Ziklag’s ultra-wealthy network of Christian donors is spending nearly $12M to mobilize Republican voters in order to secure a Trump victory this November. ProPublica found that their plan involves purging 1M+ people from the voter rolls in key swing states. Unsurprisingly, this is yet another Christian nationalist group with ties to Project 2025.
Here’s the thing: Ziklag is classified as a 501c3 charity organization, which means they’re breaking longstanding rules of nonprofit governance. Will they be held accountable and lose their status? Derek and Julian discuss.
Show Notes
Inside Ziklag, the Secret Organization of Wealthy Christians Trying to Sway the Election and Change the Country
Ziklag Exposed: Secretive Christian Nationalist Network Tries to Purge Voters in Battleground States
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Hello, everyone.
Today's Conspirituality Brief focuses on Ziklag, a network of ultra-wealthy Christian donors that is spending nearly $12 million to mobilize Republican-leaning voters in order to secure a Trump victory this November.
A reporting from ProPublica shows that Ziklag's plan involves purging more than a million
people from the voter rolls in key swing states in order to give Donald Trump an unfair advantage.
We should also note that this is yet another Christian nationalist group with ties to Project
2025 as well.
And while they're classified as a 501c3 charity organization, they're obviously breaking the rules of that standing by explicitly trying to influence elections.
Which is illegal to do here in America, and they're basically shitting on the very word charity, given that it's one of the most basic Christian principles, and everything that they're doing, as you're going to hear in this brief, is uncharitable, except when it comes to their own narrow social and political agenda.
Yeah, well said, well said.
So, internal communications have also revealed, and this is coming from ProPublica, a strategy of using transgender rights as a political wedge issue to energize Republican voters who may otherwise have Trump fatigue.
They got nothing.
They really have nothing.
If their entire platform, and this isn't only Ziklag, this is kind of where the Republican Party is at large right now, let's focus on transgender people.
That is really saying a lot for their state of affairs.
Yep, it's all moral panic and hate.
The group is funded by well-known conservative Christian donors like the Green family, who own Hobby Lobby.
You may remember them from some previous gay rights issues.
The billionaire Ulein family, which is behind the well-known Ulein office supply products.
And the Wallers, who own the Jockey clothing line.
Now, I want to give credit here to Andy Cole, who published the investigative piece that we're talking about on Ziklag for ProPublica on July 13th.
So far, the only coverage I've seen of the story, though, has been an interview with him last week on Democracy Now!
The reporting exposed members-only emails, internal videos, and strategy documents that had not previously been available to the public.
So here's audio from one of those uncovered clips, which focuses on bogus claims about election fraud and a strategy that Ziklag calls Operation Checkmate.
Voter irregularities are rampant across all 50 states.
But especially pronounced in the battleground states.
Public polling confirms Americans have lost confidence in electoral integrity.
With the federal election already in full swing, more must be done to ensure fair elections in the most important republic in the world.
That's the purpose behind Operation Checkmate and its practical approaches to both get out the vote and clean electoral rolls through our coalition partners.
Through these efforts, we have the opportunity to play a significant role in the upcoming election.
I've been texting with a lot of friends and we're trying to balance out enthusiasm coming from the Democratic side and the hopes that we will win this election with the fact that There has been a swing, but the polls are basically still tied and nothing is a given right now.
And what's really frustrating to recognize is no matter what the polls show, the election integrity issue is going to continue to just be blasted out by the right, regardless of what happens, and especially if Harris wins.
And this whole thing just reminds me of the vaccine science playbook at the same time.
These people just keep talking about election integrity.
We've spent, taxpayers, millions and millions, probably tens of millions of dollars, Researching what happened in 2020, and every single one found no problems with voting here in America.
Voting actually, the integrity increased in 2020 over recent elections.
But they're just going to keep pounding this line that there are problems with our
election systems when, from my perspective, the only real problem is we don't have a ranked choice
system, which we are actually about to start doing here in Portland, Oregon, for the first time
because we've gone from one district to five and it's all going to be a ranked choice.
And I really hope, as much as the right has problems with progressive Portland, I
I hope that this could help set a foundation for other states to follow.
Other states obviously do already have ranked choice voting, but if we can get that to the actual national elections, we could actually break this two-party gridlock.
But that is not what's happening here with Ziklag because it is a very binary choice and they're spreading tons of misinformation trying to make people believe there is a problem with this system, but it's not the problem they think it is.
