BAD THEOLOGY, PART THREE

I began this series of posts with a question: How has it happened that evangelical Christianity has so enthusiastically embraced Donald Trump. At first glance, this would not seem an alliance made in heaven—or anywhere else. In his book, The Violent Take It by Force (Fortress, 2024, Kindle Edition), a book I’ll come back to below, Matthew D. Taylor asks it this way: “How did Donald Trump, a thrice-married, notoriously reprobate, real-estate tycoon and television personality win over millions of evangelical voters and gain their undying loyalty in the 2016 election and since?” A loyalty that not only has not wavered but increased: the Washington Post reports that “Trump’s strongest religious group were voters who identified as White born-again Christians, who represented about 2 in 10 voters. In all, 82 percent of them supported him nationally, larger than his 76 percent support in 2020.” The answer to Taylor’s question and mine is at least partly theological, as Taylor’s book demonstrates and I will argue. And this is dangerous not just for our country but for the church. Christianity is fast becoming a political brand, to the detriment of the gospel. It’s that story I hope to tell in this series of posts.

AN APOCALYPTIC HABIT OF MIND

In my last post in this series, available here, I suggested that evangelical Christianity has long cultivated an apocalyptic habit of mind. The book of Revelation, with its fantastical beasts and mysterious numbers, falling stars and bowls of wrath, has been the playground of those who wish to puzzle out our own times in terms of some grand divine scheme. Who, they ask, is 666? Who, the beast from the sea in Revelation 13? Who, the beast from the land? Who among us bears the mark of the beast? Should we be afraid?

These and other questions about the biblical apocalypses lend themselves to vast conspiratorial theories. Will we all soon be wearing QR codes on our foreheads as the mark of the beast? Is the United Nations about to announce a global government under the aegis of the antichrist? Is Harry Potter a work of the devil? If you have hung around with evangelical Christians for very long, you have run into these sorts of speculations. Add to them a long-cultivated distrust of science and history, and you have created a religious culture deeply suspicious of authority and wide open to manipulation by clever preachers and writers claiming to have solved the secrets of the Bible.

This has long been true. But if, as Richard Hofstadter had it sixty years ago, American politics have always been characterized by a certain “paranoid style,” that style took deeper root in the evangelical community with its premillennial dispensational theology and penchant for conservative politics. Read the Left Behind novels. Read The Late Great Planet Earth. Nothing new here.

A SHIFT IN EVANGELICAL THEOLOGY

But as I said at the end of the post previous to this one, this apocalyptic habit of mind only gets us so far toward answering the question I am asking: why have evangelicals gone all in on Donald Trump? Or to give the question broader scope, why have so many evangelical Christians adopted a bare-knuckled style of politics that embraces hatred for one’s enemies rather than love, as Jesus commands (Matthew 5:44)? In a recent New York Times essay, David French, himself an evangelical, asks: “Why Are Many Christians So Cruel?” Something has shifted in the Trump era. Something has shifted in the fabric of evangelical Christianity. Something not just political but theological. Something deep. It’s this shift we have to identify if we are to get at what’s going on in the church.

For that, I need to tell another story, not the story of the evangelical community as once existed but as it exists now. “Evangelical” has come to embrace not only your country Bible church and denominational churches like the Southern Baptists but pentecostal churches and even people who have no church at all. As a matter of fact, asked if they are evangelical, pentecostal Christians answer yes at a higher percentage than any other group. Toward the end of the 20th century and early in the 21st, the energy of evangelicalism shifted from doctrinal and biblical concerns rooted in an older fundamentalism to an expressive form of Christianity based in personal spiritual experience. This is true not only for pentecostal believers but for people who are members of churches that once emphasized doctrine and Bible. We are in a different world. It’s that story that I want to tell, if only briefly, in this post.

C. PETER WAGNER AND CHARISMATIC THEOLOGY

The story runs through a single pivotal figure, a Fuller Seminary professor named C. Peter Wagner. It’s not that Wagner was himself a formative theologian. His ideas—the ideas we will confront in this piece—were mostly borrowed from other people, people who often became his associates. He led not by being a creator of ideas but as a consummate organizer. Matthew Taylor calls Wagner “an organizational genius.” In a series of steps I need not recount here, he merged together traditional evangelicalism—the evangelical theology and culture one would have encountered at Fuller Seminary in the late 20th century—and the much wilder world of independent charismatic churches and preachers, churches and preachers largely beholden to no one except themselves, a world that produced, not incidentally for our story, Paula White, pastor to Donald Trump. 

It was this world of “signs and wonders,” “prophets and apostles,” later “Jericho marches” and January 6 rioters, to which Wagner brought his considerable energy and organizational skills. “In essence,” says Taylor, “Peter Wagner took a highly charged but disordered religious leadership culture—eccentric Latter Rain holdouts, hawkish dominion theology proponents, aspiring apostles and prophets, and ambitious spiritual warriors on the outskirts of the Independent Charismatic world—and wove them into a nation-spanning, globe-encircling mesh of networks” (249). Wagner died in 2016, shortly after he had endorsed Donald Trump for president, but the networks of preachers and churches he created still exist. With Trump’s reelection, they expect again to be at the center of American political life.

