The Power Worshippers

by Katherine Stewart

  Barton devotes a significant part of his activism to a variety of entrepreneurial projects intended to produce future generations of movement leaders. At the end of his WallBuilders Live! radio shows, Barton narrates an advertisement for “the Patriot Academy,” a program for the sixteen- to twenty-five-year-old set whose graduates “serve in the halls of Congress, in the film industry and the pulpit and every area of the culture.” “Join us in training champions to change the world,” Barton exclaims. The program now also includes a “citizen track for adults.” The academy presently operates in state capitols around the United States, including Texas, Florida, Idaho, Delaware, and Arizona, producing four weeklong Patriot Academies just about every month.

  In recent years Barton has become closely involved in the money side of Christian nationalist politics. In the 2016 race he partnered with Ted Cruz, overseeing a Keep the Promise PAC, one of several similarly named multimillion-dollar super PACs supporting Cruz’s presidential bid. “Having David Barton running the super PAC gives it a lot of validity for evangelicals and pastors,” said Mike Gonzalez, Cruz’s South Carolina evangelical chair.34 The PAC was one of four affiliated super PACS in the network, including Keep the Promise I, a PAC managed by Kellyanne Conway, which received $11 million from Robert Mercer, and Keep the Promise III, which received $15 million from the families of Texas fracking billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks.

  Barton’s reputation as a strategist has continued to blossom. In 1992 he presciently pointed the movement in the direction of the courts, writing that “the judiciary is now the primary battlefield.”35 In recent years, even while keeping up the fight for control of the courts, Barton has worked to direct the Republican Party to capture control of state legislatures and governorships. Barton is a central figure in the conceptualization of the “religious freedom movement” as one of four board members for Project Blitz, a broad and ambitious legislative initiative that I will discuss in the next chapter. He was instrumental in focusing the movement’s sights on the Johnson Amendment, which was intended to prohibit churches and charities from directly or indirectly participating or intervening in “any political campaign on behalf of (or opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.” An aim of the movement, it would seem, is to turn houses of worship into the cash machines of the political system by allowing special interests to pour millions of tax-free dollars into churches, which could then turn around and spend like super PACs to elect or defeat candidates.

  In his political commentary, Barton plays just as loose with the facts as he does in his works of history. Speaking on his WallBuilders Live! radio program on April 17, 2017, Barton falsely suggested that the Johnson Amendment “violates the First Amendment rights” of churches. He eagerly relayed the views of a fellow pastor who said, “Guys, I’m tellin ya, Christian is the new black. Christian is what you get discriminated against now like blacks were in the ’60s.”36

  Show cohost Rick Green, a former Texas State representative, made a similar point in answering a listener’s query about the law: “The Johnson Amendment is what Lyndon Johnson slid in there in 1954 in the appropriations bill to try to muzzle churches and prevent pastors from being able to speak out on the biblical perspectives of different issues in the culture, if they could be labeled as ‘political,’ ” he said. “The government is literally inside our churches trying to muzzle our pastors and prevent them from having free speech or freedom of religion.”

  “Pastors don’t have the same right of free speech that everybody else has,” Barton complained.

  In fact, pastors are free to say what they like; the Johnson Amendment simply says that they can’t also collect their tax subsidies if they electioneer from the pulpit.

  With the Trump presidency, Barton believes, America is finally moving in the right direction. President Donald Trump, he has said, is running America on a “CEO model.”37 Christians who fail to support the Trump presidency are taking “a very selfish view of what we do with voting.”

