On October 12th one of the most remarkable political statements of any religious leader in this or any election season was broadcast live from an all-day rally of tens of thousands of people on the Washington Mall. The event, called A Million Women, was staged by some of the leading apostles and prophets in the New Apostolic Reformation.
As evening fell, Ché Ahn, a Korean American apostle from Pasadena, stepped up to the mic and declared, “I’m to make a decree, an Apostolic decree and I want all the apostles and prophets to stand behind me.” The crowd roared and blew shofars as he continued, “I decree… that Trump will win on November the 5th. He will be our 47th president and Kamala Harris will be cast-out and she will lose.”
He averred, however, that nevertheless, “you’ve gotta vote and be activists as well.”
Ahn’s decree was the culmination of a day of charismatic worship and mini sermons in front of the US Capitol. Speakers called for electoral mobilization and the exorcism of demons from society in general and government in particular. This was what he meant when he decreed that Kamala Harris will not only be voted out, but “cast out.” He drew on the biblical story of Jezebel to suggest Harris merits such treatment (something we’ll get into shortly).
But first let’s note that the New Apostolic Reformation, the largest religious movement in recent American history, has unabashed, undemocratic, and well documented political aspirations. While that alone is not unusual, what is important here is that, because apostles and prophets of the NAR are recognized by their followers, and each other, as being in direct communication with God, a decree from an apostle is understood as a statement of direction from God.
It’s also important to note that Ché Ahn’s decree isn’t a one-off election year rhetorical excess. It’s consistent with his claim in the run up to the January 6th insurrection:
I believe that this week we’re going to throw Jezebel out and Jehu’s gonna rise up, and we’re gonna rule and reign through President Trump and under the lordship of Jesus Christ.
During the Million Women event many leading apostles and prophets spoke from the platform. Their messages were well coordinated and culminated with Ché Ahn’s decree. These included Prophet Lou Engle, Apostles Lance Wallnau and Cindy Jacobs, both of Texas, Dutch Sheets of South Carolina, Bill Johnson of California, and Jenny Donnelly of Oregon.
A spiritual assassination order on Kamala Harris
After telling the crowd that he views Trump as “a kind of Jehu” and Kamala Harris as “a type of Jezebel,” Ahn then declared that he’d thrown a stone in the trash and engaged in a “prophetic act… and cast out Jezebel.”
Matthew D. Taylor, a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Judaic Studies who attended the rally, offered his analysis in a long twitter thread. Speaking of the invocation of Jezebel, he wrote:
This is among the most violent, vindictive stories in the Hebrew Bible: Jehu is an instrument of divine wrath, who commands Jezebel be executed by her own servants throwing her out of a tower (i.e., “cast down”).
Jehu then tramples her w/ his horse, & dogs eat her body.
The story of Jezebel so permeates NAR culture that there’s even an illustration by Apostle James Nesbit depicting the scene when she’s devoured by dogs.
Taylor, who’s written for RD and has a new book out on NAR, The Violent Take it by Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening Our Democracy, also says:
This was literally the spiritual imagery & rhetoric that instigated Christians to violence on January 6th.
Here Ché Ahn is invoking it w/ an even more targeted, just-veiled-enough-to-be-deniable, spiritual assassination order on Kamala Harris.
The unreported
The event was large and significant by any reasonable measure. Apostle Cindy Jacobs says the National Park Service estimated the crowd to be 250,000. Taylor thought it was less. But certainly tens of thousands attended, and the number may even exceed a hundred thousand. Whatever the actual number at the Mall, the audience was much larger since the event was live-streamed on Facebook, YouTube, and Rumble and translated into several languages. The Jumbotrons that lined the Mall were alternatively closed captioned in English and Spanish. It’s difficult to imagine any other religious or political event on the Mall this year with such reach.
Even if the numbers are unclear, the implicit threat of political violence is not. In addition to the story of Jezebel, you can hear it in the story of Esther, who was a thematic biblical figure for the event, and was endorsed as a role model for Christian women. While various Christian and Jewish traditions draw different meanings from the story of Esther, usually celebrating her role in saving her people, NAR leaders highlight the part that’s typically left out.
Esther, the Jewish wife of the Persian king, and her cousin Mordecai, persuade the king to retract his order, made at the behest of his chief minister, Haman, to exterminate all Jews in the kingdom. Instead, the king hangs Haman on the gallows he had built for Mordecai, and grants the Jews permission to annihilate their enemies. The story goes on to detail that Haman’s ten sons and 500 other men are killed on the first day, and 300 more the next. Eventually, 75,000 people are killed in other Persian provinces.
Thus in the context of the NAR and the Million Women rally, the call for women to look to Esther as a role model, is an implied call for physical violence against perceived enemies—including everyone understood to be a Jezebel spirit.
Despite the size of the crowd and the violence of the rhetoric, there was little reporting in the national media. NBCNews.com, Baptist News Global, The Guardian, and Mother Jones, and Right Wing Watch covered the event seriously. [Update 10/20: since publication, the AP published a story on NAR leaders casting Kamala Harris as a Jezebel, which, towards the end, mentions the Million Women event.] NPR thoughtfully discussed its significance in advance. The New York Times’ coverage didn’t nearly convey the significance and reach of the event or mention the New Apostolic Reformation let alone notice the implicit threats of violence against presidential candidate Kamala Harris. The rest of the national media had nothing.
