NAR WATCH Episode 1: The NAR Is Mainstream, Prophesying a Global Caliphate, and the Apostles "Saving Jews from Themselves"
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On the first episode of our new monthly sit-down with Dr. Matthew Taylor, he and Brad discuss startling new findings about the mainstream adoption of NAR ideas. They then get into a prophsesy from a NAR apostle about the creation of a global Muslim caliphate that will threaten all the governments of Europe and the United States - an Islamaphobic revelation they claim is straight from God. Finally, Matt explains how NAR figures like Ché Ahn are attending "Jewish Lives Mattter" rallies in order to save Jews from themselves - not exactly loving your neighbor.
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Axis Mundi But I want to remind you that the new apostolic reformation is the most radical change in the way of doing church since the Protestant Reformation.
That's what we're springing off into the 21st century.
And today who's going to rise up and we're going to rule and reign through President Trump and under the worship of Jesus Christ, riots and revival actually erupt.
together.
Why shouldn't we be the ones leading the way in all spheres of society?
There's a news of revival coming.
There's a rushing mighty wind on steroids.
I said many years ago that we would even come to a place of civil war if this continues.
Good to see you, Matt.
This is our first monthly installment of something we're going to do leading up to the election.
Let's start today with a kind of startling new set of findings that you and our friend and colleague Paul Juppe at Denison University had come out last week.
And it's a study about how New Apostolic Reformation ideas have really made their way to the mainstream of American Christianity.
What did you all find?
Paul is a sociologist, a political scientist.
He works much more on the numbers side of religious studies.
And if anybody has been listening to the show and hasn't quite realized this, in religious studies, it's a multidisciplinary field.
And so some of us are more on the kind of history and texts and humanity side, and some of us are more on the social sciences side.
So I'm much more on the history and texts side, and Paul's on the numbers side.
But Paul is an incredible expert on these things.
And he listened to Charismatic Revival Fury, found it really interesting, and actually started.
He ran some of the first surveys in last year in 2023, looking at these seven mountain ideas and how far the seven mountains concept had spread, how it was attached to prophecy belief.
And so Paul and I have been in conversation actually since before Charismatic Revival Fury came out because I knew we were working on some similar things.
And we co-designed a survey with seven ideas that come out of the NAR.
And these aren't ideas that are exclusive to the NAR per se.
I mean, the Seven Mountains have spread very far.
We knew that.
But these are all ideas that originate within that kind of marginal New Apostolic Reformation space in the early 2000s, as Peter Wagner and his fellow apostles and prophets are kind of gathering and beginning to lay out and ...collaborate on these different things.
And so these are things like apostles, prophets exist today.
There are modern apostles and prophets, and they should be integral to the leadership of the church.
And I grew up evangelical.
I never heard that.
Occasionally, there were some circles where you'd hear about prophecy or people who are claiming an identity as prophets.
That was occasionally in some charismatic spaces, but in mainstream evangelicalism, you never heard about that.
Or even the Seven Mountains.
I grew up Evangelical.
I was Evangelical for the first 30 years of my life.
Never heard about the Seven Mountains.
So we designed this survey and then put it out in the field.
And this was a survey only of self-identified Christians.
And we tried to get one half Evangelical and one half non-Evangelical, just to have a good distribution.
And frankly, the results of this were shocking.
So we designed these seven questions, and I tried to make them very niche, very focused, not the sort of thing that like, oh, Christians should influence society.
Of course, you're going to get a wide range of people saying Christians should influence society.
That's a very popular idea.
But these were questions very tailored, like Christians should stand atop the seven mountains of society, a phrase that did not exist 25 years ago.
This was coined in the year 2000, and on six out of the seven questions, more than 50% of self-identified evangelicals agreed or strongly agreed with these statements.
And so that means, I mean, you still read stuff about the NAR online, you still read these criticisms that say the NAR is fringe, the NAR is marginal, the NAR is just out there doing their thing, but they are not evangelical.
Well, here are six out of seven of these exact phrases that come out of the NAR are now incredibly popular, even mainstream within American evangelicalism.
And that's not even counting the non-evangelical Christians who also affirm these ideas.
So, the reality that we're seeing is that these have spread very rapidly into the evangelical bloodstream.
