John and I are on break now who are on a secret mission and this before all new Mission Implausible episodes come out this fall. But for now, we'll bring you one of our favorite past episodes and we'll soon be launching our YouTube channel. See you there.
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I was a CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy theories large and small.
Could they be true? Or are we being manipulated?
This is Mission Implausible. Today's guest is Stephanie mccrumman. She's a Pulitzer Prize winning writer for the Atlantic and previously worked as a journalist of the Washington Post, and we look forward to speaking with her about some of her recent writing on Christian nationalism and more specifically her recent art well in The Atlantic, entitled The Army of God
Comes out of the Shadows. So, Stephanie, one of the people you interviewed called the New Apostolic Reformation, the most significant religious movement of the twenty first century and a serious threat to democracy. Is it really becoming a more dominant form of American Christianity.
It seems that it is. I should say that overall Americans are becoming more secular, so that's the overall trend. But within people who identify themselves as Christians, this particular segment has been growing very rapidly in recent decades. And part of the reason it's flown under the radar a bit is because the old categories that have been used to measure religiosities are a bit out of date. So a lot of polls and surveys and stuff ask people,
you know, are you Baptists, are you Catholic? Are you this that people who identify with these ideas that sort of fall under the umbrella of new Apostolic Reformation, they
don't identify with the denomination. And you know, paradoxically, if you ask them if they are religious, they might even say no because one of the key beliefs, one of the core beliefs, is that denominations are sort of a sin, if you will, because they divide the kingdom of God, and so the surveys that do exist suggest certainly that charismatic Christianity is just growing like crazy, not only in
the US but around the world. And this particular set of ideas that fall into the category of New Apostolic Reformation are also just growing by leaps and bounds. So people who adopt these ideas, if you ask them, oh, are you a follower of the New Apostolic Reformation, they would say, I don't know what you're talking about, but they if you say, do you believe in God's Kingdom, then they would say yes. Or the Seven Mountains mandate, which I can explain, they would say yes.
So I grew up a Catholic and ALTI bore the whole thing. And in Catholicism, at least in the past, you could be a Democrat or Republican, right, But what you're talking about now it's also a political movement.
The big shift in thinking really is that they believe that that is their duty as Christians, their mandate, their God given mission, is to establish the Kingdom of God on earth. It goes beyond thinking that the US is a Christian nation and whatever. The US is more a component of this larger thing called the Kingdom of God.
The Kingdom of God is to the extent that it is translatable into a political party, you know, it aligns, of course with the conservative agenda, I suppose, not necessarily exclusively. So they very much believe that their job is not to like sit over in the corner and pray and wait for the kingdom to come, you know, in the next millennia or whatever, but that they are to establish it in the here and now, and that means going
into politics. It means going it's not just the political realm, but every realm of life, to assert God's dominion over every sphere of life. So that's what the Seven Mountains mandate is. The people of God, you know, their mission to exercise dominion over let's see, what are the Seven mountains? Education, family, government, That's where politics comes in, media are It's a central part of what they believe they are supposed to do.
And that's what makes this movement so aggressive politically and effective politically. They see their mission is to mobilize people.
I just have to say, someone who spent a lot of time in the Middle East and dealing with Middle easterners, it says John, it sounds to me like you could substrate Christianity for Islam and you'd have Isis, or you'd have Iranian theocracy in there is.
That is exactly what ISIS preaches that we need.
To bring in their version of heaven on earth and to fulfill the word of God, and they need to suppress people who think differently.
What do you do with the infidels? If you will, what is to become of them? Maybe it'll be like, you know, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, where if you didn't agree and you could exist as long as you didn't involve yourself in certain you know, in politics or certain.
That's nice, of course. Yeah.
And I should say that there is a very explicitly militaristic component of this movement too. But they talk about spiritual warfare and there are people who are in this movement who have training camps. They speak of the manifest Sons of God, which is supposed to be an elite unit, if you will, of God's army, that they are supposed to be endowed with special powers when the time comes to do battle. There very much is they will say,
a component of warfare in the natural. That's that's their language they use.
