On a sweltering evening in the thumb pad of Michigan’s mitten, a self-described prophet promised 700 Christians under a crisp white tent that they were about to cheat death.
They would do this by winning the swing state for Donald Trump.
The reasoning was simple: Each of the Christians assembled would soon feel a call to become a poll watcher or to knock on doors or to organize their church—to take part in some act that would aid the Republican presidential candidate. And that act would keep them safe, the prophet said, because God would not call them home before they had completed the task He had given them.
“The greatest argument you have with death is an unfulfilled assignment,” the man, Lance Wallnau, told the crowd.
This was the third stop of the “Courage Tour,” a traveling worship spectacle passing through key battleground states ahead of the upcoming presidential election. Organized by Wallnau, a sixtysomething Texas-based evangelical with a salesman’s persona, the three-day event was a marriage of the religious and the political, a swirl of prophecies and PowerPoints and speaking in tongues. It was a call to arms, a campaign strategy session, and—above all—an honest-to-God old-fashioned Pentecostal tent revival.
It was also a showcase of the power of a rapidly growing, militant right-wing movement in American Christianity.
Wallnau is a major leader in a coalition of Christians who believe that Trump is prophesied to play a critical role in the nation’s spiritual reformation—that the former president is destined to be a catalyst for the next Great Awakening, even. These Christians see Trump as a modern-day Cyrus the Great, the powerful empire builder and nonbeliever who is credited in the Old Testament with returning the Jews to the Holy Land. They believe that under Trump’s protection, American Christians will rise up, defeat their demonic enemies, and take their rightful place of power in the country.
This belief in a Trump prophecy has only grown stronger among the faithful since the former president survived an assassination attempt in July. It is so strong, in fact, that anything that could stand in Trump’s way—democratic or otherwise—is perceived as a force of evil that must be battled on a spiritual plane.
This has already played out once: After Trump lost the 2020 election, Wallnau held nearly daily rants about the stolen election on Facebook Live; he decreed in one online prayer call that God would overturn the election results. He spoke at a major rally for Christian election deniers in Washington on Dec. 12 of that year, warning that there was “a backlash coming” and announcing that it would be the “beginning of a Christian populist uprising.” He and other right-wing Christian leaders circled the Capitol while blowing shofars and praying for the election to be overturned, drawing clear parallels to the biblical story from the Book of Joshua in which the Israelite army marches around the city of Jericho, blowing horns until its walls crumble and the Israelites conquer the city and slaughter its inhabitants. The event, which preceded a night of political violence in the nation’s capital, drew thousands of attendees in what was widely seen as a precursor to the Jan. 6 riot.
Brent Stirton/Getty Images
Wallnau did not participate in the storming of the Capitol, but he was at the Jan. 6 rally and was even slated to speak outside the building. He said that he and similar leaders in his movement had stayed up late at a D.C. hotel the night before the riot, looking—successfully, he claimed—for definitive evidence of “systemic national fraud.”
Though he later blamed antifa for the violence of Jan. 6—or, alternatively, dismissed negative media coverage of the riot as the works of the “false prophets of Baal”—Wallnau’s political rhetoric today is once again geared toward preventing another Trump loss at all costs. “We have to operate at a level where we can go against the gates of hell,” he told the crowd under the white tent in Michigan. “This is the room that can save the nation.”
For Americans unfamiliar with the evangelical world, it can be hard to grasp how rapidly this right-wing movement is changing Christianity in the U.S. and turning politics, in many Christians’ minds, into a zero-sum war between the forces of evil and the armies of God. Matthew Taylor, a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, told me that in terms of influence, Wallnau may be “the most important political theologian of evangelicalism in this century so far.” Wallnau “has restructured how millions of evangelicals think about their life and their politics,” Taylor said. (Wallnau did not respond to requests for an interview or comment for this story.)
Wallnau’s ideas have taken off in particular among a group of Christians often referred to as neo-charismatics, evangelicals who speak in tongues and believe that the Holy Spirit has possessed them with supernatural gifts, including prophecy and healing; this religious cohort is also one of the fastest-growing segments of Christianity in the U.S. Now, four years after an election that many of these Christians continue to think was stolen, Wallnau and his faithful are on the campaign trail. “People don’t know. They’re going to look back on it in the future,” Wallnau promised the crowd in Michigan, “and they’re going to say the populist civic awakening began when believers prayed in Trump to disrupt the status quo.”