I mean, some of these ideas are, like I said, not even 25 years old, and they've become majority positions in this survey among American evangelicals.
Can I give you the two that really just, I, so...
I was, like, trying to figure out if I read it wrong, if I was, like, losing my mind.
I have young children.
Did I not sleep last night?
Do I know it?
So, one of the questions is, the church should organize campaigns of spiritual warfare and prayer to displace high-level demons.
Again, I was also evangelical.
I was saturated with evangelical language, books.
I went to seminary.
I got an undergraduate.
I mean, these are not things that You heard in mainstream evangelicalism, don't get me wrong, I had friends who went to charismatic churches who I think would have used language like this, and 66% of self-identified evangelicals say yes.
But here's the thing that you just also mentioned, Matt.
A third of non-evangelical Christians said yes.
The other one is, there are demonic principalities and powers who control physical territory, and 69% said yes.
69% said yes.
What do you make of that?
It is a little bit shocking.
I mean, like, I was expecting these numbers to be high, frankly.
I could see, anecdotally, I could see on the ground in my research, again, I'm much more on the communities and tech side of things, so I've been watching a lot of these communities, and you could see these things spreading, especially in the Trump era.
Like, you really see, as these NAR leaders kind of congeal around Trump and the story that we tell in Charismatic Revival Fury, There is this dynamic where they become more popular the closer they are to Trump.
And so there's kind of this bi-operational.
They're both sharing and collaborating and that's making these things popular.
I was shocked at how popular some of these ideas are.
With the demons controlling physical territory and the two that came out highest.
So 69% said demonic principalities and powers who control physical territory.
This is what Wagner called territorial spirits.
And then the church should organize campaigns of spiritual warfare and prayer to displace high-level demons.
That came out at 66% among self-identified evangelicals.
My theory as to why those are the strongest correlated, the furthest spread, is those ideas actually go back to the 1990s, even before Wagner started working with these NAR ideas.
He was very much working on these spiritual warfare ideas.
And some of this stuff got spread with the idea of the 1040 window campaign.
I write about this in my book that again, to review 1040 window was this idea that the, There's a section between 10 degrees and 40 degrees north latitude across North Africa and a lot of Central Asia that was identified in the 1990s as the least Christian part of the globe.
And so there was this whole missions mobilization movement to pray for and send missionaries to the 1040 window.
And Peter Wagner and Cindy Jacobs and Dutch Sheep, they all led.
The prayer side of this 1040 Window mobilization campaign, and they infused it with some of these ideas of territorial spirits, of high-level demons, of organized campaigns of spiritual warfare.
So I think that stuff has been percolating for a longer time than some of these newer, like, Seven Mountains-type concepts.
And you have to remember, at the height of the 1040 Window campaign, at least by their estimates, they had 50 million evangelicals around the globe.
Praying on their calendar for their different prayer requests.
So it was a very, very broad spectrum approach that they took.
And I think that really kind of seeded a lot of these ideas into broader American evangelicalism.
I'm still blown away that that many people are embracing these ideas.
And because, again, you're talking about a very significant Interface between the the spiritual world that a lot of evangelicals historically were very content leaving spiritual and the physical world and this has very dramatic political implications because if you believe that your state is controlled by particular demons Then you're going to link up with other people who embrace those ideas.
You're going to join these campaigns.
And those campaigns themselves have become very, very political now, to the degree that they are now overlapping with QAnon.
They are now overlapping with some of the more conventional forms of Christian nationalism that were not charismatic in the past.
So the reality is this is now dovetailing with the Trump 2024 campaign and has become a very powerful lever that Republican politicians can pull by injecting spiritual warfare language into our politics.
They are activating all of these networks of people, all these wide-branching groups of people who have embraced these NAR ideas, and it's radicalizing them even further politically.
So when I think about 69% saying that there are demons that control physical territory.
I just go back to things we talked about at length, you talked about at length, I should say, in Charismatic Revival Theory, which is that spiritual warfare language is a step toward warfare in However you want to term it, real life, the physical world, etc.
And so if you think, as you just said, that there are demons controlling your city, your city hall, your state capital, a whole province in any part of the world, You're really thinking that it's your job to liberate them.
