As with so many others, I saw Trump’s sacrilegious post of himself as a messianic figure. I’ll call it “Trump 3:16” in honor of the WWF wrestler “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. In the 1996 King of the Ring competition, Austin went up against Jake “the Snake” Roberts. Roberts had portrayed himself as an evangelical Christian. Not to be outdone, Austin played off John 3:16 saying, “Austin 3:16 says I just whipped your ass!” The phrase immediately became iconic. It led to a new slogan, new paraphernalia, and a new persona around Austin 3:16. It was irreligious. It was over the top. It was the WWF at its best, with profane, in-your-face, entertainment.
The “Trump 3:16” pic is out of the same playbook. Trump is treating Pope Leo as another political opponent, satirizing the pope being the vicar of Christ. If the pope is the vicar of Christ, Trump is the messiah. You can see how the picture riffs on Trump’s claim that the pope was only elected because the cardinals wanted an American to oppose the president. It’s as though Trump is saying, “You are only where you are because of me. I’m the messiah. You’re just a representative; in fact, you’re my representative.” It’s a rhetorical smackdown designed to distract from the major issues by causing people to lose their minds over its profane comparison.
Trump’s post also gestures toward NeoCharismatic theology. It’s this theology that led to White House spiritual adviser Paula White likening him to the messiah at the Easter breakfast. It’s a glimpse into that theology and its connection to the Seven Mountain Mandate so prominent in NeoCharismatic circles. While NeoCharismatic theology is a development within Pentecostal-Charismatic (P-C) Christianity, there is a backstory that helps to understand its basic contours.
The Backstory
P-C Christians hold that the Holy Spirit empowers believers with spiritual gifts. A potential negative side effect of this theology is an exaggerated sense of self. You find this temptation especially among those who hold that they have the gift of healing or prophecy. John Alexander Dowie, a healing evangelist in the 1890s, proclaimed himself “Elijah the Restorer.” He was an alumnus of a small yet potent group of ministers who saw their calling as so special that it either ushered in the messiah or became itself messianic. Dowie represented the former, while Jim Jones represented the latter. (Yes, the Jim Jones who led the mass suicide of himself and his followers in Guyana. Jones came out of the P-C movement, but he was also rejected by it.)
Three developments occurred in P-C Christianity between 1950 and 1990 that laid the foundation for NeoCharismatic theology. The first development came from the healing evangelists in the 1950s and 60s. While most of them came out of Pentecostal denominations, they developed the emphasis on the healing of body and soul for the prosperity of the whole person. In his 1952 autobiography, Oral Roberts claimed that the greatest discovery he made was the Scripture verse, “I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in health even as your soul prospers” (3 John 1:2).
Roberts initially interpreted the passage as God wanting people to prosper in soul and body. By 1970, he espoused his “seed-faith” approach to Christianity with its three principles that 1) God is the source, 2) you must give to receive, and 3) you should expect a miracle. When Paula White asked attendees at the Unleashed Conference to sow a “sacrificial seed” by giving thousands of dollars, she was operating out of this theological framework. The formula is to believe God, give resources, and trust God for a miracle increase.
Prosperity theology combined with celebrity to create a culture that equated divine blessing with fame, wealth, and health. It’s the mirror image of the American obsession with image, exercise, and well-being.
People often comment that Trump’s version of Christianity began with Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 book, The Power of Positive Thinking. A minister in the Reformed Church of America, Peale developed his approach during the same decades that prosperity theology emerged in the United States.
Both approaches embodied the post-war optimism of America. Whether you spoke words of blessing and faith over your situation or thought positive thoughts about it, you were engaging in a similar strategy. It’s hard to understand the connection between Trump and White apart from their shared view of blessing and “winning!” They both speak of prosperity through hyperbolic language.
The second development came from Canada through the Latter Rain Movement. Centered on the association of Pentecost with the spring (latter) rain that ripened crops, the Latter Rain Movement thought that Pentecostalism ushered in the restoration of the gifts of apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor, and teacher (Eph. 4:11).
When Paula White told Trump at the Easter breakfast that she had a word from the Lord for him, she was the prophet announcing Trump’s status as God’s chosen vessel, activating the potential in Trump’s life.
How this view was interpreted and applied varied greatly among Latter Rain ministers. Bill Hamon developed a view that God was reestablishing the office of apostle and prophet to enable the Church to bring about the kingdom of God on earth. It was to be a new apostolic reformation.
Hamon saw the purpose of apostles and prophets as teaching, training, and activating the spiritual gifts of believers. The prophet activated the gifts in a person by giving them a personal prophetic word. For Hamon, personal prophecy was like water on a dry seed, activating its potential and causing life to emerge. When Paula White told Trump at the Easter breakfast that she had a word from the Lord for him, she was the prophet announcing Trump’s status as God’s chosen vessel, activating the potential in Trump’s life. Such activation through words closely aligns with positive thinking.