So let me get to a little bit of sort of that potential conspiracy part of this. Right, So it is about dismantling the institutions of secular government to clear the way for the Kingdom of God. Right, yes, but clearly to them the secular government doesn't include Donald Trump.
And what we have now?
How is it democrats and the media became the Satanists? Why it is only one part of the government become the enemy and the other one not behind it? How did it become like so tied to Donald Trump.
Let's see, let's back up just a few notions. If you're a believer in this life, human history, everything is a great battle between God and Satan. And history is biblical history, and time is biblical time, and Heaven is real, and Hell is real, Satan is real, demons are real. This is how people think. So the question becomes who gets assigned to what? Who is satanic and who's demonic
and so on and so forth. So Trump comes along, and obviously he's in the early days, if you remember, he had a problem with evangelical voters.
Foremost among the myriad Trump supporters put in an awkward position by the release of that Access Hollywood tape. On Friday. Are Republican evangelicals Christian conservatives who are being forced to choose between voting as they almost always do for a Republican candidate and on the other hand, seeming to condone Donald Trump's screamingly impious behavior.
Which is what's going to story.
Going to be.
Is Trump going to have the normal evangelical turnout or does he lose a bunch of them.
I think he's going to lose a lot of evangelical women in the same way that he's going to lose a lot of women overall. You know, the evangelical establishment, we're supporting other candidates. Trump needed some component of these voters, and basically he was introduced to this world. These were the low propensity voters, if you will. These were people that were sort of that hadn't quite been tapped into by the Christian right, you know, when they're searching for
these low propensity voters. Low and behold, there are all these churches, these charismatic Christian churches that haven't really been activated, if you will, And they have the benefit of being they're not just white. They're also Latino and black and brown, and they're more diverse. So Trump hooks up with this woman, Paula White, who's very much in this movement. She's an apostle in the movement, and she opens the door to this world.
And so the.
Bigle says that Martha random meet him, but Mary sat still.
She lost her praise.
And when the enemy gets your praise, then he's got your weapon, because your praise is a weapon that you go to war with.
Another figure in the movement, I think he considers himself to be an apostle. Lance Walno, a very charismatic figure in this movement. He writes a book casting Trump as God's chaos candidate and develops this whole idea that Trump is being used by God and he's a modern day Cyrus, you know, the imperfect instrument, but who nonetheless is part of God's plan.
Christians building sodalities is what shifted America. Spannon's war room, Charlie Kirk turning point our work that we did courage tour, going to the five of the seven swing stats, having raped well, he's one thousand signs, wonders and miracles of the night. Daytime me talking to the remnants about election integrity. We were able to purge one million fake votes out of the system in America. That's how come you've got your million popular vote. We eliminated the fake ones nobody
knows about. That was our job.
And so this idea gets disseminated and eventually takes hold, and pretty soon every kind of profit, big and small, they're all buying into this idea.
I also wanted to think of the conspiracy theory part of.
It, and also the latent anti Semitism that's in it. Why Hackabee is now the ambassador in Israel. He's close to Pastor John Hagey, who I think.
Is also a part of this.
And Hagey is famous for saying that in two thousand and six that God punished New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina because of homosexuality. Another part of this, and my understanding of is that we need to support Israel, at least the right wing politics of Israel, because it has to rebuild the Temple and take back the West Bank in
order for the end times to come. And of course the end times, and I've worked in Israel, and I actually worked on a kibbutz very close to mcgido with it and the final Battle of Armaged it's supposed to happen is that, yeah, that God's army wins and the Jews they either have to convert.
Or they go to Hell.
And I always have trouble with Israeli politicians hugging these guys who know at the same time they think that their whole purpose in history is to bring about the end of the state of Israel and the end of the Jewish people and.
To send them all the hell.