And then I think that second question about the church organized campaigns to displace them.
So now we have campaigns to displace the enemies that hold the territory.
And what I heard you saying here a minute ago about joining up with adjacent groups as well.
If the groups like, if the QAnon adherents, if those who have politics that fits ours, maybe on the far right, are willing to help us in our campaign to displace those spirits that are holding our province, city, whatever, captive, Get it, go ahead and get in with us here on the campaign.
That's so different, Matt, than Matthew 28, go into the world and like convert people, persuade them to accept Jesus.
I don't hear that here.
I hear go into a physical territory with a campaign and displace.
We've talked about it before, but I'm not going to stop noticing that.
I'm just not, because that seems so important as we get ready for an election and an understanding of our public square as hopefully a peaceful place.
And I think we have to recognize that this is all part of this bigger picture, this shift in tone and in mood and in metaphor within the evangelical community, where the evangelicalism I was raised in, the evangelicalism I assume you were raised in, Brad, was the prime directive.
The thing we were all working for was evangelization.
Which, as you're saying, is something that happens slowly, it happens on a one-by-one, it happens at events, but it is the process of persuading and welcoming and inviting people into your movement.
Right?
And that just by the nature of the metaphor or the nature of the pursuit is you have to be congenial.
You have to be winsome.
You have to invite people in.
The metaphor that is dominating now is warfare.
The metaphor that is taken over is conquest.
And so, now people are not thinking in terms of, oh, I need to go and persuade my neighbors.
But now, if they're thinking, my neighbors are filled with demons.
And there's no persuading them until I get rid of the demons.
Lance Wallnau literally said this a couple months ago where he said, it was on his Flashpoint show that we talk about in Charismatic Revival Theory.
He said, we're coming to the point in this election where you can't even hear people on the left speaking anymore because it's just the demons speaking through them.
Right?
If that is your mentality, then you see American politics as an arena of warfare, as an arena of combat.
And again, some of these metaphors have been around.
It's always been kind of a minor chord in evangelical political mobilization.
But as you've had this, what I call the charismatization of right-wing politics, as you've had the spiritual warfare language, these apostles and prophets paradigms, These way, the seven mountains, as you've had these ideas get infused into broader evangelicalism, and we can see in the survey, even beyond evangelicalism, they build up the right wing and given it a sort of lingua franca of warfare that also has this pleasant veneer of Christianity.
Of love and peace and kindness.
That we love our neighbors.
We just hate the demons that fill them.
And so we must displace the demons.
We must organize campaigns to take over the country so that we can liberate our fellow human beings from their demonic oppressors and get them all to agree with us.
And that is just anti-pluralism at the very core.
Because you are not tolerating or accepting the validity of any worldview other than your own.
And you're saying anyone who holds a different worldview, anyone who has different values, even anyone who's coming from a different religious perspective, well, they just need to get in line.
Because I ultimately have the truth, and I am going to liberate them through warfare.
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 summed it up, and I don't want to miss this for people.
I'm always trying to find ways for people to just really distill this in their mind, and you summed it up from, we went from having to be inviting as Christians so that we might persuade you to accept Jesus.
We went from invitation to warfare.
And there it is.
One more point on this before we move on is the first question in the survey.
The Greek word ekklesia, which is often translated as church, actually means ruling body government in the world.
Now, only 43% agreed with this only, so it's nearly half.
But still, This is a place where I think we can see that invitation warfare paradigm shift because I remember being in college and reading a book by Rodney Stark about the church being a kind of counter-cultural, missional entity in the world.
Hey, we're going to stick out.
And we've talked about this before as well.
1998, 2004.
The mood is, we're not like the world and that's cool.
Let's dig into us being different as the ecclesia, as the church.
Now it is, the church is a ruling body.
It is the thing that should dominate the world.
And I just think there's also a window into the shift you're discussing in a way that to me is frightening, even if this is the question where the fewest amount of folks affirmed, you know, that this is what they believe.
Yeah, and I'll just say that this was the only question out of the seven that we got less than 50% of self-identified vandals, so we got 43%.
That would have been high in my initial expectations for any of these questions.
And so I have a couple of theories on why this one didn't get quite as much.
