Normal Politics May Be Perfect Answer
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
When Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee, she simultaneously unified and energized the Democratic, anti-MAGA coalition and threw the MAGA world into utter chaos, resulting in a flood of confused spluttering rage, racism, misogyny and conspiracism. With so much media focus on Harris and the swelling support for her campaign, the MAGA reaction was largely overlooked.
But one example shouldn’t have been: evangelical leader Lance Wallnau, a leading Neo-Pentecostal prophet in the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) saying that Harris represents “the spirit of Jezebel, and in a way that’ll be even much more ominous than Hillary because she’ll bring a racial component and she’s younger.” This echoed an earlier claim he made in March that “the left is loaded with demons.” Drawing a parallel to Nazi Germany, he said, “I don’t think it’s people anymore; I think you’re dealing with demons talking through people.” Wallnau’s 2016 book, “God’s Chaos Candidate” played a key role in crystalizing evangelical support that was key to electing Donald Trump, so his comment should be taken quite seriously. He’s also deeply involved in campaigning for Trump this year, promoting even more demon talk.
Lance Wallnau, a leading evangelical leader backing Trump, posits that the ex-president is the modern-day Cyrus.
As Melissa Gira Grant noted in the New Republic, “To call a Black woman a ‘Jezebel’ hearkens back to America’s racist and misogynistic history of casting Black women as insatiably sexual, which served to justify slaveholding men’s systematic sexual assault of enslaved women.” But demon talk takes things even further, as we’ll soon see.
Such attacks aren’t going over very well with the broad general public, which has resonated with Democrats calling out MAGA Republicans as weird. On the surface, at least, it seems like tired old news.
“This is just an evolution of GOP using fear, religion, and sometimes hate to win when the real issues are against them and their policies,” said Indivisible San Pedro activist Peter Warren, also involved in the California Grassroots Alliance, which is focused on flipping five seats to win a House majority here in California. “If it ain’t Willie Horton or some conjured, racist fear about minority-preference hiring — now dressed up as DEI — it is some other bogus issue such as outdated crime and border statistics that ignore what is happening now,” he summed up. For the most part, he just tunes it out.
In the book of Isaiah, God used Cyrus, a Perian king, to conquer Babylon in the sixth century BCE and end Babylonian captivity, during which Israelites had been forcibly resettled in exile. From his books and public comments, it appears Wallnau is peddling bad theology.
“We’re doing our work, which is registering people to vote, turning out voters who voted before, doing the work that needs to get done so that our majority can register and turn out and vote.”
But there’s something deeper — and much stranger — going on when it comes to the religious right base, which bears watching in light of the post-election violence seen last time. And raising the specter of Jezebel as a demonic spirit — not just a figure from the past — represents a key part of it.
Local community leader and senior pastor of the Warren Chapel CME Church, Pastor Adam Stevenson, defined bad theology as, “involving incorrect or dangerous beliefs about God and faith, which can result from misinterpreting scripture, adding human rules to God’s word, or focusing on one view of God’s character at the expense of others. This can lead to misunderstandings about what it means to follow Jesus and live out the Christian faith. The Bible warns against false gospel teachings to avoid confusion or division within the church and our communities.”
“Spiritual Warfare” Is As Strange As It Sounds
While the notion of “spiritual warfare” has some biblical roots, what’s practiced by the NAR differs significantly from previous Christian practices focused on individual-level practices, typically exorcisms. Under the guidance of C. Peter Wagner, who both named the NAR and played a central role in shaping its development, two new forms of spiritual warfare have been added: occult-level spiritual warfare — combatting occultism, witchcraft, Freemasonry, Eastern religions, New Age, shamanism, astrology, etc. — and strategic level spiritual warfare, involving geographical territories and even higher spiritual realms.
It’s crucial to stress that traditional Pentecostals see these developments as heretical. They have condemned them — and their forerunners — as far back as 1949. They see these forms of fighting occult spirits and demonic forces as essentially engaging in the very things they claim to be fighting — claiming a spiritual agency that neglects true faith in Christ, similar to what the Apostle Paul warned against in Colossians 2:18-19. But in today’s MAGA-fied religious right, that aspect of the Colossian heresy seems to have been reborn, celebrated as the new orthodoxy.