What's interesting to me is to see how Natanyahu and his crowd was very much dealing with these people. And as this movement has not been written about very much, and it seemed as just I think for people who aren't in it, they think it's just what, it's just spiritual warfare demons. But net yaou takes it very seriously. And these people have a show, which I've written about before called Flashpoint. It's a streaming show, and net ya You've probably never heard of it. Most people aren't in
this movement haven't heard of it. It's very popular. It's like CNN for the apostles and prophets, and instead of guests, they have profits come on and they talk about the news and how that fits with various prophecies and whatever. You know, and that often involves what's happening in Gaza, and it's happening in Israel and nettyaw who's been on
there at least twice. If these people, if evangelical Christians are an important political constituency in the world of right more right wing Israeli politics, then like this is the future of the evangelical world, arguably in the US.
So this is a broad movement, and as far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be like a leader behind it. If everybody can be a prophet, why can't I say I'm a prophet and then say President Biden was actually sent by God and Donald Trump is the He's the airti Christ, which is I think you can make a better argument on that.
You could just say, hey, I'm a prophet. But you also have to be recognized and have a following, and people have to agree that, hey, Jerry's hitting them out of the park here. So there's for example, a guy again like these people are very powerful in this world, but you may have never heard their names. A guy named che An in California is a very important apostle and has probably hundreds of churches under his spiritual authority, and he has authority over these churches. It's a very
top down, not democratic structure. There's a guid named dutch Sheets. He's the one who popularized the pine tree flag. This is a white flag with the green pine tree that says appealed to Heaven. That appeared January sixth at the insurrection. But dutch Sheets has his own ministry. He's actually sort of a prophet and an apostle, has hundreds of thousands of followers, a minor sort of publishing empire. It's paradoxical.
Is so much about this thing as paradoxical. It's authoritarian and yet it's decentralized at the same time.
I was just going to say, to what extent is it a rural or regional phenomenon? Is it in cities the place?
It's everywhere. It's everywhere. Like the church that Elon Musk spoke at. It's a big naar church in Harrisburg called Life Center. There's a profit in Brooklyn. Joseph Mattera is very important. You know, not everyone who follows this goes to a church. A lot of them just follow these profits online. But you'll find little storefront churches in rural areas. You'll find big churches in cities. They're all over Texas. You'll find old Baptist churches that maybe have been overtaken
by people who are embracing these ideas. Really, it's just I've noticed them all over the place in my reporting.
Let's pause for a second. We'll be right back.
Part of the conspiracy theory, part of this is that some of the people and organizations who they pose by the Naar, now they are controlled by Satanists, their demons.
I may be wrong about this, but I feel like Peter Wagner, he wrote a lot about spiritual warfare and demons and stuff. And I've been to churches where like the pastor will demon map the city because you know, people this movement believe that demonic forces not only can control people, but also territories. So like whole city may be infested with demons.
Like their jersey.
I think we could all agree on that.
Yeah, the Middle East, obviously, you know, any place is not Christian, it's you know, demonic strongholded whatever territories. Washington, d C.
You know.
Roger Stone caught onto this lingo and was like, oh, there's a demon portal over the White house and whatever, and there's a whole thing in this world, you know, demonology, And so I think that there's like higher level demons and lower level demons, like I may just be as a reporter working for a secular publication that questioned Trump et cetera, et cetera in God's plan, Like I may just be a dupe. I may just be my mind
may have been taken over by Satan. But other people may be more devoted to the mission, you know what I mean. So I think that there's gradations.
So what I spend a lot of time in Afghanistan and interrupt dealing with ISIS and ISIS is a very clear answer to that. The answer is that you knowingly stand against God. Whether you're controlled by a demon or not. They don't get into that, but you knowingly stand against what they believe is God's plan, and therefore you, your family, anybody who stands with you can and should be killed
or at least suppressed. So I find what you're saying very scary because we've seen it actually in a much more further advanced and actually taking place in another area.
One thing, and I haven't written about this, but I find it very interesting that there are military people, high Profileish military people who have embraced these ideas. Michael Flynn military intelligence, Doug Meis military intelligence, Carol Boykin military intelligence. Like I mean, is that just like, oh, well, you know, there's a lot of religious beliefs, there's a lot of military intelligence people and some of them believe this or I don't know, what do you think about that?
