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Oct. 31, 2024 - Straight White American Jesus
48:46
Spirit & Power Episode 6: Election Predictions for November 5th (and beyond)

Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus content most Mondays, bonus episodes every month, ad-free listening, access to the entire 700-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/ Los Angeles Event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1027970416187?aff=oddtdtcreator San Diego Event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1030505227877?aff=oddtdtcreator In this episode of Spirit & Power: “Election Predictions for November 5th (and beyond)’” Dr. Leah Payne is joined by Elle Hardy, an independent journalist who has followed the neo-charismatic movement around the globe and documented it in her book, Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity is Taking Over the World, and returning guests Dr. Flavio Hickel Jr., Dr. Erica Bryand Ramirez, and Karrie Gaspard-Hogewood. Less than a week away from a highly anticipated election day, how will charismatics and Pentecostals in the United States make their voices known on November 5th and in the days that follow? This week’s guests make their 2024 election predictions. Resources & Links: Flavio Hickle Jr.  Born-again Christians are less Southern Baptist than they used to be Some Latinos say immigrants hurt their social status, research shows “The Future of “Born-Again Evangelicalism” Is Charismatic and Pentecostal,” Fanhao Nie, Ph.D., Flavio Rogerio Hickel Jr., Leah Payne, Tarah Williams, Ph.D. for the Public Religion Research Institute Erica Ramirez The Christian sect that has always cheered on Donald Trump  Church-Hopping In Texas The real ghouls? The Evangelical Voter  Elle Hardy Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over the World Demons be gone: meeting America’s new exorcists Australian Christian group fights claim it was linked to leader of Kenya starvation massacre doomsday cult The Right-Wing Christian Sect Plotting a Political Takeover The Sexual Abuse Scandal That’s Engulfed the Evangelical Movement The Global Rise of Narco-Pentecostalism    Leah Payne The Trump Shall Sound: Politics, Pentecostals, and the Shofar at the Capitol Riots President Trump’s Hidden Religious Base: Pentecostal-charismatic Celebrities with Erica Ramirez God Gave Rock and Roll to You: a History of Contemporary Christian Music  Karrie Gaspard-Hogewood Analysis in The Guardian, the Washington Post, and Religion News Service. Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163 Check out BetterHelp and use my code SWA for a great deal: www.betterhelp.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Axis Mundi Axis Mundi The 2024 elections are upon us, y'all.
And no matter what happens, there's going to be a lot to process and a next chapter to prepare for.
That's why we're holding two live events in order to help you stay informed about what's happening and to get ready for what's coming.
On November 21st, we're holding an event with Americans United for Separation of Church and State at the University of Southern California.
We have an illustrious group of leaders and scholars, including Andrew Seidel, Rachel Lazar, Kyate Joshi, Diane Winston, and Dan Miller.
We're going to talk about what happened and prepare for what's next.
On November 22nd, we'll be talking about Christian extremism and the 2024 elections at the San Diego Convention Center.
Matt Taylor will be giving opening remarks, and we'll have a roundtable with familiar faces like Leah Payne and Lloyd Barba, not to mention me and Dan, and a few others.
Tickets are available now, and you can find everything in the show notes.
You can also watch online if you can't be in L.A. or San Diego.
November 21 and November 22.
Two chances to be with us at Straight White American Jesus and a number of other great scholars and leaders.
Join us in person or online.
I'm Leah Payne, a historian and expert in Pentecostal and charismatic movements in the United States a historian and expert in Pentecostal and charismatic movements in the United
Welcome to Spirit and Power, a podcast that delves into the intersection of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity and American politics in these pivotal days leading up to the election.
As we stand less than a week away from a highly anticipated election day, we are focusing on the role that Charismatic and Pentecostal communities play in shaping the cultural, social, and political landscape of the nation.
This week, Spirit and Power election predictions for November 5th and beyond.
I'm happy to welcome several extraordinary guests who study the growing influence of global Charismatic and Pentecostal Christianities I'm Elle Hardy.
I'm a journalist and author who has written a book about the global Pentecostal movement and continues to follow the religious right in the United States and around the world.
Elle Hardy's book, Beyond Belief, How Pentecostal Christianity is Taking Over the World, explores the transnational networks of Pentecostal movements.
I'm Erica Ramirez.
I'm a sociologist of religion who focuses on global Pentecostalisms.
I've recently completed research in Brazil and I have written about Pentecostals for outlets like the Washington Post and Religion News Service.