So if you listen back in episode five of Charismatic Revival Theory, we go through the history of this, and I was even talking to somebody Who was at Dutch Sheets Church in Colorado Springs in the 2000s and remembers when Dutch Sheets first started having this idea, claiming it was a revelation.
This is an NAR idea that originates particularly out of Dutch Sheets and his theology, his sense of American politics.
And it's become, this is very widespread.
You hear Sean Foyd, a lot of people using this language of the, we're the real government of the world, or the apostolic government of the world.
But the idea that this has spread so far, and yet I actually think that part of the reason this one didn't get over 50% is that normie evangelicals, kind of lay evangelicals, get scared when they are asked to translate Greek.
And so, the question, as we framed it, has a Greek word in it and says this is the right interpretation of this Greek word.
It's a crazy interpretation of that Greek word, by the way.
I mean, Dutch Sheets is way out on a limb, exegetically, hermeneutically.
I cannot find a single Bible scholar who has ever agreed with Dutch Sheets on this.
But the idea that 43% of evangelicals have followed him down that road, even though you cannot find a single mainstream, even evangelical interpreter who backs this up, says something about What is evangelicalism anymore?
Is it an intellectual biblical movement that is rooted in biblical exegesis and that has kind of these mainstays of biblical interpretation?
Or is it a prophecy and spiritual warfare movement with a little bit of a layer of Bible left?
Yeah, interesting.
I'm sure Dutch is really self-reflective about the fact that no Bible scholars agree with him.
He's probably taking that to heart, thinking through his interpretation, going back to his Greek.
No, he's not doing any of that.
All right.
Let's move to something else that I think follows right along with what you're talking about here with the kind of warfare paradigm and a change in mood, a change in tone, and the spread of all of that.
And that is something from Cindy Jacobs about what is coming in the next season here for the entire globe.
That there's war, there's a need for a warfare president, and that's because we're probably staring down something like a global caliphate.
What is Cindy Jacobs talking about and how does that pertain to global politics and United States politics?
So this happened just a few weeks ago, in April.
Cindy Jacobs put a big new video on YouTube, and she called it a prophetic briefing.
And it was about an hour long video, but it starts off with her issuing a prophecy.
And if you've forgotten, Cindy Jacobs was Peter Wagner's right-hand prophet.
I mean, she was the one who really introduced him to a lot of these spiritual warfare ideas.
She worked alongside Peter Wagner to popularize these ideas with the 1040 Window campaign in the 1990s.
And then as the NAR started kicking off in the late 1990s, she was right there with Peter Wagner.
And so she is probably one of the most recognizable prophets in the world.
Maybe the most.
I mean, she has incredible reach, meets with world leaders all the time.
And so Cindy Jacobs issues this prophecy.
It's a very tearful prophecy.
I mean, like, Not to get into the weeds, but I think you have to think about these people as actually believing it.
To understand how they approach this, I know there are a lot of cynical people who are like, oh, it's all just made up.
It's all a show.
I've interviewed a lot of these people.
They really believe this stuff.
But anyway, Cindy Jacobs comes forward with this prophecy, and she uses the campus protests around the war in Gaza as a springboard.
To say, I have a prophecy that what is really going on behind these protests is an insurrection.
She uses that term.
And Cindy Jacobs was there at the Capitol on January 6th, but she's pointing the finger at Muslims and saying, what's really behind this is an attempt at an insurrection, not just against the United States, but against all Western nations.
The U.S.
and Canada and Europe and all of these spaces.
Muslims are mobilizing to try to take over the governments.
Now mind you, in the United States, Muslims make up about one and a half percent of the U.S.
population.
Christians, depending on how the question gets asked and which survey you're looking at, make up about 62 to 67 percent of the U.S.
population.
Right, so she's pointing the finger at a tiny religious minority who are protesting, yes, they're protesting against a perceived grave injustice and potential genocide, and she's saying, but the real plot here is an insurrection against our government.
And she says in this video, it's not actually part of the prophecy itself, but she then plays host and invites these other prophets from her circle on to kind of comment on this prophecy that she's given.
And at one point in her own commentary, she says, I'm not saying that all Muslims are plotting to take over our government, but you have to understand that there is a demographic jihad And they are having more and more children so that they can take over societies.
