In this roundtable, Chelsea Ebin, Matthew Taylor, and Julie Ingersoll discuss the intersection of today’s New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and the New Christian Right of 1970s and 1980s formed by conservative Catholics and Protestants. Building from Ebin’s The Radical Mind, Taylor’s The Violent Take It by Force, and Ingersoll’s Building God’s Kingdom, the panelists question the narrative of backlash in shaping the Christian Right, and dig into NAR’s influence on Donald Trump and their use of biblical figures like Jezebel and Jehu to justify his administration’s political actions. This roundtable digs into the anti-democratic tendencies of these movements and the potential for theocratic, authoritarian governance.
Julie Ingersoll: Your two books give us a 75-year history, starting just before the Religious Right of the Reagan era, all the way up to the New Apostolic Reformation and January 6. They blend together beautifully. Together, they help us think about whose story is being told and what’s being hidden in the ways scholars and journalists frame their stories about this movement.
I really loved how these books dovetailed on the theoretical kinds of questions that we are always asking in religious studies. We start every class with: what is religion? How do classifications work, and what’s getting hidden? Whose story is being told, and what’s being quieted by the way that we’re seeing things? Matt, you [attend to] that with the persecution narratives, and Chelsea, you forefront this critique of the backlash narrative. We, in religious studies, call it persecution or martyrdom narratives: the way that people think about the past as a separate thing from the actual past, a kind of discourse about what happened that ends up constructing the reality itself.
But I think that the first thing to talk about is: what’s that story? Because I imagine a lot of people are wondering: how did this [history unfold]? How did we get to the Christian Right we know today?
Chelsea Ebin: My book The Radical Mind tells the story of the formation of the Christian Right by centering the role of Conservative Catholics. I examine how the architects of the New Right were deeply informed by their conservative Catholic beliefs, and how those beliefs helped to not only broker the coalition with evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants, but also to infuse what came to be known as pro-family politics, with a Catholic worldview.
Along the way, I make an argument for problematizing the discourse of backlash. The way in which the narrative of backlash gets deployed serves political purposes. It helps to manufacture the past, and cultivate an ideology of victimhood or defensiveness: We once were great, we are now under siege. What we do is defend ourselves to get back to this imagined time when we were great.
Matt Taylor: Yes, I feel like the Catholic piece of all this is easily missed and might be one of the most central elements right now for understanding what’s actually playing out.
In my book, The Violent Take It by Force, I open with the Christian manifestations of January 6, and then work backwards to understand the theological architects of January 6, particularly a network of leaders called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and how they became enmeshed with and the chief spiritual propagandists for Donald Trump.
A lot of what we think of as the rise of the Religious Right comes out of conventional, even establishment, elite evangelicalism centered in places like Colorado Springs or the National Association of Evangelicals. The NAR weren’t the A-list celebrities of the Religious Right. They were more like the C-list or the D-list if they make any of the lists, but they become incredibly influential as Trump comes on the scene. Sarah Palin herself was mentored by some of these NAR leaders.
While that evangelical elite certainly had elements of radicalism from the 1980s through the 2000s, they also assumed liberal democracy as the national context to be Christianized. NAR is how this more radical turn and more aggressive ideas through charismatic theologies enters into the bloodstream, especially around “spiritual warfare.” They map spiritual warfare onto national politics, and sometimes literally map it onto geographical regions to articulate a demonology that coincides with the fault lines of American politics.
Their ecclesiology—how they think about the life of the church as being governed by apostles and prophets, as moving past denominations, moving past democracy—sets them up on this authoritarian trajectory to be some of the first Christian leaders to embrace Donald Trump, offer theological frames, prophecy, and spiritual warfare. These frames undergird the mythos that we’re living with today of Donald Trump as this divinely anointed leader who is protected by God, and is fighting for the cause of the light, and therefore anyone against him must be in darkness.
Spiritual Warfare and Demons, Jezebel and Jehu
Ingersoll: That’s how I see the whole mega-religious schema, which I characterize as the reformed kind of Protestants that I write about, as well as the New Apostolic reformation and the Catholics.
I find it difficult when talking about this larger movement to explain what spiritual warfare is to people, particularly the way [NAR leaders] use biblical types to reduce modern people to characters in the Bible, and then imagine that character as being applicable to the modern person that they’re talking about. Will you talk a little bit more about the violence, the use of these biblical types, and the difficulty of explaining what spiritual warfare is to people who take it metaphorically?