That's a really good question because I wonder to what extent these guys believe that when they're inside, and maybe they did because it really goes against what they're doing in their day to day work, because they work for the government. You mentioned that preacher Lance Wallnow you know he said you either have God or you've got a government. Well, only one person could be supreme, So how do you
engage with that? How can you be in the US government as a military officer and believe that it's just people who believe different levels of things. I suppose, and Mike Flynn has gotten more and more. I worked with Mike Flinn. I know Mike Flynn fairly well where we don't get at bred WUS anymore, but he seems like he's gotten more and more radical. For I don't know whether it's for true religious belief or for its political or for its money. Who knows, But yeah, those things
don't go together. And so I would find out, like I did not see that in our intelligence experience.
So it's CIA. We just talk about various shades of gray. There's very little black or white, and in the military, because of their mission, it's different, and I think it is black or white. That's always the question. Is it delusional? Do they believe this stuff? Or are they grifters right they're that are making money off of this or opportunists.
A while ago, there was a it was actually a CIA guy who was pushed out of the agency who started making these absurd claims that Halian satellites had stolen the real results of the twenty twenty elections and that
people like like Lynn like just started parenting this. And what's so crazy is to say that the real results were stored in Frankfort in a CIA facility, and that the Delta and the Seals were involved in a firefight with CIA and Hillary Clinton was caught there and put out a mar Bartanamo obey And as crazy as this gets, Clarence Thomas's wife took this thing that hit some of the people that you're talking about supporting it or elements of it, and she wanted to overthrow the twenty twenty
election results.
She got to Mark Meadows with this.
Who gave it to doj So you've got religion, you've got conspiracy theories, and you've got people who should be rational.
I've touched to so many people who believe this stuff, and to them it's reality. To the true believers, it's of course, they don't see it as conspiracy. They see it as as reality. And it's just so deep in a.
Cult, whether there's a cult leader or not, you can't question anything, right, That's sort of one of the things. If you can, if you're in the Democratic Party, you could say, well, I don't think Joe Biden did that great job. You know, he did some good things and he fucked up on some other things.
And with Trump, you're either.
All in or you're all in, right or with it. No, you're either all in or you're all up. So to what extent do you think this is getting into cult territory where you're not allowed to question any of this. You're either all in or you're all out.
This is really basically an anti Enlightenment movement. Everything went wrong when people started trusting their brain rationality.
It's been all downhill since the fourteen hundreds.
I just wortge, yeah, yeah, in a very real way. And it's like they really think that was the beginning of displacing God and replacing God with our own reason and so on a really fundamental level, you can't really trust your brain unless it is guided by God in the Bible. But the other thing about this movement is that because they embrace modern day apostles and prophets, they have innovated, if you will, the idea that God is
speaking through prophets. Like now there's new stuff, there's new materials, it's not just the Bible anymore. It's also that Dutch Sheets had a dream about riding on horseback to the Capitol on January sixth.
This morning, December thirty first, I dreamed I was with our prayer team and we were coming back from having accomplished an assignment. We were leading tall, muscular horses by their bridle reins. Our horses didn't appear to be tired, but they were hot and sweaty. We had apparently been running them hard. We found ourselves in a field and could see out in front of us the US Capitol Building. We mounted our horses and as we sat looking at
the building, we heard air sirens going off. As the sirens were sounding, we saw a huge hand come down from the sky and take hold of the dome of the Capitol Building. With the fingers of the hand wrapped around the dome, the thumb of the hand flicked the dome open. When it was opened, a very thick black smoke began rising up out of the building. We then heard a cavalry bugle playing the signal to charge, and we began moving toward the Capitol, not at a full gallop,
but at a steady, determined, fast trot. As we started on the ground in front of us, written in white letters for the words don't stop. That's the end of the dream, Happy New Year.
Not need the Jesus guy anymore, right, because you've got modern day profits.
I mean, it's interesting. I don't really speak a lot about Jesus, honestly, And what they do is they speak a lot about the Old Testament a lot, and they also have fresh words. I have a fresh dream today, and the fresh dream is I had a vision that Trump was going to take over Gaza. So there's this constant, hourly, daily, weekly scroll of prophecies. That's where it starts to get to be more about a person a personality. And then that obviously coupled with you're not supposed to trust your mind.
