AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
A crucial part of January 6 remains untold. Foot soldiers stormed the Capitol. But what about the theological ring leaders who inspired many of them? That's according to Matthew D. Taylor, whose new book takes its title from a Bible verse often cited by such leaders - "The Violent Take It By Force." And Taylor knows his Bible. He came up in the evangelical Christian ministry, attended seminary and then left to get a religious studies doctorate at Georgetown. Matthew Taylor, welcome to the show.
MATTHEW D TAYLOR: Thank you for having me, Ayesha.
RASCOE: So in this book, you track over 50 charismatic Christian leaders who were in D.C. on January 6, and they all have ties to this thing called New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR. What is New Apostolic Reformation?
TAYLOR: The New Apostolic Reformation is a set of leadership networks that were formed by a seminary professor named C. Peter Wagner in the 1990s and early 2000s. They're built around this idea that is very popular in charismatic circles, that the church needs to be led by a renewed echelon of apostles and prophets. And if you know your New Testament or Biblical history, the apostles and prophets are pivotal leadership roles in the early church. But most church traditions have found ways of pushing those more to the side.
But within these charismatic circles, there's this popular belief that we need apostles and prophets again, that God is commissioning new apostles and prophets. And so Wagner was putting together networks of people who thought they were apostles and prophets, who had adopted those titles and those roles and were trying to figure out, how do we do this?
RASCOE: You do have charismatic churches, like the church I grew up in, Church of God In Christ, which is a denomination, and it has a leadership structure. But these churches, New Apostolic Reformation churches - they're nondenominational.
TAYLOR: Yeah, this is what we scholars will talk about sometimes as the independent charismatic sector, that intersection of that nondenominational governance along with this charismatic spirituality, that is sort of the wild west of American Christianity. I mean, this is a space with all kinds of experimentation. It's very tech savvy. A lot of entrepreneurial leaders - and the NAR is trying to offer, in many ways, an alternative to denominations, saying, denominations are slow moving. They've got all these bylaws. And instead, why don't we just invest authority in these charismatic individuals, these leaders, these apostles and prophets who can lead the church into grand revivals? And we can move a lot faster and more expeditiously.
RASCOE: The other key aspect of this, which is the part that I didn't really know about, is that society can be transformed through strategic-level spiritual warfare. In churches, I'm familiar with - people talk about spiritual warfare. But this is different.
TAYLOR: Yeah, spiritual warfare is a very common practice and set of beliefs within Christianity. I mean, in many ways, the idea of spiritual warfare is rooted in the New Testament and passages like the Book of Ephesians that speaks about putting on the armor of God. So many evangelicals, many Pentecostals, many Catholics practice spiritual warfare, so that's very widespread. And the basic idea is that there are angels and demons battling in this invisible spiritual realm all around us and that warfare affects us.
Wagner takes that kind of set of beliefs, and the leaders of the NAR come to embrace this idea of strategic-level spiritual warfare, which is putting that spiritual warfare idea on steroids and saying, there are these hierarchies of demons that we can identify. There are high-level, commander-level demons - what Wagner called territorial spirits - who can control literal physical territory and who can control human institutions and that, in Wagner's framework, apostles and prophets are generals of spiritual warfare who can mobilize Christians into these mass campaigns of spiritual warfare to battle back and identify these demons, develop strategies, develop combat tactics for getting rid of these.
And so the NAR has adopted a very militant vocabulary, a very violent vocabulary, a arsenal of weapons, spiritual weapons, things like blowing shofars, and particular kinds of prayers, particular kinds of worship songs. And part of the premise of strategic spiritual warfare is because it's so locateable, geographical...
RASCOE: It's in a place.
TAYLOR: It's in a place. Yeah.
RASCOE: Yeah. That's what stood out to me. You can go to a place and say, this is where the demon - high demon is, and we have to be in this place to try to fight the demon.