Taylor: The way we tend to think about violence—and part of this is my other area of expertise—is through contemporary Islam. A lot of times we want to say, here’s the violent activity, here’s the theology underneath that, and we can draw these direct and easy lines. Some of the broad-brush interpretations of 9/11 have kind of set us up for this one-to-one correlation between violent rhetoric and violent activity by the person using that rhetoric. That’s not always how these things work. What has taken hold, especially in the 20th century (but it began before that), is that Western, enlightened, elite Christians eschew violence, and say violence is bad. So we have this kind of hagiography of the Civil Rights movement and this understanding that Christianity is not supposed to be violent. But when you look at Christian history, there’s an incredible amount of violence, but [supposedly] we’ve dialed back all of this.
Part of what the NAR has innovated is they’ve appropriated all of this discourse of violence that was present within Christianity and the Bible, and spiritualized it in a way that makes it palatable to a lot of evangelicals. Most evangelicals have this sensibility to love their enemies, but the loophole the NAR discovered is it’s okay for Christians to hate demons. They leverage that to say, we love people who are our enemies, but we hate the demons inside them. If we can only get rid of the demons inside them, we will be greeted as liberators and they will come back and agree with us. So we have to oppose them. We have to stop them. Sometimes we might even have to use force in stopping them—but in the end, we will be proven right. This draws on the deep currents of Christian accommodation of violence: the Crusades, pogroms, the Inquisition, and the wars in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation. But it’s also a spiritualized-enough form of violence that many evangelicals can get on board with it.
January 6 is such a crystallizing moment for this, a kind of microcosm. You see the ramp up, the rhetoric of violence that builds and builds and builds in that season between the election in November of 2020, and then the January 6 events just a couple months later. You can see in this kind of crystalline form how this rhetoric then feeds directly into this attack on American democracy.
The same slogans that are being used to foster this idea of spiritual warfare, of enacting prophecy, then get used in the storming of the Capitol and the attack on Congress and our institutions. I’ve interviewed some of these folks and I’ll point out, you’re using this very violent rhetoric, you’re at the Capitol and look at what’s going on right behind you. And they’re like, No, but we hated the violence. We were there praying for peace. It allows for this kind of Christian cover, this facade of we’re not the ones perpetrating the violence. Then they can always kind of point to, well, maybe it was necessary. Maybe it was God-ordained violence, even if we weren’t the ones who directly instigated it.
What the NAR and this broader discourse of Christian spiritual violence does is it keeps raising the temperature in our politics. I like your allusion to typology, Julie, because this plays out through these biblical types that the NAR loves to advance: Jezebel and the Jezebel spirit, Cyrus and the Cyrus anointing, and Jehu.
Ingersoll: Will you talk about the Jezebel type? Most people outside of these worlds don’t know what this means.
Taylor: Jezebel is the famously wicked queen but also spiritual person. She’s married to King Ahab and referenced in the Hebrew Bible, with little reference to her in the New Testament. She operates as a sort of paragon of this pagan, anti-Yahweh, anti-Israelite religious fervor. In charismatic circles, going back at least to the 1980s, there was a discourse about the Jezebel spirit, a catchall term for what was inappropriate and sinful: feminist activism, LGBTQ rights, sexual immorality, and anything female coded. When Hillary Clinton ran against Donald Trump in 2016, they very much deployed this comparison of her with Jezebel. Because of the Bill Clinton connections, that Ahab analogy worked well for them.
But the Jezebel spirit rhetoric really ramps up more when Kamala Harris enters the race. There’s an element of racial coding, part of an American history of accusing Black women of being Jezebels. Jezebel was a figure who was so vile. If you read the story of the annihilation of Jezebel by Jehu (2 Kings 9-10), it’s this visceral, brutal story that her body has to be reduced to dog feces to eradicate all memory of her. Jehu is [also] the image that really took hold for them right before the 2024 election. Jehu is one of the most violent figures of the Bible and the one that they’re comparing to Trump that gives them, again, this wiggle room. Jezebel is the extremely violent image that they are using directly in reference to Kamala Harris, talking about casting her out, the way Jezebel is thrown out of a window to her death. They talk about Donald Trump as Jehu, cleansing the capital city and draining the swamp—and Jehu who goes on a killing rampage.