Yeah, I mean, the comparison to vaccines is perfect, right?
Because what these folks do is they make up claims that there's all of this rampant voter fraud, when actually, as you just said, Derek, the last election was the most safe and fair and secure, you know, election that followed all procedures, the best it ever had.
And even before that, the incidence of any problem with elections was tiny.
It has never been a significant statistical thing.
And yet, just like with vaccines, these people come along and they create these organizations that are really just ways of trying to do voter suppression.
And they say, we're going to be the ones who are really keeping an eye on this whole thing to see that it's being done correctly.
Just like with vaccines, where it's like, you know what, there's a process.
We have phase three trials.
We have FDA oversight.
We have all of these checks and balances that made the vaccines that became available to us during the pandemic incredibly effective and incredibly safe.
But when you live in a post-truth era where conspiracism becomes the lingua franca, that
can be called into question and a lot of people can get confused, which is what happened with
the big lie from 2020.
There was a great moment on this past week's John Oliver show because he focused purely
on RFK Jr.
for 39 minutes.
And if you listen to this podcast, or if you are as entrenched in RFK as we are, most of it isn't new, although he did unearth some really interesting things towards the end that I didn't even know.
But there's the moment where he really drills down on RFK saying over and over again that he's open to what the science shows.
And John Oliver shows how RFK will say this on more mainstream podcasts like Joe Rogan, but when he gets in the fringier ones, like masks are completely off.
And even though he's repeatedly been shown the vaccine science that contradicts his claims, He never actually listens to the science.
And that's what I feel like when I'm seeing all these election integrity posts.
Yeah.
And this, I mean, to me, this all goes back to the old creationism versus evolution, atheism versus religion debates, where essentially there's this turnaround that happens where people say, oh, you're saying that we're biased, but how do you know that you're not biased?
And is there such a thing as objective truth?
And can you trust these scientific institutions?
It's like, The moment you take away any sense that there is any possibility for objectivity, then you can say whatever you want.
And Trump has been sowing these seeds since, like, 2015.
And it's worked.
Let's get back to Ziklog.
Here's another internal video that we've clipped here with someone named Lance Wallnau, who is very important.
We'll learn more about him later.
And he's describing what he calls Operation Watchtower.
If we can get the left to own Their position on LGBTQ, the country's already drifted on the homosexual issue, but on transgenderism, there's a problem.
And they know it.
They're going to want to talk about Trump, Trump, Trump, he's indicted, the guy's a criminal, this and that, they're going to have riots on the street and all the kabuki theater.
Meanwhile, if we talk about, it's not about Trump.
It's about the parents and their children.
And the state is a threat.
When you get Governor Newsom or Governor Whitmer or Paulus, your top three potential candidates for the future presidency of the United States, other than Kamala, you got these, when they're going to have to stand with their LGBTQ donors.
Right.
And so when they solidify that position, that's where they've gone too far.
ProPublica points out Ziklag has three sort of pillars, and Watchtower is one of them.
And it's not only about transgender bigotry, it's also about parental rights, which sort of fits into this very authoritarian model that the Christian Right and Christian Nationalists have about How you should parent your children.
I recently posted something about Mickey Willis, who has definitely moved in that direction because he's talking about how his kids listen to exactly what him and his mom say.
But this is such a bigoted approach, but as has become common language in the last few weeks, which I'm a fan of, it's also weird.
You're talking about This idea that Jesus is coming back and we want to fulfill the prophecies of the Bible.
But what's really underlying all of Ziglag, and we'll get to that in a moment, especially with Lance Wallnau who you just heard.
It's a business proposition.
There is no difference between wanting to institute completely unfettered capitalism in America and have an authoritarian sort of parenting style that even though they talk about the nanny state all of the time and how bad it is that what the Democrats do, it's exactly what they want to do if they had control of government.
And so we're in this place where we can look at them on one level, at a policy level, and see how abhorrent it is.
But we've also been doing that for many years.
And it has some effect for people who are on the left and realize the dangers that this poses.
But then you just look at these fucking guys and you're like, what is your problem with people who don't live like you do?
And that's where I think the real strength of the weird position comes in.
Because I hear things like this and I'm like, what a weird take on reality.
What is wrong with you?
And to steal another one of Tim Walz's phrases of lately, mind your own damn business.
