The armies of god
So now I know. Like most people, I didn’t realize the people behind Rick Perry’s prayer party are weirder than other prayer police.
With tens, even hundreds of millions of followers worldwide, the NAR’s stress on Godlike prophetic and apostolic powers, its revisions of end-time prophecies, its methodology of “spiritual warfare,” and its agenda of theocratic dominion over all aspects of society are not just threatening to modern secular democracy and the religious pluralism it protects, they have been sharply criticized by other conservative Christians as unbiblical, deviant teachings, even a form of the very demonic practices they obsessively declare war against.
They’re not just messing around.
The new prophets and apostles believe Christians—certain Christians—are destined to not just take “dominion” over government, but stealthily climb to the commanding heights of what they term the “Seven Mountains” of society, including the media and the arts and entertainment world. They believe they’re intended to lord over it all. As a first step, they’re leading an “army of God” to commandeer civilian government.
Sarah Palin’s church of over twenty years, Wasilla Assembly of God, is still part of the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination. However, the leadership embraced the ideology of the NAR years ago and and numerous national and international apostles have spoken there.Both Jim Garlow, head of Newt Gingrich’s Renewing American Leadership (ReAL), and ReAL board member David Barton, have been working with the apostles for years. As described in books by Apostles Cindy Jacobs and Alice Patterson, Barton has been working with Texas apostles for over a decade. Barton’s Christian Nationalist histories, in which he portrays Democrats as the ongoing source of racism, play a significant role in outreach to African American pastors.
Oh well, the glaciers will melt so the rivers will dry up so the crops will fail so we’ll all die in the famines before they take over completely. That’s a relief.
Ophelia, Did you listen to Fresh Air on Wednesday (http://www.npr.org/2011/08/24/139781021/the-evangelicals-engaged-in-spiritual-warfare)?
Stu, yes, that’s why I now know what I didn’t know yesterday until I listened. Fresh Air seems to be doing the religious right this week; good on them. (I linked to the Fresh Air segment in News but not here.)
Added the link to the post; thanks Stu.
If the Assemblies of God say this crowd are certifiable, then they are.
[Disclosure: I went to school with Ken Ham’s daughter and once went to her church; you have never seen anything so utterly barking in your life… as in, three stops past Dagenham].
This is creepy. The whole “demons have taken over” thing might be true given the xtianist sociopaths spreading the message. They just hope we won’t notice that they are the demons.
These people — and the influence they may have over the next president of the U.S. — scare the hell out of me. What they want is so anti-democratic that I can’t get my mind around it; it still seems inconceivable to me. My fear is that it will be inconceivable to most Americans, and they’ll ignore it.
Aha ha ha!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2vaOO3YZYM