They are conditioning and preparing themselves and their followers to embrace Donald Trump’s violence and his rule breaking, and say, this is just the biblical template that he’s supposed to follow. This is how this works. In doing so, this is not an exegetical frame. They’re not just saying like, Oh, we are looking at parallels between the figure of Kamala Harris or the figure of Hillary Clinton and this biblical figure, but they’re using their own prophetic style of exegesis. Then they’re using their own charismatic authority to say this is the template through which we need to understand this current moment. In doing so, they’re short-circuiting the conventional evangelical approaches to hermeneutics and biblical interpretation. And it gives them that much more of an edge, because these images are familiar to evangelicals. Then these images are pushed into the context of contemporary politics in a way that is very rhetorically powerful and also extremely dangerous.
Right before the 2024 election, Lance Wallnau would use this rhetoric about Kamala Harris and say you can’t even listen to what she’s saying anymore, because it’s just the demons that are speaking through her. He even accused her at different points of using witchcraft in her debate with Donald Trump to present herself in a way that was not actually true to who she was. You see kind of these compounding layers of biblical violence, biblical interpretation, misogyny, racism—and then spiritual warfare becomes what holds it all together to say we need to use our spiritual weapons in order to defeat these demonic forces that are taking over our politics. As much as that is a bastardization of the biblical narrative, it’s a profoundly powerful rhetorical political frame.
Ingersoll: These constructed, explanatory narratives that can work on two different levels. The NAR know all those gory details that you just described, but most people hear, Jezebel, oh, some trampy woman—and write it off. If you compare the way that the Left Behind series made room in popular culture for eschatological, dispensationalist End Times narratives, and you compare that to the Peretti novels, the charismatic version where it isn’t some imagined time off in the future after the battle of Armageddon and the rapture and all these magical things have happened. Instead, it’s like today in your town with the university professor, right? They deeply personalize these things. The language that they use in the broad public can slide by unnoticed. But the power in them is that they can classify things in ways that seem like they’re in the nature of reality, when in fact, they’re a result of the way that you’ve classified them.
Patriarchal Domination as the Cornerstone of the Right, Past and Present
Ingersoll: Picking up on your mention of misogyny in particular, I want to come back to what the Christian Right means by traditional family values and Connie Marshner. I don’t think most people have even heard her name, but she was everywhere in these circles—in some ways, maybe more influential than Phyllis Schlafly. Schlafly was spreading these ideas, but Marshner was building the coalition of people. What traditional family values are is an issue of classification. What is traditional? Because what they mean by traditional family values isn’t necessarily all that traditional. Chelesa, when someone says traditional family values, what are they referring to?
Ebin: It really depends what conception of traditional they’re instrumentalizing at any given moment. For the Catholic New Right, as they joined forces with the evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants, traditional meant the maintenance and the reproduction of patriarchal traditionalism: the recognition of male headship within the home, female submission and obedience, women’s role being defined through necessitated motherhood, and heterosexuality. This understanding of the family is really the sort of building block of society.
So, for example, I write in The Radical Mind about Marshner’s work to oppose the Carter administration’s White House Conference on Families and to promote a counter-conference called America’s Pro-Family Forum and quote from a pamphlet advertising the “pro-family conference,” that stated, “A new term has appeared in our lexicon: pro-family. It describes a political philosophy, based on the sanctity of life, the worth of an individual, and the importance of traditional family life as the cornerstone of American society.” [Following that quote in the book, I write:] “The movement’s claims to uphold ‘traditional family life’ served to tether modern Christian conservatism to the country’s (imagined) past. Furthermore, by claiming ownership over the nation’s traditions and founding, the [New Christian Right] asserted it represents the nation’s rightful majority.”
For the Catholic New Right, the state was understood as a tool for enforcing a particular vision of the family. These are economic policies, like the tax code, educational policies, and policies around parents’ rights. And gun rights, because a man’s home is his castle, and he needs to be able to defend it and protect his family. These diverse policies get grouped under the umbrella of pro-family politics.
Which gets us back to violence. Law can be a tool of violent coercion. You can enact violence against underrepresented and marginalized groups through the law and the state’s coercive capacity. If you believe that authority is legitimate and justified, it is understood as the state is coming in to affect a sort of righteous vision as opposed to the states behaving violently.
