Into the House of Horrors
We begin our trip into the frightening world of Sarah Palin's connections to Joel's Army--more formally known among a quickly-coalescing band of researchers as the New Apostolic Reformation, after a branding used by C. Peter Wagner--with the results of longterm research by Ruth at Talk to Action.
Ruth, along with a number of other folks (including myself and Bruce Wilson), is part of a research team specifically focusing on Joel's Army issues. Her most recent project has been with digging into the "Transformations" series videos--a series of videos produced by a Joel's Army umbrella organisation called the Sentinel Group.
The Cliff's Notes version of the Transformations vids is that if a country and its culture are converted over wholescale to Joel's Army theology, pretty much it can create a utopia--crime going down, prosperity going up, kittens farting rainbows, the whole nine yards.
As the report from the New Apostolic Reformation Research Team (henceforth referred to as NARRT) reveals, though, the truth is quite a bit more horrifying.
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As we've reported earlier in posts on Talk to Action, several of the persons Sarah Palin is known to be associated with--including Thomas Muthee--promote a "Seven Mountains Strategy" that is essentially a Joel's Army "five-year plan" to take over all institutions of human culture and civilisation--including the financial, governmental, educational, and even entertainment sectors.
Quite ironically (for being a group that claims to be "God Warriors" so much), the ultimate intent of the "Seven Mountains Strategy" is to eventually set things up where one would effectively have to take the Joel's Army "Mark of the Beast" to survive--literally no services, not even at somewhere as mundane as the grocery store, would be available to those not converting. Apostates and the "unchurched"--a category that explicitly includes Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, members of non-neopentecostal Protestant churches, and even people involved in Freemasonry--would have the choice, literally, to convert or die.
The recently-released 36-page report from NARRT gives much more information on just how this is planned. Among other things, the Transformations video series promotes and discusses:
- Establishment of what amounts to a parallel banking system, and even goes into explicit detail on "wealth transfer" from the "godless" to the "godly" (C. Peter Wagner, one of the "Founding Fathers" of the Joel's Army movement and practically Mr. Joel's Army himself, is quoted in the 2006 Transformations video as stating "I decree that vast amounts of wealth will be released supernaturally, even from godless and pagan sources. . . The enemy's camp will be plundered."
- The explicit steeplejacking of emergency services. (This has been a subject of discussion before in this journal, particularly in regards to the Gothard frontgroup Police Dynamics Institute, but the trend is accelerating and has been around since at least 2005--based on documented activity with front groups of dominionist orgs and Hurricane Katrina relief.) Disturbingly, and again in parallel with trends noted as early as 2005, there is explicit discussion of partnership of front-orgs with the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA. This is also including steeplejack of police departments (such as through Gothard's PDI front) and the promotion of "prayer walks" and marathon fasts (water-only for 21 or 40-day periods, initially popularised in Latter Rain circles back in the 40s and still considered a hallmark of groups descendant from Latter Rain) as a form of community policing.
- The explicit steeplejacking of psychiatric and social services, including suicide prevention councils. Palin herself is a canonical example of this--she appointed no less than two people heavily connected to Joel's Army groups to the Alaska Suicide Prevention Council: Pat Donelson who is founder of a Joel's Army front called Carry The Cure (that targets First Nations youth in Alaska for conversion) and Brenda Moore (who is connected to a theophostic "Counseling center" and medical clinic that is run as a front of a Joel's Army church in Anchorage and who is closely connected to Palin via Mary Glazier--whom we'll get into much more detail about shortly). (We'll be doing a dedicated post on Brenda Moore tomorrow.) The increasing promotion of the highly abusive Teen Challenge, Dream Center and Mercy Ministries--all of which are Assemblies of God frontgroups with close connections with Joel's Army--as "alternative sentencing" is also a big part of this.
- Promotion of outright anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic information in the bizarre name of "spiritual mapping" and "spiritual warfare". At one point, a group goes on a tour of Mt. Everest to attempt to exorcise the "Queen of Heaven, who prevents the prayers of Catholics and Moslems from reaching God" (the Queen of Heaven is a title of the Holy Virgin Mary--claiming the "Queen of Heaven" is a demon is about as anti-Catholic as you can get, and directly equates Catholicism with Satanism), and at another, it's claimed they essentially assassinated Mother Theresa via imprecatory prayers; in another "spiritual mapping" trip, the Knesset in Israel is declared to be the "mind of Satan on earth". The US, alas, is also not alone--anti-Masonic imagery is brought up (due to the Founding Fathers having been Freemasons) and "exorcisms" have been performed on the city of Washington, DC under the claim the US--and Constitutional rule respecting the freedom of religion--was founded via a "false covenant made to Baal."