Jezebel as a demon in this cosmic war framework holds an especially violent potential, as Frederick Clarkson, senior researcher at Political Research Associates, explained.
“I have been reporting on this dramatic uptick in the rhetoric of violence, civil war, and the final battles of the End Times for several years,” Clarkson told Random Lengths. “Religious, political, and gender differences are now usually cast as demonic. Jezebel is one demonic force, that is said to occupy not just individuals, but whole ‘territories,’” he said. “We are hearing a lot from apostolic leaders about ‘taking back territories.’ My friend and colleague Chip Berlet once succinctly identified the result of this kind of ideological priming of the pump in a paper titled, ‘Heroes Know Which Villains to Kill: How Coded Rhetoric Incites Scripted Violence.’”
The two new forms of spiritual warfare shape how the NAR views Jezebel, as illustrated in Michael Brown’s 2019 book, Jezebel’s War With America: The Plot to Destroy Our Country and What We Can Do to Turn the Tide. The book’s description explains:
Jezebel died 3,000 years ago. But her spirit lives today.
Jezebel was the most wicked woman in the Bible, a powerful seductress who killed the prophets, led Israel into idolatry and immorality, and emasculated men. …
The influence of the same demonic force is being felt in the massive increase of pornography and sexual temptation, the militant spirit of abortion, the rise of radical feminism, and most importantly, the attempt to silence prophetic voices.
The prophetic voices Brown has in mind are fellow NAR Neo-Pentecostals like Wallnau, Trump’s spiritual advisor Paula White Cain, and “Stop the Steal” organizers Dutch Sheets and Matthew Trewhella, who were intimately involved in whipping up the Jan. 6 insurrection. Neo-Pentecostals have also been disproportionately represented in giving opening prayers at Trump campaign rallies, according to a recent survey in the Atlantic. So if Jezebel’s attempting to silence them, she’s doing a very poor job.
Jezebel Lore Is Even Weirder
While Wagner wrote at least 10 books dealing with spiritual warfare, firmly establishing it as a shared reference frame, a handful of books by lesser-known figures have helped advance the demon Jezebel as a prime antagonist within that framework. The first, in 1994, by Francis Frangipane, was The Three Battlegrounds, by which he meant “the mind, the church, and the heavenly places.” This was before Wagner began his work, but there’s a rough correspondence between Frangipane’s three battlegrounds and Wagner’s three kinds of spiritual warfare. Although not named in the title, the Jezebel spirit plays a significant role in the book.
More books followed in the 2000s and 2010s. One with a noteworthy twist was Bridging the Racial and Political Divide: How Godly Politics Can Transform A Nation by Texas apostle Alice Peterson. It was a masterpiece of spiritual gaslighting about America’s racial politics. Peterson asserts a continuity over time in the Democratic Party based on an “invisible network of evil comprising an unholy structure,” identified with — you guessed it — the demon Jezebel. Since Jezebel’s been associated with the Democrats at least since the Civil War, neither Lyndon B. Johnson’s embrace of the civil rights movement nor Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” played any role at all in Peterson’s account. And lest you doubt her, she assures us she’s actually seen the demon Jezebel with her own two eyes — along with smaller demons underneath her skirt. This account epitomizes the religious right’s widespread gaslighting of its racist history, which continues to this day with Kamala Harris as the Democrat’s presidential nominee.
Needless to say, this focus on Jezebel strikes most folks as weird. So don’t expect to see it shouted from the rooftops between now and Election Day. But it plays a significant role in internally orienting a hard core of religious support for the most blatantly immoral presidential candidate ever.