Trump tweeted, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” This is the idea that it’s not violence if you are anointed. It is not violence if you are the rightful sovereign. It is not violence if you are simply setting the world right, or defending victims against their aggressors.
Taylor: I agree that the NAR are not invested in democracy. The NAR does not have a coherent vision of the future. They are willing to make great accommodations for [Trump’s] immorality, vulgar speech, and violent rhetoric, because they say he doesn’t have to be a good Christian.
Trump As a Vehicle for Theocracy
Taylor: This is often then filtered through this frame of the Seven Mountains, acknowledging these different arenas of social influence. Their notion of the Seven Mountains allows for immoral and areligious, if not irreligious, leaders at the top. But then they sacralize those leaders through this discourse of Christian power to say they are anointed by God for that purpose. Like the use of this Cyrus-anointing prophecy that became so prominent, especially in the first Trump campaign. That bridged the gap to express, Donald Trump is not a good man, but he’s God’s man.
Now we find Trump calling himself a Christian in public, referring to some of these prophecies—many of them coming out of NAR circles. The NAR shifted their posture towards Trump, from a vehicle for advancing their cause, to Trump being the avatar to propagandize at all costs and put on the throne to rule. Between the January 6 insurrection and the present moment, they have become more theocratic.
Ingersoll: I use the traditional definition of, “a theocracy is ruled by ‘God,’” which means what people think about God. You broach this subject, particularly that the folks that you write about are not committed to a notion of democracy.
Ebin: Actors in the 1970s Catholic New Right and in the evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant Right defined themselves as antiliberal, not committed to democracy by any definition. Paul Weyrich, [one of the architects of the New Christian Right], has that famous quote: I don’t want everyone to vote…our leverage in the election quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down. That belies a much deeper hostility to democracy that comes out of 19th century papal encyclicals condemning democracy as being a part of modernism and liberalism as a threat to the authority and the power of the church. The horizon of possibility has changed for these movements. Unlike the 1970s and into the Reagan 1980s, the U.S. democratic consensus and liberal values and rights is much more fragile now.
Weyrich thought theocracy wasn’t attainable in 1979. But [Catholic legal scholar] Adrian Vermeule thinks that Catholic integralism is [attainable] in 2025. That’s as close to an expression of theocracy as we can get in a Christian context. I would call what the NAR envision, their Seven Mountains Mandate, theocracy: governance that is predicated on faith tradition and belief. Conservative Christian groups are uncomfortable with theocracy because they’re aware that their vision of the future may not align with their allies. Theocracy could mean you do not end up on the winning side.
If we think about Project 2025 and Heritage Foundation’s role in it, much of it is predicated on the Catholic worldview. But Conservative Catholic attitudes toward capitalism do not align with conservative Protestant attitudes toward capitalism. We’re seeing this right now in the Trump administration’s erratic, unpredictable economic policy: Are we going to provide for the poor, or are we going to slash Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare? Those reflect two different, religious and political worldviews within the MAGA movement.
The Right’s Success of a Backlash Narrative
Ingersoll: Many think that these groups have fixed boundaries, buckets of Catholics, Christian Reconstructionists, and New Apostolic Reformation people, and they don’t change over time. It’s just not that way. Sometimes we have this definition of religion versus politics, as if those are separate. These are fluid frames we put on top of the reality in order to talk about it. When we forget that these are lenses and we think that that’s in the nature of reality, our frame keeps us from seeing what’s actually happening.
Ebin: The Christian Right often gets explained through changes wrought by social and legal transformations: the Supreme Court rights revolution that transformed school prayer, access to contraception and abortion, and civil rights for African American and Black Americans. The backlash narrative that gives us Nixon, then Reagan, retrenchment, the rollback of affirmative action, along with the hyper-racialized trope of the welfare queen to gut social service programs.
There was never a time when conservative Christians were content with society. Matt, you wrote about [Pentecostal evangelist] Aimee McPherson and [others like her] bemoaning the sad state of society in the 1920s and 1930s. If not then, when exactly were the halcyon days of Christiandom in America? They’ve never existed.