And they have a mandate to do that from the Quran.
Now, this is just textbook Islamophobia, textbook far-right talking points that are used in Europe, that are used in the U.S., in these far-right circles to demonize Muslims, and literally demonize Muslims, and say that Muslims are a threat, even though they're a tiny minority community.
And Brad, my first book is on the American Muslim community and about how particular groups within the American Muslim community navigated the post 9-11 context.
And the story of the American Muslim community post 9-11 is a story of incredible, beautiful integration into pluralism.
And the American Muslim community has done an incredible, amazing job of finding ways to de-radicalize people on the fringe who in the lead up to 9-11 might have been sympathetic with Al-Qaeda and really to create a normalized structure of integration and patriotism. amazing job of finding ways to de-radicalize people on the Yeah.
And it's a beautiful story.
It's an incredible story.
And here, Cindy Jacobs is using the presence of Muslims in America, the existence of these protests, to basically castigate all of them with this prophecy.
And she elaborates and says, it's actually centered in this global caliphate that is growing, is centered in Iran, and they have Syria and Yemen and Lebanon all aligned with them, and the rest of the Gulf states and the Muslim world is going to fall in line.
And again, if you know anything about Islam, this is bizarre.
This is so wild.
She's talking about the Shiite states.
Shiites make up about 10 to 15% of all Muslims, right?
And yeah, they're very concentrated in Iran, but the idea that all of these Sunni states are going to just fall in line with the Iranian caliphate when the Iranian government He tries to attack Israel with 300 plus rockets and drones, and as far as I can tell, not one of them really lands or does much damage.
But this is going to become this global empire that all of the Muslim world is going to unite around?
I mean, this is fantasy in terms of geopolitics, but it is not about geopolitics.
It is about Putting this fear, injecting this fear into especially American Christians.
I mean, it's directed at other countries as well, but it's especially, this is about injecting fear into American Christians.
Muslims are the enemy.
Muslims are going to take over.
We need to take over to stop the Muslims.
I think on first blush, it's just really worth noticing something that I think you've already noticed, but I just want to stop and say, This is one of those times when the New Apostolic Reformation does not seem wacky.
It doesn't seem like something I've never heard before.
You know, if you listen to Charismatic Revival of Fury Friends and you heard the story of casting out a demon from Mount Everest, Probably a moment when you were on a jog or doing the dishes and you were like, what?
Okay, that happened.
That's a thing.
That's weird.
That's not something normal.
What Cindy Jacobs is repeating, Matt, and I just want to reiterate a point you've already made, this is just standard Islamophobic, American, xenophobic rhetoric.
There's nothing innovative here.
So you're telling me that you're taking an event in the country and you're using that to extract out the idea of Great Replacement, number one, and then of all the governments in Europe and the United States being toppled by the scary Arab, brown, Muslim people.
It is textbook.
And it's just one of those moments where you can see this thing we call Christian nationalism, we can call it Christian supremacy, depending on the context and who's talking and how they're talking, as really in many ways a shield and a tent for Xenophobic rhetoric, racist rhetoric, and so on.
I mean, you know, I think you and I have talked enough for you to know that I understand the complexities of all this and charismatic revival fear, the whole thing, that there are moments of moving parts and various kinds of dynamics that all have to be taken into account.
We can't reduce things to this.
I totally get it.
When you hear Sidney Jacobs talk in this time, I mean, come on, you know, I'm happy for you to correct me here, but this is just stuff that I might've heard right after 9-11 from a xenophobic shock talk radio guy.
This is something I might hear from just dude down the street at the barbecue who's repeating what he heard on Fox News.
There's nothing seemingly innovative about this when it comes to NAR except for the veneer of prophecy and it coming directly from God.
Yes, I agree with you that in terms of the ideas behind this and tells you something about Cindy Jacobs and her fellows media diet that because I again I think she really believes that this is a prophecy but you're just hearing Tucker Carlson talking points but she but what is new here and what I do want to call attention to because I think it means something within the charismatic world
Thanks for listening to the first half of this inaugural episode of NARWATCH, our monthly sit-down with Dr. Matthew Taylor on everything related to the New Apostolic Reformation.
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