evangelical 360°

Ep. 52 / American Politics and the Crisis of Christian Nationalism with Matthew D. Taylor

• Host Brian Stiller • Season 1 • Episode 52

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A prayer circle in the Oval Office makes for a striking photo, but the real story sits behind the lens: how a network of independent charismatic leaders became power brokers and why that shift matters for democracy. In this episode we sit down with Dr. Matthew D. Taylor, a renowned religious scholar and author, who helps map out some recent American history—from Latter Rain revivals, to the New Apostolic Reformation, and prime-time policy fueled by fringe prophecy. Along the way, we draw a clear line between everyday “God bless America” civil religion and a harder creed Dr. Taylor calls, "Christian supremacy"—the claim that Christians are entitled to rule.

Taylor explains how spiritual warfare language migrated from church pulpits to campaign rallies, recasting opponents as demonic and compromise as defeat. That shift, he argues, turned elections into exorcisms and normalized a revolutionary posture that helped fuel January 6 and continues to shape rhetoric and policy. We also explore why this moment emerged now: the global surge of independent charismatics, the post-1990s slide in Christian identification, and the strongman bargain many believers made after cultural defeats like the Obergefell decision.

Grounded in history and attentive to faith, the conversation doesn’t call for withdrawal from public life. Instead, we make the case for a noncoercive Christian presence that seeks persuasion over domination and protects the rights of those who disagree. Whether you’re evangelical, exvangelical, or simply curious about the intersection of religion and power, this episode offers a clear framework to understand the stakes—and the alternatives.

If you'd like to learn more from Dr. Matthew D. Taylor you can purchase his book, The Violent Take It By Force, and find him online and on social media. 

And please don't forget to share this episode and join the conversation on YouTube! 

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Brian Stiller:

Hello and welcome to Evangelical Three Sixty. I'm your host, Brian Stiller. In recent years, we have seen Christian pastors and evangelists gather around the US President Donald Trump or make so-called prophetic predictions regarding his calling. Who are these people praying with and praising President Trump? The media calls them evangelicals. Now that's the stream of Christianity with which I identify and has shaped my last sixty years of ministry. So, as you might guess, I become quite interested when evangelical Christians offer such public support for a man who has slashed U.S. humanitarian aid and refugee programs, pardon people who rioted at the U.S. Capitol, and anger the people of my home country, Canada, as no American has done in my lifetime. Who were these people supporting Donald Trump? What ideology is driving them? Matt Taylor has written a book describing their ideas, what they intend to do, and the downsides of their influence. My interest in having Matt Taylor on Evangelical 360 is that I want to encourage a deep, open conversation about issues facing us today, especially those that affect the evangelical community so deeply. You may not agree with Matt's analysis and his political opinions may rub you the wrong way, but I hope you will listen to him closely. I have another particular reason for interest in the story. One of the primary historical influences shaping many of the professing Christian leaders around John Donald Trump dates back to my boyhood days in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. My father, as bishop, presiding over the Pentecostal churches in Saskatchewan back in 1948, faced problems with a movement that came to be widely understood as heresy. Matt Taylor traces the path from that group to the so-called Christian nationalists supporting Donald Trump 75 years later. So, whatever your opinion, I think you'll find the discussion fascinating and thought-provoking. And thanks for being a part of this podcast. As you listen, please consider sharing this episode with a friend. And if you haven't done so already, please hit the subscribe button. You can also join the conversation on YouTube in the comments below. Now to my guest, Matt Taylor. Matthew Taylor, so wonderful to have you on Evangelical 360 today.

Matthew D. Taylor:

Thank you for having me, Brian.

Brian Stiller:

Matt, I'm sure most of us have seen this picture of Paula Taylor and other people surrounding the president of the U.S. praying for him in special kinds of uh prophetic ways. But this is a group that you say is threatening the democracy of the U.S. Why do you come to that fairly strong comment and analysis?