Erica Ramirez explores how charismatic and Pentecostal Christians imagine the body politic and how they have shaped and will shape evangelicalism in the 21st century.
I'm Flavio Vickle, Jr.
I'm an assistant professor of political science at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.
I was also a fellow with the Public Religion Research Institute for the past two years where I was doing a lot of research on Latino political attitudes and charismatics.
Flavio Hickel has developed groundbreaking methods for measuring and tracking Pentecostal and charismatic movements in the United States.
I am Carrie Gaspard-Hogwood.
I'm a doctoral fellow in sociology at Tulane University, and I study neo-charismatics and political mobilization.
Carrie Gaspard-Hogwood has been tracking neo-charismatics on the far right and studying how they are hoping to promote the candidacy of Donald Trump in 2024.
Thank you all for being here, Elle.
I wonder if you could share with us what your predictions are about the international charismatic and Pentecostal conversation about the U.S. election.
What are you expecting to hear in the United States and outside the United States?
One thing that I think will be quite prominent in the aftermath from the election, no matter who wins, is the concept of reverse evangelism.
For a long time, the United States has exported a lot of its ideas around the world.
But these days, the weight and the energy of so much of the Christian world is in the developing world.
And a lot of countries and networks and groups are trying to return evangelism to United States and parts of the West.
And so what we're seeing in a lot of these places is them looking at somewhere like the United States, particularly when it comes to areas around gay marriage, around gender and identity expressions and saying, you guys brought us the word and now look at what's happening to your country.
You've gone so liberal.
You're letting all these crazy ideas in and we're going to help you come back to Jesus, come back to the Bible as we understand it.
So one case in point is It's the Don't Mess With Our Kids movement, which has been having mass marches all around the United States.
That actually started with an activist in Peru, Christian Rosas, who is the son of an evangelical pastor and who actually came to the United States and studied at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.
He has been very active in very far-right politics in the country.
He's very closely associated with the mining lobby.
And a number of conservative leaders who have perhaps not taken defeat so well as we keep seeing these patterns recurring.
And he began the movement in 2016 and he helped to export that particularly to Brazil and Argentina.
But it's really found a voice in the West when he merged forces with Jenny Donnelly, who is a charismatic Preacher in Portland.
He is a father of three children with one baby on the way.
We love that.
And he is a follower of Jesus Christ and committed to defend Christianity in the political realm.
I want you to welcome with us Christian Rosas.
Thank you for joining us all the way from Lima, Peru.
Are you in Lima right now, Christian?
Yes, I'm in Lima.
It's good to hear from you, Jenny.
Good to see you, Shana.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for inviting me over to share about this great movement.
Don't mess with our kids.
You know, it was a couple of years ago in Peru when the parents gather up together and said, this is enough.
Why?
Because they were inducing our children to question who they were.
And then they were trying to manipulate their natural growth and natural development by lying to them straight up and saying that they could be something that they cannot, which is to personify a different sex, you know, and to create a different identity, which is just in your mind, you know.
And her voice movement has combined the don't mess with our kids message, which is It's very social media friendly.
It's very active in online spaces.
I think to a lot of outsiders, it can look quite unthreatening.
It can bring in a coalition of concerned mums and parents that may not necessarily be so keen on such a diehard Christian message.
And it's getting them to rallies around the country in state houses a few weeks ago in the capital.
Representing the nation of Brazil, raise your hand!
I'm here today, and I'm here for Taiwan,
And today, I stand as an Esther on behalf of my people, the rainbow people, for those who are still trapped in the LGBTQ.
And it's really starting to key in on different networks who might not always have been so politically active.
It's giving people just social media places to coalesce, names and addresses, and it's really helping them to mobilise within the United States, but also start speaking to the greater movement, and particularly in the Americas, which hasn't always been such a And a point of inspiration, I suppose, for American evangelicals, but it's very much something that we're starting to see more and more.
I'm so glad that you brought up Jenny Donnelly in particular, and we could have a whole other podcast about the fact that she's from Portland.
I think there's this mistaken idea that this kind of conservatism might thrive best, for example, in the American South or something like that.
But actually, these very liberal cities have a long history of producing Very conservative responses to that.
Erica, I wonder if you could give us your thoughts on what do you think we should be looking for in terms of how Charismatics and Pentecostals will be behaving over the next week.
I couldn't agree more with Elle's observations and it brought to mind some ready continuities between the kinds of rhetoric that Elle is pointing to, for instance, don't mess with our kids.
