Spiritual Warfare in Congress?

It shouldn’t be this hard.

Funding the government is a fundamental operation of the House of Representatives. Yet, here we are after the Republicans finally chose a Speaker, and with a slim majority of seats, they still are not able to pass a funding bill on anything. Not even the routine defense funding bill. That one is usually a slam dunk because it has large bipartisan support. It has passed every year since 1961 in a bipartisan fashion without much debate or fanfare.

GOP Members of Congress See Demons

But now, there is a “devil” in the details…for a segment of the GOP caucus bipartisanship is in fact, spiritual warfare. There are around 15 to 20 Republican right-wing hardliners who not only see bipartisanship as a bad thing, they believe they are negotiating with the Devil, literally, when they make such agreements.

This hard-line set of extremists was outraged when Kevin McCarthy made such a deal with Democrats, er, I mean demons, to fund the government back in September. It resulted in the unseating of McCarthy who was one of their own. In the minds of these Christian Nationalist extremists, negotiating with Democrats is like compromising with spiritual forces of darkness.

And it’s not just Democrats that they view as part of the legions of Satan’s forces. Republicans who want to work for consensus, compromise, and bipartisan agreements are also under the influence of the Prince of Darkness. They call them “RINOS” meaning they aren’t really Republicans, but in reality, they mean that these common-sense conservatives are not Christian Nationalists and they are dabbling with spiritual forces of evil by working with the Democrats.

I’m using a lot of religious jargon, but rest assured, these terms have specific meanings for those who are true believers. What we are witnessing in 2023 is the emergence of a movement that has been percolating in American religious culture for many decades. The broad brush term “Christian Nationalist” doesn’t quite capture the essence and nuance of this movement and its influence over some members of Congress today.

Where This Began

So….Let’s take a deeper dive into the background of where this new Christian Spiritual Warrior and Warfare concept originated. I won’t go back to the earliest beginnings which can be found in something called the “New Order of the Latter Rain” prayer movement in Canada in the 1940s along with the Pentecostal movement even earlier.

We only need to go back to the 1970’s. I will share from personal experience what this movement is like and what it is about, and then connect the dots to what is going on today in the halls of Congress.

In the 1970s I was in high school and college for most of that decade. During those years many of my evangelical friends and I became associated with what we believed to the a “fresh” outpouring of God’s Spirit called the Charismatic Movement. It wasn’t a denominational movement, which is what appealed to us, but more of an organic grassroots movement of people seeking a deeper experience with God.

We didn’t meet so much in churches as we did in home groups or informal storefront meetings. It was a hodgepodge of interesting characters who began to manifest the “gifts of the Holy Spirit.” What were these gifts? Things like speaking in tongues, miraculous healing, casting out demons, falling “slain” in the spirit, and several other extreme experiential religious expressions. It was all thought to be a supernatural outpouring of God’s spirit.

But I found out over time, that there was a national and even international component to this movement that was being driven by what were considered to be “high-ranking prophets and apostles.” For a while, I thought this was key to what God was doing in the world by restoring his Kingdom through miraculous signs and wonders. And of course, this all coincided with a strong emphasis on the anticipated Second Coming of Christ.

By the end of the 1970s, I began to become skeptical about many of the excesses I was witnessing firsthand. As I was beginning my professional career in education and an impending marriage, I graduated to the more sedate and mainstream “Assemblies of God” denomination. It was sort of like Charismatic Movement lite. I continued, however, to follow developments in this “Charismatic Movement” and have grown more and more concerned about it as the 1990s emerged.

The “New” Apostles and Prophets

By the 1990s these supposed new “prophets and apostles” had coalesced around something called, the New Apostolic Reformation, which today has become the center of gravity in modern American Christianity. It is the driving force behind the broader movement or label, “Christian Nationalism” whether its adherents understand it or not. Many deny its existence.

