NAR Apostles and Prophets on 2024 - And the End of the World
Brad speaks with the one and only Dr. Matthew Taylor, creator of Charismatic Revival Fury. They begin by discussing where key NAR prophets and apostles are on the 2024 election and how they are navigating Trump's slide in the GOP. This leads to a discussion of interesting developments surrounding the National Prayer Breakfast and the mainstreaming of NAR leaders in longstanding evangelical institutions. The interview ends with analysis of NAR eschatology and how it, like all things in this world, is never as simple as it seems.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center, UCSB.
And guess what, folks?
We have someone who's back, who you all know, who's now a kind of, you know, we had to get him away from the paparazzi and others just bothering him in a secure location, unknown to the public, so we could record this, and that is Dr. Matthew Taylor.
So, Matt, how you doing?
I'm doing well, Brad.
The secure location is the basement of my house, so I guess I gave it away a little.
Just ruined it.
You're not used to being famous.
Okay, well, we're gonna have to, you know, I'll text your security guy.
Well, you all know Dr. Taylor from just the overwhelmingly incredible Charismatic Revival Theory series that we did here on Straight White JC.
I think many of you now know him on Twitter as basically the person that you look to for information about the New Apostolic Reformation and rightfully so because he's really just outlined the history and contours in Really a, what I would call a field defining way in a field changing way.
Um, so just excited to have you back.
I think I wanted to have you back for a number of reasons.
One of them is just, I think people want some updates, you know, Hey, I learned so much from the series.
I learned so much from you about the NAR, about NAR, but what's happening now and are there new developments?
Are there new things going on?
So really happy to have you back today to talk about those things.
Let's start here.
You had a great Twitter thread the other day talking about.
The Republican Party, Donald Trump, 2020.
Trump is looking weak.
He's looking shaken.
If this were a boxing match, he's kind of on the ropes and looking like he might go down.
DeSantis is not.
He's looking strong and he's surging.
People want to know where are the New Apostolic Reformation linked apostles and prophets On this issue, are they changing their tune?
Are they sticking to their guns?
Trump is still president.
Do they have a new prophecy for 2024?
You're the guy who knows, so what's it look like from your seat?
So if you recall, in 2016, there were a few independent charismatic prophets, including Lance Wallnau, who really went all in on Trump.
And then in 2020, you just had just a plethora of prophets, an entire world of prophets that were all saying Donald Trump is going to win in 2020.
God has said he's the anointed for another term.
He's going to get two consecutive terms.
And then, of course, all that blows up.
Shortly after January 6th, right, because this is what fuels January 6th, this is the story we're trying to tell in Charismatic Revival Fury.
But shortly after January 6th, around April, there is a group of apostles and prophets, people who I would say were more kind of on the margins of Peter Wagner's world.
It's headed up by a guy, Joseph Matera, who was mentored by some of the people in Wagner's circle, but has kind of his own kind of connections to this apostolic prophetic stuff.
They put together a joint statement called the Prophetic Standards Statement.
It's a very cautiously worded statement.
They're trying to not say that everyone who's a prophet was implicated in this.
They never named Donald Trump in there.
But they try to say, we need to have some standards.
We need our prophets to follow certain strictures.
We need the apostles to be an authority over them.
If you go and read it, most of the people who signed that statement, I've never heard of, right?
They're not who are to the New Upstalk Reformation, a lot of kind of people joining in, kind of jumping on the bandwagon.
I did talk to one prophet who was close to Peter Wagner, who signs that statement.
And he actually just, when I asked him about it, he got tears in his eyes and described how he had been basically blackballed because of citing that statement.
And the funny thing was, so if you read the statement, it does not mention Donald Trump whatsoever.
And so I had just read the statement.
And he comes in and says, well, I made them take all the Trump stuff out of that statement.
So in one of the earlier drafts, it really was very explicitly about Trump, And then they actually took that out.
So that was in April of 2021.
But it was a very, it was kind of the margins of the prophetic world.
Most prophets were still very attached and following in lockstep.
And then you've got the Reawaken America tour launching that summer.
And so you've had this continued mobilization around Donald Trump, continued expectations.
That fractured within the last few weeks.
And so, in the Curious Mic Revival theory, I described this show Flashpoint that is on Kenneth Copeland's Victory Channel TV network.
And this was really important for mobilizing people for January 6th.