Wallnau and his cohort are doing everything they can to ensure that the prophecy is fulfilled. In Michigan, I began to see how far that could go.
As I pulled into the driveway of an inconspicuous host church outside Howell, Michigan, for the first day of the revival, I was welcomed by beaming children and women waving colorful, handmade signs: Jesus Is So Excited You’re Here. Today’s Your Day. Jesus Saves. The line of cars crawled toward the parking lot and into an overflow field abutting a baseball complex. Even with traffic-directing volunteers and access to open fields, it took a full 13 minutes to park.
The host church, Floodgate, is known in the area for its strident politics—according to an article in the Atlantic, its membership overwhelmingly comprises new arrivals attracted by its pastor’s anti-COVID ravings; pastor Bill Bolin told the magazine that “a lot of people from our church” traveled to D.C. for the Jan. 6 riots. Even still, it was clearly not prepared for the kinds of crowds Wallnau attracts.
At first, it would have been easy to forget that this was a political event if it hadn’t been for a cluster of vendor tents hosting groups such as the pro-Trump Turning Point USA. The main tent, an open-air structure filled with rows of folding chairs, exuded a festival-like atmosphere. The air was sticky with humidity, Christian rock blared from the speakers, and people were cheery. They were also, I noted with some surprise, not entirely retirement-age. In the crowd—overwhelmingly but not exclusively white—parents with young children hovered just beyond the tent, bouncing babies on hips or sprawled on blankets on the grass. T-shirts and shorts were the norm. No fussy church clothes here. Somewhere to the left of the tent, a group prayed in a huddle. When they broke apart, one of them blasted a shofar.
The event kicked off when a woman in a black T-shirt and jeans bounded across the stage, leading a band and the crowd in a spirited rendition of the 2023 Christian Billboard hit “Holy Forever.” Everyone knew the words. Over the next half-hour, the singer, a Georgia-based artist with 77,000 followers on Facebook, hit other contemporary evangelical hits, including 2019’s “Raise a Hallelujah” (sample lyric: “My weapon is a melody”) and 2023’s “Praise” (“My praise is a weapon”). In interludes, she pointed to individual attendees and passed along messages she’d received from God. “You feel like you can’t hold on that much longer,” she told a woman in a blue dress. “The Lord said”—and here her voice picked up into a yell, ready to break into the triumphant chorus—“ ‘I am going to renew her strength!’ ” The songs were catchy, and the energy in the tent was electric; I couldn’t help but join in, clapping to the beat.
After the musical portion of the night, Bolin, the host church’s pastor and a right-wing celebrity in this part of Michigan, spoke about his church’s explosion in membership over the coronavirus pandemic. He made fun of medical experts who supported COVID-19 vaccines, then, inexplicably, had the audience do the wave. (We were bad at it, but not for lack of enthusiasm.)
An hour into the event, Wallnau strode onto the stage with an easy and strikingly white smile. He worked up the attendees, eliciting murmurs of anger as he ranted about the left. He whipped them into states of anxiety (“Hell is more organized than we are”) and hope (“I received a word in Israel that Trump will be the next president”).
But he was warm. He poked fun at himself. During one short rant about the World Economic Forum and similar globalist threats, he winkingly said, “I can tell you’re an educated crowd of conspiracy enthusiasts.”
Over the next hour and a half, he primed the audience (and the 100,000 viewers he said were watching the livestream) for the hours of seminars ahead of them that weekend. There was a lot to cover; many hours would be dedicated to strategies for preventing the left from stealing the next presidential election. He called on the Christians to engage in “spiritual warfare,” a kind of religious practice meant to defeat evil forces through fervent prayer, praise, and other displays of faith. For neo-charismatics, these rituals are more effective when physically directed toward and in close proximity to the evil they are meant to address. This is why, ahead of the certification of the 2020 presidential election results, leaders in Wallnau’s movement traveled to D.C.: They felt called to pray as close as possible to the evil forces that were keeping the election from Trump. Many other Christians, inspired by this mission, followed them there.
What this kind of prayer does, according to Wallnau, is fortify God’s forces of angels against Satan’s armies. By speaking in tongues, throwing their hands up to the sky, singing God’s praises, anointing people with oil, blowing shofars, and calling upon God’s authority to defeat demons, neo-charismatics are commanding and assisting angels in the spiritual realm. Those angels, in Wallnau’s theology, are the ones waging the warfare against evil; earthbound Christians are aiding the army in a metaphysical sense. “We’re not warring with flesh and blood,” Wallnau told the crowd at the revival. “We’re warring with spirits working on people.”