“NAR is driving a disconnect between people that transcends religious, political and gender differences. These are all cast as demonic manifestations,” Clarkson warned. “While this literal demonization is bad enough leading to a deepening polarization, the risk is that this worldview may propel groups and individuals into their own visions of End Times religious war,” he explained. “In this scenario, mere discrimination against religious minorities is small potatoes compared with the mass elimination of everyone, including fellow Christians, who may not be of quite the right sort.”
In contrast, “Everything we do is compatible with the whole range of religious faiths,” Patti Crane, a leader with the California Grassroots Alliance, told Random Lengths. “It’s not compatible with fringe cults that put a person above a deity, and that’s what we’re seeing on the right with Trump.”
A Growing Cult Growing Out Of Touch
The Atlantic’s reporting confirmed as much. Not only do opening prayers mention Trump more often than Jesus (87 mentions vs 61), but the way he’s spoken of has changed dramatically since 2016. Then, Wallnau prominently compared him to the Persian King Cyrus, a non-believer who nonetheless liberated the Israelites from Babylonian captivity — a flawed, even unholy vessel used for a holy task. Now, “Cyrus isn’t mentioned, but Trump does get compared to righteous, prophetic heroes of the Bible, including Esther, Solomon, and David,” the Atlantic reported. More than that, “No one prays for Trump to do right; they pray that God will do right by Trump,” evangelical scholar Bradley Onishi told the Atlantic. That’s as cult-like as one can get.
“In the Central Valley, we meet many people with deep faith, and the best possible expression of that deep faith is for them to vote for Democrats, who stand for religious freedom,” Crane said.
The NAR’s rhetoric of Jezebel’s destructive threat resonates with the more common claims of rising crime and an out-of-control border, both of which, Warren notes, are based on out-of-date data, citing a just-published story in the New York Times, that border arrests had fallen to a new low of under 60,000 for July, down from a peak of 250,000 in December.
“The GOP is looking at old statistics just like they look at old statistics with crime,” Warren said. “This is all outdated material, and then they turn to the kind of fear tactics that they’ve used before, whether it’s Willie Horton and the crime thing or the cities with crime or fear at the border, we are being invaded.” He went on to note that in a sense it was all just theater, since “The Biden administration worked a bipartisan bill to fix the border and Trump killed it. So when Trump is attacking on the border, it’s an issue that he didn’t let go away because he would not allow a legal compromise that Jim Langford, the Republican from Oklahoma had worked out. … Now they’re continuing with the border as an issue, but the actual facts don’t support it anymore.”
Even more important, perhaps, Harris is running a forceful new ad highlighting the fact that Trump blocked the border bill, among other things. It’s not just that the facts have changed, the messaging has, too. All of which can make a big difference as far as the campaign is concerned.
But the deeper purpose of the demon Jezebel narrative and everything else the NAR is doing is not to win elections, but to thwart them, which the Trump campaign and its allies are working to do on several different fronts — most notably signaling in advance a multi-level unwillingness to certify election results unless Trump is declared the winner. To pull off such a blatant subversion of democracy, it certainly helps to have a chorus of religious figures claiming that it’s all God’s will — which appears to be a distinct possibility, in light of the big-picture view Clarkson closed with.
“The revolutionary movement we call the NAR has two main factions. One is incrementalist, and not prone to violence. The other is accelerationist and wants to know victory ASAP,” Clarkson explained. “Wallnau, who is currently leading a political mobilization campaign called The Courage Tour, has cast his lot with the accelerationists who helped bring about the insurrection of Jan. 6th. He says he was there. He also says that it was not as bad as some make it out to be, but that there were a few unrepresentative hotheads. That Wallnau is gaslighting his audiences suggests that he is committed to setting the stage for future revolts.”
Perhaps the best way to stop that is to make sure that this election is not even remotely close.
Editor’s Note: To learn more about the NAR, you can join a free Zoom webinar with Fred Clarkson and other experts titled “The New Apostolic Reformation and the Threat to Democracy,” hosted by Political Research Associates and the Southern Poverty Law Center on Thursday, August 15th from 1:00 to 2:30 PM EST (register here) and again on Wednesday, August 21st, 1:00 – 2:30 PM EST (register here).