SPIRITUAL WARFARE

In the Wagner world, three ideas dominate. The first, and earliest in the Wagner’s own development, is spiritual warfare. For independent charismatic Christians, spirits are everywhere, fierce angels (remember, this is warfare) and powerful demons. Charismatic preachers like to quote Ephesians 6:11-12: 

Put on the whole armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not only against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. (New International Version) 

Wagner, who borrowed much of this from Cindy Jacobs, taught that spiritual warfare occurs on three levels: the “ground-level,” casting out demons from individual people; the “occult-level,” exorcising occult paraphernalia, like Ouija boards and pagan images; and  the “strategic-level,” doing battle with what he called “territorial spirits.” Wagner’s focus was on the third, “strategic” level. He claimed, says Taylor:

. . . that behind the low-level, personally harassing demons that most believers battled through spiritual warfare were high-level demon commanders and generals—the mysterious “principalities” and “powers” mentioned in that Ephesians passage.  

The weapon against these “territorial spirits” was prayer, but not prayer as you may know it. Again Taylor: “. . . Wagner, Jacobs, and their friend Dutch Sheets also built a massive, networked prayer and information-sharing infrastructure, called the Strategic Prayer Network, with thousands of prayer activists spread around the United States and the world” (60). These networks are all about war, war against demons, especially those demons they identity as “territorial spirits.” At one point, a group of Wagner followers sent an expedition against the “Queen of Heaven,” a territorial spirit they believed lived on the top of Mt Everest:

They spent three weeks in Nepal, blowing shofars, prophesying, and interceding against the territorial spirits. Wagner . . . and others would later claim that this secretive operation . . . was one of the keys to unlocking the 10/40 Window to further evangelization. Peter Wagner published an entire booklet about it titled “Confronting the Queen of Heaven. . .” (Taylor, 91).

These territorial spirits stand in for cultures, countries, and religions, and for the people embraced by these cultures, countries, and religions. To pray in this way is to demonize other religions, cultural movements and, lately, whole political parties. If these cultures and religions and movements are under the sway of a ruling demon, then there can be no compromise with them. They need to be exorcised, spiritually defeated. The practice of spiritual warfare gives Christians a “theologically correct” way of expressing their condemnation of others. It draws a line between what belongs to God and what belongs to the devil.

APOSTOLIC LEADERSHIP

But spiritual warfare is only the first of three interlocking ideas that fund the Wagner enterprise. The second is perhaps more dangerous: the idea that churches should be run as fiefdoms of “spiritually gifted” individuals. Again, independent charismatic churches turn to Ephesians, this time to 4:11-12a: “So Christ gives apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers for the purpose of training the saints. . ..” They regard this apparently ad-hoc list as an authoritative list of church offices, offices appointed not through church structures but directly by Christ through the Spirit. Apostles and prophets—the most important of the offices in the charismatic world—are not credentialed in the way denominations typically credential their clergy, requiring a seminary education and ecclesiastical examinations, but are recognized to be apostles and prophets by their success in raising up a ministries and a congregations. If you claim to be an apostle, and enough people come to your worship services, you are by this reasoning an apostle, appointed by the Spirit. The proof is in the success of the enterprise.

This notion of success as the mark of divine approbation is central to the theology of these churches. They are almost all purveyors of the prosperity gospel, the claim that true Christians will do well in the world by the measures of wealth and power. It is no little irony that those who in fact get rich by means of this gospel seem mostly to be those who preach it, not those who believe it.

And these entrepreneurial apostles answer to no one, except perhaps to other apostles. A good example of this freeform way of building churches is the ministry of Paula White. It was White—a charismatic prosperity gospel preacher—who offered the invocation at Trump’s inauguration and who later was appointed to a White House post. Her messy but ultimately successful career runs through several churches, a TV talk show, and other ministries, built on her personal appeal. The proof is in the ratings, as the argument goes.

And it was this that attracted Donald Trump to her in 2002. After having seen her preach on television, Trump called. As Matthew Taylor tells it, 

[Trump] told White that he had seen her talk show and some of her sermons on TV while staying at his Mar-a-Lago estate, and he told her, “You have the it factor.” She offered the half-joking rejoinder, “Sir, we call that the anointing.” Trump then recounted to White, point by point, three of her sermons on “the value of riches” that he had particularly appreciated. (38)

When Trump was deciding whether to run for office, he reached out to White. She became his primary contact among evangelical pastors, although her brand of evangelicalism is a long way from the older evangelicalism represented by, say, Franklin Graham or Robert Jeffress. Taylor notes, “In a turn that no one could have predicted even two years earlier, Paula White and her coterie of televangelists, prophets, and charismatic megachurch pastors were suddenly the Christian face of the Republican presidential ticket.” In talking about how these independent, nondenominational charismatic pastors have come to have so much political influence, Taylor uses the image of a carpet: the fringe of the rug has become the rug itself.