Is that right, Elle?
to, for instance, the strategies of the Trump campaign, which are definitely mobilizing charismatics.
Not that they had so much work to do.
There's an established base there.
So it's really their base to lose, the Trump campaign's base to lose.
But let's look at a symmetry or an extension of what Ella's saying in the figure of Lake and Riley.
So you may be familiar with how the Trump campaign uses the story of a young woman who was victimized.
I think she was murdered by the way the campaign tells it by an illegal immigrant who might have been stopped at the border, but was also possibly let go by, as they put it, the Harris administration.
right?
So they make Kamala Harris directly responsible for the events that led up to Lakin Riley's death.
She was a beautiful young woman.
She was a great person, best nursing student there was.
I spoke to her parents yesterday.
They're incredible people.
They're devastated beyond belief.
But she was beautiful, just so beautiful in so many ways and brutally assaulted, horrifically beaten, kidnapped and savagely murdered.
The monster that's charged in the death is an illegal alien migrant who was led into our country and released into our communities by crooked Joe Biden.
He's crooked.
I took the name away from Hillary.
That is all a crystallization.
It's a narrative that activates the charismatic imagination around the border and chaos and lawlessness and crime all falling on the head of one young woman who was not protected, right?
A person that needed protection who did not get protection.
I think one way that charismatics are dialed in and activated by the Trump campaign is to say there's crime at the border.
And it needs to be stopped for the benefit of young victims, right?
So they'll rehearse like a list of young victims, but none of them is more, I think, prominent than Lake and Riley.
I would like to offer up that these terms are so well set, the landscape is so well set by the Trump campaign, that The Harris campaign is having to attempt to vocalize themselves as motivated by the same kinds of parental concern.
For instance, at the recent Houston gathering for Harris that featured, of all people, Beyonce Knowles to motivate Texas voters, she said she took the stage and said she is not there as a celebrity.
I'm not here as a celebrity.
I'm not here as a politician.
I'm here as a mother.
A mother who cares deeply about the world my children and all of our children live in.
A world where we have the freedom to control our bodies.
She was there as a mother.
Who was interested in what kind of future her daughters would have in the U.S. And by that she meant what kinds of access they might have to reproductive healthcare.
Now, where differences emerge is Obviously, conservatives and charismatics in particular are not particularly interested in reproductive health care as the good that they want for their daughters.
But insofar as the Trump campaign has positioned themselves as out here for the protection of children, so too is the Harris administration also trying to position itself as in it for the good of children.
As you were talking about that framing of children, I was thinking about something, Elle, that you said about Jenny Donnelly and branding.
And it's very pro-level branding, the Don't Mess With Our Kids.
There are t-shirts.
There are All kinds of social media friendly pieces of merchandise.
Elle, our listeners may be familiar with your work on Hillsong and another group that's really excellent at branding and media.
And I'm wondering, have you noticed anything about how Charismatics and Pentecostals are participating with the Trump campaign and messaging when it comes to branding and social media?
Certainly since the 2020 election, Charismatics have...
We've been very, very good at doing social media and historically there's just something that the Pentecostals and Charismatics from day one have been really, really great at capturing the zeitgeist, at capturing new media.
You know, you think of Amy Semple McPherson was able to capture radio and was the proto-televangelist way before political figures were doing it.
So there has always been that crossover and certainly since the pandemic, The fact that so many places of worship had to go online and it really favoured places with, to use a political term, who already had a good ground game, who already had the infrastructure in place, who had the cameras, who had preachers who just knew how to perform to camera instead of an audience.
They're two different skills.
And so there has been a real migration online.
I think that, yeah, we can probably talk about some figures of attendances dropping and perhaps, you know, your mum and pop churches closing as people migrate towards big box churches that have this infrastructure set up.
So it all feeds into this ecosystem of having that really strong social media presence, of having a merch store, of just having places to buy stuff and to really put your branding out there.
And obviously, as leaders of these churches and organizations who are involved in this ecosystem or this economy, they do like to stand out.
And so they are getting very clear, defined messages and And also really trying to, really just appealing to neoliberal incentives, which is to look as non-threatening as possible, to be open to a broad base.
That's why we're seeing, I think, a lot of churches increasingly call themselves non-denominational, because you don't necessarily want to say that, oh, we're Southern Baptists or we're Pentecostal.
We want to open ourselves up to as broad a group of people as possible who can get on board with our particular message.
