Digging into the roots of Trump’s evangelical support
I salute Matthew Taylor, a religion scholar based in Baltimore, for having the fortitude to take on the challenge of understanding and explaining why evangelical Christians embrace Donald Trump as God’s choice to lead the nation.
I have neither the desire nor the necessary stock of pain relievers to listen to charismatic evangelists bloviate about their wild prophecies about Trump. They spend far more time preaching than inspiring acts of charity, and the extremists believe their brand of Christianity superior to all other religions. I avert my gaze.
Matt Taylor, on the other hand, patrols the whirlpool of televangelists, charismatics and Pentecostals in an effort to learn why so many of them carried their devotion to Trump to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
A senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies, Taylor has written a book, due out in September, on these so-called “spiritual warriors” and the threat they pose to democracy. He also appears in a short film on the subject produced by ICJS and having its first screening here next week.
Taylor traced the roots of Trump’s evangelical support to what’s known as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a movement within Pentecostal and charismatic churches developed in the 1990s by C. Peter Wagner, who saw “strategic spiritual warfare” as a way to rid the land of demonic forces. It was a small movement at first, says Taylor, but it grew into a whole network of followers who believe they have a mission to reach the nation’s “prophetic destiny” of Christian dominance.
“It was very much on the margins,” says Taylor, “but they’ve moved into the center of American evangelicalism in the last decade.”
Taylor’s research showed that the NAR and “spiritual warfare” became intertwined with Trumpism.
Even before he launched his first presidential campaign in 2015, Trump was in touch with evangelicals and taking advice from some of them, the televangelist Paula White-Cain foremost.
“The people he’s hanging out with are not just not nondenominational evangelicals,” says Taylor. “They are charismatic non-denominational evangelicals. That charismatic piece is very important. … These non-denominational charismatics are very focused on modern prophecy, the belief that there are modern prophets. Starting almost as soon as Donald Trump declared [his candidacy] in June of 2015, you almost immediately start to [hear] prophecies about him and even people connecting him to prophecies that had been given years before, and saying there’s a special destiny.”
These beliefs of Trump as the chosen one — the anointed-by-God leader of a “spiritual war” to vanquish evil from government, among other institutions — carried through his presidency and into the 2020 election.
By then, says Taylor, there were hundreds of prophecies circulating among independent charismatics, all aligning with Trump and predicting his reelection as God’s will. When Joe Biden defeated Trump, believers in spiritual warfare were mobilized, with some of the preachers in the NAR movement calling for mobilization on Jan. 6.
A week earlier, Dutch Sheets, a prominent preacher with 335,000 YouTube subscribers, described for his audience a vision of the Capitol dome being opened to expose “evil spirits” within. “God is coming to clean our government,” Sheets said. “Many in our Congress need to go.”
Taylor found in his research a link between the prophecies about Trump and the turnout, on Jan. 6, of evangelicals who carried crosses, prayed and waved the white-andgreen “Appeal to Heaven” flag associated historically with the American Revolution but appropriated by followers of the NAR. That flag, spotted dozens of times around the Capitol, has become a symbol of prophecy-driven Christian nationalism.
“Their understanding of prophecy is, God declares to the prophets what God wants,” says Taylor. “But God relies on human actors to bring that [prophecy] about, either through real world activism or through spiritual warfare. And so this is why, when Donald Trump refuses to concede the 2020 election, all these prophets say, ‘Well, there’s going to need to be a miracle. There’s going to need to be some divine intervention. We’re not recanting our prophecies. God’s gonna fulfill the prophecies somehow. … Now we need to do spiritual warfare because the forces of darkness are trying to thwart the will of God … so we need to do battle, to pray, to show up on January 6th to do spiritual warfare, to overturn this demonic attempt to steal the election.’ ”
Three years after the insurrection at the Capitol, only a few of the preachers on Taylor’s radar have apologized for their involvement in it. One of them received death threats, Taylor says.
Support for the indicted former president among the NAR leadership remains strong, and Taylor’s research shows a link between the far-right movement and Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the House.
So what was once a movement on the fringes has become, says Taylor, the “center of gravity” of evangelical nationalism, and a serious concern.
“The idea of strategic spiritual warfare is antithetical to democracy, to the idea of living in a pluralistic democracy where everyone has the same rights,” says Taylor. “If you believe that American politics is just another arena of spiritual warfare, if you believe your political opponents are inspired by demons, there’s no compromise with demons. There’s no finding middle ground. Part of what is fueling extreme polarization is spiritual warfare.”
The film, “Spiritual Warriors: Decoding Christian nationalism at the Capitol riot,” will be shown at the Senator Theatre on Jan. 31. Information at icjs. org.