This is where Dutch Sheets and Lance Wallnau were going on multiple times a week talking about the prophecies.
Well, one of their co-hosts on there was, or co-panelist, was this guy Mario Murillo.
Who's an evangelist, kind of prophetic evangelist guy, goes back a long time, actually comes from the Bay Area there in California.
And Murillo went on a tear within the last month denouncing some of the prophets, some of the most extreme Trump prophets who've really continued hammering on this Trump stuff.
He's particularly targeting two prophets, Kat Kerr and Robin Bullock, both of whom are Very eccentric personalities, if you've ever encountered them.
But then he also goes after one of his co-panelists on Flashpoint named Hank Kuniman, who has associated with them and is saying, like, we need to stamp out these false prophets.
And that has just led to bedlam.
In the prophetic world.
I mean, there were over a thousand comments on Murillo's original blog post.
You have kind of these new fractures.
Lance Wall now seemingly has gone with Murillo and kind of saying, we need to rein in the worst of the prophets.
So this, it's almost like we've got like three camps now.
You've got the prophetic standard statements people, you have the continued kind of Trump prophets, and now you've got this in-between group that is saying some of the worst of the prophets need to rein it in.
There's so much here because one of the things that you, and I know that I have a feeling what you're going to say here, but one of the things you made so clear on Charismatic Revival Theory is that the spiritual oligarchy of the NAR works because those within the oligarchic class don't disagree publicly.
And I think that's what caught my eye in the last month or two and what's caught some other people's eyes is like it seems like there is a little bit of like fracturing as you say and I'm wondering if you think that signals a new development in the life of the Gnar and maybe a potential weakness because you know oligarchy works when the oligarchs all decide they're in cahoots together and if they turn on each other there's going to be There's going to be trouble in the water.
So is that happening or is this just sort of normal kind of struggles to figure out where they're headed?
It's unclear.
Some analysts, when they saw that prophetic standards statement, said, okay, well, here's a fracture and there's some truth in that, right?
Some of these prophets really have suffered in their careers because they signed that prophetic standards statement.
And this prophet that I talked to was, I was like, so who is blackballing you?
And he's like, Just look at who didn't sign the state, right?
So even now, even as he's on the outs, he doesn't want to name names.
He doesn't want to take anyone down.
In some ways, these most extreme Trump prophets like Kat Kerr and Robin Bullock are kind of easy targets because they've been so out there and sometimes Playing footsie with QAnon and saying so many things that have not been true that they really have kind of garnered a lot of hostility even amongst the kind of follower class.
What's interesting to me is Stephen Strang, who is kind of the media mogul of the charismatic world.
So he is the Owner and operator of Charisma News, Charisma Media, all the podcast networks and empires of Charisma.
And he seemingly has taken sides in this with Mario Murillo and has kind of platformed Mario Murillo on Charisma News, has published these critiques of these profits.
Stephen Strang is also one of the major sponsors of the Reawaken America Tour.
So how does that exactly work, right?
Like, if you're trying to find who is with Trump, who's not with Trump, it's a very confusing landscape right now.
I would say most prophets are trying to kind of calibrate in gear for 2024.
They are being expected to somehow call this thing that's going to be a very chaotic Republican presidential primary and general election.
And some of them know if they get this right, it could make their career.
If they get it wrong, they're going to look like idiots.
And many of them already kind of looked like idiots after 2020.
And so I think what this, this, this fighting, this infighting that you're seeing is this sense of anxiety.
There's a really interesting clip.
I put it on Twitter of Vance Wallnau, Mr. Trump, 2016, Mr. Trump, 2020.
He on his podcast is talking to Mario Berulo and he says, you know, I have prayed about 2024.
And all that God revealed to me was the passage at the end of the Gospel of John, where Peter asks, well, what about John, the Apostle John?
What's going to happen to him?
And Jesus says, that's my business, not your business.
And so, Mario, you know, Lance Waldo, right?
The person who put it all on the line in 2016 and 2020, saying like, God is not revealing to me the outcome of 2024.
It is interesting that that principle does not apply retrospectively, but for him at least, he's being very calculating right now, trying not to put his foot down on anything because he wants to see how things are going to play out for 24.
It is nice to have that passage to reference there, Lance Wallnau.
I have already made my prediction and that is The Rock 2024.
And so I'm standing by that.
I think The Rock will probably be the front runner going forward.
