It's Sunday

“Pentecostalism represents a rare feat in American religion—a tradition that is growing,” said Ryan Burge, assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University. And it plays well around the world. “The Pentecostal and charismatic movement is one of the biggest surges in the history of global and American Christianity,” said Frederick Clarkson, senior research analyst at Political Research Associates. In the most expansive definition, Pentecostalism now claims as many as 600 million adherents worldwide, or more than a quarter of all Christians.

The fact that matters today—just days after what Minnesota lawmakers have called a tragic, targeted political assassination of lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and the attempted assassination of lawmaker John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette—is that this style of religion, though diverse in its various expressions, is often intensely political. The best illustration of the point comes from the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). Associated with C. Peter Wagner, the theologian and professor of church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary’s School of World Missions, NAR is less a denomination than a secretive network. Its hierarchy of leadership includes apostles at the top, prophets next, and several other ranks below, and they often serve as front-line captains in America’s culture wars.

In his 2008 book “Dominion! How Kingdom Action Can Change the World,” Wagner explained that God has commanded true Christians to gain control of the “seven molders” or “mountains” of culture and influence, or seven areas of civilization: government, business, education, the media, the arts and entertainment, family, and religion. “Apostles,” he says, have a “responsibility for taking dominion” over “whatever molder of culture or subdivision God has placed them in,” which he casts as “taking dominion back from Satan.”

  Contrarian Substack

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