Matthew D. Taylor:

I don't come to it lightly. I have studied these folks for the last four years or so, have been tracking them very closely. I have really made it my task to study the religious leaders who surround Donald Trump and who advise him, who lobby him for their policies. And it is not a mainstream group, as most people would define mainstream. I mean, Paula White, who you mentioned, Paula White Kane sometimes goes by, is a very integral part of the both the first Trump administration and the second Trump administration. But she has gathered a group of Christian leaders around Donald Trump that I would call from the fringe historically, within even within evangelicalism. I'm I I grew up evangelical. I grew up within American evangelicalism to the point where we would have even called ourselves fundamentalists in in my youth, right? Because that term was still in use by a lot of folks. I I don't label all evangelicals by any measure as extreme or as far right or something like that. But the leaders who have surrounded Trump, the Christian leaders, in the same way that Donald Trump has remade the Republican Party in the U.S. and brought in a lot of figures like Steve Bannon or Stephen Miller, who would have been more marginal figures, would have been seen as kind of outliers within the broader conservative coalition in the U.S., but made them the center now of the party. And many of the mainstream leaders, the people that you or I would have looked to to speak for the Republican Party a decade ago, many of them wouldn't even call themselves Republican anymore. They've been forced out of the party, forced out of politics. A similar dynamic has played out in the evangelical advisors who surround Donald Trump. Many of these figures would not have been counted within the mainstream of the religious right, even of the 1980s and 1990s. But now they are at the center of power and are driving the action, driving the agenda around religion in the new administration.

Brian Stiller:

Let's identify this group that has consolidated its support around the administration. Who are they? What do they constitute as a religious community?

Matthew D. Taylor:

Yeah, so there are different layers of advisors and leaders around Trump. At the broadest, it's it's evangelicals, right? And there's there's a there's a spectrum of evangelicals through there. The vast majority of those evangelicals are what we would call independent charismatics. And independent here is just being used as a synonym for non-denominational. So these are, think of them as kind of the non-denominational wing of Pentecostalism, right? In the US, at least, most Pentecostals belong to denominations. These folks, some of them come from Pentecostal denominations, but most of them are coming out of these megachurches, non-denominational networks that are charismatic in their spirituality. And even within that segment, there's there's a subset of Trump's advisors who come directly out of a network called the New Apostolic Reformation that has been very, very influential in that independent charismatic space, not only in the US, but around the globe. And the New Apostolic Reformation is the subject of my book, and they are the ones that I am labeling a threat to American democracy. And we can get into all their history and everything, but this is a leadership network that was formed starting in the 1990s and into the 2000 around a seminary professor named C. Peter Wagner. And they have an agenda for Christian domination of society, for Christians to take control of society. And that is on its face anti-democratic. And those leaders, many of the key advisors around Trump, people who were very close to those key advisors were central to the orchestration and galvanization of Christians being there on January 6th and Christians participating in the attack on American democracy that happened right after the 2020 election.

Brian Stiller:

So these aren't just people who would hope and wish that America was more Christian. These are people who you say are have actually moved into the centers of power and using the levers of political power to assert what they believe is Christian, our Christian values and the Christian way of life.

Matthew D. Taylor:

Yeah, let me define my terms here because I want to be really clear. We talk a lot about Christian nationalism, and I actually find that term to be mostly unhelpful in describing what we're talking about here. Christian nationalism, in its simplest form, is just a version of religious nationalism, right? The idea of kind of blending a national or political identity with a religious identity. And within the US, there's a broad spectrum of people that we would call Christian nationalists. I mean, I grew up in a church that was arguably Christian nationalists. We had a Christian flag and an American flag at the front of our church on the chancel, right? That was a blending of a religious identity and a kind of statist identity, right? My church was not a grave threat to American democracy, right? That is a thread of American politics that has always been there. It's a very, very common impulse around the world in the U.S. to try to merge and hold together one's sense of religion and one's sense of national identity. So there's a lot of this like soft Christian nationalism that's out there, kind of a God bless America style of Christian nationalism in the U.S., that I don't think is a threat to our democracy. Now, when we're talking about the leaders around Trump and the Christian leaders who have banded together around him, who are his most ardent supporters, who were keenly involved in January 6th, we're talking about the more extreme end of this Christian nationalist spectrum, what I would call Christian supremacy. And Christian supremacy is the belief that Christians are entitled to power over other people, that Christians are superior, and that Christians are entitled to a premier form of citizenship by divine decree, by, or by theology, right? By their innate superiority. And that characterizes a lot both the New Apostolic Reformation and a lot of the leaders who have surrounded Donald Trump. And their agenda is not merely to have the United States be a more Christian nation. I can totally understand why many Christians want the U.S. to be a more Christian nation. Many Muslims want the U.S. to be a more Islamic nation. Many Jews want it to be a more Jewish nation, many secular people want it to be a more secular nation. There's nothing innately wrong with wanting to influence society. And by definition, in a democracy, all groups that are participating politically are trying to influence society. But it's where the question is: are they still playing within the rules of democracy to do it? Right. And if we think back to the religious right in the United States of the 1980s and 1990s, the Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Pat Robertson era, their approach to participation in trying to Christianize America very much fit within the rules of democracy, right? They would say, we're the moral majority. We're trying to use leverage, the leverage of Christian demographic power in order to bring about the more Christian society that we desire. That's fine within the rules of a democracy. As long as you're kind of playing by the agreed-upon consensus rules within your democracy, great. When we start talking about the far right, we're talking about where we start to move outside of the boundaries of liberal democracy, liberal with a lowercase L, right? Democracy that protects the rights of the citizens. Where we start moving into these more far-right circles, these more Christian supremacist circles, you start to have this idea of a top-down control of society, of a revolution within society to remake it more Christian. And if democracy works to further those ends, great. But these folks understand this as a divine mandate for Christians to take control over society. And they see that as divine decree, and the God's will is more important than the will of the people. And that was what was the theological context that gave us January 6th, and I would argue has really set up this current confrontation in American politics between these more democratic elements and these anti-democratic, illiberal elements that are making great gains within American politics today.