But the narrative of backlash allows for retroactively putting forward a vision of the past used to justify present transformations in order to bring about a future that somehow matches this imagined past. We see this most clearly in policies targeting LGBTQ individuals: in the past, gays just didn’t exist, so in the present, we can restrict talking about gay people. Then in the future, they won’t exist. The reality is, of course, queer people have always existed. If you can craft a narrative of the past where LGBTQ people don’t exist, then you can legislate them out of existence in the future.
The narrative of backlash gets deployed in this way: we wouldn’t have to do this if gays didn’t ask for so much. They changed society. We’re just trying to get back to where we were, back to the status quo. That allows conservative Christians to take on the mantle of victimhood, to say, we’re really the ones who are being oppressed by this other group advocating for equality, advocating for rights. Then egalitarianism and equality become tools of victimization for the Right.
Ingersoll: The example of abortion works here too. In the latter half of the 20th century, the Right came to understand abortion as Christians have always been against abortion, and it’s always been illegal until 1973 with Roe v. Wade. Kristin Luker, writing on the politics of abortion and motherhood, shows how the Southern Baptist Convention was okay with abortion in certain circumstances until the 1970s. Protestants hadn’t been particularly opposed to abortion, and then they embraced the Catholic position with groups like Operation Rescue. In the early 1980s, when they were working together in front of abortion clinics, the Protestants were saying, but we believe in birth control. It’s totally fine. You see the Catholic viewpoint pulling the Protestants [farther Right].
Scholars interpret history through the backlash narrative, and that empowers the political ambitions of people who want to use this kind of nostalgia to create a certain future.
Ebin: Yes, the recent struggle over IVF is absolutely a result of that Catholic viewpoint. There’s decades of scholarship that failed to recognize the radical aims of Christian conservative social movements. That was the case with R.J. Rushdoony and Reconstructionism, and the new Christian Right in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s the case with the NAR now. There is a desire to contort these movements to fit within a liberal framework, to say, they talk about rights, so they must be liberal. They’re only possible within a pluralist society, because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to emerge. They are using the tools of democracy, so they must be proponents of democracy. These failures have led us to this moment where we collectively have failed to recognize the threat that’s not just banging at the door, but has taken up residence in the house.
Ingersoll: So much of the groundwork was laid by the Christian Reconstructionists, when the [Protestant evangelical] Falwells and the [Catholic] Weyrichs were coming together. The language about what a pro-family vision is, comes directly from Rushdoony. In the 1980s, I was in Weyrich’s library and Falwell’s D.C. offices, there were Christian Reconstructionist books they were reading. The language makes its way directly into the vision. They didn’t footnote Rushdoony, but it seems impossible for it to not have come from him.
Arriving in an Imperial Present
Taylor: One of the most concerning things in this moment is many of the conventional frames we have for understanding the decay of democracy come from observing history and the present. We’ll make these analogies: Trump is like Julius Caesar, and we’re crossing the Rubicon and the Republic is breaking down. He is a reality TV star, and if you want to compare him to a Caesar, he is much more like Caligula or Nero than like Julius Caesar. He’s the Mad King who is now seemingly in unquestioned control of the most lethal military ever assembled on the face of the planet, and the largest economy in the history of the world. We don’t have a good historical precedent for what somebody like Trump can do from that perch.
What we’re seeing is not just a reversing of the polarity of modernity, but a harkening back to pre-modern conceptions of human society, theology, human belonging, justifying hierarchies of power. The way that Trump also leaned into a much more expansionist and imperialist rhetoric since the election very much mirrors these groups that we’re discussing. We’ve come to the limit of this language of Christian nationalism and White Christian nationalism. These folks aren’t thinking in nationalistic terms anymore. They’re going back to Imperial and mercantilist eras. We’re now talking about monarchist ideas in the divine right of kings.
Ebin: People in the U.S. are so deeply wedded to constitutional faith, the mythos of American democracy, and our institutions being enduring, that we collectively are failing to recognize that we’re a hair’s breadth away from the complete suspension of constitutional order. The best way I make sense of Trump’s contradictory and erratic economic decisions is a scenario where, if you create a significant enough economic crisis, then you have established the conditions for a state of exception, the emergency that allows you to really do anything you want.
Taylor: We’re not just talking about conservatives. They’re accelerationists who want to topple the present order—and whose visions of the alternative might be deeply conflicting. Across the board, we are underestimating just how bad things can go and how quickly they can go that way.