TAYLOR: Exactly. And Wagner and his fellows - they really believe this stuff. They even sent an expedition to Mount Everest in the late 1990s in order to try to displace one of these high-level spirits. They climbed most of the way up Mount Everest and spent, like, three weeks on the slopes of Mount Everest doing spiritual battle against this demon they called the Queen of Heaven.
RASCOE: I think that's going to be baffling for a lot of people who are not familiar with this movement, but this is a very serious belief, and it's now having very practical repercussions, right?
TAYLOR: Yes. And, in fact, Peter Wagner's wife, Doris, was actually present for Operation Ice Castle on the slopes of Mount Everest. And some of the people who participated in Operation Ice Castle - there was about 27 people who went to Mount Everest - some of those people show up on January 6 to do spiritual battle at the Capitol. There's this direct connection between this thing that happened in 1997 on the slopes of Mount Everest and then the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.
RASCOE: When you think about this idea of place and you think about January 6, then if you believe this and you believe there's this warfare going on, you believe you have to be at the Capitol, right?
TAYLOR: Yeah, the phrase that they use in their circles is boots on the ground. It's a military phrase, right? And so many of these apostles and prophets and other charismatic leaders - they believed that it was not only disloyal Republicans or nefarious Democrats stealing the election. They believed there was a demonic conspiracy, a witchcraft conspiracy going on behind the scenes that was the real power that was stealing the election from Donald Trump, who they believe was God's destined candidate to win the election. And so they thought that they could, in the spiritual realm, push Donald Trump across the finish line, get him back in office through these spiritual warfare tactics.
RASCOE: A lot of people listening may sound like, this sounds like the fringe. These can't be representative of the mainstream, quote-unquote, "Christians." But you outline in the book how this movement that had been seen as fringe became very entwined with Donald Trump.
TAYLOR: These ideas would have been thought of as fringe in mainstream evangelicalism 15, even 10 years ago. But as Donald Trump came into the presidential race in the summer of 2015, he turned to one of his trusted spiritual advisors, a woman named Paula White-Cain, who is an apostle herself, is a televangelist and a megachurch pastor, and she's been Trump's personal pastor since about 2002. And he asked her to be his liaison to evangelicals to build bridges to the evangelical community because Trump recognized as a Republican candidate for office, there's no way to get to the presidency without the evangelical vote.
RASCOE: She wasn't hanging out necessarily with Ralph Reed and Franklin Graham and all of these kind of, like, very high-level evangelicals that people kind of think about, right?
TAYLOR: Yeah, part of the point I'm making in the book is we tend to think of evangelicalism as this homogeneous unit. But in reality, there's all these fissures and divisions and social strata within evangelicalism. And Paula White-Cain was part of this more populist, charismatic wing of evangelicalism that, at least within more kind of respectable elite evangelical circles, was disdained. And so she brought in these figures from the margins - televangelists and apostles and prophets - and they started meeting with Donald Trump. These are some of the first Christian leaders he met with at Trump Tower in the fall of 2015.
One of these leaders was actually an NAR apostle and prophet named Lance Wallnau. And Wallnau claimed that when he met Trump, he received a prophecy that Donald Trump was a type of a Cyrus. And if you know your biblical history - right? - Cyrus is the emperor of the Persians who is the one who sends the Jewish people back from exile to rebuild Jerusalem, rebuild the temple. And so calling Trump a Cyrus - Wallnau was saying that Donald Trump is a - sort of a secular Messiah, who might not be a good Christian himself but who could return conservative Christians from cultural exile and give them power.
RASCOE: You mentioned Paula White. I've interviewed her. She was very influential in - during the Trump administration, but I didn't realize that Paula White actually became a White House employee. Can you talk about her role?
TAYLOR: Yeah, so Paula White - in the fall of 2019, about a year before the 2020 election, she officially got a job in the Office of Liaison in the White House. And almost immediately after she gets this job, she start - launches a prayer movement called the 1Voice Prayer Movement, invites a bunch of NAR leaders in to come and strategize for this prayer movement. They're meeting with her, meeting with others at the White House. And...