Brian Stiller:

What kinds of things are they promoting that, in your view, threatens democracy in your country?

Matthew D. Taylor:

So at the heart of it, and this is an idea that comes out of these new apostolic reformation networks, is an idea called the Seven Mountain Mandate. And the Seven Mountain Mandate is a form of dominion theology. Dominion theology comes out of people's interpretations of the Bible, especially actually originates more in Calvinist circles, but has made its way into these charismatic circles. And dominion theology is an interpretation of the Bible that says that Christians should have dominion over every society that they live in, that God has ordained for Christians to have dominion. And how this plays out within the Seven Mountain mandate is they divide society up into seven different areas of authority: family, education, government, arts and entertainment, media, business and commerce. In every one of those, they imagine them as a mountain. And the top of that mountain, they say, and this is this is framed as a prophecy, as a as a direct revelation from God, they would say, at the top of that mountain, and every society is either controlled by Satan and the demons or by God and the Christians. And there's no one between. And so Christians need to take over the Seven Mountains. They need to rise to positions of influence or grab hold of leaders who are at the tops of those mountains and coercively or evangelistically use those people in order to secure Christian power in society, in order for Christian influence to flow down from the top of society. Now, if you think back to the religious right of old, right, their idea was a grassroots, a bottom-up mobilization in society, that again is within the rules and boundaries of democracy, right? When you're talking about a top-down takeover of society, so that Christians take over positions of power and then institute their will from the top, that's a vanguard model of social change. That's a revolutionary model of social change. And that, I would argue, is really at the heart of the current crisis that we're in. Now, that's not the only element of this anti-democratic movement. One of the other real manifestations of this, and it's kind of embedded with the Seven Mountains idea, is this hyper-aggressive style of cultural spiritual warfare. What in the New Apostolic Reformation circles is referred to as strategic level spiritual warfare. Now, many, many Christians believe in spiritual warfare. I grew up doing practicing and believing in spiritual warfare. That is a very, very common thing, common among evangelicals, common among many Catholics, right? Not a grave threat to democracy. When you're praying against demons that are attacking you or attacking your community, right? That is not an attack on democracy. It's the taking, though, of these kind of frameworks of spiritual warfare, transposing them onto national politics and saying what nationally the Democrats are aligned with demons, or the liberals or the left is demonic. And we, the righteous ones, need to drive out those demons from our society in order to claim society for Christ, right? This is the rhetoric that we hear all over the place: this angelic demonic pairing, or this we're on the side of God, they're on the side of Satan. And when you insert that kind of a frame onto democratic politics, it both polarizes society and makes compromise and cooperation and coordination, all these things that are crucial for a democracy to function, makes those impossible. Because if the other side is demonic, you cannot compromise with demons. If the other side is satanic, well, Satan is made to be driven out, not to be compromised with. And so you are labeling groups of people, you're literally demonizing your political opponents and saying that there's no possibility of coordination or compromise, and we can't even listen to those people. That is a recipe for political violence and for authoritarian behavior.

Brian Stiller:

The title of your book is The Violent Take It by Force. Describe for us what you think, what you mean by take it. What kinds of things do you see coming or in play even now as we speak that are in violation of democracy, the assumptions of democracy, and are part of what you see as this takeover?