It would have a lot of amazing biblical allusions if you could just have The Rock.
Can you think of how many Bible references you could come up with for that one?
I mean, this is a slam dunk.
This is gonna, you know, this is amazing.
I don't know why people don't see it.
So, all right.
So, last thing on this before we move on to talking about one or two other issues, and that is Ron DeSantis.
Ron DeSantis is Catholic.
He is already, though, through his politics and his rhetoric, really cozied up to what we might think of as the Traditional religious right.
The Southern Baptist, Reformed, Jerry Falwell, Billy Graham type, Christianity Today religious right, okay?
And that religious right for half a century has had a coalition with Catholics and there's been no issue when it came at least to like electoral politics.
If you're A Catholic, it doesn't mean we're going to be wary per se, at least, because you probably are on the right side when it comes to abortion and when it comes to immigration and all this stuff.
So if DeSantis is there, I don't see that old school religious right having an issue.
But you point out on Twitter that for charismatics, there is still some sticking points at times with Catholic candidates.
So I'm just wondering, is that going to be an issue in 2024 if Uncle Ron DeSantis is the guy?
Yeah, I mean, there are some charismatic, I mean, there are charismatic Catholics, like Amy Coney Barrett grew up in a charismatic Catholic community.
So there's not, it's not necessarily Ron DeSantis is completely ruled out as a Catholic.
I think because he's Catholic, right?
I mean, you think about what Trump did.
Moving from even naming, understanding himself as Presbyterian to becoming non-denominational to really kind of cozy up to these folks.
I think DeSantis has a further trick to make if he's going to appeal to these folks.
And we, I mean, we excerpted a clip from him in Charismatic Revival Fury using this language of spiritual warfare, quoting Ephesians chapter six and swapping in the left for the devil.
I mean, that's sending a signal.
In, I believe it was New Year's Eve into New Year's 2021 to 2022, Sean Foyt did a concert in Florida.
And actually, I think it even went across the New Year's mark.
And he brought Ron DeSantis and Ron DeSantis' wife, who was going through treatment for cancer, on stage and prayed over them and talked in glowing terms about Ron DeSantis and what a warrior for religious freedom he's been.
So you can see DeSantis becoming aware of and kind of calculating, okay, well, who are the important charismatic religious leaders like Sean Foyt that I should be reaching out to?
And frankly, there are a lot of NAR leaders who are headquartered in Florida.
So he he's got a lot of people in his backyard that he can reach out to.
I think it's going to, he's going to have to up the hand during game.
I think if he's really going to win those folks over, especially from someone like Trump, who has such deep roots now.
That all seems fair.
We'll see.
I mean, we'll obviously keep an eye on that.
But anyway, all right.
Well, let's talk about the National Prayer Breakfast.
A lot of people listening will be familiar with the National Prayer Breakfast.
It's been an institution in Washington since the middle 20th century.
Many of you will have either read or watched the series on Jeff Charlotte's The Family.
Well, Congress, as you point out on Twitter, to take the National Prayer Breakfast away from the Fellowship Foundation, which is the family that Jeff Charlotte writes about and the docuseries is about.
So you have another event.
You know, there's a vacuum, there's an opening.
And so what happens?
There's an event at the Museum of the Bible.
And friends, if you don't know about the Museum of the Bible, it's a whole thing.
Matthew's wanting to jump.
Go ahead.
Correct me.
So there actually were three events this year.
So if you remember back to some of the scandals in the Trump era, you actually had Russian operatives infiltrating the National Prayer Breakfast, using that as a space where they could reach out to politicians.
The National Prayer Breakfast that started as this like, let's get some lawmakers together and pray with the Fellowship Foundation leading had become this three-day carnival of religious leaders and politicians schmoozing and hanging out in D.C.
And so you had all these lobbying groups that were starting to target this, including now foreign operatives and spies.
I think Maria Bugna was one of the spies who made it into there.
And so there were people on both sides of the aisle, Capitol Hill, who recognized these things become a bit of a debacle.
And so they decided to intervene.
So they took it away from the Fellowship Foundation, and so they had their own event.
They created a new foundation, supposedly bipartisan, and they did it at the Capitol, and that's where Biden went to.
The family, the Fellowship Foundation, still had their events at the Hilton.
They didn't want to lose any territory, so they kept their thing.
A third group came in and created the Alt-Alt-Prayer Breakfast.