So that's why I think We really have seen last election and now this election, just how good a lot of these very active groups are on social media.
And one other thing I think, which is very frustrating from a journalistic point of view, something like Don't Mess With Our Kids are at constant pains to point out how grassroots they are, which normally sets off a lot of alarm bells.
And someone like Christian Rosas, who has been very clearly keyed into American evangelical networks for quite a long time, And when a group like someone like Jenny Donnelly, no one has really been able to crack her background.
She's independently wealthy from what appears to be a multi-level marketing business, but she just came off the scene from nowhere.
And so it's really hard to understand because so many churches and non-profits are able to make their funding quite opaque, but it does seem It does raise concerns or at the very least eyebrows when you see these groups emerge from nowhere with fantastic design and branding and sort of ready-to-go followings and have a real organisation that It's interesting because she's
in my area, and I've been following her for quite some time.
Before she got a media-friendly glow-up and became a nationally known figure, her organization Tetelestai Ministries purchased Crestview Manor, which had been a Pentecostal church camp, a four-square church camp to be exact.
For decades and according to Oregon property records, it was sold for $2,950,000 in 2019.
I appreciate how you're bringing up that lack of transparency because Donnelly's kind of a mysterious figure.
Driving me crazy.
I've spent a few weeks trying to look into it and I know other people have too and you just kind of get to dead ends and go around in circles.
I love a good mystery like that.
Okay, well, I'll trust you to solve it.
But Flavio, I wonder if you could just weigh in on some of the things that you'll be looking for heading into the 2024.
I'm saying heading into, what I'm saying is next week.
What are things that we should be looking for next week?
I don't know if there's anything we can look into, right?
The race is so close.
It's margin of error as everyone's been reporting.
So I think what we're going to be doing is trying to look after, right?
Or after the fact, trying to understand what has transpired.
And a lot of that's going to depend on the quality of exit polling.
So after people have voted, they speak to survey researchers and asking them how they voted, getting some basic demographic information.
These have been done for a long time.
Some of them are better than others, but historically, there's been a lot of criticism of exit polling for marginalized communities, Latinos in particular.
And so there's a lot of people in the subfield that question whether Trump has ever broken 30% for his head.
All those caveats being said, I'd be interested in looking at what did the exit polls show us about how people are voting, who's turning out.
In particular, I would love in a dream scenario to know more about the religious affiliation of Latino voters to get a sense of how are they breaking, in particular, sort of non-Catholic Christians.
Are they We assume, I think that they will behave, you know, as we're assuming a lot of white non-Christian or non-Catholic Christians will be supporting Trump.
Here we're thinking about evangelicals, charismatics, not that many mainline Protestants within the Latino communities, but I'd be interested to see If they are going disproportionately for Trump, as an indicator that religion is guiding their vote more than we might see in other groups.
Historically, we're expecting about 35% of Latinos to probably go for Trump.
Historically, Latinos have gone for Republicans at around the 30% mark, between 30 and 40.
We've been documenting a growth of charismatic practices within the Latino community, a growth in evangelicalism.
So I guess all this is to say, I'm looking for some evidence to indicate that's having a political impact.
In the limited work that we've done with PRI and afterwards, we haven't seen that Latino charismatics are having any less of a Latino identity.
But they do seem to support Trump and support Christian nationalism in stronger numbers.
So, trying to get a sense of whether that's, again, whether there were legislatures having a closed web pipe.
One thing that I learned from you that I should have known, but it didn't really dawn on me until we were doing it, which is that polling and stats, all of this depends on money.
It's been a new thing to get people to even spend time and money thinking about Charismatics and Pentecostals.
So if you have unlimited resources, what would you ask people leaving the polls that would help you get that information?
Maybe somebody's already doing it, but not to my knowledge.
No, I don't think anyone's going to be doing it because people are not paying enough attention to charismatics.
People don't understand how charismatics may differ from evangelicals.
And so people that are designing these surveys, it doesn't even occur to them that they should be distinguishing within the evangelical community.
And that's our argument, right?
That we're lumping all these people together into evangelical born again, but there is a difference between evangelical and charismatics.
So we're not going to get this data, unfortunately.
I would ask the same questions that me and you have developed for PRI, which are tapping into, do you worship in a space where they are engaging in these quintessential charismatic Pentecostal practices, speaking in tongue, divine healing, prophecy, the spirit moving you to action, these kind of things.
I'd be interested not just in how that's affecting Latino voters, but also white voters and also black voters as we've done work with Dr.