Apostles and prophets like Wallnau are generals in this metaphysical army—they have the gift of being able to see, through prayer, into the workings of the spiritual realm and mobilize mass campaigns of believers to fight a strategic war on a supernatural plane.
More traditional conceptions of this kind of supernatural battle focus on personal stakes: praying to wage battle against whatever demonic force is causing depression or cancer or even a struggling marriage. Some Pentecostal churches choose to wage these spiritual battles against what they perceive as occult forces, such as freemasonry, new-age spirituality, and satanism. The neo-charismatic movement doesn’t dismiss prayer for individual struggles and certainly enjoys opposing the occult, but its real appetite is for national and ultimately global control of the earthly realm. Neo-charismatics who follow Wallnau and similar leaders want to use prayer to wipe civic and societal institutions clean of demonic forces, then populate those institutions with people who will implement and uphold a Christian society.
Wallnau ended the day on a loving note. He prayed for supernatural healing for those in pain: “In the name of the Lord, I rebuke Satan, get your hands off them,” he intoned. He told attendees to hug the person sitting next to them. Lightning rippled in the distant clouds, and he sat down at a keyboard and played his audience off with a jaunty show-tune performance of a song with lyrics pulled from the Book of Revelation. As the crowd streamed out of the tent, everyone was in high spirits.
The original Great Awakening was a series of 18th– and 19th-century religious revivals that swept through the American colonies and states, establishing evangelical Christianity as an enduring and powerful force in the country. The roots of the new Great Awakening Wallnau is hoping to kick off can be traced back to an evangelical project from about 30 years ago—but became supercharged during the pandemic.
In the 1990s, a cohort of evangelicals imagined a new revolution in Christianity—the group dubbed it the New Apostolic Reformation—that would reorganize worship around modern-day apostles and prophets who could hear directly from God and channel the divine into routine wonders. Most of these apostles and prophets were untethered to any larger organization or denomination. Some had their own churches; others, like Wallnau, served as itinerant preachers, taking messages to multiple congregations, as well as to TV and social media. But all these self-appointed prophets were relentlessly political. They warned of demons that threatened to harm Christians through laws and public schools and sinful movies, and they taught believers how to channel the Holy Spirit to fight off those demons. They urged followers to conquer the secular world and win it back from the forces of evil.
For years, the NAR remained on the fringes of evangelical Christianity. Few were comfortable with the incendiary talk of demonic possession and the stated push to totally erase the separation of church and state. But everything changed with Trump’s election.
At the beginning of his first presidential run in 2016, most mainstream evangelicals were wary of a thrice-married, philandering billionaire. But NAR leaders immediately praised Trump, a man they admired for his televangelistlike swagger. Wallnau in particular supported Trump long before he was taken seriously as a candidate, offering theologically contorted rationales for his devotion to the real estate tycoon. Once Trump became president, he drew prominent NAR members, including Wallnau, into his White House; his own spiritual adviser, Paula White-Cain, was one of them.
Trump knew little of doctrinal matters, but he could spot loyalty. His public favor boosted the NAR leaders; he also benefited from a message they began to spread that he had been divinely endorsed.
During the COVID pandemic, neo-charismatic churches run by NAR prophets swelled in numbers as they remained defiantly open despite lockdown rules. They attracted converts from mainstream Christian parishes that remained closed, and politically ambitious prophets in this network soon became Facebook celebrities. Some gained real-world influence: Sean Feucht, a Christian singer who led massive COVID-era worship events across the country, as well as a pro-Israel counterprotest at Columbia University this past spring, is an acolyte of the movement. So is Ché Ahn, whose Pasadena-based Harvest Rock Church successfully sued Gov. Gavin Newsom over the lockdown there in 2020.
