Christian Supremacists Are Radicalizing Your Neighbors via the 7 Mt. Mandate
Matt Taylor joins Brad to discuss a new breed of chauvinistic, theologically bull-headed Christian nationalists who might be better called “Christian supremacists.” These hard-liners believe that Christianity deserves a privileged space in American society — that Christians, being better than other human beings, should be entitled to a superior form of citizenship. They claim that Christians are even destined by God to rule over society. What is hazy nostalgia to the “God Bless America” crowd is an organized theological and political program for the Christian supremacists.
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A Democratic congressperson just took some of the money from her campaign fundraising and sent it to the Democratic National Committee.
Actually, it doesn't sound like that big a news, does it?
Sounds kind of like how things work.
You work in your party, you raise money, you send money to the party, and you get more people from your party elected.
Except, this time it was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
If you know anything about her and some of her colleagues, they have, in the past, resisted contributing money and being folks who built infrastructure within the Democratic Party.
They focused on progressive fundraising, progressive issues, and being independent from party control.
Well, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for the first time, sent a big treasure chest of funds to the Democrats.
Why?
I'm going to talk about that later today in our bonus content.
But I'll give you a hint.
It has everything to do with a very weird and somewhat creepy appearance Mike Johnson made this past week with Donald Trump and the ideas they talked about and the election denial that they did.
Happy Monday, y'all.
Hope you're good.
Hope you had a wonderful weekend.
Here today with a great episode, I have my interview with return guest Matt Taylor.
He's here to talk about a new piece he's written on the ways that the New Apostolic Reformation is cultivating Christian supremacy all over the country.
One of the things that we try to argue and show in Charismatic Revival Fury, our eight-hour docuseries on the New Apostolic Reformation, is the ways that it sees the political realm as a place of war, a place where it's either you win or lose, eat or be eaten.
What we're seeing now is the cultivation of a Christian supremacist outlook that is transcending the boundaries of the New Apostolic Reformation.
Christian supremacy is a form of Christian nationalism.
It's a form of Christian nationalism that says it's not enough for us to elect Christian people or for Christians to be the ones who create the policies.
It's one that says Christians need to be supreme in their domination and control of the country.
It's the far end of the Christian nationalist spectrum, and we're seeing it implemented and envisioned all over the place.
Matt talks about that and we also reintroduce our series Charismatic Revival Theory because it's on its own podcast feed and available free for listening.
You can check the show notes to see that and of course if you'd like to listen ad-free you can subscribe to Access Moody Media's Supercast platform or you can purchase Charismatic Revival Theory one-off.
All of the info in the show notes once again.
For subscribers.
I'm going to be talking after my interview about something that may not seem all that interesting, but in fact reveals a major issue ahead in the 2024 elections.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just gave her first donation to the DCCC.
And the reason she gave is she is worried about what's going to happen in November with Mike Johnson.
And a Republican-controlled Congress.
Will they certify the presidential election results if Donald Trump doesn't win?
She doesn't think so.
And neither do I.
The election denial goes deep in the Republican Party, and there are real world consequences to its rhetoric and belief.
I'm going to talk all about that after my interview.
Before we get there, here's me and Matt Taylor talking about the New Apostolic Reformation and Christian supremacy.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus, My name is Brad Onishi, Faculty, University of San Francisco, joined today by a return guest, a beloved guest, and somebody who's just everywhere at the moment, and that is Dr. Matthew Taylor.
So, Matt, thanks for joining me.
Thank you for having me back, Brad.
Folks will know you're a senior Protestant scholar at the Institute for Christian... I'm going to mess this up.
Christian... Jewish, Christian, Islamic Studies.
Islamic, Christian, Jewish.
Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies.
I apologize.
Should have had that in front of me.
Somebody who folks on this show will know is the creator of Charismatic Revival Theory.
The New Apostolic Reformation, an eight-hour docuseries about the New Apostolic Reformation, which is now on its own podcast feed people can listen to, and you can see all of that in the show notes.
It is also, I shall say, an award-winning docuseries awarded a prize by Zenger House.
You want to talk about that just for a minute, Matt, about the prize and the series?
Yeah, so I was not expecting this.
This was not an award that I even knew I was capable of winning.
Zinger House is run by Marvin Olasky, who people who are deep into evangelicalism might know that name.
He was the editor of World Magazine.
