Everybody knows that the presidential election will come down to six or seven battleground states. There’s bad news for the Biden campaign as a recent poll has Trump leading him in 5 of six swing states. And to add fuel to the bad-news fire, Lance Wallnau, a major figure within the New Apostolic Reformation, an ultra-Christian Nationalist movement, has launched a major campaign chasing Christian voters in districts in those states. According to veteran journalist Frederick Clarkson, “Apostle Wallnau's Courage Tour is not just a tent revival road show. This is a sophisticated, targeted, political outreach campaign to increase evangelical turnout in selected counties in swing states.”
First, recent polling. According to The New York Times’ Nate Cohn, “Donald J. Trump leads President Biden in five crucial battleground states, a new set of polls shows, as a yearning for change and discontent over the economy and the war in Gaza among young, Black and Hispanic voters threaten to unravel the president’s Democratic coalition.
“The surveys by The New York Times, Siena College and The Philadelphia Inquirer found that Mr. Trump was ahead among registered voters in a head-to-head matchup against Mr. Biden in five of six key states: Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden led among registered voters in only one battleground state, Wisconsin” (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/us/politics/biden-trump-battleground-poll.html).
New Apostolic Reformation Chasing Christian Voters
“Just as they prophesied Trump’s victory and collaborated in the 2020 attempted coup, the Trump wing of the New Apostolic Reformation is on the offensive once again, waging a campaign in counties they think will swing the 2024 presidential election,” Clarkson wrote recently in Religion Dispatches (https://religiondispatches.org/wheres-wallnau-a-nar-apostle-takes-aim-at-swing-counties-in-the-battle-for-the-mountain-of-government/).
According to Clarkson, a Senior Research Analyst at Political Research Associates in Somerville, MA.,
“The campaign has two main elements. One is led by Apostle Lance Wallnau, whose campaign is branded as The Courage Tour, while the other is led by a Trumpian think tank, the America First Policy Institute and its political action arm, America Policy Works. The latter’s project has disappeared from public view and may have gone stealth, but Wallnau’s Courage Tour, which appears to be a rejiggered version of last year’s, Fire and Glory Tour remains quite conspicuous.”
Wallnau is one of the most important figures in the New Apostolic Reformation, advocating the Seven Mountains Mandate.
Simply put the Seven Mountains Mandate is the attempt by Christian Nationalists to rule over different aspects of culture, religion, politics, education, family, business, arts and entertainment, and media. “The goal,” theology professor André Gagné, author of the “American Evangelicals for Trump: Dominion, Spiritual Warfare, and the End Times,” told Salon’s Paul Rosenberg, “is to have Christians in influential positions — maybe at the top of those mountains — to influence the culture of each of the sectors of society. And when you do that you will exercise dominion. This is how you bring about God's kingdom.”
Gagne pointed out that “The Seven Mountain Mandate is not a theology, it's more of a strategic marketing tool to mobilize people. If Christians are to rule … that's what I call the political theology of power.”
Nothing could give the Seven Mountains Mandate’s advocates more influence than Donald Trump winning the presidency. Clarkson pointed out that Wallnau says he’s engaged in “the battle for the mountain of government.” And that battle unfolds in The Lord’s target counties, which Wallnau says, “are in seven swing states, where evangelical turnout was proportionally lower,” Clarkson noted.
In an email exchange, Clarkson told me that Wallnau is not limiting his campaign to only swing states. ‘He has said he is going to Minnesota soon, and he has a forthcoming event in Charleston, South Carolina. It would be a good thing for people to [understand] that wherever Wallnau goes, it is probably part of his short or long term vision of political development -- or both.”
According to Clarkson, Wallnau claims to “‘have special intelligence apps’ including As One America, which contains the name, address and phone number of Christian neighbors ‘who are not showing up to vote or who are not registered.’”
Clarkson also noted that “The app was developed by Superfeed Technologies, which has also designed apps for such clients as America First Works, Turning Point Action, and the Arizona Republican Party.”
Clarkson also acknowledged the work of “Jason Yates of My Faith Votes, an organization that has crunched data from the list of inconsistent Christian voters and is waging a campaign to contact them via handwritten letters from fellow Christians. Yates is concerned that too many Christians don’t vote. He explains that this is partly because they’ve been deceived by the myth of the separation of church and state.”
Obviously, Wallnau’s operation is not the only get out the vote effort waged by MAGA nation. “Another group, the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a think tank formed in 2021 to promote the Trump agenda, is targeting 19 counties in 9 states,” Clarkson noted.
“Launched with $1 million from Trump’s Save America PAC, AFPI boasts the involvement of members of the former president’s cabinet, administration and campaign staff. AFPI is also partly led and staffed by apostolic figures including Trump’s spiritual advisor, Apostle Paula White-Cain who heads the Center for American Values.”
One of the more interesting aspects of Wallnau’s project is its focus on “mobilizing racial and ethnic minorities,” Clarkson said in an email. “Wallnau has, for example, turned a Latinx church in Mesa, Arizona into a political hub for their voter mobilization campaign in selected precincts in Maricopa County -- all guided by an app developed for Wallnau's company.”