This version of Christianity fits Trump. When Trump met Paula White and after, he had shown little affinity for religion. He famously did not know how to pronounce “2 Corinthians.” He didn’t think he needed forgiveness. He doesn’t go to church on a regular basis. But if he did not fully appreciate or perhaps entirely understand the content of White’s preaching, he recognized her giftedness. Taylor says:

With his oddly coiffed hair, his formative Norman Vincent Peale theology, his salesmanship, his bombastic oratory, and his unflinching personal schtick forged out of years of celebrity and television savvy, Trump has pantomimed the televangelists. His celebrity could easily mingle with Paula White’s clique of entrepreneurial charismatic celebrities because Trump’s whole brand is made of similar material. For what is “Make America Great Again” if not a gospel? (47)

It’s religion as entertainment. Freeform, outrageous, with wild things happening and wilder things said, it has less and less to do with Jesus of Nazareth or with the apostolic tradition that has come down through Christian tradition. If you are named by the Spirit as an apostle quite apart from any church process, you are free to declare your truth as you have it, and these preachers do just that. And if your truth is Donald Trump as the Anointed of God to end abortion and own the libs, then you preach your truth.

SEVEN MOUNTAIN DOMINIONISM

These first two Wagner ideas, perhaps better, practices, spiritual warfare and apostolic leadership, are joined with a third to make what Taylor calls the “three-legged stool” of this brand of charismatic faith. This third of these key ideas is “dominionism” or, more fully, “seven-mountain dominionism.” It’s here that Wagner and others avail themselves of a strain of Reformed theology: the idea of “sphere sovereignty” as formulated by the Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper communicated through (and much modified by)  the American theologian Rousas Rushdoony.

The seven mountains are seven key domains, the spheres, that are found in some form in every society: family, religion, education, government, media, commerce, and culture. The central idea of dominionism is that each of these should rightfully be under Christian control, ruled by Christians.

In this respect dominionism differs from what Kuyper taught. For Kuyper, each sphere in society had its own principle. There was a way that family, for example, was supposed to be, a law of principle of family. Similarly, there was a way that government was supposed to be, a law of good government. It’s this idea of a rule or law inherent in each of these spheres that was picked up by Rushdoony and popularized in part by his perhaps better-known son-in-law, Gary North. Where Rushdoony differed from Kuyper was that for Rushdoony the law for these various spheres of life had already been revealed once and for all in the Old Testament. 

But in this matter the new charismatic evangelicalism differs from Calvinism: Calvinism is always about law; charismatic evangelicalism has no need of law. They are not law people. It’s a matter of rule, personal rule. Of relationships. Christians should be in charge. The underlying principle we saw with apostolic leadership applies: authority, the right to rule, comes directly from God, not from human institutions or consent. Apostles answer only to God. 

This, of course, feeds directly into Donald Trump’s often expressed idea of how presidential power should be. He has said that he wants to be dictator for a day. Or longer. He believes that the military should obey his commands without question. He believes that his appointees owe him absolute loyalty. He does not want to be constrained by law. Dominionism in this way gives theological cover to the Trumpian doctrine of rights of rulers. 

AN UNDERLYING ANIMISM

The three principles—spiritual warfare, apostolic leadership, and dominionism—are based on one more operative idea: the idea that God needs or, at least, waits for people to do what God wills. As Dutch Sheets, one of the most influential pastors in this movement, has it: God does not always get what God wants (Taylor, 211). For the divine will to become reality, believers have to invoke it.

Contrary to what a naïve observer might think, prophecy, just to take one example of how God waits for people, is in this theological ecosystem not a straightforward prediction of what will happen. A prophetic word is a statement fraught with divine possibility. Taylor calls it a theological “meme.” But before the prophecy is enacted, it has to be unleashed, set into motion. It has to be spoken, prayed in that spiritual warfare style of praying. And that is the responsibility of people, Christians.

Believers, especially apostles and prophets and other charismatic adepts, in this way of thinking, exercise real power. Prayers change things. One can pray down dominions. God responds to the prayers and other efforts of people by interrupting a cancer or deciding an election or bringing down the Queen of Heaven from the top of a mountain. There is an animistic, magical idea at work here. It verges on the ancient animisms one meets everywhere in the world in native religions. One suspects that one of the reasons this sort of theology has spread so quickly around the world is that it touches on these ancient beliefs.

In this sense, this theology is hardly Christian at all. It has not much left in it of Jesus of Nazareth. What’s important is not what Jesus taught but accessing divine power to shape the world in ways that these believers would like it to be shaped. The practices popularized by Wagner and his followers are spiritual technologies designed to unleash these powers. It’s this faith—not Christianity in the traditional sense—that is fast becoming the dominant faith in the US and in the world. 

And it is bad theology. But before I get to that—which I will in the next post—there is one more part to the story: how this strange theology has come to influence not only nondenominational charismatic churches but the churches of which of many of those read this blog have been and remain a part. Churches—even churches that claim a doctrinal heritage—have bought into this theology, especially in worship.

But that too will have to wait.

Until then,

Clay