Messiahs I Have Known: Apocalypse Trump

Donald Trump, a narcissist with classic messianic delusions, has courted conservative evangelicals calling for a Christian revolution to assume "dominion" over government.

We had a four-year break from the messianic madness of Donald J. Trump, but his volatile mix of politics, prophesy and self-promotion has continued with the Second Coming of his Presidency.

Over the last week, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, an influential Christian nationalist and Trump ally, has suddenly turned Kirk into a martyr for the religious right. The suspect in the murder, Tyler Robinson, appears to have been motivated by rising anti-trans rhetoric and Trump’s fascist tendencies.

Let’s step back and look at how we got here.

As discussed in last week’s episode, Trump’s 2018 decision to recognize Jerusalem — not Tel Aviv — as the true capital of the Jewish state inspired Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to compare the American president to King Cyrus, a Biblical figure some ancient Jews viewed as a kind of “messiah.”

In his second term, Trump has continued to shower blessings upon Netanyahu. He appointed the Rev. Mike Huckabee — the conservative evangelical leader, Baptist minister and ex-governor of Arkansas — as the U.S. Ambassador to Israel.

Huckabee resides at the center of a strange spiritual/political alliance between the Christian right and the Jewish state. Many — but certainly not all — evangelicals believe that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ must be preceded by the Jewish people returning the Israel and rebuilding the ancient Jewish temple, last destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 BCE and currently occupied by the golden Dome of the Rock, a major Islamic shrine.

Netanyahu and other right-wing Israeli leaders eagerly join this alliance, dismissing the inconvenient belief among evangelicals that he and his fellow Jews will forever burn in hell unless they ultimately accept Jesus of Nazareth as the True Messiah.

Strange bedfellows, indeed.

Earlier this year, five days before Trump launched air strikes against nuclear installations in Iran, the White House released the following text from Huckabee to Trump:

“God spared you in Butler, PA to be the most consequential president in a century — maybe ever. You have many voices speaking to you Sir, but there is only ONE voice that matters. HIS voice.”

This mix of current events, Bible prophesy and foreign policy has infected American politics since the rise of the religious right in the 1970s and the Ronald Reagan presidency of the 1980s. Much of it was fueled by the publication of The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey, the best-selling book of the 1970s. Lindsey used the Bible to explain how Israel recaptured Jerusalem in 1967. He predicted a Soviet invasion of the Middle East and a war in the 1980s paralleling the biblical Battle of Armageddon.

Of course, the Soviet Union did not invade the Middle East in that decade — sparking the apocalyptic war to end all wars and rapturing True Believers straight to heaven. Something very different happened. The Soviet Union collapsed.

On September 6, Trump posted this image of himself, based the Robert Duval character from the film Apocalypse Now, adding “I love of smell of deportations in the morning.” Federal troops, he warned, are on their way to Chicago.

In the new millennium, Trump is playing with fire as he seeks to inspire Christian nationalists who see an apocalyptic war between the forces of good and evil.

Today, some of the same prophesy-obsessed evangelicals who bought Hal Lindsey’s book in the 1970s belong to a movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, a loose coalition of politically conservative and often Pentecostal congregations whose leaders sometimes see themselves as modern-day prophets or apostles engaged in “spiritual warfare.” They are already engaged in a battle against demonic forces — including liberal Democrats, abortion rights advocates, gun control lobbyists, or folks pushing an LGBTQ agenda. Many see themselves as a divinely inspired bulwark against rising secularism, including some who call for a Christian revolution to take “dominion” over public schools and other government agencies.

In a new book, scholar Matthew Boedy links the recently assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk to this movement. “Driven by prosperity preachers, extremist politicians, and right-wing power brokers,” he writes, Kirk and other “laid the groundwork for Trump’s presidency and are now advancing its agenda under his second administration.” Boedy saw Kirk as a “millennial kingmaker” and “the new face of Christian nationalism.”

Before Charlie Kirk was born, some of the bishops of the New Apostolic Reformation first made headlines in the 1980s as leaders of the so-called “shepherding movement,” which practiced a form of radical Christian discipleship. Its cultic tendencies were expressed in a strident, authoritarian power structure spread through secret cells that would infiltrate existing Baptist, Pentecostal and other evangelical congregations.

In 1984, San Francisco Examiner photographer Kim Komenich and I travelled to Mobile, Alabama to interview one of the five international leaders of the shepherding movement, Bob Mumford, and to profile his church, the Gulf Coast Covenant Church. Mumford’s bishop in Northern California, Dennis Peacocke, a former 1960s Berkeley radical, is now a leader in the New Apostolic Reformation.