As NAR leaders became the political power brokers of evangelical Christianity, their symbols and ideas proliferated. The “Appeal to Heaven” flag—a simple pine tree over a white background that has become a symbol of Christian nationalism and was flown at the insurrection, as well as by politicians including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito—was resuscitated by the NAR from its origins in the American Revolution. On Jan. 6, rioters blew shofars, Jewish ceremonial trumpets appropriated by neo-charismatics as a symbol of spiritual warfare, toward the Capitol and even into the broken windows of the Capitol building, summoning angels to engage in combat on behalf of Trump. When the Alabama Supreme Court briefly outlawed in vitro fertilization, its chief justice, Tom Parker, used terminology particular to the NAR to explain his reasoning. Powerful conservatives from varied Christian backgrounds have taken up the call to weaken the separation of church and state—a project that Wallnau and his ilk frame as going to battle for Christ’s kingdom on earth.
This is why, sweating in a black polo and khaki slacks, affable and smiling, Wallnau promised the members of the faithful in Michigan that they would be shortly hearing from God. “Every one of you has an assignment,” he said. “My job for all of you is to find your unfinished assignment, because America is too young to die.”
At an earlier point in his career, Wallnau was a motivational speaker, and on his professional websites and online merchandise stores he’s still described as a “strategist” and “futurist.” But over the past several decades, he has become most well known for resurrecting a niche, ’70s-era Christian call to arms: a mandate for believers to conquer the “seven mountains of society”—family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government.
As Wallnau put it in an essay printed in the 2013 volume Invading Babylon, “We need more disciples in the right place, the high places. The world is a matrix of overlapping systems or spheres of influence. We are called to go into the entire matrix and invade every system with an influence that liberates that system’s fullest potential.”
And to Wallnau—and other similar charismatic evangelicals—the system’s fullest potential depends on Trump.
Taylor, the scholar and author of The Violent Take It by Force, a forthcoming book about the NAR’s influence on the Jan. 6 insurrection, has found in his research that more than 50 neo-charismatic Christian leaders were in Washington that day. Ahn, the California pastor, spoke at the main “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 5, calling it “the most important week in America’s history.” Another major NAR leader broadcast daily prayers ahead of the rally; in a predawn address hours before the insurrection, he too proclaimed on social media that it was “one of the most critical days in our history.” Taylor waded through hundreds of social media accounts from Christians involved in the Jan. 6 riot and noted that one of the most common denominators among them was interaction with these calls—and with Wallnau’s streamed rants.
Knowing all this, I had expected Wallnau in person to have a fiery personality to match his warlike rhetoric. And over the next few days, I would certainly see signs of Wallnau’s extremism, as when he reiterated that in the End Times, Jesus would be coming back “not as a therapist” but “in flames to wreak vengeance on his enemies.” Or when he warned that the predatory left was going to make children suicidal by “evangelizing” them into thinking they’re the wrong gender, at one point telling the crowd, “You’re authorized to take the Philistines out of position.”
But I also saw a man who was disarmingly goofy. Twice during the three-day event, Wallnau recounted, in full detail, a scene from the movie Gladiator. Sitting in a movie theater in 2000, watching Maximus and his band of slaves fend off men in chariots in the Colosseum, Wallnau said, he had sensed God telling him to pay attention. Onstage two decades later, in his lengthy retelling of the scene—employing an impressive Russell Crowe impression—Wallnau shared the significance of the gladiators locking their shields, moving and fighting as one. He told members of the cheering crowd to lift their right hand in the air and, on the count of three, yell “As one!,” chopping their arm as if they were “breaking the neck of the demon afflicting you.”
The Gladiator spiel reminded me of an incident from 2022. That September, a major Twitter account had posted a video of a rally for the Christian nationalist Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano in which a man onstage had commanded attendees to lift their right hand in the air, proclaiming, “America will have a new birth of liberty.” (Mastriano would go on to lose badly to Josh Shapiro.) Liberal Twitter users who shared the viral video online expressed horror at a Nazi salute’s being performed in Pennsylvania. In my car, I searched for the old clip. Sure enough, the man in the video was Wallnau, and he was leading Mastriano supporters in an “As one!” Gladiator chop.
I was a little irrationally indignant on his behalf. And for a moment, before I remembered that the “Courage Tour” was laying the groundwork for another such violent attack in the event of Trump’s loss this year, I felt for Wallnau. The secular world had undeniably, in this instance, distorted a rather benign action. Toward the end of that first night, Wallnau shared a message he had received from God, an articulation of his particular assignment: “They have a caricature of who you are, they’ve got the ‘weird MAGA Christian-nationalist insurrectionist’ narrative out there. Your job is to contradict the narrative.”