And I actually didn't even know that he had listened to Charismatic Revival Fury, but he apparently did and really liked it.
Awards, I think they hand out 10 each year of these prizes, and they're for reporting, but especially reporting about evangelicalism.
But again, it's evangelicals who are giving the awards.
So I felt actually really grateful, because when we were working on Charismatic Revival Fury Brad, I think I wanted to write it in a way that evangelicals could listen to it.
And not walk away saying like this is against me or this is this is hostile.
Even I wanted it to be something that Charismatics or AR followers could listen to and say no this is accurate and this reflects some reality.
So it was just really great to to see evangelicalism recognizing like this is this is this is an apt challenge to our world and this is an accurate rendering of what's actually happening right now.
Well, the accolades are coming fast and furious for you.
You also created a documentary, a 25-minute documentary, that has also received awards.
And so what I love about your work right now, if I'm honest, is you've really created three ways for people to engage.
There's a documentary, which is short and succinct and yet informative.
There's an eight-hour podcast series that folks can just get in the car or do the dishes and tune in.
But then your book is coming out, The Violent Take-It-By-Force, and that's, of course, the most expansive and rich treatment of the New Apostolic Reformation.
So, if you want to engage with Matt, you have big, bigger, and biggest in terms of how to get all of his scholarship on the New Apostolic Reformation, which we'll talk about today.
Want to start here?
Folks listening, some of them will be familiar, some of them won't.
This is the very first thing that you highlight in the Charismatic Revival Fury docuseries, and that is, what is the New Apostolic Reformation?
So, I want to get that out of the way so that we can talk about some very recent things happening and things you've been talking about, which are Christian supremacy, the ways that people in the NAR are linking up with folks on the far right, and other things that are happening as we just sizzle toward the election here in November.
Give me your 30-second, very brief definition of the New Apostolic Reformation for folks who have forgotten, need a refresher, or don't know.
Yeah, and this is very important to get right, because there are a lot of weird definitions of the NAR that float around online.
It's getting better since Charismatic Revolutionary Theory came out, but there's still confusion out there.
So, the New Apostolic Reformation was a theory that was created by a man named C. Peter Wagner, a Fuller Seminary professor in the 1990s.
But then it became a set of institutions because Wagner retired from Fuller, started building a set of really leadership networks of people who believed that they were, almost all of them were charismatic in their spirituality.
They believed that they were the end times apostles and prophets who had come back to revive the church and to lead it into what Wagner called the second apostolic age.
And those networks, there were about, at their height under Wagner, probably about a thousand people in the heart of those networks.
And they became very radicalized politically and theologically over time.
They started out pretty radical, became more radical over time, and then got very, very involved in politics.
And when Trump came along, they were really the front line of Christians supporting Trump.
I sometimes put it this way, that if you think of the phrase, the tip of the spear, right?
If you think of the shape of a spear, the NAR is like the tip of the tip of the spear in terms of Christian Trumpism.
And then they led a whole cohort of their fellow independent charismatics, non-denominational charismatic folks, who became kind of the rest of the spearhead.
And then the rest of evangelicalism kind of followed as the shaft of the sphere, right?
The full force of it came from the rest of evangelicalism.
So the NAR is kind of that linchpin of Trump's support among Christians.
They created the theological paradigms.
That made Trump support, at least for many Christians, a positive good.
Not the lesser of two evils, but something that we should positively support Trump because he is Cyrus, he is prophesied, he is the king of the government mountain, and we can't use him to bring about the kingdom of God on earth.
And once again, if you are like, no, I don't think so, Matt, I don't believe that, or you want more, just tune in to episode one of Charismatic Revival Fury because there's literally an hour explanation of this history.
You see Peter Wagner, the formation of these networks, and how it all led into the Christian Trumpist movement that Matt just talked about.
You just said the government mountain, so I think something else we need to clear up is What is the Seven Mountains Mandate?
How is it related to NAR?
Something you've talked about a million times, something that is talked about in the series at length, but I think still something people can't understand in terms of the relationship between those two ideas or phenomena.
I think it gets hard, and this is why we need to think historically about it, because Seven Mountains became a central pillar of the New Apostolic Reformation, but it actually originates in a little bit of a slightly different channel than they are.
So Seven Mountains is this concept that is coined by a guy named Lance Wall now in the year 2000.
