a much
Speaker 3: more further advanced and actually taking place in another area.
Speaker 5: One thing, and I haven't written about this, but I
Speaker 5: find it very interesting that there are military people, high
Speaker 5: Profileish military people who have embraced these ideas. Michael Flynn
Speaker 5: military intelligence, Doug Meis military intelligence, Carol Boykin military intelligence.
Speaker 5: Like I mean, is that just like, oh, well, you know,
Speaker 5: there's a lot of religious beliefs, there's a lot of
Speaker 5: military intelligence people and some of them believe this or
Speaker 5: I don't know, what do you think about that?
Speaker 2: That's a really good question because I wonder to what
Speaker 2: extent these guys believe that when they're inside, and maybe
Speaker 2: they did because it really goes against what they're doing
Speaker 2: in their day to day work, because they work for
Speaker 2: the government. You mentioned that preacher Lance Wallnow you know
Speaker 2: he said you either have God or you've got a government. Well,
Speaker 2: only one person could be supreme, So how do you
Speaker 2: engage with that? How can you be in the US
Speaker 2: government as a military officer and believe that it's just
Speaker 2: people who believe different levels of things. I suppose, and
Speaker 2: Mike Flynn has gotten more and more. I worked with
Speaker 2: Mike Flinn. I know Mike Flynn fairly well where we
Speaker 2: don't get at bred WUS anymore, but he seems like
Speaker 2: he's gotten more and more radical. For I don't know
Speaker 2: whether it's for true religious belief or for its political
Speaker 2: or for its money. Who knows, But yeah, those things
Speaker 2: don't go together. And so I would find out, like
Speaker 2: I did not see that in our intelligence experience.
Speaker 3: So it's CIA. We just talk about various shades of gray.
Speaker 3: There's very little black or white, and in the military,
Speaker 3: because of their mission, it's different, and I think it
Speaker 3: is black or white. That's always the question. Is it delusional?
Speaker 3: Do they believe this stuff? Or are they grifters right
Speaker 3: they're that are making money off of this or opportunists.
Speaker 3: A while ago, there was a it was actually a
Speaker 3: CIA guy who was pushed out of the agency who
Speaker 3: started making these absurd claims that Halian satellites had stolen
Speaker 3: the real results of the twenty twenty elections and that
Speaker 3: people like like Lynn like just started parenting this. And
Speaker 3: what's so crazy is to say that the real results
Speaker 3: were stored in Frankfort in a CIA facility, and that
Speaker 3: the Delta and the Seals were involved in a firefight
Speaker 3: with CIA and Hillary Clinton was caught there and put
Speaker 3: out a mar Bartanamo obey And as crazy as this gets,
Speaker 3: Clarence Thomas's wife took this thing that hit some of
Speaker 3: the people that you're talking about supporting it or elements
Speaker 3: of it, and she wanted to overthrow the twenty twenty
Speaker 3: election results.
Speaker 4: She got to Mark Meadows with this.
Speaker 3: Who gave it to doj So you've got religion, you've
Speaker 3: got conspiracy theories, and you've got people who should be rational.
Speaker 5: I've touched to so many people who believe this stuff,
Speaker 5: and to them it's reality. To the true believers, it's
Speaker 5: of course, they don't see it as conspiracy. They see
Speaker 5: it as as reality. And it's just so deep in a.
Speaker 3: Cult, whether there's a cult leader or not, you can't
Speaker 3: question anything, right, That's sort of one of the things.
Speaker 3: If you can, if you're in the Democratic Party, you
Speaker 3: could say, well, I don't think Joe Biden did that
Speaker 3: great job. You know, he did some good things and
Speaker 3: he fucked up on some other things.
Speaker 4: And with Trump, you're either.
Speaker 3: All in or you're all in, right or with it. No,
Speaker 3: you're either all in or you're all up. So to
Speaker 3: what extent do you think this is getting into cult
Speaker 3: territory where you're not allowed to question any of this.
Speaker 3: You're either all in or you're all out.
Speaker 5: This is really basically an anti Enlightenment movement. Everything went
Speaker 5: wrong when people started trusting their brain rationality.
Speaker 3: It's been all downhill since the fourteen hundreds.
Speaker 5: I just wortge, yeah, yeah, in a very real way.
Speaker 5: And it's like they really think that was the beginning
Speaker 5: of displacing God and replacing God with our own reason
Speaker 5: and so on a really fundamental level, you can't really
Speaker 5: trust your brain unless it is guided by God in
Speaker 5: the Bible. But the other thing about this movement is
Speaker 5: that because they embrace modern day apostles and prophets, they
Speaker 5: have innovated, if you will, the idea that God is
Speaker 5: speaking through prophets. Like now there's new stuff, there's new materials,
Speaker 5: it's not just the Bible anymore. It's also that Dutch
Speaker 5: Sheets had a dream about riding on horseback to the
Speaker 5: Capitol on January sixth.
