Whether or not anyone recognizes it by name, the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) is hitting its stride.
After his June declaration that “every teacher, every classroom… will be teaching from the Bible,” Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters, who has spoken at a banquet for the NAR-affiliated City Elders actually took a step further, issuing guidelines last week and a statement asserting that “The Bible is indispensable in understanding the development of Western civilization and American history.” Walters, who’s called the “Trans Day of Visibility” demonic, is engaged in what he believes to be “spiritual warfare” in the public school system.
Meanwhile, earlier this year, conservative activist Alex Newman told the NAR-aligned Truth & Liberty Coalition that public schools are teaching a “wicked religion from the pit of hell.” Newman, whose nonprofit recently held its annual fundraiser at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, told a crowd at the NAR-influenced Turning Point USA‘s Educators Summit that “Satan wants your kids” and that children in public schools are under spiritual attack by demonic “wickedness in high places.”
These aren’t merely the efforts of some of the more brazen Christian Right warriors. Walters and Newman are diligently working alongside other conservative efforts, in Louisiana and elsewhere, to radically change the landscape of American education and to ultimately transform society into the anti-democratic image of the New Apostolic Reformation.
And America’s education system is just one of the core institutions under attack by the NAR, a global neo-charismatic and Pentecostal movement of leadership networks that are, according to Frederick Clarkson and André Gagne, on the “cutting edge of the Christian Right in the US and in other countries.” That both Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson have displayed the NAR-adopted “Appeal to Heaven” battle flag only demonstrates the breadth of the movement’s reach. Of course, while we should all be concerned that such powerful figures have signaled support for a flag that’s been wielded by the NAR to undermine democracy, one group should be uniquely worried about strengthening ties between the NAR and powerful figures in the nation’s capital: those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or—especially—transgender.
NAR leaders have exerted great influence on today’s Christian Right, but the tenets most prominent in today’s public square have been carved out of the NAR’s most extravagant elements: that spiritual warfare against actual demonic entities (which are believed to cause LGBTQ identity) is necessary to conquer the Seven Mountains of Culture in the US, which include religion, family, government, business, education, media, and arts & entertainment.
Even among seemingly ordinary conservative Christians who’ve never heard the term “NAR” and who may disdain certain Pentecostal teachings and practices like speaking in tongues and faith healing, there appears a willingness to embrace the NAR’s wilder theological claims about conquering culture and Satanic influences on LGBTQ people—a toxic mix for LGBTQ civil rights. These ideas have been percolating for decades, and provide a warning of where we could be headed in schools (and the rest of society) if NAR-influenced leaders gain control over American education. Oklahoma would just be the beginning.
Outlandish forms of faith-based discrimination
With the Supreme Court’s recent rulings on taxpayer supported religious schools, and “school choice” activism on the rise, it’s important to note that many of these initiatives are advanced through anti-LGBTQ organizations. Some states in conservative regions have even enacted private school voucher programs to specifically exclude legal protections based upon LGBTQ identity.
In other words, by invoking principles of “religious liberty,” many states have made it clear through legislation that religious schools influenced by the NAR are legally protected, while LGBTQ students are not. If these rights can be forfeited in schools, they can be eroded in the larger society. In contrast to Christian conservatives like David French who hold to traditional views of gender and sexuality but support the law as it now exists, NAR leaders seek to eradicate LGBTQ visibility and hard won civil rights.
But legally sanctioned discrimination against LGBTQ students isn’t limited to enrollment restrictions or expulsion, both of which are punitive enough. The NAR’s teachings and practices stand out for their outlandish forms of faith-based discrimination. While conservative Christians have long believed that homosexuality is a sin, NAR leaders teach that LGBTQ experiences and expressions are actually caused by nefarious demons.
These demons, which are believed to be engaged in spiritual warfare against believers, put NAR-influenced Christians into a heightened state of alert and paranoia about LGBTQ affirming “secular culture.” And it must be emphasized that for NAR believers these demons are not metaphorical: they believe the power of the Holy Spirit is required to vanquish evil through what they call “deliverance prayer.”
In a recently published academic article, in fact, I discuss a personal experience with violent exorcism (aka deliverance prayer) from what I believed at the time to be a “homosexual demon,” at a school associated with the early years of the NAR. Such teachings and practices—most of which come from NAR quarters—continue to link a belief in actual demons to the lived experiences of LGBTQ people. It would be disastrous for the media, voters, and legislators (of both parties) to chalk up language about demons to mere figures of speech—especially when used by influential politicians, educators, and school choice activists.