- Have promoted the use of military coups--including death squads run out of Joel's Army churches, literal God Warriors With Guns--to promote their ideology. Guatemala of course is used as the canonical example, but in some of the Transformations videos an example is made of a coup-de-etat in 2000--where Joel's Army promoters (largely based in the indigenous Fijian population, after Assemblies "cell churches" largely steeplejacked the Methodist church in that country) proceeded to use Joel's Army theology to justify policies that largely disenfranchised Indo-Fijians and indigenous Fijians who disagreed with governmental policies. (This ultimately led to a coup in 2007.)
Sometimes the two combine. 1) and 4) combined quite recently in particularly bizarre fashion as Joel's Army promoters prayed over (I am not making this up) a bronze bull on Wall Street to call for the US economy to be completely steeplejacked and thus not "bullish" or "bearing" but "lionish"--in other words, if you're not Joel's Army, you don't get to do business. Seriously, this is some of the bizarreness promoted in these circles.
And the real horror story here: Palin is, quite blatantly, among their number as friends.
Fright Night
The folks at NARRT have been digging up quite a bit of info on Palin--and if the initial revelations re Muthee were disturbing, the following info may be horrifying.
Part of the reason the "Transformations" series of videos has come to attention is that because Ed Kalinins, head of Wasilla A/G apparently loaned a grateful Sarah Palin the videos back in 2000.
Even worse, it would appear this just scratches the surface.
For the first time, we have direct evidence of a top-level candidate being actively shepherded by an extremely hardline Joel's Army preacher.
In the same article above, it's noted that Sarah Palin not only is friends with Mary Glazier--a darling among the Joel's Army set, in part, because she is a major lynchpin in Joel's Army networks associated with C. Peter Wagner and because she's of Haida Nation descent--but would appear to be in an ongoing shepherding relationship:
On July 13, 2008, an Alaskan woman named Mary Glazier told attendees at a religious conference near Seattle that Palin joined Glazier's prayer group in 1989, when Palin was 24.
Glazier's group soon evolved into a prayer-warfare group and sometime in the early 1990's that group was absorbed into a budding national, then international, entity called the "Spiritual Warfare Network" and Glazier became the network's Alaska state director.
In 1995 Glazier's Alaska prayer-warriors mounted effort to drive an employee in the Alaska State prison system, a chaplain alleged to be a witch, from her job with "prayer warfare".
In the late 1990's, the prayer warfare network, now global, began to interlock with other rapidly coalescing national, then international networks - coalitions of "apostles" and councils of "prophetic elders" - all under the ideological imperative of something called "spiritual warfare".
Bruce Wilson, a NARRT researcher, has written a good piece on Glazier's activity and transcripts are available of the video where Glazier explicitly endorses Palin.
Since that article was published, additional confirmation that Palin is being actively shepherded by Glazier has come out, including via reports to the New York Times:
Sarah Palin has been publicly anointed and blessed by a top leader and inspirational figure in the New Apostolic Reformation, a global movement rapidly transforming Christianity: Thomas Muthee. Another top leader in the movement has stated Palin joined her prayer warfare group in 1989, at twenty four around the time when, according to Mary Glazier, "God was speaking to [Palin] about going into politics." A third movement leader has stated that Palin is still in Glazier's prayer warfare network, and a fourth movement leader has confirmed, to a New York Times reporter, the relationship.
And this is still not the full extent of Palin's relationship with Glazier.
As noted, Glazier runs effectively a statewide network of Joel's Army promoters and sympathisers. And Brenda Moore--the subject of a dedicated post tomorrow--is the other appointee Palin made to the Alaska Suicide Prevention Council; she herself is connected to Glazier via fellow Glazier shepherdee Eleanor Roehl.
We will get much, much more into that tomorrow--space does not permit me, unfortunately, to go into details (this does require a dedicated post).
But suffice it to say, the prospect of Palin being near the presidency (and no, folks, we cannot count an Obama victory as "in the bag" until votes are in, votes are counted, and he's sworn in as President Obama on 20 January 2009--a whole lot can happen in four days, much less three months)--an act which would quite literally give an apocalyptic, coercive Bible-based cult whose core theology dictates a nuclear war with Russia potential access to the Nuclear Football should McCain die in office--should give ANYONE nightmares.
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