There's an idea of submissions admission to God. If you go to any of these churches, they'll often talk about that it's very emotional. I'm sure you've been in charismatic Christian churches and a lot of people have that these churches are like that on steroids. Like the music is really really loud. The ones that have the most money they have these professional sound systems and lights and just pounding and the music is mantra like and there's tears.
It's very free, oddly again like a paradox because you're supposed to think a certain thing and yet it's very physically free. So it feels good and there's like a lot of feeling to it, you know, and a lot of catharsists. But make no mistake, but you're supposed to submit to this and submit to this idea and submit to God. And what is God? God is these things and et cetera.
It's an interesting historical time because if you go back into the nineteenth century, even late eighteenth century, but the first grade Awakening in this country, I mean, the Puritans came and they were very focused on rationality and learning, formed Harvard University and these other type of things. And then when the first great Awakening came is the personal relationship to God and the beginning of the evangelical sort of spirit in the United States. And so it almost
seems like there must be a schism in Christianity. This can't be something that's supported really by the Catholic Church or other parts of the Protestant Church. How is it that this is gaining ground in those other and in general people are moving away from religion.
I've gotten emails from readers. A reader who's part of a Lutheran church, and she said that it started as a study group in the church and then it was a Seven Mountains thing, and then pretty soon like these ideas were starting to overtake the church. And it does cause sometimes splits in churches. And these ideas you will find them in many denominational churches. And yeah, and some people are like, what is this? This is weird? I
think this is heretical. You know, it doesn't always go overwell, but I think that it seems to be overtaking a lot of denominational churches. There are people who have needs who go there. Churches have soup kitchens and food pantries and drug addiction programs and porn addiction programs, and people find everything that they find in real churches. They find help and guidance in a community.
And so, putting your sociology in what need is this fulfilling? It offers simplicity, I guess it offers you understand your place in the world. It offers you a hero's journey.
You know, you can be just like isis.
You can be a soldier of God, or you could be a sheep.
Farmer, or you know whatever.
Jerry and I both lived in Muslim countries and we've seen similar things happening there, whereas you know, if you're in Indonesia, Afghanistan and Rock you know, twenty thirty forty years ago they were not as conservative. Is this a global thing that people are moving and moving more away from secular society?
What need is it fulfilling? I mean, I think that's a fine question. Maybe it's just the need that any religion fills. It's just that it's doing in this different way, and it's more complete, like you said, because it does give people a purpose. It's like, here are your marching orders. It's not just Sunday, it's every day. It's seven mountains, get with the program, figure out your purpose in life. And their courses and seminars and trainings and everything. It's
twenty four to seven. And that's also what makes it effective politically, because people are constantly organizing. It's not just every four years, every two years. It's like this is a constant movement. It's always happening, always going on.
We'll be back in just a moment.
In a natural part of the fracturing of our society is more and more people become secular and their religion is none. Those that still something within the needs of faith that become more radical.
I'm assumed.
I wrote about a woman who was in this movement, and if you talk to her, she would say she hates religion, she would say she hates church, and yet she follows all these prophets. I think there's a sense among the people who follow this thing that they're the true everything else has screwed up Christianity. It has screwed up, screwed it up.
They're the t clergy.
Yeah, they've all divided and all these little arguments, so you know, angels on pinheads and whatever like. These people think that, oh, we're the real you know, we're open to the Holy Spirit moving. It's very mystical. It's very empowering really if you think about it, because they also believe, you know, you can fight a war spiritual warfare, you're powerful. And then look at January sixth. I mean, people really missed this dimension of the insurrection, but there were people
outside in this movement doing spiritual warfare. Matthew Taylor's written an excellent book about this. Dutch Sheets was traveling the country rallying people after the twenty twenty election and preparing people and visited the White House and people had different motivations, but a lot of them thought that they were taking the capital for God, for the kingdom. And what did
they do when they got to the rotunda? These people they prayed, they prayed, some of them did, and they had the flags and it's.