Talking to evangelical scholars later, I realized what was so striking to me about Wallnau’s delivery. Against all evidence to the contrary, I had the feeling in that tent that he just wanted to heal the country, to bring us together. And I was, in a strange way, almost happy for the charismatics around me: They were being offered the promise of purpose in their lives, a pitch to be part of something big and exciting. “We often think of Christian extremism as about hate,” Taylor told me. “Wallnau has found a way to make it inspirational.”
When I arrived at Floodgate on the second morning, this time prepared for the heat with three full water bottles, the music was going again, and Wallnau, now in a more casual “Courage Tour” shirt and gray jeans, was busy laying hands on believers.
Just in front of the stage, a dozen or so attendees clustered around him, waiting to be anointed with oil. I watched as Wallnau grasped a woman by the back of the neck and prayed over her, forehead to forehead, murmuring. Then, suddenly, gripping her head in both hands, he blew on her brow. As if she’d been bowled over by a hurricane-force wind, the woman fell back into the arms of her fellow believers, who gently eased her to the ground, where she lay in the downy grass with four other siblings in Christ, overcome by the sublime presence of the Holy Spirit.
To their left, a hyenalike shriek pierced through the Christian rock. A woman had been possessed with holy laughter, which some of the faithful—after particularly intoxicating brushes with the Spirit—can by seized with for hours at a time. (The wife of the pastor of Floodgate, we were told, had once laughed for four straight days.) The possessed woman convulsed in her folding chair, heaving with laughter, drawing enraptured hand-laying from her compatriots.
That this kind of religious ecstasy preceded a day of seminars amazed me. Soon, Wallnau would be introducing the day’s first speaker, a Christian nationalist historian named Bill Federer, whose PowerPoint on U.S. history was both boring and packed with misleading assertions (for example, that many historic lynchings targeted Republicans who had registered Black people to vote) as well as many outright falsehoods (including that a 2023 reproductive health bill in California would have allowed people to kill babies 28 days after birth). (Federer did not respond directly to a request for comment but rejected the characterization of his presentation as misleading or containing falsehoods in a lengthy blog post about the Civil War, abortion, and religion.)
Federer was followed by representatives from the America First Policy Institute, Turning Point USA Faith, Moms for America, and a group for Black conservatives selling “MAGA Black” baseball caps, which I saw just white people wearing. “You’re the only people who go from divine-healing miracle service and getting filled [with the Holy Spirit] to precinct strategies,” Wallnau said approvingly to the crowd.
I sat through sessions that presented convoluted (and wildly incorrect) evidence that the 2020 election had been stolen. I watched a representative of the group My Faith Votes propose a letter-writing campaign. (Wallnau added that people should lay hands on the letters in prayer before sending them.) I saw one woman urge people to stop supporting “woke companies” and one man advise attendees to learn how to file FOIA requests.
The practical approach didn’t always go over well: When the America First Policy Institute representative posited that Trump had lost his election because Christian men over the age of 60 hadn’t turned out in high-enough numbers, a bearded man behind me repeatedly yelled, his voice hot with anger, “We didn’t lose!”
I had imagined a bifurcated experience based on the “Courage Tour” program: political lectures during the day, worship at night. But for the leaders of this movement, as with their goals for the country, the political and the spiritual could not be separated. One speaker, while displaying an image of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, screamed, with true fire-and-brimstone energy, “I prophesy they’re going to jail!”
Another lecturer, a man named Joshua Standifer, came onstage the first day just as a soft rain began to fall, breaking the afternoon heat. “They say rain is a sign of blessing,” he said, to appreciative audience laughter.
The Lord, Standifer explained, had called on him to start a group called the Lion of Judah, which would serve as a kind of National Rifle Association for biblical values. The group’s goal was to install believers in polling places, “like a Trojan horse” in the enemy’s camp. To do that, he encouraged everyone to become an election worker so that they could document and report suspicious activity and lay the ground for potential legal challenges.
“There’s more of us than them,” he said, in language that echoed certain rioters on Jan. 6. “We can take back this nation, one county at a time. We’re going to win Michigan.”
In an email, Standifer later said that his organization was focused not on ensuring a particular electoral outcome but on getting Christians involved in politics. “Regardless of what the media or others may think, our cities need election workers who will stand for truth, justice and who have a moral compass rooted in the Lord,” he wrote. “The rhetoric and labeling of Christians as threats to democracy is wrong and dangerous during the uncertain times in which we live.”