The final development was a new approach to spiritual warfare called strategic-level spiritual warfare. In the late 1980s, some Charismatics started to claim that there were demons over cities or areas of culture. One had to identify the specific demons over an area through spiritual mapping and then begin to pray against them. It was called strategic-level to differentiate this approach from demonic possession of an individual or fighting off sinful thoughts as a form of spiritual warfare. This was warfare at the societal and political level. When Paula White called on angels to come from Africa to help America at the end of the first Trump presidency, she was tapping into this approach.
The New Apostolic Reformation and the Seven Mountains
The developments of prosperity, spiritual warfare, and the offices of apostle and prophet were features of what Peter Wagner called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). They are one reason I refer to this theology as NeoCharismatic. It’s a theological development within the P-C movement.
NAR networks formed part of what Brad Christerson and Richard Flory called INC (Independent Network Charismatic) Christianity. Centering in a megachurch or ministry, the networks can vary in size, but they overlap with one another. It is best to view the NAR as a smaller series of networks within a much larger web. You might think of the NAR as a partner airline within a large network of airlines, like Delta’s Sky Team Alliance. It’s also a global and multiethnic network of men and women—this is not “white Christianity.” The connection between global networks is a source of difficulty when tracing out influence.
Journalists and writers who do not understand the P-C movement might assume ideological influence because a conference has a speaker representing one network among many. The NAR centers on key persons (e.g., Ché Ahn or Cindy Jacobs) who operate church or ministry networks within a larger group of independent congregations.
Over the past two decades, the Seven Mountain Mandate has become a central part of the NeoCharismatic strategy of political and social engagement. While the road to its emergence has twists and turns, the Seven Mountain Mandate is Abraham Kuyper’s sphere sovereignty in NeoCharismatic dress. Kuyperian sphere sovereignty means that God has ordered the world through distinct domains, such as family, state, and church. Analogous to the sovereignty of a nation, each sphere has its own integrity that cannot be violated. Forming part of the structure of human life, such spheres should be governed justly in relation to one another. Kuyper’s ideas had different interpretations in the American context, but two streams are important to the NAR and the emergence of the Seven Mountain Mandate.
The first is the Christian reconstructionism of Rousas J. Rushdoony, and the second is the worldview apologetics of Francis A. Schaeffer. While both men adapted Neo-Calvinist ideas, they deployed them in different ways. Schaeffer held to premillennialism while Rushdoony reinvigorated postmillennialism with its emphasis on bringing the kingdom of God to earth. While Schaeffer read Rushdoony in the 1960s, it is better to see both as transmitting Neo-Calvinist ideas rather than the latter influencing the former significantly.
Both Rushdoony and Schaeffer referred to Kuyper’s spheres as areas of life where a Christian worldview should be utilized to proclaim Jesus as Lord. These two developments of Neo-Calvinism impacted the P-C movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Along with the founder of Cru (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ), Bill Bright, Loren Cunningham utilized Schaeffer’s approach to Kuyperian sphere sovereignty in the organization he founded.
Beginning in the mid-1970s, Cunningham reorganized Youth With A Mission (YWAM) around what he called the seven spheres of society. These were family, religion, education, government, media, celebration (arts, entertainment, and sports), and economics (business, science, and technology).
By the mid-eighties, the seeds of Christian reconstructionism had also taken root in independent Charismatic ministries.
Cunningham claimed that these came to him in a vision, but he was also influenced by Schaeffer. Schaeffer had lectured occasionally at the YWAM evangelism school Cunningham established in Lausanne, Switzerland in the late sixties. Having grown up in the Assemblies of God (AG), Cunningham’s approach to changing the culture influenced many in the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement. Neither Bright nor Cunningham developed a form of Christian nationalism, but they operated within a Neo-Calvinist approach to the transformation of American culture.
By the mid-eighties, the seeds of Christian reconstructionism had also taken root in independent Charismatic ministries. From his base in Tyler, Texas, Rushdoony’s son-in-law, Gary North, developed relationships with several leaders. These included Bob Mumford and Ern Baxter of New Wine in Florida, Bob Weiner’s Maranatha Campus Ministries, Earl Paulk, Jr.’s megachurch in Atlanta, and some faculty, primarily Joseph Kickasola at Pat Robertson’s Regent University.
Embracing Gary North’s vision of Christian reconstructionism allowed these Charismatics to transfer the focus of prosperity theology from personal wealth to national wealth. As America came back to God, economic wealth would flow to the nation as a whole. This was part of bringing the kingdom of God to earth.
While there were differences in approach among these Charismatic ministries, they all wanted to restore the American republic by advancing an approach to government grounded in biblical law. In a letter to Ronald Reagan in 1982, Bob Weiner told the president that he hoped for a constitutional amendment that would “define the historic base of the United States law as the Judeo-Christian-based Biblical law.” Weiner was a former AG minister whose campus ministry had a major impact in the seventies and early eighties.
