“I wonder what new doors to evangelism might be opened in sophisticated, tolerant, politically correct America if Christians started expressing their faith by encouraging those who possessed artifacts of magic or unclean books to burn them publicly?” — C. Peter Wagner, from The Book of Acts: A Commentary, page 441 (1994, Regal Books
On Monday, October 3, 2011, at 5PM EST, National Public Radio's Fresh Air released a full-length Terry Gross interview with New Apostolic Reformation pioneer C. Peter Wagner, who mentioned his attendance at Texas governor Rick Perry's The Response prayer rally, last August 6th.
While Republican presidential hopeful Perry is under heavy onslaught for alleged ties to racism, media scrutiny of the the overwhelming role that the NAR's apostles played at Perry's The Response prayer event has been, until now, thin. But coverage is mounting, from disparate geographic and media niches--on Friday September 30th, both the National Enquirer and the UK Daily Mail covered Rick Perry's ties to NAR apostle Alice Patterson. Now, public radio's elite Fresh Air has again weighed in as well, following up on an August 24th interview with Rachel Tabachnick.
NAR guru Peter Wagner's own responses to Fresh Air's Terry Gross, in the interview, powerfully corroborate over three years' worth of reporting on Peter Wagner's movement, and its intersection with politics, that Rachel Tabachnick and I began in early September 2008, with our extensive documentation of Sarah Palin's deep connection to Wagner's evolving NAR. But Palin is far from the only national US politician with such close ties.
On August 6th, 2011 Texas governor Rick Perry appeared onstage at a nationally broadcast prayer rally teeming with apostles from C. Peter Wagner's New Apostolic Reformation, a radically sectarian religious tendency whose top leaders encourage their followers to burn books and scripture (including Books of Mormon), religious relics (such as statues of Catholic saints), and native art (such as Hopi Kachina dolls, and totem polls), and whose political initiatives (such as the Oak Initiative) demonize Muslim-Americans and promote the claim that, through fine-print clauses in Barack Obama's health care reform legislation, President Obama is secretly gathering a left-wing brownshirt army to impose Marxism on America.
This is the movement that pundits, from the op-ed pages of the New York Times and Washington Post, are trying to pretend does not exist, despite the flood of publicly available books by movement leaders and hundreds (possibly even thousands) of hours of conference video churned out every year by the apostles of C. Peter Wagner’s New Apostolic Reformation.
This is the movement that Rick Perry symbolically wed, on August 6th, 2011, at Houston's Reliant Stadium, before tens of thousands of followers gently swaying to the soft-rock of The Response.
[video, below: Texas Governor Rick Perry's full speech at The Response, August 6th, 2011. The Response website, along with footage of the over four hour, controversial event, has since been removed from the Internet. Flanking Perry is ICA apostle Alice Patterson, and Houston pastor C.L. Jackson. Introducing Perry's speech was ICA apostle Doug Stringer
Over the weeks since The Response, a growing chorus of mainstream media pundits--who present little to no evidence for their claims and demonstrate a shocking level of ignorance about C. Peter Wagner's New Apostolic Reformation--has tried to dismiss the influence of Wagner's movement, and of dominionism generally, in contemporary American politics.
Examples of such typically fact-free, opinion-driven dismissals published in mainstream media can be found in the writings of Michael Gerson, Ross Douthat, and Lisa Miller, a religion writer at The Washington Post (journalist Bill Berkowitz examines such writing in a Buzzflash.net op-ed.)
The latest in this increasingly hyperbolic genre comes from religion writer Mark I. Pinsky who, in a USA Today op-ed, suggests, without substantiating the allegation, that concern about dominionism amounts to a "hysteric" obsession on the part of urban East Coast Jewish writers. Pinsky warns, darkly, that Jews risk demonizing evangelical Christians in the manner that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion has been used to demonize Jews. Sojourners founder Jim Wallis has just written a column praising Pinsky's piece (British scholar of religion Richard Bartholomew dissects Pinsky's USA Today op-ed here.)
Journalistic hyperbole, innuendo, or simple neglect, cannot make Rick Perry's "The Response" prayer event magically go away.
As I document, with extensive quotations from top NAR leaders' own books, in Burning Buddhas, Books, and Art: Meet The New Apostolic Reformation,
"Top NAR leaders, including C. Peter Wagner, Cindy Jacobs, Ed Silvoso and, Chuck Pierce, have repeatedly emphasized in their writings the need for believers to destroy or neutralize, by burning, smashing, or flushing down toilets, objects deemed to be unholy, including profane books and "idolatrous" religious texts (such as Books of Mormon), religious relics (such as statues of Catholic saints, the Buddha, or Hindu gods), and native art (such as African masks, Hopi Indian Kachina dolls, and totem poles.)
According to New Apostolic Reformation doctrine, objects to be destroyed include those associated with Mormonism, Islam, Jehovah's Witnesses, Hinduism, eastern religions, Christian Science, native religions, and Baha'i."
[in my video, below, C. Peter Wagner lays out his view on the "Dominion Mandate" which, according to Wagner, "has to do with control" as well as "rulership", "authority", and "subduing". The video also shows Wagner apostle Dutch Sheets declaring that their movement has apostolic networks all over America and the world, and has apostles placed "everywhere", including in government and the military.]
The full-length version of this story can be found here, at Talk To Action.
For some more recent media coverage of the New Apostolic Reformation, see Forrest Wilder's August 3, 2011 Texas Observer story Rick Perry's Army of God and Fresh Air's August 24, 2011 interview with Rachel Tabachnick, The Evangelicals Engaged In Spiritual Warfare.