Delgado on black charismatics.
And we know that some of the strongest growth is happening among, you know, black voters kind of thing.
That would be the dream scenario.
Unfortunately, we're not going to get it.
Hopefully, as scholars continue to publish in this area, maybe that will break through.
And with enough time, it'll break through into what these exit poll people are doing.
If we have a fairy godmother, fairy godfather listener who wants to fund excellent work, now you know who to talk to.
Carrie, I know you've done a lot of listening and observing at some of the key gatherings in the far right and charismatic world.
And I wonder, what are you expecting to see?
You've been listening to them talk about, quote unquote, grassroots organizing.
Elle, I appreciate you putting an asterisk.
By that.
So what are you hearing?
What will these groups be doing to organize in the next week?
Studying this stuff from a social movement's perspective, a lot of the groups share a specific goal, but not necessarily specific tactics, or they're not motivated by the same things, right?
So my big question is looking at these neo-charismatic groups of how much is this spiritual warfare narrative mobilizing people politically, as opposed to just maybe saying something, if you think of like your non-charismatic traditional right, Saying things like, oh, it's just sinful or it's against the Bible or something like that.
I have lots of questions about that.
To the grassroots point, I think they go to great lengths.
Really kind of promote this idea of grassroots and the mama bears and things like that.
But this is so top down.
You look at the Courage Tour and it's just to gather good Christians to have courage to stand up for what's right and vote in the election.
And I mean, this is funded by AFPI and it's well coordinated.
The America First Policy Institute, AFPI, And so I take a lot of issue with any kind of grassroots mobilization effort.
Jenny Donnelly has an app.
All the merch.
This is not something that just her and a friend developed in her basement on a Tuesday night.
So with all that said, I'm looking for the strategy of just throwing the spaghetti against the wall and seeing what sticks.
Because there are different organizations involved in this.
I've been getting a lot more emails from the Lion of Judah organization.
They're trying to Create election deniers who are paid poll workers and to put those people in that type of position.
And in their training manuals even say to contact the organization first before you contact election officials to talk about any kind of suspicion of fraud.
And so I think it's just going to be this whole chaotic thing that happens between very high-level legal strategies to poll workers pulling out things that are suspicious.
I think it's just going to be a whole, just what sticks.
Erica, I was just thinking about an article that you wrote about charismatic evangelicals as ghoulish, I think.
Tis the season.
This episode will air on Halloween.
Whether or not it has grassroots And organizing, it certainly has grassroots appeal.
These types of ideas are appealing to a broad set of Charismatics and Pentecostals.
I'd love for you to talk us through that.
That's super right.
Some of the best people at gauging audience receptivity are going to be people who organize events like this, because when you're in a non-denominational setting, you have literally zero guarantee.
That the people who are involved this week will be involved next week.
I've been thinking about this a lot.
I've been studying megachurches in my area, of which there are eight within a 20-minute range of where I live.
Texas, wow.
When you keep wondering, how do I know that we're not double-counting people?
Because it's super easy to go from one megachurch to another.
It's kind of seamless what's on offer there.
That being said, people who organize for this kind of Hard to retain and keep audience are going to be super sensitive about what they put their money and effort into.
They're going to be What appeals to Pentecostal and Charismatic audiences?
And how will that shape Charismatic and Pentecostal voting turnout?
Stay with us for more.
So what's scary in Pentecostalism has been always what's scary in Pentecostalism.
Which is the corruption of our government by malign forces in Pentecostal parlance.
For a long time, this has been the Antichrist or forces that will give rise to the Antichrist.
Again, Erica Ramirez.
And it's a cyclical event for a charismatic or Pentecostal congregation to go through a period of thinking.
They see one or another Event as a run-up to the appearance or emergence of the Antichrist.
She is the devil, whoever screamed that out.
She is the Antichrist.
So look no further than the war in Palestine to see this has activated Pentecostal and Pentecostal adjacent imaginations about being in the end times.
My favorite way for identifying when a congregation is In a scary mode or scared mode is when there's a lot of thinking about the mark of the beast.
This is the idea that you could accidentally have a chip placed inside your hand or some other part of your body that would make you scannable in the way you scan your groceries at the grocery store.
And I think what's particularly scary about this idea, the idea of being trackable by barcode or some adjacent technology, Is the idea that the body is so porous and so vulnerable, so that there are spiritual forces that acquire political power, and that your body is so vulnerable to being co-opted or being almost zombified.
