How something called "The New Apostolic Reformation" became the unhinged religious left's favorite current conspiracy theory

It's about as convincing, however, as Pizzagate, or Taylor Swift colluding with the Pentagon to rig the Super Bowl and elect Joe Biden

Here’s a brainteaser for you.

What’s the intellectual counterpart to the Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce “psyop” conspiracy theory – the unhinged belief gaining steam on the right that the Pentagon has rigged this weekend’s Super Bowl clash between the Chiefs and the 49ers to make sure the vast audience this coming Sunday is focused on the international pop star, who will then endorse Joe Biden?

Don’t react all together.

But while you’re racking your brains for an answer that isn’t as obvious, or as crisp as the Dorito chips you’ll be snarfing down this weekend, let me put this in context and elucidate.

This past week I had coffee at the invitation of an old friend of the family, who is a well-educated and highly successful pastor and missionary, who runs a special school and has a network of supporting churches in both the United States and in a South Asian country, of which he is a native.

He is one of the indigenous leaders for what the eminent American historian Philip Jenkins calls “the next Christendom” or the “Coming of Global Christianity” in his 2002 book by the same title, which won numerous awards and prizes.

He also brought along a family associate who is East Asian, but teaches at a major university in New Zealand.  He is also an internationally known and respected luminary in his field.

Most of our discussion by far centered on my friend and I catching up (we had not talked in ages) as well as learning about the work and research of his associate.  But toward the very end of the conversation we ended up talking at their instigation about something that as a reputable scholar concomitantly perplexes and vexes me – the campaign, stoked by certain ideologues in the press and among the Christian left, to libel and demonize and Pentecostals, especially what was hitherto a relatively low-key movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation.

Somehow the New Apostolic Reformation has all at once become the soft target of a mishmash of crazed and largely incoherent conspiracy theories on the part of progressive elites in our country.

Consider the following article from Salon magazine entitled “Meet the New Apostolic Reformation, cutting edge of the Christian Right.” 

According to Salon, “Christian nationalism has new momentum” with the rise of the NAR, which it describes as “a new movement that openly longs for ‘dominion’ over secular America.”  It goes on to further characterize NAR as “a rapidly-growing, anti-democratic religious movement …which few Americans have heard of, except in passing or by way of heated denials.”

The best conspiracies, of course, are always the ones you’ve never heard of.  In fact, nobody has probably ever heard of them because there is far less than meets the eye – sort of like Taylor Swift having secret confabs on her private jet with the National Democratic Committee.

But I digress.

Now, as it turns out, besides attending quite a number of NAR services over the years, I happen to know a lot of about the movement because I hung out with a lot of different people associated with it in the late 1990s. I even wrote about it extensively as the cutting edge of the global Pentecostal movement in the second half of my well-known book The Next Reformation: Why Evangelicals Must Embrace Postmodernity. 

That was the part that nobody got excited about and probably didn’t read because it was not so much about “postmodernism” as about Pentecostalism, which of course has been around for well over a century (actually, since the beginnings of Christianity).

As I recall, nobody I met during that era ever mentioned anything about seizing political power and turning the U.S. into Calvin’s Geneva..  The overwhelming majority of them were not involved in politics at all.

I’ve also kept up close friendships over the years with many of them, and they are appalled about what is going on.

NAR, like Pentecostalism itself, breeds a certain style of cultural and political conservativism, but it is at the same time the most racially diverse of all American Christian groups.  And, like Pentecostalism as a whole, it is egalitarian when it comes to gender roles in the ministry. 

When it comes to women holding positions in the top echelons of leadership. NAR does not practice tokenism like most evangelical denominations and independent churches.  It is as welcoming to women in such roles as most liberal Protestant organizations.

So why is the religious and political left insanely obsessed with them?

One major reason the critics of NAR have singled it out is that many of NAR’s most eminent personalities have been outspoken in their support of Donald Trump.   However, the vast majority of evangelical leaders, including Pentecostals, supported Trump from the get-go. 

So that isn’t really a compelling explanation. 

The Salon article cites the case of what it insinuates are the three horsemen of the NAR-directed 2024 Trumpian electoral apocalypse – Paula Cain-White, Lance Wallnau, and Dutch Sheets.

You’ve probably heard of Paula White-Cain, which the press has repeatedly cited as Trump’s “spiritual advisor”, although she is about as theologically congruent with NAR’s teachings as Speaker Mike Johnson is with the United Methodist Church.

Johnson, by the way, is a Southern Baptist, and Southern Baptists tend to loathe Pentecostals, but that doesn’t prevent him from being tagged routinely as part of the grand NAR conspiracy nobody’s ever really heard anything about.