And he's drawing together a bunch of different streams of thought, some of them going back to the Christian Reconstructionists and some of these very Calvinist ideas of dividing society into different spheres.
But he's also drawing upon, and this just came out recently, we exposed this, that he kind of made it up in some sense.
But he claimed that he had heard about a near-death experience that a band had with a vision of Seven Mountains coming out of the sea.
And Wall now took these different things and bottled them all together as the Seven Mountain Mandate.
And the basic concept is that you divide society up into seven arenas of influence.
Government, education, the family, religion, And that Christians are mandated by God, commanded by God, empowered by God to take over every one of those mountains, to take over, to capture the top of those mountains and then let Christian influence and Christian power flow down from the tops of the mountains.
What happened, though, was then that after Wallenau kind of coined this, he meets Peter Wagner, and Wagner embraces Wallenau, embraces the Seven Mountains, and brings him into the inner core of the NAR.
And so the NAR became the broadcast platform for the Seven Mountain Mandate, and they spread it all over the place and used these networks to galvanize charismatic Christians around this political theology.
And so the two became deeply, deeply entwined.
And so it doesn't mean that every person who embraces the Seven Mountains today is necessarily an NAR follower.
It's spread far beyond that.
But the origins of the Seven Mountains, where it originally kind of emerged, and how it came to prominence was through Walnell, through Wagner, through the NAR, has now become a staple of right-wing Christian organizing.
I think what you said at the end is something I really hope people will understand.
You have helped me understand this through your writing and your scholarship, and I really want others to understand it, which is the Seven Mountains Mandate is embedded within the NAR.
It has a long history within New Apostolic Reformation spaces.
But it's also a concept that is portable, I think is a word you've used with me before.
And you can take it away.
So I can be somebody like Charlie Kirk, for example.
I can be somebody from a reformed background.
I can be somebody who's not charismatic, not hanging out with Lance Wallnau, not somebody influenced by C. Peter Wagner.
But I can get this idea of seven mountains, government, family, economy, arts, media, And think, hey, that's a good idea.
I'm going to take that to my church.
I'm going to take that to my denomination.
I'm going to take that to my rally.
So I just really want people to see that.
There's a way that you're going to encounter the Seven Mountains idea in places that are not New Apostolic Reformation places.
It's a portable idea.
It's a travel-sized It's like when you go to a birthday party and you're a kid and you get something you can take home.
You can go to a NAR rally, a NAR space, and as a non-charismatic, you can take it home to your reformed church in Michigan or your evangelical megachurch in Texas and you can espouse the Seven Mountains idea.
One of the things that I think is clear to me after working with you, learning from you over the last years, is that the Seven Mountains idea is really an idea of, you've used these words before, I've just hung on to them, that Christians should colonize the earth for God.
And when you talk about colonizing the earth for God, having the power of dominion delegated to you, You sound a little bit more than just a Christian nationalist.
You're somebody who's talking about more than a Christian nation.
It seems like you're getting into Christian supremacy, which is, I think, something you're arguing in a recent piece at RNS and something you've been thinking about a lot.
Yeah, I have been thinking about it a lot.
And I think for Wall, Wallnail's genius, right?
Because Wallnail truly is a genius.
He's not he's not an intellectual, but he's a genius.
And he's a genius and marketing.
And we made the seven mountains accessible, and seem vaguely biblical.
Enough that other evangelicals who might not believe that this is a prophecy, because it's originally framed as a prophecy that Wallnau and others have received, other evangelicals can attach and grab onto it and say, this feels biblical, although it's not actually rooted in any particular Bible passage, and it's rooted in these kind of dreams and visions.
But people claim or imagine that it is biblical, and it's so convenient as a program of Christian supremacy, really, right?
It tells Christian nationalists, people who might have kind of a sentimental attachment to a vision of a Christian America, it tells them, here's a program that God is telling you, God is commanding you to transform the nation.
And it's become a trigger in many ways for making the transition from these kind of Vague, hazy, nostalgic Christian nationalists to become Christian supremacists.
And so, Christian supremacy, in my understanding, in my definition of it, it's on the spectrum of Christian nationalism.
It's not something different than Christian nationalism.
It's the hardened, consolidated end of the most rightward wing of Christian nationalism.
And there are different kinds of Christian supremacists.
You can even talk about a blending of kind of white supremacy and Christian supremacy in places like the KKK.
But here we're talking about a more theologically driven style of Christian supremacy.