So if you get the mark of the beast, and that's in Revelation, by the way, if you get the mark of the beast, then you might actually be part of the wrong, on the wrong side of apocalypse.
Apocalyptic history.
I think of stories, Leah and friends, like the book of Daniel, where they won't bend the knee to King Nebuchadnezzar, where the Hebrew children won't bend the knee, they won't eat the food that's meant for idols as the resistant body, the body that cannot be defiled.
By the worship of an idol or by malign political forces.
So in an election year, guys, where there's a lot of opportunity for malign political forces to do some underground maneuvering, look for Pentecostals and Charismatics to be especially charged around what could happen to your body.
Elle, I have no idea what you're going to say about this when I ask you, but I wonder about, you've done so much work outside the US. I'm curious about, Mark of the Beast seems like a universal Pentecostal fear, but I don't really know how it would be embodied elsewhere.
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Mark of the Beast is an idea that you really see it moving in online circles, and you can see people self-radicalizing.
You can almost Sometimes when I've traced particular people, you can see the rabbit holes that they've gone down in the dark hours on their phones, as we all have.
And certainly you can see these certain more extreme currents, such as Mark of the Beast, moving through Facebook groups and through different preachers.
And so you'll see pockets of people heavily influenced by William Branham in Kenya through a Facebook groups and WhatsApp groups.
William Branham was an influential American Pentecostal faith healer and preacher in the mid-20th century who helped launch the Healing Revival Movement, which significantly shaped Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity.
Among his worldwide followers, he was and is regarded as a modern-day prophet.
I sit in some Facebook groups just to keep an eye on things that will have tens to hundreds of thousands of people in them.
So people can really be getting their ideas from probably less conventional places than we're used to and can be a lot harder to trace as well.
And particularly these days, as people are more and more aware of their social media footprint, they're often closed groups, but can be really hard to see what circles people are spending time in.
And you can see strange ideas pop up in unusual places or someone like Branham, who just seems quite an anachronistic style of preacher, Being reformed and having relevance today influencing Paul McKenzie who is on trial in Kenya for the horrific starvation murders of 400 people out there.
So you really do see ideas drifting through in different places and nothing's linear.
Everything that can be old is new again.
I think probably the most potent global movement that we're seeing within Pentecostal and charismatic networks is spiritual warfare.
We're seeing That idea where conventionally someone may have possession or bad spirits within them, the spiritual warfare that Peter Wagner has really made popular is what he calls the third level, which is territorial or strategic level spiritual warfare.
That has become really potent, often to very dangerous ends, because it says that areas and institutions can be infected with demons.
We see opposition political parties.
We see red light districts.
We see abortion clinics.
We see LGBTQ friendly areas or gay clubs.
And these can be a place where people converge to do prayer walks.
And we've seen enough examples around the world and in the United States of how these things can become protests and how they can turn violent or they can be aggressive and scary for people who are on the other end of it.
We've seen a lot of spiritual warfare language in January 6 in the United States, January 8 in Brazil, also in the 2019 coup in Bolivia, in some of the political turmoil that we've seen in Peru, and even combining some of the different issues that we've seen in the United States.
So when Marjorie Taylor Greene was introducing a bill to ban gender-affirming care for trans children and teens in 2020, She started speaking in spiritual warfare terms.
She said, I think it shows we're in a true spiritual war in America and you can see that the attacks on me are proof of it.
We're seeing this idea that was once an empowering idea, I think, for a lot of people.
I'm sure most people that practice spiritual warfare do it in a very innocuous manner, but we're seeing how the language and the ideas around that are being used as dog whistles.
And often I think dog whistles that a lot of people who aren't so keyed into this world Probably don't really understand or think they sound fairly innocuous, but we're really seeing it turned by people.
I'm not especially certain of Marjorie Taylor Greene's piety, but people I think you might not really associate with traditional evangelical circles.
I believe she attends Andy Stanley's church in Atlanta and has been very vocal about that.
A colleague of mine, David Dark, is always trying to tag Andy Stanley to get him to discipline her publicly.
So far, it's been crickets.
To Erica's point about the non-denominational churches, one thing that I really take away from that, the opportunism associated with grabbing that particular term.
That term has cash value maybe in another era.
20 or 30 years ago, we would have been saying culture war, culture warriors, and people still use that word, but the spiritual war, spiritual warriors, seems to have a different resonance.
Erica, I have to tag you in right now to get your response.