RASCOE: And this is at the White House. This blew my mind. A prayer movement, a Christian prayer movement on the White House dime - I mean, there are constitutional issues here, right?
TAYLOR: Yeah, and I think this was often missed because this was right around the same time as the first impeachment trial was ramping up. Yes, the White House - out of the White House, you have a White House employee launching a prayer movement that - if you track what happens in the 1Voice Prayer Movement, it is an extremely partisan endeavor. Almost all of the leaders who get enlisted in this prayer movement are extremely pro-Trump.
And once the election gets called for Joe Biden and Trump denies the results of the election, many of the leaders from this prayer movement become pivotal to gathering Christians and propagandizing Christians, telling them that Donald Trump is God's destined candidate. Some of the calls from this prayer movement become key organizing venues for January 6.
RASCOE: Is that what you see as, like, key evidence that the work of these particular charismatic Christian leaders was influential in the run-up to and on January 6?
TAYLOR: Yeah, that was one component of it - was this kind of 1Voice Prayer Movement and then these different conference calls led by apostles and prophets. And you had people like Steve Bannon and Doug Mastriano and the lawyers for Donald Trump who are prosecuting these cases against the election results in the swing states - they're all calling into these calls and talking strategy. There were also podcasts. There were the Jericho Marches, a set of protest marches in the swing state capitals.
RASCOE: And a Jericho March would be like when Jericho - they marched around the walls.
TAYLOR: And the walls of Jericho fall down, and then the people of Israel go in and slaughter all the inhabitants of the city. This was the metaphor.
RASCOE: If you take it in a certain way, it can lead to the idea of violence.
TAYLOR: Yeah. I am not arguing that people - that Christians should not participate in spiritual warfare. I'm not opposed to charismatic Christianity. I grew up charismatic myself. What concerns me is the political weaponization of these theologies, right? And part of what the NAR has done is they've taken these ideas of spiritual warfare that are - in most cases for Christians, are about protecting yourself, protecting your family, protecting your community against these kind of maligned spiritual forces, and they've mapped that on to American politics. And they've said Republicans and Donald Trump are on the side of the angels, and so everything they do must be right and good. And the Democrats or anyone who opposes Trump, including Republicans who oppose Trump, must be on the side of the devil.
RASCOE: If you believe that this is God's will, God wants Trump to be president, then you're fighting for the Lord. You're not just fighting for a political candidate, right?
TAYLOR: Yeah, and part of the problem is, too, if you believe that a demonic conspiracy is hijacking the election, well, you don't really need evidence to believe that, right? It's just prophets saying this. And so that is a very sticky belief. Many of these people still believe this. I mean, one-third of the country still believes that the 2020 election was stolen, and many, many Christians have bought into that. In fact, if one-third of the country believes that the election was stolen, two-thirds of white evangelicals believe that the 2020 election was stolen.
RASCOE: Am I correct in looking at this that you see this as a Christian problem that Christianity must solve?
TAYLOR: It is a Christian problem. And I welcome non-Christians to help us in solving this problem. But I think Christians have a responsibility here. And I say this as a Christian. This is a form of Christian extremism that has taken hold in a large part of the American population. I think part of the reality is a lot of Christians are not aware that this is going on. A lot of Christians think of this as heretical or as marginal or as goofy or silly. And so they don't reckon with it. They don't deal with it. And that has allowed a lot of these ideas to fester. And so I'm calling in my book on Christians to reckon with this because we have very strong protections of the First Amendment. None of the religious leaders I'm looking at in my book faced any legal consequences or any congressional scrutiny for their role in January 6.
RASCOE: That's Matthew D. Taylor. His new book is "The Violent Take It By Force." He's a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic Christian and Jewish Studies. Thank you so very much.
TAYLOR: Thank you, Ayesha.
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