And I just had a piece that posted in Religion News Service where I was trying to call people's attention to this because I think in some ways we can get distracted A conversation about Christian nationalism and debating, okay, what is the definition of this?
Again, because Christian nationalism, people want to talk about it as though it's a movement.
It's not a movement.
It's a tendency.
It's a trend.
It's a style of thinking about the relationship between America and Christianity.
And there's a whole bunch of different theologies and worldviews that plug in to Christian nationalism and then and then nativize it into these different uh communities and denominations right and so
I think, though, when you get too lost in that conversation, if you paint with too broad a spectrum, Christian nationalism can be everything from somebody who loves to sing God Bless America and loves to pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, but who, when you really try to pin them down, is like, no, I'm for the separation of church and state.
I just kind of like this Christian gloss on my patriotism.
That is Christian nationalism.
But to me, that's fairly benign.
I mean, that's not my particular cup of tea, but that's kind of benign.
But all the way straight to Christian supremacists storming the Capitol on January 6th, also Christian nationalism.
So I'm trying to force more of a conversation to say, Before we get all hung up on, is Joe Evangelical a Christian nationalist or not, adjudicating, oh, well, this question in this survey is not very accurate.
So much of it can get into navel-gazing, and I'm like, but let's look at the real radicalization and the real extremism.
And it is a very real phenomenon.
I almost think we, unless you are immersed in tracking and watching this stuff the way that you and I are, Brad, it can feel like This is a bunch of liberal people with their hair on fire.
Oh, the liberals have always hated evangelicals, and so they are just out to say that there's something wrong with Christians being involved in politics or something.
This is the straw man commentary that we are hearing a lot of these days.
And I have to say, I grew up evangelical.
My family is evangelical.
I am not hostile to evangelicals.
But there is real and dangerous radicalization that is going on.
And it grew to a fever pitch right before January 6th, and it is once again rising to a fever pitch.
I would even argue that January 6th, far from being a discouragement to the Christian supremacists, it was a catalyst For galvanizing the Christian supremacist movements and popularizing many of the people that we profile in Charismatic Revival Fury are more popular today than they were on January 6th, are more respected
Far-right Christian circles today than they were on January 6th faced, if anything, they've received positive consequences from their participation in the mobilization for and the enactment of the Capitol riot.
And so we really, really need to be paying attention to this sector and to the ways that these extremist groups are mobilizing more and more Christians, drawing more and more of these kind of Hazy, sentimental Christian nationalists into the camp of Christian supremacy.
And the Seven Mountains has been just one of the real catalytic converters.
It's one of these things that can move people from a kind of God bless America crowd into this ardent Christian supremacy crowd.
I appreciate how you talk about a spectrum.
I think some folks are going to be familiar with that.
But I want to think about like Kiyoti Joshi's book, White Christian Privilege, really zeroes in on the micro forms of Christian nationalism in everyday life.
If you're on a high school football team, you might be invited to pray with the team before the game, and the coach is the one doing the inviting.
So if you don't go, does that mean you get less playing time?
Okay, so that's Christian nationalism.
That is Christian privilege.
And that's an everyday example.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of it.
I think it's insidious.
I think there's some things there that are just, they're really not good.
But there's also, and it's not that these two are mutually exclusive, but there's also forms of Christian nationalism that are like, Christians should dominate our society.
If you are not a Christian, you should, by law, by cultural practice, you should be a second class citizen who is either living in a place where you are inferior to others, not a real American.
Or you should be forced to leave the country.
I mean, there's a lot there in terms of the difference between Christian supremacy and the kinds of Christian nationalism we could talk about with God Bless America, or the fact that 90% of our Congress is Christian, so on and so forth.
Give us some examples of how this is ramped up, whether it's Lance Wallnau linking up with Alex Jones, whether it's Charlie Kirk and his willingness to adopt the Seven Mountains Mandate.
What are the ways that we're seeing this Christian supremacy sizzle as we approach 2024 election season?
I mean, you and I have written on this together, Brad, but we, I mean, we see it in Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, and the way that he really over, what, six months, not even, maybe, since he was elevated as Speaker, he has mainstreamed a lot of forms of Christian supremacy.