Matthew D. Taylor:

The passage we're re I'm referring to there is Matthew 11, 12. Jesus is speaking about the impending death of his cousin John the Baptist, and is kind of reflecting on the death or the trial at that point of John the Baptist and says, Since the days of John the Baptist, which means the days that he's speaking in right at that moment, the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force. And many Christians, most Christians, I'd argue, throughout history, have understood that as descriptive, that the life of following Jesus entails suffering, and that the violent forces in the world that feel threatened by the non-coercive and non-violent kingdom of God will react with violence. And that Jesus is pointing to his cousin and saying, look, the righteous ones will suffer violence, right? But within these new apostolic reformation and independent charismatic spiritual warfare circles, that verse is taken as a mandate to do spiritual violence. That Christians are made to be violent spiritually in order to take back the kingdom of God by force, to take the kingdom of heaven by force. And this verse was everywhere in reference to January 6th on social media and the commentary of many of the participants, because they saw this as a spiritual battle. Now, January 6th, I would argue, was the first big outcropping of this that we've seen in American politics, but it was by no means the last. I mean, this rhetoric of spiritual warfare, of prophecy, of seven mountains, of Christian empowerment and Christian control has only been amplified since January 6th. And in the new administration, there is now a quote, anti-Christian bias task force that is being empowered and ramped up to go after anyone who is critical of Christianity, particularly the styles of Christianity that the Trump administration wants to advance. And I'll just note 62% of the U.S. population is Christian. There is no widespread anti-Christian bias in the U.S. Christians are the majority. Christians have a lot of power. In fact, Christians, conservative Christians even, control the White House, our executive branch, both houses of our Congress, our legislative branch, and a supermajority on our Supreme Court, our judicial branch. So in what sense and where are Christians being so widely persecuted in the United States when we start to see religious majorities claim that they are persecuted? That is the pretext, that is the predicate for them to start persecuting other people. And this is what we're seeing through the new policies that are being put in place. I mean, just yesterday we watched as Pete Hegseth, our Secretary of Defense and Donald Trump gathered the U.S. generals and gave them a lecture all about the ways that they need to be more upstanding and conform more to Trump's agenda. And part of that, historically, if you look at how Pete Hegseth has been doing this within the Pentagon within our military, has been pushing Christian worship services, messaging Christian doctrine. I mean, some of the videos that have been put out by our military and by our Department of Homeland Security in recent weeks involve pairing together military enforcement and police enforcement, particularly against migrants and foreigners, with Bible verses and quotes from Jesus. Pete Hegseth released a video just this week of him praying the Lord's Prayer and over images of the US military attacking different targets, right? And so even as you're praying for God's kingdom to come and God's will to be done, it is being projected alongside American military force and violence. And so right now, what we're seeing across our government is this ramping up of a kind of protective authoritarian state that protects people who are on the inside, who are part of the MAGA coalition, and labels those on the outside as threats. And if you look around the world, what happens when those types of conditions take place in a democracy? It's not going to remain a democracy for very long under those conditions.

Brian Stiller:

Matt, this didn't come out of nothing. It didn't happen anywhere. It happened someplace. There was a vacuum, there was an opportunity, there was a need, there was a reaction. What created the environment that allowed this to assert itself?

Matthew D. Taylor:

