Not lengthy earlier than Alabama Supreme Court docket Chief Justice Tom Parker issued an opinion citing the Bible as the idea for declaring that frozen embryos are folks, he was a visitor on a YouTube present hosted by a self-described prophet named Johnny Enlow. Parker’s look on such a program reveals so much in regards to the rising political energy of the nation’s fastest-growing Christian motion.
Through the years, Enlow has written about how “a authorities can probably operate as a digital theocracy” if leaders faithfully hearken to God. He’s a high promoter of the concept that Christians want to say dominion over “seven mountains” of life—authorities, enterprise, household, schooling, media, faith, and the humanities. In current months, he has mentioned that Donald Trump may very well be justified in calling for “revolution” and interviewed a former Military main who runs an Idaho tactical-weapons coaching camp billed as being for “Christian males who imagine the occasions warrant a excessive customary of firearms readiness.”
[Stephanie McCrummen: The woman who bought a mountain for God]
Now Enlow was introducing Parker as one other “asset,” a “fellow Kingdom lover.” He invited the 72-year-old decide to speak about how God had known as him “to the mountain of presidency.”
“As you may have emphasised prior to now, we now have deserted these seven mountains, and so they’ve been occupied by the alternative aspect,” mentioned Parker, who was elected to Alabama’s highest court docket in 2004 and has been chief justice since 2019. “I’ll say that God created authorities, and the truth that we now have let it go into the possession of others is heartbreaking.” The 2 went on speaking in regards to the Holy Spirit and, quoting the Ebook of Isaiah, about “restoring the judges as within the days of outdated.”
This language, which will be mystifying to these not steeped in it, is often categorized as fundamentalism or Christian nationalism. However these phrases don’t adequately seize the scope and ambitions of the quickly rising charismatic Christian motion with which Parker has publicly related himself—a world of megachurches, modern-day apostles and prophets, media empires, worship bands, and tens of millions of followers that’s turning into probably the most aggressive faction of the Christian proper and the vanguard of charismatic Christianity worldwide.
These are usually not blue-blazer Southern Baptists. That is the demon-mapping, prophecy-believing, spiritual-warfare, end-times-army, take-the-U.S.-Capitol-for-the-heavenly-Kingdom crowd—a motion that has its personal historical past, its personal superstars, and an agenda that goes past saving souls, or drawing upon religion to affect coverage, as People of many religions do.
The motion is usually known as the New Apostolic Reformation, a phrase coined within the mid-Nineties by a theology professor named C. Peter Wagner and as soon as overtly embraced by many leaders. Wagner was attempting to explain what he mentioned he was witnessing in church buildings not solely in the US but in addition in components of Latin America, Africa, and China: explosive progress, miracles, indicators and wonders. He believed {that a} contemporary wave of the Holy Spirit was shifting across the globe, obliterating denominational variations, banishing demonic strongholds, elevating up new apostles and prophets with new desires and visions for humanity. An excellent restoration of the first-century Church was beneath means, he contended. The tip sport can be an precise, earthly Kingdom of God.
[Peter Wehner: Where did evangelicals go wrong?]
Wagner himself turned a serious determine within the motion, collaborating within the first worldwide convening of apostles in 2000 and writing books corresponding to Dominion! How Kingdom Motion Can Change the World. Years later, the motion is supplying an argument for authoritarianism, turning into a political drive behind the rise of leaders corresponding to Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. Prophets and apostles are in all places, describing God-given desires and visions on their podcasts and social media. The motion is competing with Catholicism in lots of Brazilian villages; organising in storefronts in Nairobi, Kenya; and filling moribund church buildings from California to the Deep South.
I’ve visited many of those church buildings throughout the US in my reporting. Inside, the partitions are often clean. No portraits of Jesus, no crosses. Some have Broadway-quality lighting. As an alternative of a pulpit, there’s usually an enormous display screen exhibiting futuristic scenes—spinning stars, crashing waves. Reward bands blast songs with easy chord progressions and mantralike choruses about submission to God. Many individuals pray mendacity prostrate on the ground. Sermons clarify life as an ever-escalating religious battle between the forces of God and Devil, one wherein Mr. Splitfoot would possibly take the type of Joe Biden, Democrats, your native librarian, gay impulses, medication, abortion—something and anybody in the best way of God’s Kingdom.