After Standifer left the stage, Wallnau led a prayer to expose hidden works of darkness affecting the election, before asking those who felt energized to raise their hands in prayer. He was anointing them, he said, to become poll workers.
Watching Wallnau lead these Michiganders through a kind of spiritual oath to “protect” the election, I felt a deep sense of dread. This seemed far more dangerous than any hype man screaming about the evils of the secular world. Wallnau’s vision for his great revival hinged on another Trump administration. The stakes meant that there was no room for a divergent outcome—or for anyone, really, who might disagree.
As another headlining charismatic prophet at the event, Mario Murillo, put it, “It’s no longer about conservatives vs. liberals. It’s not Republicans vs. Democrats. Now it’s good vs. evil.”
Murillo was more serious in tone than Wallnau. A bearded man with a set grimness to his face, Murillo led the main worship session on the second evening. In his introduction, he launched into a story of a pastor being cured of Stage 4 cancer the previous night in Eau Claire. As his story wrapped, the air, which had felt stifling under the tent, began to stir. “I had asked for a cool breeze,” Murillo said simply. There was none of Wallnau’s winking. (Murillo did not respond to a request for comment.)
“We live in a moment that is precisely like that of America before the Civil War,” he thundered. “All of the features of abuse, dishonesty, and evil are present now.
“America has sinned,” he said.
“Amen!” the audience yelled.
“America has abandoned God,” he said.
“Amen!” the audience yelled, louder.
“There’s no sweeping under the rug the seeds America has sown,” he said.
“You are the lowest human being on the planet if you take a scalpel to a child to alter their gender.”
Around me, everyone got to their feet, furiously applauding.
“What they’re trying to do to our children should awaken us to war in Jesus’ name,” he roared. “We have got to declare war on the demons trying to come after our children.”
As a brassy hum picked up around the tent—the sound of multiple shofars being blown—Murillo proclaimed, “The Founding Fathers didn’t want us to be loyal to the government. They wanted us to be loyal to the truth.”
Then, more quietly, his voice creaking: “The power of God is on my body, so strong I’m barely able to stand.”
I looked up at the people on their feet around me, who just half an hour earlier I had seen happily singing about God’s grace. They were now yelling and cheering. Someone behind me screamed out, “War!”
According to neo-charismatic prophets, the assassination attempt on Donald Trump on July 13 had been foretold. Several months earlier, on March 14, an Oklahoma prophet with 359,000 subscribers posted a podcast episode to YouTube in which he discussed the spiritual ramifications of the impending solar eclipse. In it, he also mentioned a vision he’d had: “I saw Trump, rising up, and then I saw an attempt on his life,” the prophet said. “This bullet flew by his ear, and it came so close to his head that it busted his eardrum.”
After Trump did indeed survive an assassination attempt that wounded his ear, neo-charismatic evangelicals spoke of the incident as “proof” of “miracles.” Jentezen Franklin, the pastor of a Southern megachurch, compared the moment with Moses’ anointing Aaron as his high priest in Leviticus because the book mentions placing blood on Aaron’s ear. And as Wallnau would later tell his Facebook followers, when Wallnau learned of the assassination attempt, he went to his prayer closet, “where he keeps a cardboard cutout image of Trump,” and, “as he prayed, he cupped Trump’s cardboard ears with both hands.” He told his followers that he hadn’t yet known where Trump had been shot. It all added up to an irrefutable message to those plugged into this world: Trump was favored by God.
In some ways, though, the response to Trump’s miracle seemed almost perfunctory. It had been almost a decade since Wallnau and other NAR leaders first rallied behind the former president as a kind of savior figure; the consensus on his righteous role is nearly universal among that segment of charismatics. The event that actually brought new life to the right-wing charismatic world came soon afterward, when Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.
“She represents an amalgam of the spirit of Jezebel in a way that will be even more ominous than Hillary because she’ll bring a racial component, and she’s younger,” Wallnau said in a video about Harris. In another, he said that she appeared presidential only because of “witchcraft.” Murillo appeared on Wallnau’s podcast to discuss the “demonic power” at work in the new Democratic nomination. “That’s why God spared Trump’s life, for such a time as this,” Murillo said.
Because although Wallnau and his compatriots have paved the way for evangelicals to embrace Trump, their real power lies in how they vilify their enemies.