While the NAR’s teachings have extended to figures like Oklahoma Superintendent Walters, it’s critical that we examine whether he is an exception or part of a much larger movement seeking to influence America’s institutions. Such efforts are challenging as NAR leadership networks are amorphous and difficult to define, yet there is a documented history that helps us to understand this movement whose teachings reach tens of millions of people in the United States alone.
NAR ideas cross-pollinate
Charismatic and Pentecostal Christians generally do not identify as part of the NAR, but the teachings of NAR apostles and prophets are accepted by many millions of Charismatic and Pentecostal believers. As André Gagné notes in his groundbreaking work, American Evangelicals for Trump: Dominion, Spiritual Warfare, and the End times, NAR ideas cross-pollinate with established organizations that emerged from what NAR founder C. Peter Wagner called the “three waves’‘ of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity, the first of which hit the US in the early 20th century.
Organizations that surfaced from these waves include the Assemblies of God, with over 86 million members (nearly three million in the US); the Foursquare Church, with nearly 7 million members; the Vineyard Movement, with 300,000 members; and many other thousands of independent Charismatic and nondenominational churches (themselves amounting to many millions more) in the United States and abroad.
What’s more, NAR teachings about demons, and the urgent call for Christians to conquer culture are increasingly held by the larger evangelical world—even among non-Charismatic and non-Pentecostal communities. The NAR’s unique sense of paranoia about secular culture has mutated and spread to the broader Christian Right, a movement that was already preoccupied with the expansion of civil rights for groups defying its sense of traditional morality.
Though the NAR networks today are considered part of the larger, White Christian nationalist movement in the US, they’re distinct from other Christian nationalist groups due both to their pronounced racial and ethnic diversity and their inclusion of women leaders. This diversity does not mean that they embrace a progressive politics of racial or gender equity, and it certainly doesn’t extend to affirmation of LGBTQ identities—least of all in schools, where the vehemence of their opposition to LGBTQ people becomes most apparent.
Prominent NAR leader Lance Wallnau—who makes the expansive claim that American education has been “taken captive by Satan”—is on a tireless mission to mobilize the MAGA base for Donald Trump through his organization of Courage Tours in key battleground states, which Frederick Clarkson reported on for RD in May. At these events, Wallnau regularly features people speaking ill, not just of traditional public schools but also of LGBTQ people and their allies.
Such opposition is standard among various factions of the Christian Right, but Wallnau promotes a unique and even more pernicious brand of NAR teachings on gender and sexuality, including the dangerous idea that LGBTQ-identifying kids need to be “delivered” from demons. As noted earlier, “deliverance” among NAR adherents is coded language for exorcism, which is an even more noxious version of the psychologically (and often physically) harmful practice of LGBTQ conversion therapy, which researchers Sue Spivey and Christine Robinson have even referred to as “genocidal.”
In 2016 conservative policymakers, who today push anti-LGBTQ legislation at an alarming rate, were not prepared to implement some of the most revolutionary elements of the MAGA movement. Enter Project 2025. With eerie echoes of the NAR’s Seven Mountain Mandate, Project 2025 unabashedly seeks to take the reins of government via policies that would drastically change the landscape of American governance and, as the document says, “bend or break the bureaucracy to the President’s will.”
Calling for the abolishment of the Department of Education, Project 2025 would roll back (if not eliminate) civil rights protections for LGBTQ students in publicly funded schools. While the language may be different, this massive shift away from federal regulation aligns well with the NAR’s efforts to radically transform American education into a system that reflects its troubling version of domination- and demon-oriented Christianity. If NAR leaders can stake a claim on young minds and hearts, they may ultimately succeed in rebuilding society in their own image.
Warfare prayer, Satanic principalities, and doctrine of demons: A NAR curriculum
But what would a NAR-influenced educational system look like? Wallnau—who’s thrilled that exorcisms (focusing on trans youth) are making a comeback—recently participated in a ministry event with early NAR leader Roberts Liardon, who operated a school known as Spirit Life Bible College (SLBC), which was intended as a model for NAR education.
C. Peter Wagner, who coined the term New Apostolic Reformation, lectured at SLBC numerous times from 1996-2001 and featured the school in his first book on the NAR, published in 1998, called the New Apostolic Churches. These early years of NAR schooling, as exemplified by SLBC, serve as a warning about what taxpayer-supported NAR education might look like should the education policies of Project 2025 be implemented.