And this was Tony Perkins and Jim Garlow.
Jim Garlow has deep kind of inter-era ties, has really kind of become kind of one of the top kind of peers of a lot of these inter-era apostles.
And what's fascinating about this event, so this Alt-Alt is at the Museum of the Bible.
It's from like 6am to 8.30.
They didn't call it a breakfast because they didn't serve any food.
So, but they still had a bunch of lawmakers show up at the breakfast hour to do this and they called it a National Gathering of Prayer and Repentance.
And so very, very kind of somber, somber vibes there.
It starts out with Jim Garlow and Tony Perkins, who's kind of mainstream, very mainstream of the religious right, kind of the heart of the religious right.
Family Research Council.
Family Research Council, right.
And then they have a shofar as the kind of opening music.
And then they segue into a worship set.
And the worship set is led by Alma Rivera.
And that name probably doesn't register for anyone.
But if you listen to Charismatic Revival of Fury, the woman who is singing at the Capitol right about we cover the Capitol in the blood of Jesus, the woman who's on stage with Cindy Jacobs and Becca Greenwood from the NAR, that is Alma Rivera.
So this woman who has led the liturgy at the Capitol riot, this charismatic liturgy, the music and worship at the Capitol riot, is the one they bring in to lead worship at the Museum of the Bible for this alt prayer breakfast.
And you've got all these lawmakers showing up and sharing a stage with her.
You've got multiple instances where they break into the program to blow shofars.
They have Jonathan Cahn, who was the keynote speaker at the Jericho March.
He's the one that Cheyenne references on January 5th, saying that the spirit of Jezebel has taken over the Capitol.
He speaks, this Messianic Rabbi Jonathan Cahn.
So, like, all of these elements that we talked about in Charismatic Revival Fury that were the kind of religious genre and ethos of the Capitol Riot is now being integrated into this alt-prayer breakfast at the Museum of the Bible.
Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a prophet in the new novel, American Prophet.
I was the one who dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened.
Oh, and the pandemic.
And that crazy election.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging.
It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country, and meet some really interesting people, and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.
Just look for American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
So, okay, so we've got these multiple events and we're talking about the museum.
So, I just want to zoom out a little bit, right?
The Museum of the Bible is really bankrolled by the Green family, and the Green family are the Hobby Lobby people.
So, if you want some more info on this, listen to my interviews with Jill Hicks Keaton and Kevin Kincannon, who wrote wonderful books about them, numerous works on this, and the Museum of the Bible and what it's like and how it got to be what it is and blah, blah, blah.
But all right, so we have the Green family, the Hobby Lobby people, and these are religious right people, okay.
Tony Perkins is Family Research Council, okay.
So this is an organization that goes back decades and it's not, as you're saying Matt, it's not like associated with sort of organically with the NAR, with Charismatic Networks, with Pentecostal Networks.
I mean none of this world is really Kind of built into the Family Research Council.
And then you have this guy, Jim Garlow.
And I know that Jim Garlow is less of a household name for many people listening.
But Jim Garlow comes out of my backyard in Southern California, and your backyard, you're Southern Californian.
I've been in the same room as Jim Garlow many times because when I was in ministry 20 years ago, 25 years ago, God, I'm old.
I'm going to have to edit this out.
Like, whenever I was in ministry at some point, there were like these conferences led by Jim Garlow.
And I'm telling you, Matt, I sat in a room at a conference where Jim Garlow was explaining to us how in his church he was going to have Busts of Luther on one side, excuse me, Calvin on one side, Calvin, and Wesley on the other, because he loved the theology of both and he had some way he was going to reconcile the long division between the Wesleyans and the Calvinists.
What's the point?
He gave off this vibe as like a kind of Southern California, high theological intellectual who wanted to kind of show off what he knew about Calvin.
Now he's the guy who introduces the folks with the shofars, right?
And he brings on Alma Rivera to stay.
I mean, you know, happy for you to jump in here.
I'm just saying, not only is Tony Perkins in the Green family here, but Jim Garlow kind of read the tea leaves and went to the guy who wanted to be like, oh yeah, let me quote Calvin to like, oh, let's bring up Alma Rivera and let's get the chauffeurs on stage.
So anyway, that's just want to like make sure we have that in the context of this whole event.
So what else do we need to know about what happened here with the Museum of the Bible event?