So I think let's think on a global and a national stage. So on a global stage, I think we have to think about the growth of this independent charismatic sector of Christianity. So when we're talking about, again, we're talking about non-denominational and charismatic, right? That the juncture of those two qualities. The Center for the Study of World Christianity at Gordon Conwell Seminary estimates that in 1970, there were 44 million independent charismatics in the world. Worldwide, 44 million. By 2020, their estimate was up to 312 million. So we're talking about a segment of global Christianity that is roughly doubling in size over 20 years right now. Fastest growth we have seen of a religious movement or a religious tendency, maybe in global history. And this is it's not just that it's growing in terms of converts, it's that other people are leaving their denominational or non-charismatic identities to join up. This is the growth edge of global Christianity. This is the exciting space, right? And Peter Wagner, who was a seminary professor, an expert in church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California in the 1970s and 1980s, was watching and observing this. And he was really ahead of his time in recognizing that this was the growth trend of future global Christianity. And he became very invested in that and started to hang out with leaders within that space, started to cultivate relationships with leaders, and ultimately adopted those frames himself. And that was the space in which he helped coin this phrase new apostolic reformation in the mid-1990s, as what he was trying to describe a burgeoning movement. He thought of it on the order of the formation of a new branch of Christianity, a reformation on the level of the Protestant Reformation, but this time led by apostles and prophets. This is a very, very important element of their theology, is they believe that they themselves, Peter Wagner called himself an apostle, and they believed that they, that in the late 20th century, God was commissioning new apostles and prophets to lead the church, to transform the church. Sometimes goes under the heading of what's called fivefold ministry out of Ephesians chapter four. And they would talk about we are the new apostles and prophets who will lead the global church into a global revival and reformation and transformation of society. And they became politically radicalized around these Seven Mountains ideas, but they were still on the margins of American Christianity until Donald Trump came on the scene. And Paula White, who has been Donald Trump's religious advisor and personal pastor for more than 20 years now, she helped kind of broker this relationship between Trump and many of these independent charismatic leaders who, again, were on the fringes of American Christianity, but were more aligned with the Trump and MAGA coalition even from the start. And that was the group that has now become this kind of inside track group of advisors who are central to everything that we're seeing within the both of the Trump administrations.

Brian Stiller:

But Matt, what in the American culture uh was lacking or was uh uh was in its face, something either allowed it or created impetus for this to take over, to, or at least to show the kind of influence that is manifesting today.

Matthew D. Taylor:

Yes, definitely. So let me again give give kind of a big picture context and then the political context, right? So big picture context, up until 1990, 90% or more of Americans in every survey that you can find are identifying as Christian, right? So when the moral majority or the religious right of the 1980s and 1990s is claiming we just need to mobilize Christians and get them voting, and then we can change American politics, that's not a crazy claim. If 90% of the country is identifying as Christian, you really just need to mobilize your portion of that and you can exercise great power. As I said, today it's down to around 62%. So we've seen over the last 40 years or so a rapid secularization in the American populace. That's been it has not been a secularization imposed from the top down. It has been people leaving Christian identity. But that is experienced within Christian communities as a real threat to their identity. I mean, it's it's people's children who are leaving the church, right? That's how this is happening. And so people experience this as a lessening of Christian power, a degradation of Christian kind of dominance in society. And so you got that on the one side, this kind of demographic shift that's constantly declining since 1990. And then you have this religious right infrastructure that had been built up in the 1980s and 1990s. This is what Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and these folks were doing. And this whole lobbying wing that was very, very involved in Republican politics in the United States. And they had done a lot in the 30, 40 years that they were doing. But then in the summer of 2015, actually, just about a week after Donald Trump entered the presidential race to be to join the Republican primary in the summer of 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the Obergefell gay marriage decision that legalized gay marriage all across all 50 states in the United States. And this was something the religious right had campaigned against for decades. And suddenly the Supreme Court that they had invested all this time and energy in getting their people on were the ones who pushed it through. And I think that was experienced as a real low point for many of these religious right leaders and for their followers. And it was this moment of almost existential crisis that they had spent so much and invested so much and spent so many years trying to push their agenda and it wasn't working. And I think it's not coincidental that it was right at that time that evangelicals, both at the grassroots level and through these independent charismatic leaders, all banded together around Donald Trump because the rationale was he may not be a godly man. He may not even be a Christian, but he's a strong man. He's a strong leader. He will be a bully on our behalf, he will hurt our enemies, and he will protect us. And this has always been the bargain between religious communities and authoritarians is they might not conform to all of the scruples, all of the morality that we hold, but they will protect us. And that's the mentality that I think has really driven this merger of very conservative and even far-right Christianity and Donald Trump in the United States. And that is what has created the base that the hardline base of support that he has with American Christians.

Brian Stiller:

Matt, one of my interests in your book was a group that you referred to called Latter Rain. This started in my own backyard in Saskatchewan. My father was a pastor, and in 1948, after the latter rain had was forced out of Bethel Bible Institute in Saskatoon and went to North Mattelford and called and developed what's called the Sharon Group. My dad was elected superintendent, which is really bishop of the province. We moved to Saskatoon and he became president of Bethel Bible Institute, where the Latter Rain had actually formed and then for a number of reasons was forced out. So I'm in I'm intrigued by the linkage between the NAR that you've described and the group that are surrounding the president and their vision that goes back to a view that was that percolated and uh came to existence within within my old life and personal history. Now, what what was latter rain and how do you connect the two?