Speaker 9: This morning, December thirty first, I dreamed I was with
Speaker 9: our prayer team and we were coming back from having
Speaker 9: accomplished an assignment. We were leading tall, muscular horses by
Speaker 9: their bridle reins. Our horses didn't appear to be tired,
Speaker 9: but they were hot and sweaty. We had apparently been
Speaker 9: running them hard. We found ourselves in a field and
Speaker 9: could see out in front of us the US Capitol Building.
Speaker 9: We mounted our horses and as we sat looking at
Speaker 9: the building, we heard air sirens going off. As the
Speaker 9: sirens were sounding, we saw a huge hand come down
Speaker 9: from the sky and take hold of the dome of
Speaker 9: the Capitol Building. With the fingers of the hand wrapped
Speaker 9: around the dome, the thumb of the hand flicked the
Speaker 9: dome open. When it was opened, a very thick black
Speaker 9: smoke began rising up out of the building. We then
Speaker 9: heard a cavalry bugle playing the signal to charge, and
Speaker 9: we began moving toward the Capitol, not at a full gallop,
Speaker 9: but at a steady, determined, fast trot. As we started
Speaker 9: on the ground in front of us, written in white
Speaker 9: letters for the words don't stop. That's the end of
Speaker 9: the dream, Happy New Year.
Speaker 3: Not need the Jesus guy anymore, right, because you've got
Speaker 3: modern day profits.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's interesting. I don't really speak a lot
Speaker 5: about Jesus, honestly, And what they do is they speak
Speaker 5: a lot about the Old Testament a lot, and they
Speaker 5: also have fresh words. I have a fresh dream today,
Speaker 5: and the fresh dream is I had a vision that
Speaker 5: Trump was going to take over Gaza. So there's this constant, hourly, daily,
Speaker 5: weekly scroll of prophecies. That's where it starts to get
Speaker 5: to be more about a person a personality. And then
Speaker 5: that obviously coupled with you're not supposed to trust your mind.
Speaker 5: There's an idea of submissions admission to God. If you
Speaker 5: go to any of these churches, they'll often talk about
Speaker 5: that it's very emotional. I'm sure you've been in charismatic
Speaker 5: Christian churches and a lot of people have that these
Speaker 5: churches are like that on steroids. Like the music is
Speaker 5: really really loud. The ones that have the most money
Speaker 5: they have these professional sound systems and lights and just
Speaker 5: pounding and the music is mantra like and there's tears.
Speaker 5: It's very free, oddly again like a paradox because you're
Speaker 5: supposed to think a certain thing and yet it's very
Speaker 5: physically free. So it feels good and there's like a
Speaker 5: lot of feeling to it, you know, and a lot
Speaker 5: of catharsists. But make no mistake, but you're supposed to
Speaker 5: submit to this and submit to this idea and submit
Speaker 5: to God. And what is God? God is these things
Speaker 5: and et cetera.
Speaker 2: It's an interesting historical time because if you go back
Speaker 2: into the nineteenth century, even late eighteenth century, but the
Speaker 2: first grade Awakening in this country, I mean, the Puritans
Speaker 2: came and they were very focused on rationality and learning,
Speaker 2: formed Harvard University and these other type of things. And
Speaker 2: then when the first great Awakening came is the personal
Speaker 2: relationship to God and the beginning of the evangelical sort
Speaker 2: of spirit in the United States. And so it almost
Speaker 2: seems like there must be a schism in Christianity. This
Speaker 2: can't be something that's supported really by the Catholic Church
Speaker 2: or other parts of the Protestant Church. How is it
Speaker 2: that this is gaining ground in those other and in
Speaker 2: general people are moving away from religion.
Speaker 5: I've gotten emails from readers. A reader who's part of
Speaker 5: a Lutheran church, and she said that it started as
Speaker 5: a study group in the church and then it was
Speaker 5: a Seven Mountains thing, and then pretty soon like these
Speaker 5: ideas were starting to overtake the church. And it does
Speaker 5: cause sometimes splits in churches. And these ideas you will
Speaker 5: find them in many denominational churches. And yeah, and some
Speaker 5: people are like, what is this? This is weird? I
Speaker 5: think this is heretical. You know, it doesn't always go overwell,
Speaker 5: but I think that it seems to be overtaking a
Speaker 5: lot of denominational churches. There are people who have needs
Speaker 5: who go there. Churches have soup kitchens and food pantries
Speaker 5: and drug addiction programs and porn addiction programs, and people
Speaker 5: find everything that they find in real churches. They find
Speaker 5: help and guidance in a community.