And we are, you and I both wrote a piece in Rolling Stone back in November exposing how
The Appeal to Heaven Flag, which we spend a goodly portion of time in Charismatic Revival Fury, really unpacking where this Appeal to Heaven Flag symbol comes from, both its historical roots in the Revolutionary War, but then also its real transformation through these leaders, particularly by Dutch sheep, into making it a real symbol A logo of Christian supremacy.
Over the last decade, this transformation, this shift, so that the flag still has a denotation historically, but the connotation now is very clearly about this very charismatic style, this kind of spiritual warfare and prophecy, NAR style.
In the same way that the NAR networks took the seven mountains and broadcast that to the world, the NAR networks glommed on to this appeal to heaven flag that Dutch Sheets brought forward and then broadcast that into the world.
And I'll tell you, you can now see, and this is new, this is new since January 6th, you can see Neo-Nazi groups in Oregon marching with the Sonnenrad flag, a Nazi symbol that's a version of the swastika, and next to it is the Appeal to Heaven flag.
And that flag is flying outside of the House Speaker's office still today, as far as I know.
And so the mainstreaming of some of these things, it's not the Christian flag.
It's not the kind of, oh, it's a generic symbol that a lot of Christians have used.
It's a very particular symbol.
And it is being used in this particular way to facilitate an acceptance.
And Mike Johnson has done this through other things.
We talked at one point, I think, about the National Gathering on Prayer and Repentance, this kind of alternative event.
Mike Johnson and some of these AR leaders who are Trump advisors created at the Museum of the Bible as an alternative to the National Prayer Breakfast because they feel like the National Prayer Breakfast has become too bipartisan, too inclusive.
In which even the National Prayer Breakfast they're still in the US Capitol praying in the name of Jesus.
The National Prayer Breakfast is an expression of Christian nationalism.
It's a bipartisan expression of Christian nationalism now, but it's still an expression of Christian nationalism.
But even that felt too chummy for Mike Johnston and his crew, and so they created this alternate event that is bringing people like Dutch Sheetz and Lou Engel If you've listened to Charismatic Revival Theory, you know how dangerous those people are, bringing them into contact with Congress people, holding them up as spiritual leaders for our country.
And so I think there's this way that we have begun to accept this infiltration of very extreme ideas into the public square, and what you find is many Christian nationalists In some cases, they might not even know what they're talking about, but just are congenitally conditioned to defend anything that they think is Christian.
Standing up for some of these very extreme ideas and saying, oh, no, that's just Christians being Christians.
It's not just Christians being Christians.
These are very, very extreme ideologies.
Just to highlight another story, it blows my mind.
Especially with the research to do.
So just in February, we had this Alabama State Supreme Court decision that came down about the complicated case.
Basically, there was an in vitro fertilization lab Somebody somehow stupidly got in there that shouldn't have been in there, mishandled the embryos and damaged them, and the embryos were destroyed.
And so the families sued the lab to say, our family members, these embryos were harms, and those are people.
Those are our children.
And the Alabama State Supreme Court upheld that?
And the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, a guy named Tom Parker, wrote a concurring opinion.
The whole court affirmed this thing.
As he's just writing a concurring opinion, he doesn't have to write a concurring opinion.
He's in agreement with the majority.
But he writes a concurring opinion where he outlines the theology and the biblical reasons why he's making this choice.
The exact same day that that decision came down, a podcast episode that had been recorded that week aired.
And it was a podcast recording with Johnny Enloe.
And we didn't get into Johnny Enloe that much in Charismatic Revival Fury.
He's more of kind of a second tier leader in the New Apostolic Reformation.
He's in some ways kind of Lance Wallnau's understudy.
It's how I would describe Johnny Enloe.
Maybe even a little more crazy than Lance.
Johnny Enloe has gone deep on QAnon.
But it was Johnny Enloe who wrote the first book on the Seven Mountains.
Lance Wallnau never wrote a book on the Seven Mountains.
He edited a volume with Bill Johnson to get...
He never wrote his own book.
In some ways, Johnny Inlow stole Lance's thunder.
If you want to know the internal politics, there's a lot of resentment between these guys because Inlow took Walnau's idea and put it in a book and almost tried to claim it for himself.
But anyway, Tom Parker is being interviewed with Johnny Inlow.
Why is a state Supreme Court justice talking to an NAR prophet and a conspiracy theorist?
And Tom Parker says, we did this because of the Seven Mountains.
I believe in the seven mountains.
I'm trying to conquer the government mountain.