The NAR isn’t so much an organized denomination as it is once again, a loose federation of evangelical-right-wing people who see the world through a common lens. What is that lens? The lens was developed by a guy named C. Peter Wagner, a former missionary, became an author and coined the term “New Apostolic Reformation.” Wagner, who originally called this form of Christianity the “Third Wave” and was a theoretician of the Church Growth Movement, advocated for the principle of spiritual warfare against demons through his book Spiritual Power and Church Growth. He has written several books about this new “movement of God in the world,” and indeed, this movement has global reach.

In an Atlantic article, “The Woman Who Bought A Mountain for God,” by Stephanie McCrummen in the June 20, 2023 edition, she describes the essential core beliefs of this movement:

The reformation meant recognizing new apostles—men and women believed to have God-given spiritual authority as leaders. It meant modern-day prophets—people believed to be chosen by God to receive revelations through dreams visions and signs. It meant spiritual warfare, which was not intended to be taken metaphorically, but actually demanded the battling of demons that could possess people and territories and were so real that they could be diagrammed on maps…It meant the rise of the Manifest Sons of God, an elite force that would be endowed with supernatural powers for spiritual and perhaps actual warfare. Most significantly, the new reformation required not just personal salvation but action to transform all of society. Christians were to reclaim the fallen Earth from Satan and advance the Kingdom of God, and this idea was not metaphorical either. The Kingdom would be a social pyramid, at the top of which was a government of godly leaders dispensing biblical laws…

It is pretty easy to see the echos of these beliefs in the current push to ban books, pass anti-LGBTQ laws, restrict transgender health care, and oppose abortion. Although it is estimated folks that who believe these ideas may represent less than 15% of the population, they don’t believe they need to be a majority to enact their godly vision. They are becoming more and more outwardly anti-democratic.

Current Domonionist Examples

Here is an example of how this lens affects current political players. Roger Stone, former campaign advisor to Donald Trump whom Trump pardoned, claimed in an interview in December 2022, that a demonic portal that opened above the White House after President Joe Biden moved in is visible to those who are looking for it. He claims the media is deliberately ignoring this phenomenon which can clearly be seen. Whether he truly believes this idea or not isn’t relevant. What is relevant is that millions of people in the religious right do.

More contemporary “apostles” of the NAR are Lance Wallnau and Bill Johnson, authors of the 7M manifesto Invading Babylon. “7M” stands for The Seven Mountain Mandate which is a concept that suggests that Christians should work to become dominant in different aspects of society, such as business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, family, and religion. The idea is that by having a presence and influence in these areas, Christians can bring positive change and spread their values and beliefs throughout society whether the majority wants it or not. It is heavily fortifying many on the radical right of American politics. Popular with hypermasculine, gun-toting types, 7M has encouraged believers to invade “mountains”—including the U.S. Capitol and local school boards.

Separately and together, NAR beliefs such as 7M and spiritual warfare are emboldening those who claim that America is a Christian nation and that they have a mandate from God to rule. It is Christian dominionism for the twenty-first century, and there’s little wonder that petty tyrants like Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, and Mike Lindell are aligning with NAR leaders. But these ideas are held by a wide range of evangelical-religious right-wing politicians who are now in positions of power in the House of Representatives.

Playing the Zero-Sum Game of Spiritual Warfare

That brings us back to the stalemate in the House. From the current Speaker, Michael Johnson, to the ten most extreme MAGA members of the caucus, the one thing they all hold in common is that there is a spiritual warfare going on that manifests itself physically through bills and debates. And for them, the Democrats are part of the evil forces that dominate the country from whom they are trying to vie for dominance. And election-denying is not just a convenient vote-getting trope. For people who see the world through the NAR lens, they truly believe that God has chosen Donald Trump to be the President and that the 2020 election was not just stolen from Trump, but from God. That is why it is such a litmus test for being a “true Republican.”

As the House of Representatives stumbles and bumbles toward yet another government shutdown, because the GOP majority can’t agree on funding proposals, it might be good to remember that these extremists are playing a zero-sum game. They represent God, and when you believe you represent God, there is no such thing as compromise.

That is why this statement from the new Christian Nationalist Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson has such poignancy in this environment. It is a warning, not a statement of religious belief: