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In this episode of Spirit & Power: “Post Election Insights: What We Know One Day Later” Dr. Leah Payne is joined by returning analysts Dr. Dara Delgado, Dr. Erica Bryand Ramirez, journalist Sam Kestenbaum, and first-time guest Bishop Mark Chironna. 24 hours after Election Day, how did charismatics and Pentecostals in the United States make their voices known on November 5th? This week’s guests share their post-election thoughts.
For more analysis of transnational charismatic and Pentecostal networks:
God Gave Rock and Roll to You: a History of Contemporary Christian Music by Leah Payne, or join her at Candler School of Theology’s Summer Institute, May 21-23, which will explore the theme “Songs of the Spirit: Music and the Making of Global Pentecostalism.”
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AXIS MUNDY AXIS MUNDY 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 LA 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.
Welcome to Spirit and Power, a podcast that explores the intersections of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity and American public life.
I'm your host, Dr.
Leah Payne.
Today, we're bringing you a special post-election episode, recorded less than 24 hours after the polls closed on November 5th, with what appears to be a victory for Donald J. Trump in the 2024 presidential race.
In this episode, we've gathered a panel of experts who are familiar with Pentecostal and charismatic communities and the growing influence they have over American public life.
As we dive into this real-time discussion, you'll notice a more conversational tone, less editing, no audio clips, a few tangents, some inside baseball, and an unstructured flow.
We felt it was important to share our panelists' first impressions, responses, and insights into this evolving relationship between these Christian movements and the political landscape in the United States.
Thank you for joining us as we unpack this pivotal moment I want to welcome you all to introduce yourselves.
First up, Dara Colby Delgado.
I'm the James Mill Thurborn Chair of Religious Studies at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania.
I am Erica Ramirez.
I am Director of Research at Auburn Seminary.
I'm Sam Kastenbaum.
I am a journalist who covers religious life in America for newspapers and magazines.
I'm Bishop Mark Sharona, and I am the co-director of the Pentecostal House of Studies at United Theological Seminary.
Regular listeners will be familiar with Erica, Dara, and Sam, but Bishop Mark Sharona is new to Spirit and Power.
I asked him to join us because he has a long history with some of the most pivotal actors in the New Apostolic Reformation.
Mark Sharona has shared many stages and pulpits and television programs with figures like Lance Wallnau, and now is a voice of dissent in those communities.
Especially around issues of prophecy and the prophetic, and of course, around the figure of Donald Trump.
Thank you all so much.
We are recording less than 24 hours after the polls have closed on Election Day.
Sam, I wonder if you could tell us what you saw, what stood out to you about how figures like Lance Wallnau, maybe even Clay Clark, were experiencing Election Day.
Yeah, for sure.
I spent the afternoon and evening watching these media revivalists types who I've been spending time with in various capacities.
I was tuned in Lance Wallnau's live stream and Gene Bailey at Turning Point, Kenneth Copeland's ministry, and a few others, folks who I've, some of whom I've met in person, some of whom I know digitally.
And I was talking between that and More mainstream news outlets.
And a point that sort of clicked in my mind, there was a time when toggling between the two things, this highly charged political language, battleground states of watching the map go from red to blue, watching this sort of This general sports quality of how we watch, how we receive elections through our devices, how the consonants between the spiritual warfare language, it really clicked in a new way for me.
When someone's saying battleground, battleground, I wasn't sure who, which sort of stronghold are we talking about here?
Are we talking about a democratic stronghold or democratic stronghold?
On one hand, that's like kind of a simple aesthetic language, but it clicked a new way for me.
And I think that we Generally, Americans follow elections with this sort of battleground language already in the back of their mind.
So it struck me in this way.
As for Clay Clark, he runs Reawaken America Show, has officially closed the door on that chapter for now.
He's producing lots of rap music.
He was an aspiring MC back in the day, and he's putting out lots of music on his Rumble and Twitter and what have you.
He's actually a little bit on the outs of the Trump world right now in part because he has issues with Elon Musk and J.D. Vance and sees these people as part of a sort of technocratic elite.
The Courage Tour Lance was saying last night will continue going on, so I'll be curious to see what that looks like.
The past four years, we've been in a kind of election season.
These revival worship rallies have been going on since pandemic and prior to that.
That was really the genesis for a lot of these media ministry revival shows that I've written about.
Clay has turned his off for now and focusing on his would-be music career.
I will be curious to see where the Courage Tours go and what they look like in this official Trump era without the embattled impetus or embattled rhetoric of being on the outs of power.
I wonder about that, too, because so much of the entire reason for having them was to mount a challenge to the Biden presidency.
Some of the figures that you have been tracking were gathered last night, I believe, in Florida.
Is that?
Yeah.
And Erica, you and I had talked about Florida.
What do you gather from what we saw there last night?
Alia, thank you for inviting me on.
I think in the last time I visited Spirit Empower, I said I would be looking at Texas and Florida.
I said I'd be focused on their returns because of two factors that I keep close tabs on.
One, how do Latinos vote and in ways that shape our electoral politics?
Of course, we know Latinos are not a monolith.
They vote in various ways.
But where they form a sizable part of the electorate and have an outsized influence, I think, on our presidential election outcomes, Are clearly in communities in Florida and Texas who have big shares of electoral pie and have lots of Latinos in their electorate.
So something I'd like to point out is that while Trump won all battleground states, he actually won Texas and Florida by the widest margins, by 5% wider margins than other states.
So when I'm looking for the impact of charismatic groups, I look to the megachurches in Texas and Florida.
When I look for the influence of Latino voters, I also look to Texas and Florida.
And there we see a discernible story now of 5% wider margin for Donald Trump.
These close hours after the election, we've seen really energetic support for Trump in this electoral cycle, and we can safely prognosticate that's going to include Latino voters.
Dr.
Delgado, I wonder, the last time you talked to me on this podcast, we talked about megachurches, we talked about non-denominational megachurches, and we also talked about Black charismatic and Pentecostal practitioners and how they share a lot with other charismatics and Pentecostals.
They're politically, though, quite distinct, or at least historically they have been.
I wonder what stood out to you about yesterday.
Actually, if I can just elongate the story just a little bit, if we remember when Biden was getting ready to bow out, one of the last places he went was to a Black Pentecostal church, specifically Church of God in Christ.
Where did Harris go?
Last Sunday before election, right?
The Black Church of God in Christ.
And so one of the things I've been paying attention to throughout this entire process is the rise of Black Pentecostals in political activism, like actual political engagement.
And anyone can surf through either we win with Harris or we win with the Black Church or just my emails where I'm getting spammed by all of them.
Major personalities in Black Pentecostal and charismatic spaces have been actively involved in this process to date.
Before the election, you would find high-profile Black activists and political figures who identify with the Black charismatic tradition and maybe have some rootedness in Black Pentecostalism using language on social media like, my spirit is settled.
I seal it with a shando.
And anybody that knows good Pentecostalese, right, knows that is a colloquium for a glossolalia.
It's a tongue, right?
And so there was this sense of calm and confidence up until the night before and even the morning of.
So there was a quietness among Black Pentecostals and leading figures who identify with the charismatic Black charismatic tradition because there was a settled, And what ended up happening with that quiet, subtle feeling or sense and not really stirring too much because it was seemingly in the bag, if you will, especially with about 80 percent of the Black vote coming out in support of Harris.
And we already know from Pew Research's work that those many of that, much of that population identifies as having some affiliation with a Black charismatic or Pentecostal church, at least in expression, ritual practice or doctrine.
So something like what Dr.
Ramirez was naming with the Latino population that we can make some assertions about who's in and who's out in that particular.
But by the time we got to the evening, that Shondo had turned into something of a quiet intercessory thing.
Less activity in social media spaces.
And it wasn't until this morning that you would see a change in rhetoric.
We went from a settled in my spirit, Shondo, to a my hope is built on nothing less.
It went to a more kingdom rhetoric of I don't place any of my trust in the kingdoms of this world.
God is still in control.
So the prophetic language around Black Pentecostals and Charismanters, I'm noticing it in the last, not even 24 hours, has shifted to God's got this and now God's got us.
There's also been kind of prayers of comfort around the Democratic candidate where that her spirit not be disquiet.
It's a lot of spirit language.
But there seems to be, as I can see it right now, less of a clear rhetoric around spirituality and much more leaning in on maybe the racial identities and politics that's going on.
One group that has not been quiet would be groups affiliated with this sort of nebulous network, Pentecostal and Charismatic Practitioners, that is known as, branded as the New Apostolic Reformation.
I can't think of anyone who knows more about that movement.
And I wonder if you could talk about what you noticed.
Was there anything that surprised you or didn't surprise you about what you saw yesterday?
So, it's a great question.
It's an honor to be here with all of you.
I have been saying for months now, I have spent the entirety of my journey in ministry as a pastor integrating theology and psychology.
And my challenge and my concern has been that we don't do theology well because we don't reckon on psychology.
And we're calling theological issues are simply reactionary coping mechanisms to cover up our failure to discern where our own souls are, our fears, our anxieties, existential as they are, and the way those are not addressed within our circles.
So we end up masking all of those and projecting them into theological frameworks to justify Why we do what we do.
And I think we underestimate how rhetoric.
Words create feelings.
At a very simple level, words create feelings.
And when there are those who use words to demean and dehumanize, yet it speaks to something of a fear within people that feel like they're losing power, A lot of what goes on is punditeering in the name of thus saith the Lord.
And yet, because words create feelings, all you've got to do is thus says the Lord.
And in that community, it's going to be equally considered.
This is almost canonical.
And so, when we don't take heed to the psychological dynamics in play, we become blinded to the realities that may be underlying outcomes we didn't expect.
Coming back to Sam's original observation about battleground states, one of the first things I thought of when you were talking about how words create feelings was the spiritual warfare language.
You've been in this movement for a really long time.
You've seen...
Quite a migration of these terms in terms of their application, in terms of who's using them.
Where do you think this is going?
What's next for this group in your mind?
Okay, so again, if I take a psychological approach to this, when we double down out of a need to assert that we are right, it really doesn't matter what the other factors are that we're not paying attention to.
We have to reaffirm that even if there's a certain amount of cognitive dissonance that we have to live with.
We're in for a very rough ride for the next four years because all that may be happy right now for those that feel like everything's wonderful, even within the ranks of those who feel like they've been vindicated, there are a number of things that are going to come to the surface in normal political discourse that are going to reveal that politics is the art of compromise.
And with that, there are going to come all sorts of things where people that said, we were promised this, are going to discover government doesn't work like that.
It just never does, right?
Instability will reign for at least another four years and maybe settle down.
And so I don't see that diminishing.
I see a doubling down.
I see an intensifying.
What you're going to see is that this is going to be seen as a vindication that God is with us The danger, theologically, is we have two dynamics going on between a dispensational view of the future and a top-down, control-dominated, restorational view of the future where the kingdom is all now and we've got to reform the culture.
We have forgotten it's the church that needs to reform.
So the whole dominionism thing that entered into the charismatic renewal in the late 70s From all places, from R.J. Rushdooney in the late 1970s, the Institute for Biblical Law, became something that Charismatics grabbed onto,
and many of the leaders of the Pentecostal charismatic movement saw this as, this is our way forward, so we're already 50 years into a cycle, and unraveling this is going to take a while.
You've been observing how these ideas and practices, the prophecy and healing and deliverance in spiritual warfare, get worked out in a variety of contexts over the last few years.
Yeah.
I want to say one other thing about spiritual warfare, because...
On the one hand, so there are a number of deliverance ministers I follow and know, or have written about and follow here in Los Angeles where I live.
There's a deliverance minister here that I've written about, Catherine Crick, who runs a ministry in Los Angeles, who Like Shawn Floyd, like many of these folks, really had a boom during the pandemic outside revivals.
She's doing pop-up ministries in many ways that it looks a lot like other sort of anti-lockout ministries.
She has Really stayed away from anything, capital P politics in her, in her ministry.
And it doesn't mean that people who are going there aren't also going to the Reawaken show or going to go to the Sean Foy show and they're wearing the Let Us Worship sweatshirts.
So they are in this whole consolated mixture.
Katherine Crick has really kept her exorcisms happening, not on the territorial level, but in the personal, in the bodies of the people who are walking into her church, which she now has a brick and mortar church.
Someone like Greg Locke has tried to go from the macro back to the personal, but he, I think, is being lured back into that macro and it's never really far from what he does and really how he made his name.
But just to think that just that language of exorcism of deliverance for people within this universe can engage with that still on multiple levels.
That is, you can still see that as a thing that you are doing for your own body or for a loved one and not necessarily have to engage in this territorial level.
And it's notable that in this moment, there are people who are making a decision to not engage on that level, or in some cases to back away from that.
There was a big conference, the Breakers Conference, which Mike Signorelli, Jenny Weaver, other people who are in this sort of colloquial demon slayer ecosystem, that also just happened.
I know Charisma has relationships with many of those people, and I think livestreamed that event.
But that was not a territorial event happening.
That was very much training people up to do that sort of work.
So just to remind listeners, remind us that there's lots of practice still happening in the same sort of extended universe, but is not engaging in that territorial exorcism that is like animating these other ministries.
That's right.
And thank you for mentioning that.
One thing people who may be new to observing Charismatic and Pentecostal movements may not understand, based on the national coverage that they've been reading leading up to the election, is that Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianities are way, way bigger than networks like the New Apostolic Reformation, and their practices have much broader applicability than what we see in how far-right movements are operationalizing them in, for example, the MAGA movement.
So things like prophecy and deliverance can be used for big political ends, but they can also be used for everyday life or on a micro level, as you suggest, for discerning where to live or who to date or what job to apply for or to exercise demons of addiction or pursue healing for migraines or really and truly anything.
I'd love to hear your take, Sam, on figures who have received a lot of coverage on the far right, people you've written about, like Sean Foyt or Lance Wallnau.
How are they narrating Election Day?
It's a story of vindication.
Sean Foyt was one of the people who was at, who was in Florida, live streaming, really excited to be there.
I don't mean this in a demeaning way, but he really has such a sort of a camp counselor energy for me.
He has his guitar and he goes from place to place and he's kept Yeah, I think.
There was an at-hand story to tell, should it have gone either way?
And I think we saw how that story looked last time.
If it had split the other way, I think that they would have been prepared, Sean Foyt would have been prepared to tell a different sort of story about Them being embattled, because that is still part of the narrative.
It's quite collaborative.
I think Sean needs to see, we need to see how Alanis tells the story, how Sean tells the story.
If Clay's, not that these people are, they have all collaborated, but I think it's a story that's user-generated and told.
And I don't think there's one person dictating, now we're going to say Jay Hu, which Jonathan Cahn's been saying for years.
And Jonathan Cahn is also more integrated into the mix this time than it was last time of it.
Also a Charisma production himself.
And so I think it's collaborative and I think it's going to take still a couple days or weeks to see.
You know, Lance also is promising that he'll be part of religious liberty initiative in the White House.
I don't know.
What that means, and I don't know if that's what that would look like.
But I think the proximity to power and the bishop's point about compromise being a part of what politics mean, that'll be an interesting thing to watch.
That is, if the halls of power are really not as open as they seem to be in the drum up, I think that will change how they narrate that story.
I have wondered about that.
These figures Are claiming a very close proximity to Trump and his administration.
To my knowledge, they have not received the same warm welcome, say, RFK has received or the same promises to positions of power, but maybe that will happen.
Paula White was, I think, very influential in marshalling this group of folks.
Erika, I was watching you nod when Sam was talking about vindication, so I just have to get your take on what you think about that.
Yeah, you were noticing correctly.
I think that charismatic leader rhetoric has been pretty effective over the last eight years, and let me say why.
I think of initially many scholars who worked on what we call Pentecostal and charismatic religious traditions Early on thought of this particular tradition as oriented around compensation.
So some of the ideas that sounded at home with what Bishop Mark was saying.
These are people who see their influence in public life on like it's waning, right?
Or they're experiencing one or another kind of decline.
You could relate it to age or demographic salience, right?
Like how many, in this case, it would be how many white people are in the United States.
So people who study Pentecostals and Charismatics have for a long time thought about this religious tradition as one of compensation.
But I was thinking a lot about ritual action and how that's accompanied this discourse.
So Leah, you've written beautifully in Political Theology Network about the use of the shofar and the ritualizing power of that.
What does that symbolize?
How does that Create in charismatic watchers' imagination a next level of discourse, right?
right?
Not just, for instance, that America is and should be a Christian nation, which idea we're pretty aware of, but additionally now that there are words of prophecy, that there are songs, for instance, sung by Sean Foyt and others like him, or that there are ritual actions like shofars that can up or that there are ritual actions like shofars that can up the kind of power of this prophetic rhetoric, So there is the kind of garden variety Christian nationalist vision of the U.S., like it is and should be a Christian nation.
And now I'm thinking about the efficacy of Pentecostal and charismatic ritualized discourse.
So the addition of ritual action, which you've talked about through Awakened Tour, right?
So when you have the revival context and the ritualization of prophetic action, In this election, what we have seen is that makes Pentecostals and Charismatics not just people who sadly need some kind of compensation, but actually early adopters of a realignment in the electorate.
So that they just now seem to be having played the role of early adopters and enablers.
Trump, for instance, has been able to count on their support.
In a Teflon way, for the last seven and a half years, it's enabled him to actually create some sort of daylight, right?
So he softened, for instance, his stance on abortion.
And he could do that and still rely on this base.
So this base having gone in on Trump, Provided for him a stable, already prophetically anointed and ritualized campaign from which he could then deviate just slightly, creating some daylight and expanding his territories, to say it in a way that sounds analogous, expanding his territories to now capture some of the swayable vote.
This is a group whom early on scholars said were too heavenly minded to have any insight into their earthly interests.
Watching them lay claim to political goals and succeed in being early adopters and then enablers of a massive political realignment in American history.
More soon from our panel about Pentecostals and Charismatics as the early adopters of political realignment.
We don't have all day to have this conversation, but one of my soapbox issues as a scholar of Pentecostal and charismatic movements is that if you read early Pentecostal literature, oftentimes you will find people who are in fact deeply concerned with American public life, and they are very energized political actors.
Probably the biggest early political issue that captured their imagination was prohibition, which they supported with gusto.
But that wasn't the only one.
And it's a really big mistake to think that, A, just because they had a robust conception of heaven and the spiritual world, that they were not also very invested in this worldly things.
And B, that their lack of access due to racism or classism in the early 20th century meant that they didn't have ideas about how American public life should be.
The other thing that you said, Erica, that I wanted to highlight was the idea of Charismatics and Pentecostals as harbingers of the political realignment that's getting a lot of coverage in the news right now, right after Election Day, and also the quote-unquote racial realignment and the 2024 election cycle.
I think this is something that we're going to be talking about for many years to come.
Charismatics and Pentecostals their worship practices, their rituals, their global networks could be seen as enablers or adopters of this realignment.
Dr.
Delgado, I was seeing you nodding a lot to Dr.
Ramirez.
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
For me, it actually begins with Bishop Sharona's point about compromise, and then it lends to what Dr.
Ramirez was saying about that daylight.
I don't know how many of us remember, there was a New York Times piece that was reporting that evangelicals actually felt like they were being abandoned by their party.
And so there's something that we also want to pay attention to here, because there's this idea that even before we got to yesterday, November 5th, that daylight had gotten a little too broad, even for that solid 80%.
And the reason why I bring this up is because if anybody's paying attention to history, we will see that this is a typical trajectory, right?
You're first round in.
You're visiting every church.
You're visiting every Christian college.
You're making all the promises prior to the Dobbs Act.
We are making sure that we reverse Roe v.
Wade.
We're doing all the things.
We're promising everything.
Religious field.
We're juggling.
By the time we get to the second term, bring in Barack Obama.
Hold for a second.
I need to.
I gotta do something else.
I'm going to your church's lesson.
This is a constant pattern, whether you are part of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party.
That first term, you're courting the American Christian population.
The second tension, you're allowing for that daylight.
So if anybody's paying attention to those ebbs and falls, you would see that what actually happened this time around should not be surprising to us.
Why do I bring this up?
Because we can also remember that the last four weeks of this campaign, nobody was cosplaying evangelical Christian nationalism anymore.
They were on podcasts, right?
They were on SNL. We're not going to your churches.
So yeah, we have Harris stopping off a minute.
Duval Blyan's church and Sherrod's church at the end.
But that chunky middle, everyone was like, what is going on?
Joe Rogan and Who's Her Daddy, right?
It's like they're getting the play that churches would typically get because the candidates felt okay.
They felt like they had shored the ground.
But in the appeals, folks are feeling like they've been forgotten.
Why is this significant?
Because I would like us all to consider What it means for a Trump presidency that did not have to court the evangelical base hard.
He owes them nothing.
They've already got their Dobbs Act.
This means now moving forward, that proximity to power might be a little bit more fledgling and fragile than you think.
That claim to religious freedom, despite what was going on at the RNC and the DNC where everybody's up praying and quoting scriptures and prophesying and speaking in tongues, now we need to take a pause.
Because I literally did not give you anything.
I literally did not promise you anything.
I literally did not stop in your churches and ask you to do anything other than to vote.
And if you vote for me, you'll never have to vote again.
Direct quote.
Now what happens when we introduce a new form of neo-fascism that looks a lot like our friend Hitler and his national church in Germany, where your religious freedom Your proximity to power.
All of these things no longer allow you to operate as an autonomous entity, American Christian enterprise.
And now that compromise is not even a compromise of give and take.
It's more like I have to bow to the powers or the authoritarian in power.
What happens when evangelicals, charismatics who have enjoyed a little bit of nuddling to the powers that be will find themselves on the short end of the stick When authoritarianism says, I don't need you to fulfill the rest of this project.
Especially if I'm thinking about deconstructing the American experiment.
One thing that stood out to me was, and this is something that Flavio Hickel brought up on the last episode of this, which was that he was analyzing how the Trump campaign had, in his words, privatized outreach to certain communities.
And he noted that Charismatics and Pentecostals were some of those constituencies.
And Bishop Sharona, I thought she's coming on.
I need to ask him this.
Do you think this is true or not?
I think Charismatics and Pentecostals are maybe the most skilled...
Folks that you could get as surrogates because they are so excellent at mass media use.
What do you think?
Is there anyone who could be better as in the media, the digital age at being a surrogate for any campaign?
I can assure you that within all the denominations that are out there, I've And I've been in a lot of them and a lot of those circles.
I would argue that an Anglican doesn't have that fire unless they're a closet.
And even then, they're very dignified in how they talk about Jesus.
They're not going to be rolling on the floor or binding demons from this place or that place and commanding this or decreeing this.
You need that.
That can only happen And in the world that I have been a part of for 50 years, I've seen the best of it and the worst of it.
My challenge, again, we think we understand spiritual warfare.
Much of what has been popularized in terms of spiritual warfare, if we were to sit with John Cassian or St.
John of the Cross or any of the ancient fathers and mothers of the church or the desert fathers and mothers, This would be about the personal response we make to the one who is totally other than we are.
That's foreign at this point to where we're talking about the general populace is within Whatever we may want to say about the fact that Pentecostals and Charismatics have their roots in Wesleyan holiness and Pietism, somewhere we've lost that.
And what that means, our forebears would probably not recognize where we are right now.
And that's a concern for me.
Again, we're back to, for me, it's psychology.
We are either going to be led by the Spirit or driven by our unmet needs.
And our lack of discernment equates driven by our unmet needs more often than not to being led by the Spirit.
And those are two entirely different categories.
And I think we're watching all of that play out in a very real way that doesn't always end well.
It doesn't always end well, could be interpreted in many different directions.
One direction that comes to mind, and Sam, you've written a little bit about this, is the sometimes friendly, but sometimes not friendly relationships these figures have with one another.
And it strikes me that having a common enemy in the Biden-Harris administration is a potentially unifying force.
But then winning presents its own problems.
And I wonder, do you anticipate any fissures that you've already observed rising to the surface in these communities?
I'm hard to know.
Ones that have been highlighted by other folks would be, okay, Mike Flynn was a part of the Reawaken show with Clay Clark and is a...
Catholic, maybe with some, maybe a little bit of a New Age leaning in, because he's quoting Church of Universal God Triumphant.
He recently spoke at Godspeak in Thousand Oaks run by Rob McCoy right before the election.
He was invited to speak there.
And I know Rob McCoy had to do some sort of correctives afterwards to say, he said this thing about the Pope, and he had to do something, but he said, but they've gotten abortion things right, and we could learn from them.
So that was his sort of line at that moment.
And the other one I've mentioned already would be less a sort of a theological thing than Clay Clark's sort of more conspiracy-minded suspicion of people like Elon Musk or the tech elite who have been invited back, Peter Thiel money and things like that, that are part of this rebuild America Trumpian line.
So I can see that being a fissure, but I don't know, fissures emerge and then go away within 48 hours.
It's very hard.
And there are things of convenience.
Clay, I've mentioned Clay a number of times because he's a person who I stay in touch with and watch what he's up to.
And he remains, unlike some folks, really eager to talk to media and lots of people who would reach out to them.
His email and cell number are things that he shares very widely.
And he is somebody who is now...
Sort of in Tulsa up to his own thing, but can certainly be welcomed back into the house, so to speak, in other ways.
I wanted to say one other thing about narrative, and this has to do with a way, something that I've seen emerging as part of how folks are narrating what has just happened for the past hours, 24 hours.
And that is not unlike, I think, how this election will be read by lots of people, which is another death blow to the mainstream media.
That is, there's something, you know, there's a real part of that media savvy is a deep suspicion and critique of media, which is its own sort of irony, and the lies that are fed to us through mainstream media.
And even back to Lance now talks so much about the New Apostolic Reformation that is being called New Apostolic Reformation.
And his show is as much a sort of running media commentary as anything.
And he runs it.
Just the aesthetics of these shows, they look, they're news pundit shows.
And so for all the critiques of news media, the programs look like Talking Heads news media.
Down to, oh, let's take a break and go to the floor.
In this case, the floor is a worship meeting and someone speaking in tongues.
Oh, then back to the Talking Heads.
And so the critique of media, and somehow this also being as a vindication of the lies media is told about us, about the Christian right, about MAGA.
I think that, again, is not unique to them, but it's a way, I think it has a particular sort of charismatic flavor to how they're talking about that, that is reflected in the way the wider culture will read this election as well.
When you say the media, in my mind, I'm just thinking, quote unquote, legacy media outlets.
And also what came to mind is that Charismatics and Pentecostals also have legacy media.
You've covered Charisma, which by this point is in its elder years compared to some of the newer.
Every year there's a new set of folks to follow.
And one thing that I want to bring back to is, Dara, you were talking about how someone in the Harris campaign had the intuition that it would be good to have footage of her being prayed for in a charismatic way, with very charismatic prayers.
In fact, I was listening, it was Esther language, which is language that Erica and I have written about being applied to Trump.
So it was the same lexicon.
In many ways.
But the thing that stood out to me was that this was an old-school institution in Pentecostal circles.
Church of God in Christ is the oldest, right?
It doesn't really go back further than that.
And I don't know, care to comment on just the idea that someone was intuiting that it was important to have that relationship.
Also, it was an older institution that they were appealing to.
Thoughts?
Well, the thoughts, right?
Especially, we're talking about seizures.
Are you Pentecostal charismatic unless you're splitting and breaking?
And are you charismatic Pentecostal if you're not involved in media, broadcast, music?
This is what we do when we do it.
So there's a lot of thoughts there.
The fact that the teen decided to end at the church of, not in, let me be clear.
This is not the Church of God in Christ Church that is here in Meadville, Pennsylvania, that sits at the top of the hill that might have 50 people.
This is Drew Sheard Seniors Church, the most senior leader of the Church of God in Christ.
And for those who are not familiar, I would beg them to Google a recent contentious situation Wherein Donnie Swagger thought it was in his best interest to not only rebuke Bishop Sheard, but also fold in indictment the entirety of the Black Christian demographic in this country.
To which Jamal Bryant offered a response.
Roland Martin, the political analyst, offered a response.
And the bishop himself.
So we could pause and look at the ways in which the Harris campaign thought it quite savvy to land her there and have that type of ritualistic performance happen, right?
And we'll talk about that.
I want to just pause for the media effects of Pentecostalism and Charismatics and the ways in which can I do this?
Black Pentecostals do it.
You want to critique me?
You want to indict me as not being wholly orthodox in my state, lowercase orthodox?
I will do one better.
I will host her.
I will give her a microphone for which she will have 12 minutes to not only address the church, but to do her own performativity of Black church.
The entire time she referred to them as church.
She actually cited herself as a young girl growing up in the Church of God and singing in a choir.
She familiarized herself and the audience with her knowledge of the Clark sisters who are royalty, not only in Black gospel, but across Christian music writ large, right?
She took it another step further and then tied it to her political campaign and said, while we want to think about the ways in which we are doing this for such a time as this and that God has something in store for us, we recognize that no good thing is going to come unless the people of God involve themselves in the process.
So she knew how to play the audience.
She quoted scripture.
And I don't mean that in a pejorative way, but she understood scripture.
She understood the rhetoric.
She understood how to get up.
And you got to watch it.
It's so wonderful.
She gets up on this thing.
She's shaking hands.
She knows what she's doing.
She's wearing a dress.
She's wearing a dress.
She's not wearing a traditional pants suit.
In the Church of God in Christ.
She knew what she was doing.
Her team knew what they were doing.
They thought it wise to not only have her there, but on her birthday at Jamal Bryant's church in Atlanta.
So she's in these two battleground states.
She's going to these two legacy churches.
One that is the house of the senior leader of the Church of God in Christ.
And one is New Birth.
And if you know anything about New Birth, it has its own rich history in terms of being a Black charismatic space with its former bishop, Bishop Eddie L. Long.
There is so much going on in these visits, and in both of them, hands are extended.
Folks are laying hands on her.
She is posturing herself to receive these prayers, and in both instances, The declaration isn't necessarily she's the chosen one, but it is such a time as this.
There are prayers about good happening and not evil.
There is a way in which she is being anointed, but not in the same ways in which we have seen it in the past with the current newly elected and re-elected president.
The language is different.
The prophetic tone is different.
The ritual is different.
And as I've said to you before, Dr.
Payne, it is definitely far more communal.
So when we're thinking about how Black charismatic and Pentecostals are responding today, there is a double-edged sword of hurt.
There is a racialized letdown because there is something about the ways in which the Black body will never be fully represented as its best self in this country, received as its best self.
And no matter how hard you try, no matter how many boxes you check, there will still be a shortcoming.
There's that reality.
But on the faith side, there is, Bishop Sharona will be familiar with this name.
There is a woman pastor by the name of Pastor Claudette Copeland.
And she has a talking point in one of her interviews that she did.
And she says, what happens when you have to defend God?
And I feel like the reason why it's been a little quieter, I think it's the other side of how do we, how has it that we did all the things right?
We anointed her with oil.
We laid hands on her.
We hit the ground running.
We knocked on doors.
So we did the spiritual and the natural.
And yet the wrong side seems to be vindicated.
What I would submit to us for our consideration is to pay attention to the next few Sundays, because we're about to hear the other side of the song in the Black church.
The discontent, the desolation, the sense of needing consolation, and having to offer an apologetic for what went wrong.
And that will be a much more interesting conversation going forward because we're going to see a different type of discourse that is not rooted in bitterness and vengefulness, but much more in terms of our God is about to do something because he cannot fail.
So there's going to be a lot of that type of energy going.
But it all starts with the Pentecostals, if you ask me.
One of the things that's been floating around in my head, so one of us is in Florida.
We have Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Oregon represented here.
And I'm thinking about the...
Regional, racial, class-based distinctions between these communities.
What do you all expect to see and hear in churches?
I definitely think that while some groups are growing further apart and experiencing a sense of abandonment and betrayal, I think we see others growing closer together in strategic ways that also map onto Texas.
It's true in Texas and it's true in Florida, if I can speak for both.
That Trump has base in both Catholic Florida, so he took Miami-Dade to an unheard of degree, I think since 1986, I think was the number.
So Trump has Miami-Dade.
I'm going to go out and say the Cuban Catholic vote there.
He also has the South Texas is growing redder vote, which represents both Mexican-American Catholics and Mexican-American Protestants, largely evangelical and Pentecostal.
So what we're seeing in Trump's base is a coming together In voter priority.
And in this case, it's really helpful that I just mentioned Mexicans and Cubans because it's even more so the case with white Catholics and white Protestants that Trump has enjoyed all of these categories, robust support.
And I do think he thinks he has delivered them something.
I think he thinks he has delivered them J.D. Vance.
And it may turn out to be true.
So Trump did an interesting job of picking a vice president.
And that, at first, he seemed to wobble in his public reception.
But I reckon if you took a vote today on how good a pick Vance was, it would probably be at an all-time high.
I look to J.D. Vance to be the heir to Trump's newly established Pentecostal-slash-Catholic coalition.
Can I just interject, Erica, can you say how this differs from Pence, who was a Catholic who converted to the Protestant side, when we know J.D. is a Protestant who converted to Catholic.
How do they mesh differently when they're both very conservative about certain hot-button political...
That's a great question, Dara.
I think it comes down to style.
I wrote before that Mike Pence had a kind of starchy, formal style that he didn't seem able to shake.
And I've written a lot about how Pentecostals are, from their inception, populist, and they like rowdy politics.
What you see in J.D. Vance that poises him for a higher degree of success with this group than Pence enjoyed is he's at least willing to try.
He's not good at rowdy articulations.
He's nowhere near Trump's level of off-color jokes, but he is willing to be more assertive in his style of communication.
I actually think most about Vance's ability to broaden his appeal to create a sense of real solidarity with the kinds of populist voters, very much Pentecostals and Charismatics, who've come to really appreciate that kind of swashbuckling, shoot-from-the-hip style of rhetoric.
He's going to return to the Hillbilly era and leave Harvard behind, eh?
I've been thinking a lot about that, too, about how Vance performs and writes about his own class location.
Pence had a very old-school, mannered performance of his identity.
He even paid special attention to the domestic sphere in a Billy Graham-approved kind of a way, we might say.
Even his referral to his wife as mother, it received ridicule, but it was also reminding people of his domestic life as a patriarch and his wife as the matriarch.
Her identity was mother.
J.D. Vance talks a lot about women and men's roles, a lot, and it's quite conservative, but it's not in the same manner.
I suspect he does and will resonate with many conservative Pentecostals and Charismatics, regardless of their class location.
Because the Pentecostal and charismatic worship space itself is a much less formal place.
It's rowdy.
It can be very rollicking.
At times, Trump rallies look a lot like what you might see at a Pentecostal or charismatic meeting.
And Vance seems better suited for that audience than Pence ever did.
I think this idea of looking at Vance as someone who could embody a Pentecostal and charismatic-approved future of the Republican Party might be the best place to stop the conversation.
Of course, we could go on and on, but I just want to thank all of the panelists who've joined me today.
Thank you for investing your time and your expertise, and thank you for sharing that with the Spirit& Power audience.
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.
Spirit and Power is a limited series podcast from me, Dr.
Leah Payne, with research from Keri Gaspard-Hogwood.
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Don't forget y'all.
Two live events coming in November.
Some straight white American Jesus.
One at the University of Southern California and LA with Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
And then the next night at the San Diego Convention Center.
Tickets are available now and you can find everything in the show notes.
You can also watch online if you can't be in LA 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.