“We do not believe the Kingdom of God is a democracy,” Peacocke told me in a story published on page one of the Sunday San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle on February 19, 1984. “God the Father and his authority is established in the world, and you can like it or lump it. That cuts across every democratic fiber in us as Americans.”

Christian nationalist leaders who were once on the political and theological fringe now hang with Trump in the While House. At the annual National Conservatism Conference, held earlier this month in Washington, D.C., a parade of administration officials addressed the True Believers. Their talks were given amid panels entitled “The Bible and American Renewal” and “The Threat of Islamism in America.”

The bashing of immigrants — included legal immigrants — was high on the agenda. “America does not belong to them. It belongs to us,” proclaimed U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican. “Our people tamed the continent, built a civilization from the wilderness. We Americans are the sons and daughters of Christian pilgrims who poured out into the ocean’s shores.”

Back in the relatively innocent days of the late 1960s and early 1970s, cults seemed almost quaint. (Except, notoriously, for the few followers of Charlie Manson.) The Beatles went to India and meditated at the feet of a chubby guru. Hare Krishnas shaved their heads, dressed in orange robes, shook tambourines, and danced in divine ecstasy to their Hindu gods. Thousands of idealistic young people from East and West gathered in Madison Square Garden to have their marriages blessed by a strange Korean evangelist.

Today, the son of Sun Myung Moon, Pastor Hyung-Jin “Sean” Moon, runs a Unification Church splinter group called Rod of Iron Ministries. Headquartered in Newfoundland, Pennsylvania, he and his followers worship with AR-15 rifles and proudly wear crowns of golden bullets. Seeking alliances with MAGA and other right-wing nationalist sects, they hold militia-type trainings in the rolling hills of a state founded by Quakers preaching a message of “brotherly love.”

These days, spiritual cults, messianic sects and other new religious movements have powerful new tools to spread their message and attract new members. Before the rise of the Internet, books and in-person proselytizing were used to recruit acolytes. Today — as we saw with the rapid spread of Q-Anon conspiracy theories — ,YouTube videos and various social media platforms draw true believers into isolated silos of information and misinformation.

Steve Hassan, the former Moonie and anti-cult activist quoted in last week’s installment of “Messiahs I Have Known,” doesn’t see “another Jonestown” erupting out of Trump’s volatile mix of religious prophecy and militant rhetoric.

He sees something worse.

His one-time messiah, Rev. Moon, died in 2012. In recent decades, the Unification Church, now led by Moon’s widow, has rebranded itself as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification. It has courted and funded many leading Republican politicians, including Donald Trump. It operates as strange bedfellows with other prophecy-fueled New Apostolic Reformation churches in Trump’s base.

“What I see,” Hassan told me in an interview before Trump’s re-election, “is civil war.”

That civil war has begun. California and Texas are leading the blue and red forces in the battle over abortion rights, immigration policies and political gerrymandering. And Trump, with his prophecies of “Chipocalypse Now,” seems intent on turning this into a violent confrontation between liberal and conservative.

“Chicago,” he said, “is about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”

According to a survey conducted in May, nearly a quarter of Republicans back Trump’s move to use the military to crack down on protests against his agenda. That same poll showed that nearly four out of ten Democrats could justify removing Trump from office by force.

As we saw with last week’s assassination of Kirk, it doesn’t take much for political rhetoric to inspire gun violence. Robinson, the 22-year-old murder suspect, left evidence indicating that he was at least partly motivated by Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, which is seen by many on the left as signs of rising fascism.

Kirk, the 31-year-old Trump influencer, was speaking last week in Utah at an outdoor event called “Prove Me Wrong.” He was answering a question about trans people and mass shootings when the bullet from a high-powered, bolt-action rifle tore a hole in his neck. According to the governor of Utah, Robinson was living with “a romantic partner, a male transitioning to female.”

According to a recent article from Religion News Service, Kirk was increasingly emphasizing his evangelical faith. His rhetoric about “reclaiming the country for Christ” had grown bolder. Speaking at a Christian rally in Phoenix, he said, “If the church does not rise up at this moment, if the church does not take its proper role, then the country and the republic will be gone as we know it.”

We’ve seen in recent years how outbursts of violence can come from the radical right, the far left, or from people so deranged that it’s hard to place them on the political spectrum. Trump immediately responded to Kirk’s murder by turning up the temperature and declaring war on “left-wing lunatics.” Some conservative evangelicals and Christian nationalists have already raised Kirk up as a martyr to further inspire their cause.

Where we go from here is anyone’s guess, but one thing seems clear. Throwing apocalyptic prophecy and “spiritual warfare” into the mix is unlikely to calm down the next troubled shooter.