And what we also exposed was that was not the apex of Tom Parker's connections to the NAR.
In fact, Dutch Sheets and Chuck Pierce have been running a series of state-by-state prayer calls over the last couple of years.
And this is a very NAR thing to do.
They love their state-by-state networks and trying to conquer the territory of every state, displace the territorial spirits in every state.
And they had a prayer call for Alabama in 2023 that Tom Parker called into and they invite him to speak and he is speaking about it is my role as a judge to help fulfill the prophecies that Dutch and Chuck It's been prophesied over the state of Alabama that judges have a role in bringing about revival and the transformation of the nation.
And so that is what motivates me.
And I'm trying to enlist my fellow judges in the projects of the Seven Mountains and the project of revival.
Remember, we're talking about charismatic revival theory.
This is not just, oh, generic revival, Second Great Awakening.
This is revival to Christian supremacy.
And Tom Parker is on a first-name basis with Dutch and Chuck, and he is referencing their prophecies.
This is a state Supreme Court Chief Justice.
This is a man who has deep knowledge of the law and deep training and has risen to the highest level of the judiciary in the state of Alabama.
And he is referencing charismatic prophets and saying they are the ones who are driving and motivating the way that he's operating.
I've used this analogy in a couple places.
I think what we're seeing is democracy is a really hard thing to do.
And pluralism is a really hard thing to do, right?
We're managing, we're balancing, we're trying to hold together Diverse societies.
And in some ways, democracy is like a spinning top.
And we're all on the top of the top.
We're all on the top of this spinning top together.
And the goal of democracy is just to keep spinning, just to keep balance, just to hold together this diverse coalition.
And what we see with Tom Parker, what we see with Dutch Sheets, what we see with Mike Johnson, is that there is a contingent of American society around these Christian supremacy circles that has decided it is their role to throw themselves against the side of the top.
With all the energy and force that they can to destabilize the system that we have today.
And to really upend American democracy, right?
And they would not say that.
They would not say, oh, I'm anti-democracy.
They would not say, oh, I'm out to end America as we know it.
But that's what their mission is.
That is the effect of what they're doing.
They're trying to destabilize the system that we have because they believe that they can replace it with a system of Christendom.
And they believe that this is prophesied, they will do this.
So it is not merely an ideology for these folks, it is a theology.
It is a theology that is instigating them to radicalization.
There's so much there.
I just wanna summarize a couple things for folks so they don't miss it.
One is, we've talked about the Seven Mountain Mandate and the Appeal to Heaven Flag as two things that...
And I just want to make clear, friends, that what you've heard Matt talk about today is, since January 6th, you have the Appeal to Heaven flag, which we wrote about in Rolling Stone, which is talked about at length in Charismatic Row of Fury, the documentary podcast series that Matt created and we did here at Axis Mundi.
You have folks like Nazis in Oregon marching with that flag.
I just want everyone to stop for a minute and imagine you could be a Christian or you could be a Christian whose Christianity is really tied up with the belief in some terrible ideology like God and homeland and white nationhood.
But the Appeal to Heaven flag is so easy to integrate into that kind of system.
Y'all think about integrating something into a system.
Well, the Appeal to Heaven flag fits right into that.
It's one of those components that you get from Amazon and it arrives in your door and you can plug it right into your system.
You don't need to download a driver or a new app.
You just plug it right into what you're doing.
And all of a sudden, the Appeal to Heaven flag fits in where?
It fits in to the neo-Nazis marching in Oregon.
It also hangs outside the Speaker of the House's office.
In addition, the Seven Mountains, it can go from the charismatic revival that's happening in Appalachia or in San Diego.
But it can go to the Supreme Court justice who's sitting there saying, yes, I want to colonize Earth for God.
I want Christian supremacy.
I want this mode of Christian dominance in my country.
So I just want everyone to see the ups and downs, the wide and high and low and everywhere in between that these things can travel.
All right, y'all.
Thanks for listening to Matt and I talk about Christian supremacy in the New Apostolic Reformation and truly, truly scary developments.
Matt, unfortunately, had a semi-emergency as we were taping.
He had to run quickly, and it kind of cut off our conversation there at about 30 minutes.
Everything's okay.
Don't worry.
He and his family are fine, but he did have to jump off of our interview, and therefore, we didn't get to talk anymore.
Don't fret, however, because there's more to come.