Speaker 3: And so, putting your sociology in what need is this fulfilling?
Speaker 3: It offers simplicity, I guess it offers you understand your
Speaker 3: place in the world. It offers you a hero's journey.
Speaker 4: You know, you can be just like isis.
Speaker 3: You can be a soldier of God, or you could
Speaker 3: be a sheep.
Speaker 4: Farmer, or you know whatever.
Speaker 2: Jerry and I both lived in Muslim countries and we've
Speaker 2: seen similar things happening there, whereas you know, if you're
Speaker 2: in Indonesia, Afghanistan and Rock you know, twenty thirty forty
Speaker 2: years ago they were not as conservative. Is this a
Speaker 2: global thing that people are moving and moving more away
Speaker 2: from secular society?
Speaker 5: What need is it fulfilling? I mean, I think that's
Speaker 5: a fine question. Maybe it's just the need that any
Speaker 5: religion fills. It's just that it's doing in this different way,
Speaker 5: and it's more complete, like you said, because it does
Speaker 5: give people a purpose. It's like, here are your marching orders.
Speaker 5: It's not just Sunday, it's every day. It's seven mountains,
Speaker 5: get with the program, figure out your purpose in life.
Speaker 5: And their courses and seminars and trainings and everything. It's
Speaker 5: twenty four to seven. And that's also what makes it
Speaker 5: effective politically, because people are constantly organizing. It's not just
Speaker 5: every four years, every two years. It's like this is
Speaker 5: a constant movement. It's always happening, always going on.
Speaker 2: We'll be back in just a moment.
Speaker 3: In a natural part of the fracturing of our society
Speaker 3: is more and more people become secular and their religion
Speaker 3: is none. Those that still something within the needs of
Speaker 3: faith that become more radical.
Speaker 4: I'm assumed.
Speaker 5: I wrote about a woman who was in this movement,
Speaker 5: and if you talk to her, she would say she
Speaker 5: hates religion, she would say she hates church, and yet
Speaker 5: she follows all these prophets. I think there's a sense
Speaker 5: among the people who follow this thing that they're the
Speaker 5: true everything else has screwed up Christianity. It has screwed up,
Speaker 5: screwed it up.
Speaker 4: They're the t clergy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they've all divided and all these little arguments, so
Speaker 5: you know, angels on pinheads and whatever like. These people
Speaker 5: think that, oh, we're the real you know, we're open
Speaker 5: to the Holy Spirit moving. It's very mystical. It's very
Speaker 5: empowering really if you think about it, because they also believe,
Speaker 5: you know, you can fight a war spiritual warfare, you're powerful.
Speaker 5: And then look at January sixth. I mean, people really
Speaker 5: missed this dimension of the insurrection, but there were people
Speaker 5: outside in this movement doing spiritual warfare. Matthew Taylor's written
Speaker 5: an excellent book about this. Dutch Sheets was traveling the
Speaker 5: country rallying people after the twenty twenty election and preparing
Speaker 5: people and visited the White House and people had different motivations,
Speaker 5: but a lot of them thought that they were taking
Speaker 5: the capital for God, for the kingdom. And what did
Speaker 5: they do when they got to the rotunda? These people
Speaker 5: they prayed, they prayed, some of them did, and they
Speaker 5: had the flags and it's.
Speaker 3: Cool though it's if the democratic right, it's against the constitution.
Speaker 3: They don't want separtial church and state. They don't support
Speaker 3: democratic values. Only the people of God right get to them, right.
Speaker 4: They want a theocracy.
Speaker 5: At the end of the day, they would say democracy
Speaker 5: cannot flourish without a Christian conscience. Christianity has to flourish,
Speaker 5: but people aren't able to govern themselves without this conscience,
Speaker 5: Christian conscience.
Speaker 4: That's what communism was.
Speaker 3: It was like everybody, as long as you follow Lenin's dictates,
Speaker 3: you can like disagree inside.
Speaker 4: But at the end of there was.
Speaker 2: A book by Jack So that JD. Vance endorsed that
Speaker 2: describes their political opponents as unhumans and that they must
Speaker 2: be crushed on humans must be crushed. Is that a
Speaker 2: book that spreads in this group.
Speaker 5: Well, I mentioned that I mentioned that book in the
Speaker 5: in the story because to me, it was an example
Speaker 5: of how the Seven Mountains idea and this idea of
Speaker 5: overturning this liberal order, how far that idea has seemed.
Speaker 5: He didn't refer to the Seven Mountains, but there was
Speaker 5: a part in the book where he essentially was referring
Speaker 5: to the Seven Mountains.
