Bonus writing: Flying Flags
When you're poor and black and tell the Rampart police that "it's just a bandana" you get a wildly different reaction than if you're Speaker of the House, or Justice Alito.
Dutch Sheets, the New Apostolic Reformation apostle who very mysteriously organized a two hour meeting at the White House a mere 8 days before the events of January 6th, introduced the Christian Nationalist symbol of the “Appeal to Heaven” flag. He didn’t attend the Jan 6th riot in person, but he spoke to the crowd by telephone that day, and Appeal to Heaven flags were in abundance there.
I’ve mentioned previously that a man named C. Peter Wagner, a former Fuller Seminary professor and church growth specialist, created a movement within the independent Charismatic churches he called the “New Apostolic Reformation”, which introduced the idea that Apostles and Prophets were officials of the Christian church and had the highest authority but had been long ignored for their leadership positions. He gathered to himself a core group of like minded people like Cindy Jacobs, Paula White, Lance Walnau and others to serve as apostles which would oversee networks of Charismatic churches, and it was Cindy Jacobs who introduced Wagner to Dutch Sheets.
In the 1990s Sheets was a founding member of what was at the time called the “Prayer Movement” where concepts and doctrine of what came to be known in NAR circles as “Strategic Prayer”, an idea of Spiritual Warfare in which demonic spirits would be identified as having strongholds in communities and organized prayer would be waged against them. This is an early example of Sheets demonstration of being able to recognize influential concepts that could be spread easily throughout churches and Christian communities. He would go on to leverage this talent repeatedly in his career as a pastor and “apostle” of the NAR.
Combined with Wagner’s expertise in church planting and growth, Dutch Sheets would continue introducing more of these paradigms while occasionally performing as a guest teacher in Wagner’s classes at Fuller, and Wagner would go on to write the introduction to Sheets’ book “Intercessory Prayer”. Later Wagner and his wife would become members of Dutch Sheets’ church, while Wagner acted as a mentor to Sheets in return.
Sheets is made a member of Wagner’s secretive “Eagles Vision Apostolic Team”, and eventually is made the chancellor of the “Wagner Leadership Institute” in Colorado, C. Peter Wagner’s school for aspiring leaders in the New Apostolic Reformation movement. Dutch Sheets takes Lance Walnau’s “Seven Mountain Mandate” and, recognizing it as a powerful symbol, pushes it to new heights and makes it a household term in NAR communities, but he wasn’t satisfied with how slowly the “mandate” was being implemented. He wanted things to start happening faster, and realized he could use the networks he had created under his apostolic authority and prayer network to start assaulting regional politics to promote the Christian Nationalist colonization of the “seven mountains” happen sooner rather than later. He strongly believes that Government must immediately be “taken” for God, and that he’s one of the people who has direct command from God as to how Government needs to be remade.
In 2013 a friend of his gave him, as a gift, a flag. It’s a replica of a flag commissioned by George Washington which flew over the Massachusetts naval fleet. A white flag with a simple pine tree in the center and the words “An Appeal To Heaven” at the top. Sheets employs his talent for recognizing symbols which can go viral and hold deep meaning to push the Appeal to Heaven flag into the NAR as he had Walnau’s “Seven Mountain Mandate”, and the flag quickly became a powerful meme, a representation of the Christian Nationalist movement. Like the way street gangs would “fly flags” by hanging bandannas of specific colors from their back pockets, Christian Nationalists suddenly had a seemingly innocuous signal to show they were part of the movement.
And that’s how the Speaker of the House and Justice Alito came to know they’re in the same gang...