I want to turn now to Mike Johnson, Donald Trump, and how they got Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to give money to the Democratic National Committee.
Even if you're not a subscriber, I want to say, hang out!
We're going to post our bonus content for free today in order to give you a glimpse of what we do every Monday for subscribers.
I want to remind you that our Swag Premium subscription is on sale until Mother's Day.
So hang out today, listen to our bonus content, and then take advantage of the sale, hit the show notes, and go sign up.
Here's Shane Goldmacher writing at the New York Times.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has made her first ever contribution to the campaign arm of House Democrats.
A $260,000 donation that is a milestone in the New York Democrats' long and complicated relationship with her own party's political establishment.
improvement.
In an interview, Ms.
Ocasio-Cortez said her decision to give to the campaign arm the DCCC was driven primarily by the dire threat of Republicans staying in power.
She feared a Republican-controlled House would not certify a potential re-election of President Biden this fall.
The entire country saw a terrorist attack on the United States Capitol that was predicated on not certifying the duly submitted results of a presidential election.
And if anybody thinks that that was not a dress rehearsal for what they may try to attempt in January 2025, I'm sorry to say, but I think that's a very naive assumption.
AOC's comments here bring into relief something I spoke about with Bryn Tannehill back a couple of months ago.
Bryn is a veteran of the armed forces in this country, is somebody who's an analyst, has been trained to think about strategy.
And warfare.
And what Bryn said on the show and in our interview was that there's a chance that if Biden is elected, Mike Johnson would not certify the results of the election.
And if there is a Republican majority in the House, or if Mike Johnson refuses to sit newly elected Democratic members and thus holding on to his very slim majority, He may be able to act in the role that Mike Pence was supposed to act in back in 2021.
When that interview dropped, some people said, Hey, look, I like your show, but that sounds like fear mongering.
I like your show, but if you're going to do this kind of stuff, I'm not going to listen anymore.
And here we have now Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
A figure in the House who has been staunchly independent and progressive in relationship to the Democratic Party.
Who is willing to say, I will give money to the fundraising arm of the House Democrats, because if I don't, democracy itself may no longer exist.
That it requires me to do something I've never done before.
No, I just want to hover on this today because I think it really draws our attention to something that is really easy to overlook.
At this point, I think that The Big Lie and everything surrounding January 6th are like that house plant or the family photo that's been in the corner for like 15 years.
You don't even see it.
If somebody said, hey, draw a picture of the room, you wouldn't draw it because you no longer look at it because it's just become part of the space.
It doesn't stick out, you don't notice it, and you don't even remember it.
Well, for a lot of folks, January 6th has become something that is so mired in various discourse, conspiracy theories, and different takes, that it doesn't seem like something that is politically expedient.
It's not a thing that, like, you look at straight on anymore.
The moments for us to analyze and dissect it have passed, and now we have other dangers to worry about.
And I understand that.
But there's a straight line from where we are going in November 2024 and what happened in January 2021.
Greg Sargent, who now writes at the New Republic, has a great piece on Mike Johnson's recent appearance with Donald Trump.
They appeared on stage together and they talked about protecting election integrity.
Here's what Sargent says.
says, it was a deeply weird affair with Trump hovering watchfully over Johnson.
The House Speaker said that in campaigning, he's discovered that people across the country just happen to be thoroughly obsessed with precisely the same thing that preoccupies Trump.
Everywhere we go, one of the first questions that people ask is the issue of election integrity.
So here he is standing alongside a man who incited the attack on the Capitol.
I A man who called Georgia to ask them to find 11, 12,000 votes.
A man who wanted to use a fake slate of electors.
A man who pressured his vice president to act in a way that would overstep the Constitution and his duties.
Talking about election integrity.
Now I have said since January 21, I have written about it, I have talked about it, you all are sick of it, but I'll say it again.
When you allow the idea that this was not an attempt to thwart democracy, but a tourist visit, a protest by patriotic Americans, Nothing more than a day that got out of hand.
When you allow that narrative to take root, and the man who is in charge of this, who incited it, who wanted it, to go unpunished.
To run for office.
To be somebody who can stand up and say, we need election integrity to protect, not from me, but for me.
Well, you're going to have a weakening of your democracy.
January 6th was an attempt to overrun the will of the people.
Period.
And yet the man who incited it is leading in the polls to be president once again.
What is the result of that?
The result is this.