OK, so in addition to Operation Watchtower and Operation Checkmate, the third prong, as you mentioned, Derek, is Ziklag's overt political strategy called Steeplechase.
And that's about exerting influence over pastors to get out the Trump vote amongst their parishioners.
As an expression of religious commitment, right?
If you are a good Christian in all these ways, you will vote for Trump because these are the things that are really at stake here.
And one of them, of course, is this, you know, moral panickery about around transgender stuff and parents' rights.
And again, this violates the 501c3 charity status of this heavily funded group.
It's actually illegal.
And that's why this stuff was all kept hidden.
And so ProPublica does include some legal commentary from several experts about what they think this means.
So stay tuned to see what the outcome of that is.
But look, as we've covered extensively elsewhere, Derek, all of this is completely consistent with Project 2025 and with Leonard Leo's stacking of the Supreme Court.
And with the conservative libertarian Christian nationalist ascendancy on our political stage, which, as you're saying already, is not only about Christian nationalism, it's also about libertarian Christianity, as some scholars have called it, right?
Where you have this notion that Jesus wants us to have a completely exploitive free market economy.
And the focus on transgender people also helps to hide their real agenda and this is part of the problem that we had up until Harris announced that she was going to be the candidate because We've been pointing out, many people have been pointing out that the dangers of the Dystopian Project 2025 document and agenda, and what did the right do?
They're like, oh, you think we're authoritarians?
No, we're not.
The real problem is this moral panic, as you pointed out.
So it fits their narrative very well to have people look at culture war issues, which is what they're constantly doing, to disguise the fact of what they really want to implement.
And I think by turning around and showing a mirror to the right and doing what they've been doing for years, it actually has an effect because when you call out the bully for bullying, they don't like that.
And I know right now they're trying to actually, the right is actually, it's the most amazing thing.
They're trying to be like, oh, you're spreading misinformation like with the couch fucking thing.
And as David Simon pointed out on Twitter this week, you've been doing this shit for years.
And we have one opportunity where we get to laugh at you.
So he said, fuck right off, which I think is the exact attitude that I have toward these people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, we're going to talk more about this in this upcoming episode.
So I'll save some of my responses to that.
But yeah, I totally am agreeing with you and smiling along with the observations you're making.
I mean, I will say one thing here, you know, I feel like Democrats would do well to make a strong stand for transgender rights while also recognizing that a lot of just everyday normie kind of centrist, maybe uncommitted voters or even Democrats are somewhat uncomfortable with certain ideas for which which they tap into the fear of with this notion of parental rights.
So I can imagine as a parent having a kid who's going to school and being uncomfortable with the idea that They may have a secret relationship with their teacher in which their pronouns, their name and their gender identity is being withheld from me as a parent.
Now, I understand the argument that says, well, what if the parents are not supportive?
That could be really difficult.
So it's good for the kids to have an ally.
But I think just acknowledging that this is a difficult question and socially it's easy to understand and psychologically why a lot of parents would be like, oh, that does sound transgressive in a way that I'm not comfortable with.
I'm not a parent and I could also imagine that just from the fact of I don't know the sort of downward pressures that come holistically in parenting because I have chosen not to follow that path.
But when you explain it that clearly, I can completely imagine having those same questions.
Yeah, and so politically I just think it's smart to think that stuff through in ways that are not quite so binary in terms of like, either you support trans people completely or you're an ugly, disgusting, transphobic conspiracy bigot.
It's like, well, let's really try and figure out, this is a difficult...
You know, topic that we're trying to make sense of within our society.
Well, fortunately, social media is really good at nuance and complexity.
So I don't see any problems here, Julian.
Yeah, it's going to be fine.
It's going to be fine.
We'll just put it we'll put it on the altar of Elon and do our affirmations.
Everything will be great.
So let's back up here a little bit and come back to Ziklag, because listeners may be wondering about this odd sounding name.
I had never heard it before.
What does Ziklag mean?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is a biblical reference.
It's situated within the battlegrounds of the Old Testament, and in the story, the Amalekites This is the guy who would later become King David.
He's fighting against King Saul.
He's kind of an insurgent revolutionary.
And upon returning to the town after battle, David and his men learn that the town has been burned down.
The women and children have been carried off into captivity.
And so nowadays, in the sermons of evangelical preachers, Ziklag is often used as symbolic of the despair that people feel, the rage they feel, when they recognize that we live in this time when the forces of evil have laid waste to American culture and values, and they're taking our children from us, right?