  “It’s not your vote, it’s God’s vote,” says Barton.38

  Even as he has cultivated links with the big names in Republican politics, Barton has stayed close to some of the most extreme representatives of the Christian nationalist movement. He paired up with evangelists Lance Wallnau, who wrote a book comparing Trump to King Cyrus, and Andrew Wommack, who has said opposition to Trump is “demonic deception” and “one of the signs of the End Times,”39 in the Truth & Liberty Coalition, an activist and media organization whose mission is “the reformation of Nations by igniting the latent potential in the Body of Christ.” The website champions “the 7 Mountain Mandate, a powerful, transformative campaign intended to bring about social transformation,” a reference to the idea, popularized by C. Peter Wagner, that Christians who hold similarly radical beliefs are to dominate seven key areas of culture. Under “resources,” the website for Truth & Liberty Coalition links to a number of right-wing get-out-the-vote sites, including the iVoterGuide. It also links directly to the Trump campaign via “Trump’s Accomplishments (WhiteHouse.gov),” a site promoting Trump’s policies and celebrating his successes. Its “coalition partners,” who are also referred to as “influencers,” include many familiar names, such as Mike Huckabee, Jay Sekulow, Tony Perkins, Jerry Boykin, Steve Green, and Kristan Hawkins, who launched Students for Life of America. “I believe the 45th president is meant to be an Isaiah 45 Cyrus,” Wallnau writes. “With him in office, we will have authority in the Spirit to build the house of the Lord and restore the crumbling walls that separate us from cultural collapse.”40

  Throughout his own rise, Barton has remained close to the family that brought us the Museum of the Bible. Since that early meeting in Aledo, Texas, Barton has lavished praise on the Greens, inviting Steve and his brother Mart on WallBuilders Live! on multiple occasions. Characterizing the Bible as “the document that is the true founding document of America,” Barton and his cohosts hail the Green family as “champions for getting the Bible in the hands of people all over the world.”41

  Mart Green is founder and CEO of the Oklahoma City–based Mardel Christian & Education, with over thirty stores in six states. He also founded Every Tribe Every Nation, which brings together Bible translation agencies and digital technologies to promote access to the Bible with the aim of “eradicating Bible poverty,” as they call it, by evangelizing “unreached people groups.”

  Barton and Steve Green have also appeared together on various right-wing platforms, including Glenn Beck’s BlazeTV in September 2013, to discuss Green’s then-ongoing lawsuit Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. Barton opened the conversation with a sympathetic gesture of shared grievance. “You guys are in the middle of a lawsuit that is on its way to the Supreme Court for appeal that may dramatically restructure Obamacare by the fact that they have said you guys are not allowed to have a conscience, a religious conscience,” Barton told Green.42

  In a segment that aired May 1, 2017, Steve Green appeared on WallBuilders Live! to discuss “the need to revive the Bible in America so that we can have that biblical worldview.” Barton’s cohost, Rick Green, emphatically endorsed Steve Green’s work at the Museum of the Bible. “For us to have a biblical perspective, or the nation to have a biblical perspective, we’ve got to get back to what a biblical worldview actually is,” he said. Rick Green went on to praise Steve Green’s “incredible effort to restore this book back to its proper place in our culture.” Steve Green asserted, “We had a love for God’s word. I believe [the Bible] is foundational to our nation, to our lives, and to our business.” Rick Green concluded, “The significance and importance of what you guys are doing with the book, the museum, all of it, is huge.”43

  In its official pronouncements, the Museum of the Bible has learned to present itself as just a museum. Its first president, Cary Summers, described the museum as “a non-sectarian institution. It is not political and it will not proselytize.” Its aim, he said, is simply to “reacquaint the world with the book
that helped make it, and let the visitor come to their own conclusions.” Steve Green has also dismissed concerns the museum has a religious agenda. “The theological weeds or the political weeds—we don’t have time,” he has said.44

  In 2012 the museum removed from its corporate mission statement the language about inspiring “confidence in the absolute authority and reliability of the Bible” and announced that the museum’s purpose was simply “to invite people to engage with the Bible.”45 Yet Green himself has maintained that there was no real change. “The intent had always been to be a nonsectarian museum,” he told the reporter Michelle Boorstein at the Washington Post.46 Perhaps Green hews to the belief that being “nonsectarian” and inspiring “confidence in the absolute authority” of the Bible mean exactly the same thing.