You know, I think what's so interesting is the Mobius strip that Elle is showing us because, yes, we see the way that spiritual warfare is one way that I just described congregations becoming anxious and articulating their fears.
But once it spills out over into public life, it can become the place where charismatic themselves become the source of anxiety and fear in the wider public imagination.
So when I wrote that article about how Pentecostals are the real ghouls this election season, what I was trying to speak to there is the way that Pentecostals' cosmology with how they imagine the world works, which just saying spiritual warfare is the perfect distillation.
There are forces of good and evil.
Those forces are in and among us.
People who might look like normal people to the uninitiated might actually be agents of evil.
This is part of the whole idea, for instance, about QAnon and the deep state.
There are malign forces almost inhabiting people so that there really are people on the wrong side of salvation history.
I would just like to note before I pass this over to Flavio, because he looks like he has something to add, that when Marjorie Taylor Greene said, I am under spiritual attack, the line of sight there is still on the body.
Trans politics are usually on who can change or alter or intervene in their bodies.
So it is really interesting to see Marjorie Taylor Greene for her to say, I am being attacked because of my stance against trans politics.
She really is utilizing it in a way that shows she probably does go to church.
She is contending for the sacredness and tactness of certain bodies.
And in this case, usually children's bodies.
I am going to ask Flavio to weigh in here.
I had a couple thoughts from some of these comments.
The one from the most recent thing that Erica was just talking about, I can see, I do a lot of work studying how Latinos might overcome the sense that anti-immigration policies are anti-Latino, right?
And how do they get behind conservative candidates?
How do they even get behind anti-immigrant policies themselves?
And one thing that is occurring to me is, and I don't know if this is happening, but I could see the kind of rhetoric you're describing of spiritual warfare lending itself to characterizations of new immigrants as being in league or influenced by these bad spirits, bad actors, things like that.
Because one thing that, in the theorizing that I've done on a lot of this and the work I've done on it, is that You know, existing Latinos that immigrated further back in their family history or that themselves immigrated, they see themselves as very different from these newer immigrants.
And so I wonder if this is another line of argumentation that provides a permission structure to see themselves as different.
So I am wholly, I am on this path.
These newer immigrants are not.
They may even be agents of malign forces.
And this becomes another rationale for why I support restricted immigration policies.
I don't know if anyone's done any work on this.
I don't know if there's evidence of it in terms of how Latino congregants are getting these kind of messages tied to immigration or not, but that's what came to mind for me.
What I love about what you're doing now, Flavio, is basically just this is we're setting an agenda here.
This is what we all need to be studying.
Carrie, I wonder if you could comment on how spiritual warfare I think in these spaces,
spiritual warfare, and that's why I have a question about how actually mobilizing is it, because that's That's what's being told to these audiences that's needed.
And Ginny Donnelly actually goes as far as she always speaks about the air game and the ground game.
So the air game is prayer, spiritual warfare, and the ground game is voting and marching and protest and stuff.
It's all framed in this spiritual warfare narrative of the battle between good and evil.
And obviously, if God is not in control of one of these seven mountains, then it's under demonic control and we have to Wrestle the demon down and take control of that mountain.
That's how it's presented to audiences.
I like to call these folks grievance entrepreneurs because they figure out different things to point the audience toward to wage spiritual warfare against.
And we talked about it earlier, scapegoat communities tend to be the LGBTQ plus community in this election, immigrants as well.
And then we also see it just from your big There's neo-charismatic leaders talking about Kamala Harris in terms of Jezebel and the Jezebel spirit, which obviously has historically racial overtones and also important in spiritual warfare narratives.
I think that it's being used to attempt to mobilize people.
How mobilizing that is, I don't know.
Before we go, is there a person, persons, characters, or figures that you're watching throughout the Returns?
Anybody come to mind?
Carrie?
I would watch Lance Wall now because his hand is all over the AFPI effort.
And actually, there's a National Faith Advisory Board meeting this afternoon in Georgia, so any members of Trump's advisory board.
And folks specifically like Dutch Sheets and Cheyenne that were really instrumental last time, and especially Cheyenne in riling up the crowds on January 5th.
So I would definitely be paying attention to him.
Erica, what are you looking at heading into election day?
I'm going to be looking at exit polling out of Florida and Texas.
So while one of the questions is, while there are so many charismatics in non-denominational churches, it's kind of hard to know who and what is mobilizing them, including social media.
What we do know is that a certain salience of voters Is how electoral politics shapes our outcome.