And even a little more background on Jim Garlow in terms of the NAR.
So like we talked about in Charismatic Revival Fury, how Wagner has an inner circle.
Garlow was not in that inner circle.
He was close to a number of the people who were.
And what happens is as Wagner's retiring, there are a number of, there's a lot of shifting that goes on in these NAR circles.
And Garlow seems to kind of ingratiate himself into that world.
A lot of this has to do with organizing around, I believe it was called Prop 8, the anti-gay marriage proposition in California.
And a lot of these NAR leaders in California were mobilizing around that.
Che Ahn was very important to that.
And then Garlow was also very important to that.
So a lot of these folks kind of made common cause against gay marriage in California.
And so, and then Garlow was, he, Trump advisor, was a very important Trump advisor, and he, when we talked in the series about these election integrity prayer calls, where you have apostles and prophets leading in the season between the 2020 election and January 6th, these kind of mobilizing prayer calls where you have Mike Flynn and Mike Lindell and Doug Mastriano calling it.
Jim Garlow was the guy who organized that, along with Michelle Bachman, the former congressman She's kind of Jim Garlow's right-hand person.
Again, this event at the Museum of the Bible ends with Michelle Bachman speaking and praying, right?
So I think what I see happening in this Museum of the Bible is this deep integration, independent charismatics, NAR leaders, into the religious right, into what you could think of as the very heart of the religious right.
There's a George W. Bush advisor, Andy Card, who once had made this comment about The fringe has become the carpet.
And I think that is what we are also seeing in the religious right right now.
These people who would have been laughed out of the room in 2007, 2008, are now kind of being integrated into the very heart of religious right networks and mobilization.
They are recognizable names and even recognizable faces in those spaces, such that they get top billing in this Museum of the Bible event, alongside Kevin McCarthy.
Well, and I'll just add one thing here, and that is people say, well, if Trump's gone, are they going to be gone?
Because Trump was really their way in.
And it's like, you know, you laid out so wonderfully in the series that, look, this is the part of American Christianity that's growing.
This is where the numbers are.
You're not saying goodbye to the NAR folks because if you do, you're saying goodbye to millions of voters.
So no, they're not going anywhere.
They're in the building, they're now the carpet, and they're now on stage, and they're the headliners because they bring the people you need if you're going to win any election.
All right, before we run out of time, I want to get to something that I'm getting asked this a lot when I talk about my own book, and I think you probably get asked this a lot too, way more about this than I do when it comes to independent charismatics, and that is eschatology, the end of the world.
I think there's a lot of folks that are kind of realizing that There is a desire on the part of the people we talked about in Charismatic Revival Theory, the New Apostolic Reformation, Cosmos, but also a lot of just Christian nationalists in general.
They want dominion, to use the word, over the United States government and every other sector of society.
That doesn't seem to line up well with a premillennialist eschatology.
Meaning, if you think Jesus is going to come at any moment, why do you want to be in charge of the world so badly?
There's an easy jump to say, well, they're no longer pre-millennialists, they're post-millennial.
So that means there's going to be a thousand years of rain on earth and they will be a key part of that rain as God's faithful servants.
So here's the question, Matt, is it just too simple to say that the rise of Christian nationalism The cultivation of dominionist theology, the seven mountains mandate, and everything else we talked about in Charismatic Revival Fury leads to a post-millennialist eschatology rather than one that expects Jesus to come at every moment and the whole world to end.
Let me see if I can do 200 years of theological history in two minutes.
So American evangelicalism in the 19th century, so 1800s, was very post-millennial.
And don't worry too much about the millennium and a thousand years.
Just post-millennial means the church builds the kingdom of God on earth, right?
And so Jesus comes back and congratulates the church as opposed to Jesus comes back and fixes everything.
So the 19th century, you've got the temperance movement and the abolition movement and the women's suffrage movement.
All these things are all kind of connected to evangelicalism.
They're kind of campaigning for and against the death penalty and for and against slavery, but they all think we need to build the kingdom of God on earth.
After the Civil War, there's this deep disillusionment that sets in in American evangelicalism.
And people, because you had evangelicals on both sides, believing that they were bringing about the millennial kingdom of God by slaughtering each other.
And so, especially as you start getting into the World Wars in the early 20th century, there's this deep sense of despair.