  The pretense that the museum was just a museum, however, cut no ice with its most fervent champions. Values Voter summits, Road to Majority conferences, Watchmen on the Wall gatherings, and other assemblies of religious right activists invariably include events at the museum, such as film screenings, behind-the-scenes tours, and lectures. In late March 2019 the Museum of the Bible cohosted the International Culture Shapers Summit featuring prominent Seven Mountains dominionists such as Lance Wallnau, Os Hillman, and James and Anna Kramer. Other speakers included Roma Downey, whose husband, Mark Burnett, created President Trump’s former television show The Apprentice and guided it with Trump at the helm through fourteen seasons; Family Research Council leaders Tony Perkins and Ken Blackwell; and over a dozen other representatives of media-, government-, education-, and business-focused associations.

  In May 2019 the Museum of the Bible hosted a special reception and tour for the Watchmen on the Wall’s annual national gathering in Washington, D.C. According to an event schedule, speakers at the three-day event included dozens of Christian nationalist activists, including many who appeared at the regional event in Unionville, North Carolina: Tony Perkins, Lieutenant General (ret.) William Boykin, and J. C. Church. Predictably, they were joined by David Barton. The event schedule also promised a handful of Republican politicians, including Representative Vicky Hartzler and Senator Josh Hawley (both R-Mo.) and training sessions before lobbying on Capitol Hill. According to reporting from the National Religious Broadcasters, Mike Pence made a surprise appearance and vowed to “fight until we fully repeal the Johnson Amendment.” He added, “I know it is the President’s conviction and my conviction that the pulpits you stand at are of much greater consequence than any podium behind which he and I stand.”47

  By now the Museum of the Bible had become a well-trod pilgrimage destination, not just for leaders of the movement, but also for its foot soldiers. In August 2018 the Museum of the Bible hosted a special tour for Generations, the ministry affiliated with homeschool advocate (and Rushdoony acolyte) Kevin Swanson, as part of its four-day Bible Family Conference. Generations advocates “biblical” government, strictly enforced gender roles and the submission of women, and condemns same-sex relationships. There is little in the museum to challenge Generations members’ philosophy, or “worldview,” as they call it, and that’s exactly as organizers of the Bible Family Conference want it. In an article posted to the Generations website, the question “Should I let my kids read books by non-Christians?” is met with the response by one of Swanson’s associates that the “bigger question I have is, ‘How do I make sure that my grandkids don’t turn into Mark Twain?’ Because this is one of the defining characteristics of most of the men in these books, they are apostates.”48

  The Museum of the Bible also hosted Revive Us 2, a “national family meeting” organized by evangelical celebrity Kirk Cameron. The event broadcasted live to movie theaters and churches around the country, delivering the message that national unity can only be achieved through allegiance to conservative Christian religion—and by voting “biblical values.”49 Another group that appears thrilled with the museum is the Center for National Renewal, an initiative of Churches in Covenant, a large international coalition of churches. During their December 2017 conference, the D.C. Renewal Experience, CNR arranged for a special access tour of the museum. In a promotional video for the group, Pastor Stephen Hayes, son of CNR founder Dr. Mike Hayes, said, “God has called us to take possession and dominion of this land and of our government.”50

  In 2019 the Museum of the Bible sponsored the three-day Worldview Conference of Kingdom Education Ministries, “Capturing the Next Generation for Christ Through Kingdom Education.” It has also sponsored Passages, a group that provides Christian college students with trips to Israel to promote the political and theological views of Christian Zionism, and which Southern Methodist University professor of religious studies Mark A. Chancey calls “a sort of ‘Birthright [Israel] for Evangelicals.’ ”

  And of course the Museum of the Bible is a little piece of heaven for leaders such as Ralph Drollinger, who held a fall training conference for international leaders of his ministry at the Museum of the Bible shortly after its opening in November 2017. “Many of these men were named Global Directors earlier this year, and have made tremendous progress in establishing their own ministries as well as in their charge of finding godly, skilled, and experienced men to take the Gospel to the leaders of nations in their area of the world,” Drollinger said.51 None of these visitors seem to have any doubt that the Museum of the Bible is something like “God’s base camp” in the nation’s capital, as “apostle” Cindy Jacobs put it during Revolution 2017.