And they're saying, don't despair.
This is the time of Ziklag.
Put on the armor of God and rise up to reclaim political power.
And I should mention here, too, that this story about the Amalekites is actually the one that Netanyahu has brought up around October 7th to galvanize Israeli sentiments, shall we say, antipathy towards the Palestinians in really brutal and dehumanizing way.
And he used this kind of holy war rhetoric And a lot of critics who understood that biblical reference were really alarmed by it.
Now, in America, this religious call to reclaim power is actually most Extreme or even revolutionary, some say, amongst the group that we've talked about on this podcast before.
These are the Christian Dominionists.
And that movement exists within evangelical and Pentecostal churches.
It's more of an ideology or theology than an actual denomination.
And it's organized around something called the Seven Mountain Mandate.
And this idea postulates that there are seven main areas in which believers should pursue dominant influence.
Those are family, education, religion, media, arts and entertainment, business and government.
Right.
So having a charitable organization that is specifically involved with trying to affect the outcome of elections, again, is illegal.
And it is actually What they are doing.
They're not hiding it at all.
I want to talk about Lance Weil now because he's the figure who has popularized the Southern Mountain Mandate and sort of reframed it according to this evangelical lens.
But Ziklag itself was founded by a guy named Ken Eldridge, and he made his billions in Silicon Valley back in the 80s.
And in the year 2000, he co-founded a call center in India, which is called Epicenter Technologies, and it's an IT and customers focused center.
I personally find this a bit ironic in terms of this is someone who's trying to reshape America in a Christian image, because he's so focused on that aspect, but apparently he has no problem outsourcing American jobs to India.
So he's one of the guys who really led that.
And even more ironically, his 2016 book is called, God is at Work, Transforming People and Nations Through Business.
And he certainly seems to be doing just that.
But then again, I also found that he wrote an introduction and edited a book in 2003, so shortly after he co-founded Epicenter, and it's called On Kingdom Business, Transforming Missions Through Entrepreneurial Strategies.
And this was published shortly after, as I said, opening the call center and it features chapters on doing missionary work through business in Israel, the Middle East, South Asia, Central Asia, you name it.
Yeah.
And I think one of the things that I found, I remember when I was researching Seven Mountain Mandate at an earlier time, is that Lance Wellnau and his buddies, before they figured out how to ride this particular wave, They're really prosperity gospel kind of coaching figures who are running courses on how to link your Christianity to entrepreneurial ventures earlier on in strip malls.
They're that type of operator who have figured out now how to come to prominence in the evangelical world.
Well, just this morning, one of my closest friends texted me that the Life Surge, which is an evangelical slash business tour, headlined by Tim Tebow, is coming to the Portland area in October.
It's going to Salem, which is an hour south of us.
And I might have to go to this just to see what it's about, because we do so much of this sort of work on the podcast.
You are morally required.
You are morally required to go.
So, might be more reporting on this, but back to Ken Eldredge and we'll get to Wall now.
In the intro of that 2003 book, Eldredge writes, Business can and should be an integral part of missions.
For the adventurous, business is viewed as ministry.
Business people see their role as a way to demonstrate their faith to those around them.
Business also may be seen as a way to help Christians who need to have a job and are in a market where employment for Christians is almost impossible because of their faith.
So, this persecution complex that we see today with a J.D.
Vance figure who's saying that Christians are persecuted, it goes back.
They have never not felt persecuted, which is just astounding to me.
So that's Ken Eldridge.
But the real juice right now behind Ziklag is, as we've said, Lance Wownow.
And he didn't invent the 7mm mountain mandate, but he's credited with evolving it and really giving it power in American conservative circles.
So he's the founder of Lance Learning Group, which is a Dallas, Texas, of course, based teaching and consulting firm that seamlessly blends mission work with Making a shit ton of money.
Charity.
Well, we're getting there.
Now, unlike the prosperity preachers of old, he leads with business first, though everything happens under the framework of religion.
So 7M was launched originally in 1975 by the founder of the Campus Crusade for Christ.
And I remember them in the 90s in college, they were on my campus at Rutgers all the time.
And his name was Bill Bright.
And Lauren Cunningham was the other founder, and he founded You With a Mission.