White-Cain comes out of the prosperity gospel tradition, which is why Trump became first interested in her in 2002, a decade and a half before he decided to run for President. Trump himself as a child attended the church of the granddaddy of all prosperity gospel preachers Norman Vincent Peale, which is probably why and White-Caine have hit it off so well.

But, alas, White-Caine has little to do with the NAR or with Pentecostalism, which has a quite different pedigree from the prosperity gospel.  As far as I can tell, the only evidence she is part of the NAR conspiracy Salon warns us about is that Salon says so.

At least we do know that Taylor Swift has a liking for Joe Biden.

Then there’s Dutch Sheets?  You ask, Dutch Sheets who?

Here’s not only a conspiracy you’ve never heard anything about, you’ve probably also never heard anything about one of the premier conspirators behind the conspiracy itself you’ve never heard about.

According to that supreme scholarly authority Wikipedia, Sheets is “an American author and pastor” who has “written over 20 books”.

That’s it?  Hmm.  I was at least anticipating a fire-eating, sword-brandishing, neo-Cromwellian version of Lex Luther.

However, in the view of that celebrated theological journal Rolling Stone, whose writers in the last few years seem to have become fixated on the NAR, “the new Republican fringe is done with the separation of church and state” and “William ‘Dutch’ Sheets has been trying to tear down that wall for decades.”

The charge is ridiculous and based solely on twisting the meaning of the title of one short video where Sheets is merely advocating for religious freedom – not religious control of government – and making the rather quotidian case that the phrase “separation of church and state” is not in the Constitution (it isn’t), and that in any case it does not mean religious people should have no voice in politics.

Furthermore, if you read the Rolling Stone article itself it doesn’t furnish any confirmation whatsoever for what the headline trumpets.  Sheets himself isn’t registered with any political party, and there is no evidence he was active politically in any serious way before the 2020 election.

Sheets’ bio reads pretty much like all Pentecostal or charismatic ministers.  It talks mostly about his preoccupation with “intercessory prayer” and the gifts of the spirit, which is analogous from a charismatic perspective to profiling an Episcopalian as extremely interested in communion tables and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.

Sheets, as might be expected, is an avid supporter of Trump.  He also gained notoriety in the runup to January 6 by prophesying (wrongly) that Trump’s loss to Biden would be overturned and by mobilizing prayer vigils around the disputed election and the future of America.

But there is virtually no evidence for the claim promulgated by Salon that Sheets “played a leading role in building religious support for the Jan. 6 insurrection, in coordination with Trump’s White House.”

The claim itself, as the hyperlink in the text of the Salon piece indicates, simply paraphrases a highly tendentious and sophistical article authored on the second anniversary of the January 6 uprising by two marginal academics in Religion Dispatches, a publication that might be described as the National Inquirer for the religious left in America.

The headline blares: “Evidence strongly suggests Trump was collaborating with Christian nationalist leaders before January 6.”

You need to carefully parse what the authors are saying to realize they are trying to convey a dubious message – i.e., that Trump secretly plotted with certain “Christian nationalists” (a term by the way that these very same authors have effectively spun to mean virtually any conservative evangelical) luminaries to orchestrate the storming of the Capitol.

They even claim “evidence” for such a conspiracy by providing numerous hyperlinks which, if you actually follow them, do not support at all their contention that Sheets was “coordinating with Trump White House officials throughout this post-election prophetic propaganda campaign.”

For example, the authors write that on December 29, 2020

…Sheets, along with 14 other apostles and prophets, had a multi-hour meeting inside the White House with Trump Administration officials. Who exactly among White House Staff attended this meeting is unclear (and the Trump Administration has made the White House Visitor Logs secret and invulnerable to FOIA requests until 2026). But members of Sheets’ team posted photos of themselves (with White House Visitor Passes) both outside and inside the building.

I keep the original hyperlinks intact in this lengthy quote so my readers can see for themselves the disconnect between what is behind them and what is alleged.

The link to the claim that all the “apostles and prophets” had “a multi-hour meeting inside the White House” is nothing more than a video of one of Sheets’ daily talks to his followers about going to DC in late 2020 and doing prayer vigils at various government sites, something which Pentecostals have done for generations.

In the video Sheets says in the prayer walks his group simply was “releasing the prophetic word” and encouraging others to “pray what is God’s word for the nation”.

Dangerous stuff.

Sheets does not mention getting together with anyone in the Trump administration, let alone inside the White House.  As for the “photos of themselves (with White House Visitor Passes”), these are the kinds of pictures any tourist on any given day could take.

And, yes, the same “passes” are routinely available to thousands of random Americans for White House tours.  Once more, a nothing burger.*

The particular authors in question are Brad Onishi and Matthew D. Taylor, religious studies scholars who work outside regular academia and have overnight turned into media entrepreneurs with the sacred mission of sniffing out “Christian nationalists” and defaming Pentecostals.