And alongside that, there's a growing movement of premillennialism, and especially of what's called dispensational premillennialism that wants to kind of chart out Eschaton through these different kind of eras or dispensations.
And so that really takes hold in the 20th century and Evangelicalism starting with Fundamentalism and then throughout Evangelicalism.
So this becomes the big of eschatology of Christians.
This is where you get the late great planet Earth in the 1970s, right?
And so when most people talk about Evangelicalism, the million-dollar phrase that they have for the cocktail parties is dispensational premillennialism.
In the 1970s.
So this is left behind series, right?
This is where we, right?
Okay.
So if you're listening at home.
Yep.
Yeah.
So this whole, this whole conception of the rapture left behind deep in the night films, right?
Like this idea of the, at some point, Jesus is just going to pop on the scene, take all the Christians away.
And then the world's going to go to hell until Jesus comes to fix it.
Starting in the 1970s, you have this group of reformed theologians called the reconstructionists.
And this is R.J.
Rushtuni and his son-in-law, Gary North, and a bunch of other guys very much steeped in Calvinism who start to reinvigorate post-millennialism.
And they are the ones who create this kind of dominion theology.
They're the ones who start talking about imposing biblical law on America.
And so you start to have this revitalization in some circles of a post-millennial framework.
So when the NAR comes along.
Peter Wagner eventually kind of grabs hold of this Dominion theology, and also almost fully outright comes out and says, I'm a post-millennialist.
He actually makes a joke, I'm a pan-millennialist.
Pan-millennialist, because God's going to have everything's going to pan out in the end, right?
Which is just a very evangelical dad joke.
But Wagner really kind of embraces this more post-millennialist frame, because they want to take Dominion over the earth.
Not everyone follows him.
And so what you get in the independent charismatic world is a real mix of different theologies, different eschatologies.
But where they all are in agreement, I'd say, you have some premillennialists, some even people who might call themselves amillennialists, they want to kind of get out of this business of figuring out what the thousand years is going to be about, some postmillennialists, they're all in agreement on rejecting dispensationalism.
They're all in agreement and rejecting this kind of careful outlining of history in favor of what they would call victorious eschatology.
The idea of victorious eschatology, which is this kind of nice way of blending all these things together, is the church has to keep fighting until the end.
Whether Jesus comes back and raptures us all away or whether Jesus comes back at the very end, we gotta fight like hell because we are responsible for building the kingdom of God.
And so what victorious eschatology does is it gives space for narratives of persecution alongside narratives of dominion.
So you can have simultaneously, and Sean Foyt is, you hear him using this rhetoric a lot, the light is getting brighter and so that darkness is getting darker, right?
So this idea that as revival comes, as we conquer more of the earth, Satan and his forces are going to mobilize more against us.
And this becomes licensed then for even more extreme rhetoric of spiritual warfare.
I appreciate you laying out the fact that it's not really simple, and I think this sticks with everything you did on the Charismatic Revival Series, because it's not about straight theological lines in the Neapolitan Reformation, and in many ways the feet really lead the
The mind, rather than the mind leading the feet, it seems like what's happening on the ground, it seems like what's happening in churches, in the sort of political spaces, in the Sean Foyt rallies, those are leading to reconceptualizing eschatology.
And you can imagine, if we're out here fighting the devil to take back the country and the world, to beat down spiritual enemies, then why would we want Jesus to come back any moment?
Because that would, what are we fighting for?
And you can just sort of see some of the, like, we're going to have to reshuffle how we think about what it means for Jesus to return or for the apocalypse to happen because that, but you know, I don't know about you, Matt, but when I was growing up in evangelicalism, we just thought Jesus could come at any moment.
And that really shaped, you know.
Yes, it would be great if we had a Christian president, but it would also be great if Jesus came and everything was ended.
I think what we're seeing is not only that idea It's really going by the wayside, at least in its most pure forms.
But what was fringe in Rush Dooney, what was fringe in the NAR, is now not just taking hold in those spaces, but it's kind of, as everything we talked about, taking hold in evangelicalism writ large in the United States.
And I think that's something that is just worth keeping an eye on and looking at.
I also think that if you're at a cocktail party and the cool kids are using the words premillennial dispensationalism, you should say that you need to go to the bathroom and then just walk out the door and not go back.
That's just a piece of advice I want to give to people.
It's free.
I'm not going to charge you for it.
So anyway.
All right.