Yet it was Walnau who, along with a man named Bill Johnson, laid out the 7M Theory in their 2013 book, Invading Babylon.
Now, you might be surprised, Julian, to learn that critics of the 7MM Theory said that it focuses too much on gaining power than actual Christian principles.
Surprise!
But if you spend time listening to Wall Now, as you kind of made me do for this brief, thanks, you quickly realize that they are the same thing to him.
In fact, I found a talk that he gave in March 2013, so around the time the book came out, and this was at a church in Oakland.
Now he talks about attending a 7mm meeting in China, yet he was not invited to speak, nor was he given credit as the person who brought the Seven Mountain Mandate to the spotlight.
So he kind of laughs about it in a passive-aggressive way.
Here I am in China and they don't even know who I am.
And then he says, and this is 11 years old, mind you, so it's a perfect summation of what we're looking at here today, but he's in China doing mission work specifically.
And then he says this.
I'm lecturing over there, I'm speaking to them about how to liberate the nation to work With the church, or they don't call it church, they call it charity.
I'm trying to figure out, they said, do you want me to come over and talk about the impact of charities on culture?
Like United Way?
I don't, what's going on in China?
But then I realized they don't want to use the word church because it's a very explosive word, so they refer to it in other ways.
They call it charities.
I realized, oh, charities!
Like Christian Charities.
Oh yeah, Christian Charities.
Oh, okay.
The leading economist I met over there told me that China has a good likelihood of being 30% of the country converted to Christ by 2030.
So, it's a very interesting walk going on right now, working out the implications of how you can have 10% of the country already converted, but you see the majority of the Politburo, the Communist Party, isn't Christian.
So here's something which the church has got to figure out.
We have had such a mindset of separation from the world system, that we don't recognize that everywhere we fail to go, a vacuum is created where witchcraft fills it.
Think about that.
Every parent has to know this, that to some degree you've got to claim your house and your kids and be watching over them.
Just because you're living there doesn't mean you're using your authority.
There's your parental rights coming in, and there's your charity.
Oh my goodness, now I have a whole new mandate in terms of really taking care of my child.
I have to make sure that witchcraft is not rushing into the gap.
So he's a critic of China in this talk.
It's a communist country, but he's there doing business to make money and to evangelize and to do mission work.
And it's all blurred together.
So he has no problem, like Ken Eldredge, making money overseas.
Possibly outsourcing jobs from America to make that money, but then to come here to institute an authoritarian regime that is under the cover of this very specific type of Christianity that is rooted in the prosperity gospel.
And I think that basically describes Ziklak.
You know, let's backpedal on this previous strategy of being separate from the world system, he called it, right?
Which is what?
Politics, capitalism, being engaged in these different sorts of campaigns that are really about, you know, trying to gain a whole lot of power.
It's always hard to tell how much of it is really in the name of their fervent faith in Jesus and how much of it is just wanting to win, wanting to gain power, wanting to make a lot of money.
And I think whatever it starts off as, as we've seen with so many of these big TV preachers and, you know, stadium evangelists, they become incredibly corrupted by the amount of money and power and fame that they amass.
I'm fine as an atheist debating religious topics, metaphysics, all of that, bringing in science.
I'm fine with people who have faith in any sort of religion, and if it helps them through the day.
I've always said that religion is not going away.
It's pretty much baked into our biology on some level, and it'll come and go.
We always see it at times of a lot of chaos and confusion, like going through a pandemic.
I hold firm to the fact that you are going to be judged by your actions, not by whatever you say you believe in.
And so when we come to a figure like Wallnau and Eldridge, who are doing these things that are very apparent, which again is making tons of money by selling this prosperity gospel, That is your action.
I don't care what you say your beliefs are.
You are trying to subvert democracy.
You are trying to institute someone who will help you achieve that end.
Those are your actions.
So whatever is in your heart is Inconsequential to me.
This is who you are, these are the actions you're doing, and we need to criticize them and call them out for that first and foremost.
I agree with that completely, and I also see that the anti-democratic aspect of this kind of Christian nationalism is based in this core idea that gets indoctrinated into the followers, which is that the supernatural authority transcends democratic Legality, right?
It transcends any other political concerns because it is the absolute higher truth.
And that, to me, is incredibly dangerous.
And, you know, we've seen that played out in a variety of ways through the history of religion.
So, yeah, it's a tangled mess.
So you've given us a good history of, you know, where a lot of the stuff comes from that underlies Ziklag.