Since Pentecostals, who according to the Pew Research Center “make up about 27% of all Christians and more than 8% of the world’s total population”, that’s a load of chutzpah.

As for the particular libel that the NAR was somehow responsible for J6, I’m not aware of any of Sheets’ team that was arrested for breaking and entering the Capitol.  Nor do any of the over 1000 people arrested for their participation in the riot seem to have any connection to Pentecostalism or to the NAR.

But in a recent interview with the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) Onishi repeats the bogus assertion (once more sans evidence) that Dutch Sheets is the “one who may have done the most of any Christian leader in the United States to mobilize folks to try to overturn the 2020 election and to make sure to attend January 6”.

It should be noted that Onishi appeared on PBS to promote his new book Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next, which ironically doesn’t reference NAR even once. 

And, as we have pointed out, NAR hardly fits the paranoid progressive stereotype of “white Christian nationalism” insofar as most of its movers and shakers are not white, but people of color in the Global South.

We could go on.  But we need to pose the question of what all this hysteria is really all about, and I have a hypothesis.

Just as the more extreme members of the MAGA movement are petrified that Taylor Swift, the most acclaimed pop singer since Elvis, might actually rouse the younger generation to wriggle out of their social media cocoons and vote (Democratic, of course) in 2024, so the anti-NAR crusade is motivated by the fear that Latinos and Asians, in particular, who comprise the bulk of global Pentecostalism as well as the transnational NAR phenomenon, will vote for Trump in the November election.

Such a prospect is no longer a Republican fantasy.  A recent poll showed Trump with a 6 percent lead over Biden in the 2024 Presidential sweepstakes, and Texas is the headquarters of the NAR movement.

The pollsters, however, have made it clear that economic and cultural issues as well as disdain for Biden personally, not religious indoctrination, is behind the sea change in Latino voting patterns that is taking place.  And the preponderance of Latinos, even in Texas, are Catholic, not Pentecostal.

Thus multiethnic, religious groups like NAR, which have hardly any public name recognition and live in a religious universe that seems weird and indecipherable to most white Americans,  become the new favorite target of hate among the urban, progressive elites for whom they are convenient scapegoats.

The NAR-baiters claim to be “experts”, but neither of them has any serious background in the academic study of American religious movements.  If they did, they would not make such prima facie false statements about NAR.

Of course, even in his own self-branding Onishi, in particular,tends toward gross distortions. In his interview with PBS the host introduces him as “a former evangelical minister who once identified as a Christian nationalist himself.”

Of course, if you read the autobiographical portions of his book, Onishi says much the opposite.  He recounts how he was appalled by the way in which “my church community prioritized individual success, prosperity, conservative politics, and the military might of the United States.”

Onishi’s church, in which he served as a youth minister by his own account up until 2005, by the way was Rose Drive Friends Church in Yorba Linda, California, which is hardly a typical evangelical megachurch, let alone a “Christian nationalist” one.

It was then, and still is, a Friends or Quaker church – you know, those guys who are committed pacifists and for generations have led anti-war protests.  Onishi writes in his own book that Rose Drive “has never been known as an overly political congregation.”

So how do we get “Christian nationalism”, whatever that signifies, out of all of this?  You tell me. 

I’ll put my money with the Taylor-Swift-secretly-colluding-with-the-Pentagon-to-rig-both-the-Super-Bowl-and-the-election-for-Biden-in-November conspiracy theory over the one that the mindless mainstream media seems to be lapping up – namely that a cabal of Pentecostal pastors is covertly, powerfully, and insidiously manipulating MAGA to take over the U.S. government and force us every one of us to start speaking in tongues.

But that’s only because I suspect “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” has more subliminal political propaganda potency than anything those sly Pentecostals could come up with.

______________

*Update: Since this article was originally published one of the authors of the RD piece has persisted in sending me further “proof” that Sheets and company secretly met with White House officials on Dec. 29, 2020. However, this “proof” simply comes down to more pictures Sheets’ team took inside and outside the White House, which anyone on a regular public tour available to numerous nondescript visitors on a daily basis can do on their own, as well as offhanded mention in later public talks or sermons by team members that they visited Washington, which is an established fact but in no way substantiates their claim. Some examples provided by the author are here, here, here, and here. The author also argues that further “proof” is that “Sheets and his team of prophets were in Washington, DC, staying at the Willard Hotel, the site of the various war rooms overseen by Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon.” The Willard Hotel has 335 guest rooms. But that’s like saying if person X stayed at the same hotel as President Kennedy did the night before he was shot in November 1963, they were obviously part of the plot to assassinate him. There is a well-known adage that “correlation is not causation”, and conspiracy theorists routinely infer what they insist are hard “facts” from circumstantial connections.