Greg Sargent.
Riding the New Republic.
And here's another measure of how deeply enthralled to that cause the GOP remains.
By my count, at least a dozen Republican incumbents or prominent candidates in competitive races are tainted with election denialism, some of it extremely serious or even deranged.
These include representatives like Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, who was extensively involved in Trump's coup.
Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, who co-wrote a children's book falsely depicting the 2020 election as stolen.
And Derek Van Orden of Wisconsin, who attended the Capitol rally on January 6th.
Sargent goes on and he gives many more examples.
But I just want to stop here and say this.
It's one thing to think about January 6, it's one thing to realize all the religious symbols and all the things that we talk about in the show all the time, all the things that our colleagues and friends from Andrew Seidel and everybody at the Uncivil Religion Project and across the board have done.
It's another thing to realize this.
What happened January 2021 is going to remain with us for many, many years and many, many reasons.
But one of them comes down to what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave voice to when she gave $260,000 to the DCCC.
You put someone like Mike Johnson in charge of the House, somebody who is, as Matt Taylor just talked about, a Christian supremacist, somebody who we wrote about, who espouses the Appeal to Heaven flag, who hangs out with those who develop and spread the Seven Mountain Mandate, somebody who thinks it's Christians' vocation to colonize Earth for God.
You put that man in charge, a man who worked illegally to try to overturn the 2020 election for Trump and who supports and cohorts with those who tried to overturn the 2020 election illegally at January 6th.
A man who is not cut out for the job, as we've talked about in this show.
Who's not ready for prime time.
Who seems in over his head.
You put that man in charge because that man, you think, will do what Mike Pence would not do.
You put that man in charge because maybe he has less of a backbone, less of a willingness to stand up for himself, less of a willingness to stand up for the Constitution.
You can tell me that we're fear-mongering, you can tell me that we're worried about nothing, and I'm just going to point you to AOC.
Somebody who says, I'm scared that if we don't have a Democratic majority in the House, it doesn't matter who wins the presidency, Donald Trump will be in charge.
So let's look at the specifics of what AOC is doing.
Her $260,000 contribution is earmarked for the Voter Protection Program.
That's the first time a congressperson has given money to a program for voter registration, poll observation, litigation.
This is AOC saying, I'm giving money.
If you don't believe me about Mike Johnson and why he's in charge, listen to AOC explain her decision.
This party, meaning the Republican Party, has turned into a party of Trumpism, and it has turned into a cult of personality.
I don't know if Mike Johnson has it in him to defend our democracy against a threat like that.
This brings me to my final point.
Where was Mike Johnson on stage with Trump?
At Mar-a-Lago.
So Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, made a trip down to Florida to get on a stage where he looked like the oldest son of an incredibly mean and disciplinary father.
Someone who needed to say the right thing or else he would be punished.
Someone who looked nervous and unsure of himself.
Somebody, though, who was doing something his predecessor had done right before him.
Kevin McCarthy made a similar trek.
He did so after The 2021 insurrection.
He did so after saying that Trump was to blame for the insurrection.
He did so in a way that marked what would become the path, the ethos of the Republican Party after Trump.
It would remain Trump's party.
It would remain what Greg Sargent calls a post-truth party.
It would remain a party of election denial, election overthrow, and conspiracy theory.
When Mike Johnson went to Mar-a-Lago, he was doing what Kevin McCarthy did before him, bowing down to the authoritarian who's the leader of the Republican Party and who wants to be leader of this country once again.
He did not look like a man who has it in him to defend democracy.
He looked like a man, a Christian nationalist, submitting to the bully who he hopes will return his country to the right Christian order, even though he has no Christian virtue.
He looked to me like a representative of all the Christians who've been willing to bow to Trump in hopes that he would make their country great and Christian again.
In many ways it was the perfect summation of the last eight years.
An overwhelmingly conservative Christian supremacist standing there under the guise of an authoritarian and both of them telling lies about our elections and our democracy.
Trump and Johnson and Republicans can tell you that the real crisis of our country is coming from without, from the southern border, from those who would somehow take away our way of life.
But for me, it's clear the real threat is coming from within the House, and it may be the one that crumbles the entire republic.
Thanks for listening today, y'all.
Appreciate you, appreciate your support, appreciate your insight, your questions, your emails, and all of it.
Keep them coming.
Straight White American Jesus at gmail.com.
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