Other than that dad joke, Matt, anything else we need to know about Just this discussion about eschatology or anything you want to leave us with going forward just in terms of how things are looking since we last talked to you regarding the New Apostolic Reformation, American politics, and so on.
There's a word that sometimes you'll hear, ecumenical.
And the term ecumenism, as most people mean it, is this kind of liberal coming together of different forms of Christianity, right?
Ecumenism means kind of cross-pollination or discussion between different branches of Christianity.
And typically when people talk about ecumenism, it's in reference to mainline Protestants dialoguing with Catholics, dialoguing with Eastern Orthodox folks.
And so it's all these kind of Diverse groups of Christianity that are all kind of liberal in some sense or have liberal wings that are talking to each other.
I've thought for a long time we need to also recognize that there is a deep ecumenism on the right of American Christianity.
And you have, starting in the 1970s and 1980s, Mormons and conservative Catholics, evangelicals and fundamentalists, all kind of coming together.
Like, we can set aside some of the theological differences we have so that we can advance.
And Francis Schaeffer, who's a very important philosopher in that religious right world in the 80s, talked about, we're co-belligerents, right?
We are all belligerent.
We're all fighting against something, and we are fighting against the same things, and so we can set aside our theological differences for now.
And I think that that has continued into today, and so what you're seeing is not that everyone is becoming NAR, or everyone's becoming Reconstructionist, right?
But the radical traditional Catholics, the rad-trad Catholics, and the Reconstructionist-inspired Reform folks, and the NAR and Independent Charismatic folks, can all come together in a space like the Museum of the Bible, can all come together on eschatology and say, hey, look, We all have different interpretations here, but we can all agree that we need to beat the crap out of our enemies.
And that, I think, is more the unifying force.
And that's the way that the culture wars have in some ways shaped a different form of right-wing ecumenism, where these people are willing to let their differences sit in the back seat for a while.
And I think that's really important to recognize.
But I would also make the observation that what we saw at the prayer breakfast, what we saw on January 6th, is This charismatic spirituality has become a language that has become more and more accepted in all those spaces because it's so popular and because that's a growing part of Christianity.
That charismatic, the shofars and prophets and all these sorts of things in a way that is not what you would expect in an ecumenical space where you'd find kind of a merging together of everything.
In some ways that charismatic spirituality has become kind of an underlayer that's supporting all of this.
No, I think it's a great point to finish on.
I think what we're seeing over the last decade or so is that, as you're saying, it's not that every Reformed person is like, oh, I'm going to become NAR or go to a Pentecostal church.
It's not that the Southern Baptists are no longer existent.
But I do think If I think back to the late 20th century, you had standard language that was used and it was kind of like, you know, I lived in Europe several times and, you know, you get together with Europeans right from Italy and Spain and Slovenia and Sweden and what language are they going to speak?
They're all going to speak English.
And they're all going to speak English in a certain sort of European way, like certain words and phrases are going to be kind of, you know, morphed from what we might think of as the Queen's English or American English.
But nonetheless, they're all going to get together and the language is going to be English.
In the 90s, when you got together, the language was often like the purpose-driven church, right?
Or stuff you heard on Focus on the Family.
What it feels like now is when they all get together, the language is spiritual warfare.
And it's all N.A.R.
And so you still might be Catholic, you still might be Reformed, but there's just this sense of... like when they start talking Dominion...
They all got together and they're using this language.
And I think that's what, you know, your series shows us.
And I also think what you're kind of driving at here.
So, all right, we got to go.
As always, you know, people want to link up with you.
I know you're going to have some exciting news soon and developments and things that you're going to want to share with us.
But for now, you know, what are the best ways to get ahold of you?
You know, the paparazzi and everyone else be damned.
How can people still connect with you?
Well, I'm here in my basement, if you want to come here.
I'm on Twitter, TaylorMatthewD.
I work at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore, and we do a lot of public programming, including on Zoom.
We've got a YouTube channel with some of the past programs.
We do interreligious learning, also thinking about religious extremism, working against anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
So our website is www.icjs.org.
That's great.
You know, there's a nice idea people have of us professors.
We sit in mahogany chairs with, you know, leather and we wear these tweed coats and smoke pipes, but you're in your basement.
I usually do this out of a storage closet.
So anyway.
All right.
As always, find us at Straight White JC.
Find me at Bradley Onishi.
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Send us some money on Venmo.
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