The exorcist
Jonathan Cahn, a Messianic Rabbi and bestselling novelist set the stage for Ché Ahn’s decree (9:45 in video above). With remarkable theatricality Cahn and others used a sledgehammer to smash a stone altar of the pagan goddess Ishtar (who’s closely associated with Jezebel), calling it an act of “national deliverance” and urging the crowd to pray for deliverance of the capitol “and for the election.” Calling it “a mass deliverance, a mass exorcism revival,” Cahn requested that everyone pray for “a casting out, a deliverance for an entire nation.” (9:46:25)
Jonathan Cahn smashes the altar of Ishtar with a sledgehammer. Image: YouTube/UPPERROOM
Cahn and others described Ishtar as a demonic spirit that dominates our culture and is responsible for a broad range of evils that have kept our country “in bondage,” including feminism; abortion; pornography; “sexual immorality” and all matters concerning LGBTQ people, especially the “transitioning of children… mutilating them”; divorce; the destruction of families; “the trafficking of women and children”; and more. The smashing of the altar of Ishtar was intended to liberate the people, the capitol, and the nation from the bondage of Ishtar.
What many in the media may not appreciate is that the casting out of Jezebel isn’t merely a reference to exorcism, but to the literal casting of Jezebel out the window to the street, as in the celebrated biblical story.
Demons beyond
Referring to Kamala Harris as a Jezebel is also well understood and widely reported on as a racist and sexist trope. Lance Wallnau, for example, notoriously said that Harris represents “the spirit of Jezebel, and in a way that’ll be even much more ominous than Hillary because she’ll bring a racial component and she’s younger.”
Melissa Gira Grant, writing in The New Republic, observed,
To call a Black woman a ‘Jezebel’ hearkens back to America’s racist and misogynistic history of casting Black women as insatiably sexual, which served to justify slaveholding men’s systematic sexual assault of enslaved women. But for right-wing white Christians of the sort Wallnau is addressing, to say a woman has a ‘Jezebel spirit’ is also to say she is a danger to them, a barely human being hell-bent on seducing men to their destruction and assuming their power.
Stephanie McCrummen, writing in The Atlantic, highlighted the provocation of potential religious violence that marks NAR events, such as those on The Courage Tour tent revivals slash voter mobilization events organized by Lance Wallnau and evangelist Mario Murillo.
Every day, internet prophets are describing dreams of churches under attack, Christians rising up, and the start of World War III, acclimating followers to the prospect of real-world violence.
And this is what awaits people under the tent: leaders waging an intentional effort to move them from passivity to action and into “God’s army.”
McCrummen reported that on the last day of the Wisconsin event, Murillo explained:
‘I am not on the Earth to be blessed; I’m on the Earth to be armed and dangerous… I am not on the Earth to feel good. I’m not on the Earth to do my own thing. I’m on this Earth as a God-appointed warrior in a dark time.’
That is what four days of carefully choreographed sermons and violent imagery had come to with only weeks to go before the presidential election.
A political paradox
Image: YouTube/UPPERROOM
The politics of the NAR are paradoxical. They assert that we’re living in a biblically prophesied End Times, in which The Church as they understand it, and God’s angels, join forces to battle the demonic forces of Satan. They suggest the battle is nigh and that people should be prepared.
But the ordinary activities of electoral democracy don’t carry the same sense of transcendent urgency as an End Times war, the result of which is not in doubt. What IS in doubt is exactly when the ever-imminent war will break out. Thus the electoral politics of the NAR are being driven by a psychology of imminent war with transcendent evil. So when we hear apostolic leaders talking about “casting out” demons as they’re casting ballots, ordinary differences of opinion about religion, politics, and gender become matters of supernatural good vs. supernatural evil.
NAR election mobilizer Lance Wallnau sought to rally the Million Women assemblage—in person and online—into the electorate, and encouraged them to download his voter mobilization app (the QR code for which was projected onto the Jumbotrons placed around the mall). This may have been the largest voter mobilization event this election season.
Illustration in Mario Murillo’s essay, “The Daughter of Lies”
Wallnau has been engaged in election mobilization all year, notably on The Courage Tour, which seeks to register and mobilize evangelicals in 19 key counties in nine swing states. Embodying the paradox, Mario Murrillo, Wallnau’s partner on the Tour, published an essay on Kamala Harris in September which portrays her as Jezebel, and her followers as demons.
But whatever happens in the national election, the New Apostolic Reformation will be a defining feature of public life going forward. This new reality will bring many challenges. Among them is that those of us who understand that the kind of constitutional democracy we aspire to live in has to recognize that religious identity must be neither an advantage or a disadvantage in matters of citizenship and government. This is the underlying premise of religious equality. NAR doesn’t see it that way, and, as we know, they’re unlikely to compromise with demons.
Correction: an earlier version of this story indicated that Dutch Sheets is based in Texas. He is in fact based in South Carolina.