So I think I'm looking at Hispanic voters in Florida, where I know there are plenty of charismatic churches, and Hispanic voters in Texas, where I know there are probably only 4% less charismatic megachurches, and seeing what their returns show.
Elle, does anyone come to mind for you?
I'll be watching who turns up at these sorts of events.
I try not to be in the prophetic marketplace myself, given I spend a lot of time writing about such people.
So I'm trying to keep an open mind.
But I think, unfortunately, we are in something of a race to the bottom since January 6.
And there are incentives to be the guy, to be the most extreme, to be the person who gives the speech, to give the guy who puts on the Viking hat and charges in.
Even though for a lot of these people they have wound up in jail, they still have got attention and that often leads to fundraising and being a martyr for the cause that is very appealing.
I think in the event of Uncertainty, which looks likely that the election won't be cleanly called on Wednesday or on Tuesday night.
So I think it's who's turning up?
What networks are they involved in?
I know that Teddy Wilson, who's a great reporter, has done a lot of work on the networks and how closely integrated they were with Pentecostal and charismatic circles, where people went to school, who's leading them, who's in their network.
As Carrie mentioned, Cheyenne is such an influential person and seeing who's flowing out of these networks and going back to some of the things we were talking about earlier, some of these preachers might be people from overseas.
We have seen a number of prominent, particularly women, female preachers and prophets in the United States, such as Paula White Kane.
Her spiritual father is a Ghanaian pastor.
So what ideas as well are coming in from overseas?
Who's going to turn up I think is the really interesting thing because I think unfortunately there are more incentives for people to be extreme this time.
I suspect we might see a few new figures emerge onto the stage as well as some old hands.
Flavio, anyone or anything come to mind?
Not particular people.
I do have one observation I had before speaking about turning out and everything.
The political scientist me is like to remind people that this is ultimately a turnout election, right?
We're 50-50.
It's going to be who gets their people out.
One of the things that really strikes me about the dynamics of this race is How behind the scenes religious organizing has been, at least in terms of the public campaigning.
All of the public campaigning has been, particularly from Trump, it's on immigration, the economies, all that kind of stuff.
He's really farmed out, like you guys did a great job talking about spiritual warfare.
He's really farmed that out.
To religious groups that already support him, these religious organizations, letting them take the lead.
So he hasn't had to really talk about culture wars or trans issues, areas where he might turn off other really important segments of the electorate that he needs, and he's letting them do it for him quietly in their own organizational efforts.
The big thing we've been watching as political scientists That study campaigns is that Trump has privatized this get-out-the-vote operation.
It's not really the Republican Party that's doing it.
It's Charlie Kirk with Turning Point and Elon Musk, and they're doing it.
And so the question is, is this going to work?
And particularly for Trump, who needs In order for him to win, he needs low propensity voters to actually turn out.
There's a lot of question marks about whether he's going to be able to do it with Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk.
But as we're talking about all this, I'm thinking we will do it.
These religious organizations, they have a proven track record.
They have the social media and marketing and branding know-how, and that might really be what he needs.
I don't know what evidence of this we're going to see per se, but I think that might be a really important factor in this race.
I think that's a really smart observation, perhaps part of a larger strategy that is moving that into different segments.
So for example, Melania Trump can come out with a very counterintuitive message about abortion.
I think the Trump campaign is hoping that all those things will go together.
All those people will come together and turn out.
As far as who I'm watching, I'm watching the social media account of Carrie Jobe, who is a very famous, globally famous worship leader who went to Elle's point about where these people went to school.
She went to Christ for the Nations in Dallas, to Erica's point about Texas Charismatics and Pentecostals, who I think is, in my mind, is a stand in for normie charismatic evangelicalism.
So she's very hesitant to make public statements about politics, but she was a very enthusiastic participant at Trump's White House.
And so I'm watching her as maybe a stand-in for that mainstream, megachurch, charismatic response that probably statistically will be overwhelmingly Republican, but will they support more extreme action?
I'm watching her social media pretty quickly.
Closely.
And then also La Guinha Church in Orlando, which is to Erica's point about Florida, which is an outpost church frequented by Jair and Michelle Bolsonaro in Brazil.
Thank you all so much for sharing your brilliance and your insights.
And I hope that I can check in with you again because I'm very curious to see what kind of world we'll be living in this time next week.
If you want more insights from this week's guests, you can find links to their work in today's notes.
You can find me at drleahpain.com and on most social media platforms at Dr.
Leah Payne.
Thanks for listening.
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