Crucially, followers are urged to affix on this nice, rolling drama. In sermons, YouTube reveals, books, and coaching academies, leaders within the motion urge folks to hearken to God and determine which of the seven mountains is theirs.
A North Carolina apostle named Greg Hood began one thing known as Kingdom College to create what he calls Kingdom residents. Businesspeople have began “Kingdom-aligned” funding corporations. A lady I profiled final 12 months had felt God telling her to purchase a mountain in Western Pennsylvania, and he or she did, aiming to construct a retreat heart for folks to study their Kingdom assignments.
In Alabama, Justice Tom Parker determined that his mountain is authorities.
“When the judges are restored, revival can move,” he mentioned on a prayer name convened final March by a distinguished apostle named Clay Nash, one in all 50 such calls in 2023 that routinely featured state legislators, members of Congress, judges, and different officers reporting on their progress constructing the Kingdom. “So, I’ve been laboring. I’m a part of it in Alabama … No less than as chief justice, I may help put together the soil of the hearts, exposing the judges across the state to the issues of God. I need to ask that we focus, going ahead, on judges as one of many elements to revival on this nation.”
On the steps of the Alabama capitol constructing final 12 months, Parker—who declined to be interviewed for this text—launched Sean Feucht, a well-liked singer within the motion who was touring state capitals and who instructed one crowd, “We would like believers to be those writing the legal guidelines! Sure!” and “We would like God to be accountable for every part!” Parker prayed for “a complete awakening throughout the state that will likely be so highly effective that it’ll carry forth reformation in authorities that can have an effect on the nation.”
On Enlow’s present, the host requested Parker to speak about how he felt doing his job.
“Do you’re feeling angels are attentive?” Enlow requested him. “Do you’re feeling warfare?”
“We all know God equips these he calls,” Parker mentioned. “And I’m very conscious he’s equipping me with one thing for the particular scenario I’m dealing with.”
“So that you do really feel just like the Holy Spirit is there?” Enlow requested him.
“Sure,” Parker mentioned.
The decide went on to clarify his authorized philosophy. He mentioned that there’s pure legislation and God’s legislation, and that God’s legislation is critical as a result of man can not belief his personal cause. “Due to the impression of the autumn of man within the Backyard, man’s cause turned corrupted and will not correctly discern God’s legislation from nature,” Parker mentioned. “So he needed to give them the revealed legislation. The holy scripture.”
[Read: How politics poisoned the evangelical church]
Not lengthy after recording the present, the decide issued his concurring opinion within the in-vitro-fertilization case, eschewing secular sources to cite the Books of Genesis, Exodus, and Jeremiah as the final word authority in defining “the sanctity of human life.” The backlash has been swift, and the Alabama legislature voted Thursday to guard docs doing IVF from legal or civil legal responsibility if embryos are destroyed. However the New Apostolic Reformation stays a gathering drive in American politics.
“The Parker standpoint, the NAR standpoint, is deep and complex,” Frederick Clarkson, a analysis analyst who has been finding out the Christian proper for many years, instructed me. He considers the NAR to be probably the most essential shifts in Christianity in fashionable occasions. “Christian nationalism is a useful time period, however it’s a field into which NAR doesn’t fairly match,” Clarkson mentioned—the motion is “a lot larger than that.”
The individuals who superior the notion that God was utilizing Trump weren’t merely Christian nationalists. They had been distinguished apostles corresponding to Dutch Sheets, who’s as acquainted to these within the motion as Billy Graham as soon as was to your common Southern Baptist.
Sheets was a key determine within the run-up to January 6, exhorting his followers to go to Washington, D.C., to take the Capitol not only for Trump however for God. They got here by the busload, bearing the Revolutionary Conflict–period flag that Sheets popularized and repurposed as a logo of the Kingdom motion.
The flag is white with a inexperienced pine tree and the phrases An Attraction to Heaven, and it’s now posted outdoors the district workplace of Home Speaker Mike Johnson. As wild and hyperbolic because the motion can appear to outsiders, believers proceed to show their seriousness, in Alabama and past.