Matthew D. Taylor:

Yeah, great question. And and I I find your own your own personal journey here fascinating because I I've interviewed a number of folks who have kind of similar intersections with latter rain early on. So I think we have to remember, right, that Pentecostalism as a movement emerges at the very beginning of the 20th century, right? Uh the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles. I mean, there's there's a number of these revivals all around the globe, really, in the first decade of the 20th century. And but by the 1940s, right, the inner all this energy, excitement in Pentecostalism, the sense of revival, well. You're really 40 years into the movement. And there's a segment within it that says, we need to renew Pentecostalism. We need a, we need a new revival. We need a new outpouring of the spirit. And many of them get excited about this latter rain kind of idea. And the latter rain is a reference to the rain patterns, the weather patterns in Israel, right? And the sense of if the day of Pentecost or maybe the rise of Pentecostalism was the former rains, the beginning of things. Now in the latter rain is a sense of an end times outpouring of the Holy Spirit. And so as you said, these folks begin in Canada and begin kind of this idea of we are the renewing generation. We are the group. And the that they sometimes refer to themselves even as the new order of the latter reign. And these ideas, because of these global Pentecostal networks, these ideas spread around the globe. The Latter Rain were influential in New Zealand and Australia. They were influential in China. They were influential in the United States. But the one of the core ideas of this Latter Reign renewal and revival movement that most of the Pentecostal denominations utterly rejected, right? And we should be clear about that, right? The Pentecostal denominations look at this Latter Rain stuff and say, oh, uh oh, no, no, they're going too far. But that's why they moved into these more independent networks, into these spaces that are not regulated by denominations. But one of the core ideas of the Latter reign was this idea of fivefold ministry, focused especially on Ephesians chapter four. Um, right, and in Ephesians four, the author of Ephesians lists five different ministry gifts that Jesus gives to the church upon his ascension: apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers, and evangelists. And the Latter reign folks are looking at that and say, hey, well, we've got pastors, teachers, and evangelists, but we don't have apostles and prophets. We need these offices of apostles and prophets. And they believe, began to believe that they were receiving prophecies themselves about the renewal of the apostles and prophets in the life of the church. And so these Latter Rain ideas, they're they're they kind of spread out into these diffuse non-denominational networks and are being carried by many people and reflected upon and percolating and continuing in these spaces. But it often is happening off the charts, right? This is not happening within more institutional and denominational bodies. This is happening out in the hinterlands of American evangelicalism. But these ideas are very popular and are around for 40 or so years until Peter Wagner and some of these other folks start picking them up and deciding they're really going to enact them through the New Apostolic Reformation. That is the baseline out of which these NAR networks grow. Now, I want to be very clear: the New Apostolic Reformation is a particular set of these apostolic and prophetic networks. There are many, many charismatic Christians around the globe who believe in some of these latter reign ideas and are downstream of the Latter reign, who are not necessarily on board with this whole NAR program, right? That was Peter Wagner's version of it that emerges in the 1990s and early 2000s. But these apostolic and prophetic networks that are all downstream of the Latter reign, Paula Wycane herself is very influenced by these apostolic and prophetic ideas. Many churches around the globe are influenced by these apostolic and prophetic ideas. And built into that, right, if these apostles and prophets, right, and think about the role of the apostles and the prophets in the early church, right? If you have offices of apostle and prophet that obviate the need for bishops and supersede the authority of pastors, you are installing an echelon of personal leadership built around these personalities of the apostles and prophets that can claim that they hear directly from God, can claim that they don't need any bureaucratic checks or committees to help guide them. They don't need denominations, and they are just empowered to lead the church. And you can imagine what types of personalities would gravitate towards that kind of a role and that kind of leadership. Those are exactly the kinds of personalities that you find in these networks around Peter Wagner, and we're including Peter Wagner himself. And it's it tends to be these more authoritarian type characters, the people who don't want accountability, the people who feel a sense of kind of charismatic gifting that says that they should be in leadership over others, right? And so you get this migration of all of these entrepreneurial and very skilled and ambitious leaders around first C. Peter Wagner, and they get kind of radicalized and mentored around him. Almost everyone who joins these NAR networks, and there's hundreds of leaders around the globe who do join these NAR networks under Peter Wagner, almost all of them identify as either apostles or prophets or both. And so they they are claiming a level of authority over their fellow Christians that is virtually unprecedented unless you go back to the era of the early church, and I'd argue even there they are severely misinterpreting the early apostles and prophets too.