And we ended with, in 2013, this clip from Lance Wallnau saying some truly outrageous things.
This is when it really caught fire for him.
And he's also associated with something called the New Apostolic Reformation.
And that's the group that gave rise to Paula White, who you may remember was the spiritual advisor to Trump during his presidency.
She's the one who was doing that clip that went viral where she was saying, we will strike and strike and strike.
And angels are coming from Africa and angels are coming from South America.
She was doing this whole thing on a stage where essentially she was, you know, calling in angelic help for Trump to win the 2020 election.
Really, really bizarre individual.
But She's not the only one.
Charlie Kirk, Doug Mastriano, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Mike Johnson all have expressed their alignment with the New Apostolic Reformation, which is a kissing cousin to the Seven Mountain Mandate.
Yeah, the networks, the networks are tremendous here.
And again, it is something that you really Discover when you read Project 2025 and I don't even mean the mandate itself.
I mean just the opening section where it lists the organizations and authors who are involved.
We've done some of that work.
It would take years to unpack all of that.
But if you go in and read who these people are and all of their connections to business and to religious cults like you just pointed out.
This is an extremely dense and packed network that, ironically, is always talking about the deep state and putting that on the left when that's basically their MO.
Yeah, absolutely.
And the thing that I find really fascinating about that, Derek, is that I think this has been building steam over the course of the last maybe three decades, but it really, really came to fruition during the pandemic.
And it's this, that groups of Different religious groups, different denominations, who had real feuds with one another.
You know, evangelicals say that Catholics are not real Christians.
If you ask an evangelical, what denomination are they?
They say, well, we're just Christians.
But those folks over there, those Catholics or those folks over there who are whatever, I don't know, Presbyterian or Anglican or what have you, they're not real Christians.
And somehow, I really noticed it during the pandemic, but I think it's been slowly building in terms of this common cause politically.
They found ways to become ecumenical.
They found ways to become more tolerant and diverse and downplay the differences in their theology that actually define their identities and what they preach from the pulpit in the name of we have to get Christian nationalism to power, which is why you have Leonard Leo stacking the Supreme Court with a bunch of conservative Catholics.
And that serves the agenda of these evangelical Christian nationalists.
Pretty amazing.
You kind of have to because I have, there's something like 4,000 accepted types of Christianity that exist.
And I've talked to some Christians before within, like, let's just say Protestants, for example, because there's different Protestant churches.
And they will say things like, oh, we don't we don't agree with that church over there.
And I'll be like, what don't you agree on?
And they identify one sentence in the Bible And they'll say, that thing, no, we believe this.
Totally.
I admit I'm an outsider in that sense to devotional religion.
I have a degree in religion, so I have a good foundation in understanding theology.
But the actual like practice of it, I am definitely ignorant of so that when they tell me that it comes down to a sentence in a book that was written over the course of 200 years by who knows how many authors, I'm just a little And the underlying unifying delusion, as far as I'm concerned, is that they all believe that whichever sentence they're interpreting in whichever way, and whichever authors and groups of authors they find to be the most compelling,
The underlying shared belief that drives all of this is that it adds up to some kind of supernatural authority, and it just doesn't.
It's just a book, and to my mind, not a particularly interesting or good one.
It just happens to have a lot of historical significance.
The second best class I took in college was a class taught by a Catholic priest called The Bible is Literature.
He didn't know evangelism.
He did no sort of missionary work.
He was not trying to convert anyone.
He just presented the Bible as if you were reading a novel and it gives you a whole other framework and understanding.
And as someone who's read hundreds of novels in his life, I would say it's mid.
Yeah, that sounds like a great course.
And yeah, I've engaged with it in that way too.
And it's interesting up to a point.
So look, if Paula White seemed weird and a bit nuts, it's because she really is.
So this brand of Christianity is extremely political.
It sees the world as embroiled in a cosmic war between Jesus and Satan.
They believe in direct personal revelation of the Holy Spirit to individual believers.
So, in a way, all of us are apostles, right?
Bearing witness to the Holy Spirit.
And those revelations include gifts of prophecy and the ability to perform miraculous healing, according to them.
But running through all of it is this notion that spiritual warfare is necessary in order to establish God's kingdom on earth so that Christ can return.
And, you know, sadly, there are plenty of political, religious organizations motivating followers with exactly that message.