Cool though it's if the democratic right, it's against the constitution. They don't want separtial church and state. They don't support democratic values. Only the people of God right get to them, right.
They want a theocracy.
At the end of the day, they would say democracy cannot flourish without a Christian conscience. Christianity has to flourish, but people aren't able to govern themselves without this conscience, Christian conscience.
That's what communism was.
It was like everybody, as long as you follow Lenin's dictates, you can like disagree inside.
But at the end of there was.
A book by Jack So that JD. Vance endorsed that describes their political opponents as unhumans and that they must be crushed on humans must be crushed. Is that a book that spreads in this group.
Well, I mentioned that I mentioned that book in the in the story because to me, it was an example of how the Seven Mountains idea and this idea of overturning this liberal order, how far that idea has seemed. He didn't refer to the Seven Mountains, but there was a part in the book where he essentially was referring to the Seven Mountains.
That's very fascist, right, making the other subhuman. That was part of Nazi ideology. And this also brings us to this guy Beattie who's now at State Department, senior at the State Department, whose writings have come out recently where he said that only good people, smart people should be allowed to have children, right and low iq trash should not have There should be eugenics, they should be youth to them. But he also brings it in as basically
Christians need to like have kids white Christians. And this is a guy who's now sitting in the State Department and mirroring this thing that the world is filled with unhumans and we're not worthy of basic rights to have families or to speak out.
This thing gets conflated with what has been, i think personally rather vaguely called Christian nationalism, which I think doesn't really do justice to the depth of what this movement is all about. And it's worth just noting briefly that Christian nationalism would say, oh, the founding fathers actually were Christian, and they point to all this evidence so to speak, of why our nation was founded as a Christian nation.
These people, again, the more serious thinkers, think that the founding fathers screwed it up, actually, and that the real origins go back to William Penn in Pennsylvania, and there's this whole story about William Penn who came over and God gave him a vision and the US was the seceed of a nation and that he had a covenant with God. And I mean, there's a whole different origin story, is what I'm saying with this movement, and has to
do with Native Americans. Their whole concept of what gave rise to this country is different than like your more typical sort of sentimental Christian nationalism stuff. So they would say that the Washington Monument is a pagan symbol and Jefferson messed it up and et cetera.
And if they've decided that the rest of us are devils or Satan's, I don't know how you push back against that. And I worry that you know that that Trump people know that they need this support, and they clearly believe some of these things that Jerry and I know to not be true about a deep state and then working against Christians and working against the president and
all these types of things. And you can see by some of the actions recently things that you might have thought were just popular politician stuff where you create enemies to win power. They're taking action that suggests that they believed some of these things. Firing all those FBI people destroying the state, are destroying USAID, destroying the CIA, these type of things. And so this is really an important issue to understand because it's something we're gonna have to come to terms with.
They are serious about their project. I can't say I completely understand. There seems to be this sort of union between some libertarian thinkers and this movement. And I don't know if it's a temporary alliance of convenience because they both wish to tear down the state in a way. But you know, I thought it was very interesting that must Elon Musk, of all the places he could go, he went to an nar type church in Harrisburg. I
don't know, maybe it was just a venue. But they call Peter Thiel a lot people in this movement, So I don't know, that's a whole other dimension that has yet to be explored. I was, I'll mention one thing. I was at Life Center right after the election. They had an apostle speaking there. He was a guest actually, and the mood was obviously, you know, very celebratory. They really saw this as something that they had brought about through their voting but also through prayer. And so it was.
That was the mood up until one point where the speaker, found seemingly out of the blue, started talking about immigration, and he said, could it be that all these people coming across the border are actually the harvest?
You know?
Are they part of God's harvest? Is God is sending them here to us rather than sending us out into the world. And he didn't stay on it very long, but it sounded like a little bit of dissent, perhaps from the Trump agenda, and I thought that was pretty interesting.
Well, I'd like to say, Stephanie, I thank you for being with us, and it's really interesting stuff, but it doesn't lead me warm and fuzzy.
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Ceipher, and Jonathan Stern.
The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Mission Implausible is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable Pictures for iHeart Podcasts.