Inventing Moral Panics, or how Muslims are the new Jews: Part 2
What to watch for from the usual Christian Nationalist suspects.
Dutch Sheets, former pastor to New Apostolic Reformation founder C. Peter Wagner, was a founding leader of what came to be known as the “Prayer Movement”. The highlight of that movement was something called “The 10/40 Window” project, which was promoted by other people like Cindy Jacobs as well as C. Peter Wagner, which encouraged Christian churches of all denominations to pray for the deliverance of a region spanning from Asia down to Northern Africa for Christ on the assumption that it had been the least evangelized area with the fewest Christians on the planet. C. Peter Wagner injected much of what he would later call “Strategic Spiritual Warfare” ideas into the rhetoric surrounding this movement, relating that demonic spiritual forces held sway over specific portions of that part of the world and needed to be vanquished through prayer and evangelism.
This introduced Charismatic Christian ideas of demonic deliverance into mainstream Evangelical church thought about what Spiritual Warfare meant as the message of this campaign gained support in huge numbers of churches across the world. It should come as no surprise then that the NAR concepts of territorial demonic spirits have become popularly accepted in mainstream Evangelical circles. When surveyed with seven questions which specifically address NAR ideas Christians who identify as Evangelicals provided interesting answers. For instance, when asked if “There are demonic principalities and powers who control physical territory” 69% agreed, and to the question “The church should organize campaigns of spiritual warfare and prayer to displace high level demons” 66% said yes. 20 years ago mainstream Evangelicals would have chalked this up to the kind of spooky woo that proliferated in Charismatic churches, but now it’s quickly spread into their doctrinal beliefs as well.
Over 50% agreed when asked about whether “Christians should stand atop the seven mountains of society”, a concept which was created in the year 2000 within the NAR movement and propagated by Lance Walnau. In less than 25 years this very specifically NAR concept has taken hold in the Evangelical churches. This implies that there’s a common language, doctrinal belief and ideology between the NAR, which gets treated as a fringe movement, and mainstream Evangelical church culture. In fact, 6 out of 7 questions specifically addressing NAR doctrinal ideas received more than 50% approval with Evangelicals which leaves the question, how will the average non-Charismatic Christian American react should a Trump administration Christian Nationalist agenda unfold? How many Evangelicals will be willing to go along with adopting more NAR doctrine if it means supporting a Christian-centric reorganization of our government, and subsequently our nation?
How far will they let the government “deal with” Muslims and other non-Christians in the population, and to what extent will they accept the dismantling of the pluralistic society our country was founded as if it means finally making America the Christian Nation their mythology describes? When Muslims, Jews and Atheists are forced out of elected positions, and laws are passed making them effectively second class citizens, will they balk and protest or simply go with the flow to insure their inclusion in the privileged class? There’s an overt expression of revenge, the binary of Win/Lose in which the Christian Nationalists feel they’ve been losing because there is no negotiation with the literal Biblical devil. When prominent NAR prophets are claiming that God told them directly that the tiny minority of Muslims in the U.S. are a national security threat, there’s little that one cannot believe possible in the Populist Theocracy that demands “Religious Liberty”.