Brian Stiller:

Okay, that's very helpful analysis. Where do we go from here? So I'm I'm part of a global evangelical community. Uh and when I look at at your country and the evangelical community in its various forms, what's the next step? What do people do who want to disentangle politics from their expression of faith? Uh do you have any suggestions?

Matthew D. Taylor:

First of all, I'm I'm not sure that the goal should be to disentangle politics from our expressions of faith. If we're thinking in the broadest sense of what politics means, right? Politics is how we talk about power in relationship with each other, how we talk about the how we have community together. Well, politics is built into that. And and of course, the Bible and Jesus have a lot to say about politics. So I don't think the goal is for Christians to not participate in politics or for Christians to eschew politics in favor of some kind of quietist piety or something like that. Absolutely, Christians should be involved in politics. And the gospel has political implications, right? I think where we need to be really careful and thoughtful is if you go back throughout Christian history, and some of this begins with Constantine and the Council of Nicaea in the fourth century, but you can kind of trace throughout Christian history the blending of Christianity and national identity or empire, has been one of the most destructive forces in human history. And I am not being hyperbolic there. I mean, out of the blending of Christianity and imperialism, and this begins with the Roman Empire appropriating and adopting Christianity, both under Constantine and then under his successor Theodosius in the fourth century, you get crusades, you get pogroms against Jews in Europe and around the world, you get uh the colonization of peoples in the name of Christ, right? Christian imperialism and Christians imposing Christianity on whole populations, right? You get the Inquisition, you get the religious wars in Europe in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. I mean, Christianity has a lot to answer for in its history in terms of how Christians have abused and harmed other people in using and abusing power, using and abusing politics in the name of Christ. And all of that historically goes under the heading of what we would call Christendom, right? The blending of Christianity and empire, the the description of Christianity as though it is only pertaining to the Christian rulers and the Christian peoples who were under those rulers. Christendom is one of the worst ideas in human history. And I would argue it was something that Jesus argued directly against and completely opposed in his own life and teachings. Christendom is what these folks are angling for. And there's this recurring belief throughout Christian history, and you can see it even with Constantine. This belief, well, the world is a threat to us. And so we need to use worldly means. We need to use worldly power to coerce our enemies and to force societies to align with our vision of what Christianity should be. And I would argue that that is antithetical to the way of Jesus, antithetical to the way of the early church, that their politics, the politics of the early church was we give up power to serve. We love our enemies. We bless those who persecute us. And the impulse now is well, if I'm persecuted, I need to get a big enforcer from the government to go and protect me. If I'm persecuted, I'm gonna hit back, right? I'm gonna strike back at my persecutors. I'm gonna stop this anti-Christian bias. I'm gonna stop these people who blaspheme the name of Jesus. I cannot tolerate such heathen immorality. That is unchristian. The early church had no option but to tolerate heathen immorality because it was all the surrounding culture, right? And Jesus, I mean, Jesus was friends with the sinners and the tax collectors. He went he went out of his way to become an ambassador for his message with people that would have seen themselves as his enemies, right? And yet now we have this idea that Christians need to declare war on their enemies, need to do battle against these dark spiritual forces that are taking over all of our societies as though this has never been tried before. As though this is as though this is some new revelation, right? All they are doing is repackaging the leftovers of Christian imperialism and Christendom and turning it into Christian nationalism and Christian supremacy and rebranding it and then saying that this is some new solution. This has been tried before, and it has resulted in the the bastardization of Christianity and great, great, great harm to people outside of the church. And so I would call my fellow Christians back to the marginalizing and self-decentering gospel of Jesus. It says, our space in society is to be a blessing, to serve, to love our enemies, to give up power for the sake of love, and to try to do as much as we can to serve the poor and the least of these, as Jesus taught us.

Brian Stiller:

Matt Taylor, thanks for joining us at Evangelical 360.

Matthew D. Taylor:

Thank you.

Brian Stiller:

Thanks, Matt, for joining me today. Your analysis of what is going on today in the name of the Lord Jesus of Nazareth has certainly caught our attention. And thank you to our faithful listeners for being a part of the podcast. Be sure to like this episode and subscribe wherever you watch or listen to the podcast. And if you'd like to learn more about today's guests, check the show notes for links and info. And if you haven't already received my free ebook and newsletter, just go to Brianstiller.com. Thanks again. Until next time.