  On the eve of my departure for Revolution 2018, I am frankly disappointed to learn that the venue has unexpectedly been switched. But I feel a certain shiver of excitement when I learn of the new venue for the event. With help from the Museum of the Bible, Revolution 2018 has secured space at the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, just a few blocks from the White House. This, I think, should be interesting.

  Lamplighter Ministries, the group behind Revolution 2018, is associated with the New Apostolic Reformation, a fast-growing movement in the charismatic tradition that counts Seven Mountains dominionist C. Peter Wagner as a forefather. Its leaders call themselves apostles, maintaining that they can receive direct communications from God and have influence in the supernatural realm. On a chilly December evening I arrive at the Trump International Hotel, where the rank and file of Lamplighter Ministries move around in curious juxtaposition with the pale interiors, gold trim, and sparkling crystal chandeliers.

  A gentle man of about thirty wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt tells me he made the long drive with his father to D.C. from Albany, New York. The pair could not afford the hotel’s $56 parking fee, so they parked on a faraway street. They could not afford D.C. hotel rates, either, so they decided to lodge outside the city limits. “But it’s so good to be here,” he says with delight. For a middle-aged attendee who says she’s on disability thanks to a workplace-related injury, the trip is a splurge. “I’ve never been anywhere like this before,” she tells me, looking around the white-and-gold ballroom.

  I fall into conversation with Johneen and Tom, a friendly, gregarious couple in their seventies who flew in this morning from the Houston area. Johneen, who wears a scarf and sweater in softly coordinating shades of gray, tells me stories about her four children and fifteen grandchildren—“thirteen of them homeschooled!”

  She confides, “We had a prophetic moment on the way here. Our plane was delayed because they had to secure a fire extinguisher that had come loose. And here we are heading into ‘The Fire!’ ” she exclaims, her delicate features crinkling with pleasure and wonder.

  Johneen’s husband, Tom, who is wearing a fine cashmere sweater, works “in oil,” she says. Johneen “started getting involved in intercession” when the pair were living in a historic house in London and “we had some issues with demons.”

  At the front table, organizers are handing out a stapled program and wristbands. The headline on the handout reads: “Compilation—Verdicts from Heaven’s Court.” Some of the papers, which
are printed on both sides, purport to be a “Life Decree: Amendments to Decree of Divorce from Baal,” concerning the case of “THE PEOPLE OF GOD, Plaintiff, versus THE PRINCIPALITY OF BAAL (Incl. Baal, Queen of Heaven, Leviathan, Defendant).”

  Under the header “Re-Constitution of the United States (The Turnaround Verdict),” the handout tells us: “It has been decided that the land and government (of the United States) were consecrated to Jesus Christ from inception, and remain in this standing today” and that “the Court now rules according to Psalm 15:3 that the scepter of the wicked must no longer remain on the land allotted to the righteous. The scepter, or enforcement of unjust governance, must now be rescinded. Further, the Court grants the wealth of heaven and Earth to establish this Covenant sworn to your forefathers by the King. The issuance of the King’s land grants and inheritances is now authorized for distribution and stewardship to this end.”

  A giant screen behind the podium features a large graphic of what appears to be a red substance—blood? food coloring?—swirling in water. “I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord,” several hundred worshippers sing the refrain of a Phil Collins’s song. On stage, a nine-piece band from Georgia plays the familiar tune slowly. Soon they pick up the pace, transitioning into contemporary worship songs like “Holy Visitation” by Rita Springer, whose voice has the ragged edges that suggest familiarity with the harder side of life. In front of the room, a dancing woman whirls two flags through the air, American and Israeli.

  Up at the podium, the speakers take over, wielding a gavel for dramatic effect. Jon Hamill, who founded Lamplighter Ministries with his wife, Jolene, announces, “In Jesus’s name, we declare the Deep State will not prevail,” before banging the gavel on a podium. A similar prayer ritual, directed at “the false media network,” is led by Jolene, who implores members of the audience to “repent of drinking the cup of media, because it is a false cup.”