It was in the form of seven spheres that Lance Wallnau suddenly discovered this Kuyperian approach to culture transformation. Wallnau was the first to associate the seven spheres with seven mountains. In his book The Violent Take It by Force, Matthew Taylor offers a succinct overview of its origins in Wallnau’s thought, but I differ with him on some details.
Taylor claims that Wallnau started teaching on the seven mountains in 2000, but this most likely refers to Wallnau’s conversation with Loren Cunningham about the seven spheres that year. Wallnau changed spheres to mountains after he got the idea from interviewing the Georgia state senator Michael Crotts about Crotts’s near-death experience. Crotts claimed to have had a vision of seven mountains with one large mountain representing Christ behind them. He later wrote about his experience in Dead for 34 Minutes.
Wallnau interpreted the mountains as symbolizing positions of political and cultural power in each area from which individuals try to shape the minds of individuals in society. Those in positions of power operate with authority to alter society. For this reason, Wallnau refers to them as ideological strongholds that Christians must seek to hold.
Wallnau subsequently started teaching the seven mountains as a strategy to take over the culture. In a video clip from 2005, the Kenyan evangelist Thomas Muthee preached on the seven mountains at the AG congregation Sarah Palin attended. In 1998, Peter Wagner identified Muthee as part of the NAR. The clip reemerged in 2008 when John McCain picked Palin as his running mate for the presidential election. In a commentary for Anchorage Daily News, local professor Alan Boraas connected Muthee’s “Seven Mountains Strategy” sermon with Michelle Goldberg’s work on Christian nationalism. Boraas saw Palin as a Christian nationalist.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, NeoCharismatics such as Wagner, Cindy Jacobs, and Johnny Enlow all released books that described the kingdom of God in terms of winning over nations and used the Seven Mountain Mandate as part of their strategy. Johnny Enlow had been on staff at Earl Paulk, Jr.’s church in Atlanta when the church imploded from Paulk’s sexual deviancy, while Wagner had come to embrace postmillennialism and theonomy. The Seven Mountain Mandate was incorporated into the Reformers pledge that Wallnau, Cindy Jacobs, Lou Engle, Bill Johnson, and others took in 2010.
Wallnau merged his view of the seven mountains with Christian nationalism. For Wallnau, Trump is a Cyrus figure, by which he means a political leader chosen by God to help the church transform a particular nation. Wallnau’s approach does not require Trump to be a Christian, which is why NeoCharismatics are immune to chastisement about evangelicals voting for moral candidates.
NeoCharismatics are not typical evangelicals. Most of them are immigrants or Americans from lower-middle-class backgrounds who fought to get where they are… they see Trump as a fighter who is taking on the elites.
This transformation occurs as individuals take control of the cultural and political positions of power within each of the mountains. The importance of Trump for Wallnau resides in Trump’s opposition to globalism and his efforts to take down those who currently occupy positions of cultural and political power in a way that opens the door for Christians.
Not all NeoCharismatics share Wallnau’s perspective. Some see the Seven Mountain Mandate as a way to transform the culture by bearing witness to Christ in each sphere of society. They are less interested in taking control of the structures of society than in the older evangelical view of bringing individuals into the kingdom, individuals who then operate in each sphere.
Most journalists don’t know who these NeoCharismatics are. They don’t understand them. NeoCharismatics are not typical evangelicals. Most of them are immigrants or Americans from lower-middle-class backgrounds who fought to get where they are. The connection between NAR and African ministers and immigrants reveals a new kind of “black theology” that has little to do with the historic Black Church in America. Many of them have struggled with broken relationships, broken homes, and addictions. They have never attended or been part of the elite institutions of American life. They despise the political class that hurls accusations at them.
Many NeoCharismatics see Trump as a fighter who is taking on the elites. It’s a spiritual battle, and God is using Trump to tear down the institutional strongholds that have kept the nation from realizing its destiny. Paula White is no doubt taking advantage of her position, but she also believes what she says. She and Trump believe in personal and national prosperity and the power of words to alter one’s perception of life. It’s not quite patriarch and emperor, but it is prophet and president.
Works I engaged with in this newsletter:
Ché Ahn, ed., The Reformers Pledge (2010)
Brad Chisterson and Richard Flory, The Rise of Network Christianity: How Independent Leaders Are Changing the Religious Landscape (2017)
Mike Crotts, Dead for 34 Minutes: A True Life Story of Life After Death (2020)
Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking (1952)
Oral Roberts, Oral Roberts’ Life Story (1952)
Jeff Sharlet, The Family: A Study of Power, Politics, and Evangelical Influence in Washington (2008)
Matthew Taylor, The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy (2024)
C. Peter Wagner, The New Apostolic Churches (1998)