Speaker 3: That's very fascist, right, making the other subhuman. That was
Speaker 3: part of Nazi ideology. And this also brings us to
Speaker 3: this guy Beattie who's now at State Department, senior at
Speaker 3: the State Department, whose writings have come out recently where
Speaker 3: he said that only good people, smart people should be
Speaker 3: allowed to have children, right and low iq trash should
Speaker 3: not have There should be eugenics, they should be youth
Speaker 3: to them. But he also brings it in as basically
Speaker 3: Christians need to like have kids white Christians. And this
Speaker 3: is a guy who's now sitting in the State Department
Speaker 3: and mirroring this thing that the world is filled with
Speaker 3: unhumans and we're not worthy of basic rights to have
Speaker 3: families or to speak out.
Speaker 5: This thing gets conflated with what has been, i think
Speaker 5: personally rather vaguely called Christian nationalism, which I think doesn't
Speaker 5: really do justice to the depth of what this movement
Speaker 5: is all about. And it's worth just noting briefly that
Speaker 5: Christian nationalism would say, oh, the founding fathers actually were Christian,
Speaker 5: and they point to all this evidence so to speak,
Speaker 5: of why our nation was founded as a Christian nation.
Speaker 5: These people, again, the more serious thinkers, think that the
Speaker 5: founding fathers screwed it up, actually, and that the real
Speaker 5: origins go back to William Penn in Pennsylvania, and there's
Speaker 5: this whole story about William Penn who came over and
Speaker 5: God gave him a vision and the US was the
Speaker 5: seceed of a nation and that he had a covenant
Speaker 5: with God. And I mean, there's a whole different origin story,
Speaker 5: is what I'm saying with this movement, and has to
Speaker 5: do with Native Americans. Their whole concept of what gave
Speaker 5: rise to this country is different than like your more
Speaker 5: typical sort of sentimental Christian nationalism stuff. So they would
Speaker 5: say that the Washington Monument is a pagan symbol and
Speaker 5: Jefferson messed it up and et cetera.
Speaker 2: And if they've decided that the rest of us are
Speaker 2: devils or Satan's, I don't know how you push back
Speaker 2: against that. And I worry that you know that that
Speaker 2: Trump people know that they need this support, and they
Speaker 2: clearly believe some of these things that Jerry and I
Speaker 2: know to not be true about a deep state and
Speaker 2: then working against Christians and working against the president and
Speaker 2: all these types of things. And you can see by
Speaker 2: some of the actions recently things that you might have
Speaker 2: thought were just popular politician stuff where you create enemies
Speaker 2: to win power. They're taking action that suggests that they
Speaker 2: believed some of these things. Firing all those FBI people
Speaker 2: destroying the state, are destroying USAID, destroying the CIA, these
Speaker 2: type of things. And so this is really an important
Speaker 2: issue to understand because it's something we're gonna have to
Speaker 2: come to terms with.
Speaker 5: They are serious about their project. I can't say I
Speaker 5: completely understand. There seems to be this sort of union
Speaker 5: between some libertarian thinkers and this movement. And I don't
Speaker 5: know if it's a temporary alliance of convenience because they
Speaker 5: both wish to tear down the state in a way.
Speaker 5: But you know, I thought it was very interesting that
Speaker 5: must Elon Musk, of all the places he could go,
Speaker 5: he went to an nar type church in Harrisburg. I
Speaker 5: don't know, maybe it was just a venue. But they
Speaker 5: call Peter Thiel a lot people in this movement, So
Speaker 5: I don't know, that's a whole other dimension that has
Speaker 5: yet to be explored. I was, I'll mention one thing.
Speaker 5: I was at Life Center right after the election. They
Speaker 5: had an apostle speaking there. He was a guest actually,
Speaker 5: and the mood was obviously, you know, very celebratory. They
Speaker 5: really saw this as something that they had brought about
Speaker 5: through their voting but also through prayer. And so it was.
Speaker 5: That was the mood up until one point where the speaker,
Speaker 5: found seemingly out of the blue, started talking about immigration,
Speaker 5: and he said, could it be that all these people
Speaker 5: coming across the border are actually the harvest?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 5: Are they part of God's harvest? Is God is sending
Speaker 5: them here to us rather than sending us out into
Speaker 5: the world. And he didn't stay on it very long,
Speaker 5: but it sounded like a little bit of dissent, perhaps
Speaker 5: from the Trump agenda, and I thought that was pretty interesting.
Speaker 2: Well, I'd like to say, Stephanie, I thank you for
Speaker 2: being with us, and it's really interesting stuff, but it
Speaker 2: doesn't lead me warm and fuzzy.
Speaker 7: Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Ceipher,
Speaker 7: and Jonathan Stern.
Speaker 4: The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Speaker 7: Mission Implausible is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable
Speaker 7: Pictures for iHeart Podcasts.