“They believe if God is not in control of something, automatically the devil is; it’s an either/or,” said Karrie Gaspard-Hogewood, a sociologist at Tulane University who studies neo-charismatic Christianity. “There’s no compromise with the devil.”
And when millions of Americans believe that Harris is literally possessed by a demon, or that her party is acting on behalf of the devil, that could have repercussions for how they expect their elected representatives to govern—and how they might treat a Trump loss. “God can’t be wrong; the prophet can’t be wrong,” Gaspard-Hogewood said. “It must be human error or some kind of nefarious act.”
This reality hit me in the tent that second night of the revival in Michigan. I could no longer conjure any cheer. My mood had been curdled by the transformation of such a friendly crowd, by Murillo’s raw anger, by the details from his diatribe: the way he said he was sick of Pride month, spitting out the word to hearty applause, or how he had the audience stand up and read the quote from American Revolutionary Thomas Paine: If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.
But where I heard warnings of violence, Murillo seemed to think he was spreading hope. He could see the agony of his fellow Americans as he traveled around to these events, he said. “The audiences are desperate. They’re broken. They’re coming to the tent because they read a card that said God could heal them. They’ve waited three to four hours in an emergency ward. They’ve been given drugs that have worse side effects than what’s actually wrong with them. They don’t have the money for their surgery. They don’t have the time to take off work to get well. They’re suffering. They’re in an American hell created by socialism. That compassion grips me. It consumes me.”
Then he pointed to a person in the crowd. “And then it hit me how God was healing a woman right over here,” Murillo said.
Quicky, he pointed again, to the back of the middle section of the tent. “God is healing a man, right somewhere near that pole. In your heart, in your chest. Heart disease is being healed.”
Again and again, he identified people who were being healed, with remarkable specificity. He directed a woman with a blond ponytail to place her hands on a second woman’s head and tell her that the Lord was curing her in her neck, back, chest, and legs in Jesus’ name. The healing, Murillo said, was backing up through the blond woman’s arm, in turn repairing her spine and eyes. The damage she had from a car accident, it’s all gone, he said. She began sobbing. “This is where cancer starts to vanish,” he cried out as the whole tent began speaking in tongues. “This is where diabetes starts to become a thing of the past.”
I watched an older woman grow overcome by the proclamation that a protrusion in her abdomen was being burned out of her body. I watched another woman, in a blue dress, cover her face, shaking and nodding, when Murillo told her that she had been scheduled for an operation but that that operation was canceled, all glory to Jesus Christ. I watched him tell another person that multiple sclerosis was leaving their body, then point around the assembled and declare that the other ailments he sensed—“cancer,” “heart disease,” “a lump in the throat that is scaring you to death”—had vanished.
The crowd was euphoric, and my earlier panic softened into a deep sadness. This was why this segment of Christianity was growing so rapidly, I realized. So many of these attendees were desperately seeking healing and answers. They were, in some way or another, deeply disappointed in society, misdirecting their anger onto immigrants, gay teachers, and transgender people. But they were bound together by shared suffering.
Murillo promised everyone that they would remember the healing they had experienced over the weekend. “You’re going to be talking about this 30 years from now,” he said, “the power of God, the way everyone got lost in Him.”
I had little doubt it would be true. And no doubt it did actually help some of those in pain: Medical experts have known for centuries that there are mysterious healing powers in belief. Everyone around me felt, with an undeniable intensity, a type of grace they weren’t getting from society.
Wallnau and Murillo seem to be true believers, invested in their flocks. But Wallnau, as a former strategist, also knows something important: The NAR will only grow, and gain more footholds in those seven mountains of society, if it continues to link its cause to genuine human despair. Wallnau can and does say remarkably incorrect and hateful things, but to those in his audience—suffering from the American medical system’s cruel and byzantine billing system or financial distress or the frightening absence of a safety net—what matters is that they feel, momentarily, in control.
On that final night, Murillo healed the whole tent. He had everyone lay hands on their neighbors, pray in tongues. He called on those who could not walk to move their legs, to stand. Some did. One woman abandoned her walker and took off. A man began running around. In the aisle next to me, another person stood, hidden by a cluster of people around him. They reached out their arms, touching him, wanting to be part of his miracle.
To the believers, the air in the tent seemed electric with signs of God’s favor. Come November, when it is time to keep the prophecies alive and secure the future of America, Wallnau and Murillo will know where to turn.