During my time as a student at SLBC, from 1998-2000, the school focused on “spiritual warfare” and taught that “homosexual demons” possess individuals and control geographic territories. Every morning before class the entire student body together practiced a militaristic “warfare prayer.” I would sometimes lose my voice after these lengthy sessions of ecstatic prayer deployed (while speaking in tongues), both to combat the influence of Satanic “principalities” in the atmosphere and also to rid myself of what I believed to be an indwelling demon of homosexuality. The “spiritual warfare” I learned at SLBC has endured, from Liardon’s school to Wallnau’s Courage Tours—and now to Trump’s MAGA rallies—coalescing into some of the most vicious forms of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric on the far-right today.
In fact, Liardon’s take in Haunted Houses, Ghosts, and Demons: What You Can Do About Them, written more than three decades ago, reads like a blueprint for the anti-trans activism we’re seeing from Wallnau and many others on the far-right (emphasis mine):
Notice that Lucifer was not happy with who he was, with the way God made him. And so he said, “I will become like the Most High.” In our world today, a lot of people are not happy with the way God made them. There are men who don’t want to be men so they’re having operations to turn themselves into women (although they’re really not women, just mutilated men). And there are women who want to be men. There are black people who want to be white, and white people who want to be black, and all sorts of people who are flat-out unhappy with who they are. Such discontent always leads to trouble, and it is always right on the border of rebellion, shaking the fist at God and saying, “I could have done a better job than you did.” It’s just not so.
Despite the SLBC imploding after public revelations about Liardon’s own “homosexual relationship” in late 2001 (which he referred to as a “moral failure”) his influence on the NAR persists to this day. Pastor Donna Wise, who is networked with NAR leaders and whose “Impact Church” runs the Daniel Christian Academy in North Carolina, recently referred to “transgender acceptance” as a doctrine of demons. Such teachings about demons, tragically, can lead to psychological and physical assaults upon students—as I experienced firsthand at Liardon’s SLBC.
A proud alumnus
One product of NAR-influenced education is Brandon Burden, a prominent NAR leader in North Texas and a 1996 graduate of Liardon’s SLBC. Burden, a NAR prophet deeply involved in school choice activism, is Lead Pastor at Kingdom Life Church in Frisco, Texas, which, via its association with a NAR network known as the Federation of Ministries and Churches International, is connected to Dutch Sheets, the “Stop the Steal” Trump loyalist. Burden recently rubbed shoulders with Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz, and made national news in 2021 when he urged his congregation to “stock supplies” and “keep guns loaded” in the lead up to Biden’s inauguration.
During a recent interview on the mass conversion of people away from the “LGBTQ lifestyle” with controversial NAR leader Lou Engle (himself a supporter of vicious anti-gay legislation), Burden and Engle talk about spiritual “ground strikes” that “close portals” to demons causing homosexuality and “transgenderism” in the United States.
Burden’s resume doesn’t end there. Active in the “stop sexualizing Texas kids” campaign, he (just days after Trump’s conviction) waved the “Appeal to Heaven” flag for his congregation while declaring the subjugation of earthly courts to the courts of Heaven and shouting “don’t tread on me,” a well established anti-government slogan.
The foreword to Burden’s recent book, Daniel Nation: When Christians Take a Stand in Civil Government, was written by NAR leader Clay Nash, who in early 2023 hosted a series of 50 state prayer conference calls, almost exclusively with prominent GOP leaders. These calls didn’t only confirm the NAR as a “religious movement that sees itself at war with demonic forces,” but as a political force, period.
Informed by his NAR education, Burden seeks to establish “God’s law” by “cutting [off] the head” of the controlling “territorial demon” he holds responsible for the legalization of homosexuality in Texas. Left unchecked, this spiritual warfare isn’t likely to stay in the spiritual realm for long. Burden himself recently told his congregation that if believers “get really good at extending the Kingdom of God and taking cultural ground back [from] Satan, [it] might mean that we accidentally start a war.” At the time, Burden was participating in a church event with NAR leader Jim Hodges, who insurrection sympathizer and “Appeal to Heaven” flag enthusiast Dutch Sheets calls his “spiritual father.” And Burden is just one graduate of NAR education.
NAR networking power
As an opaque leadership alliance seeking to influence America’s institutions the NAR today encompasses networks within networks of influential people and organizations. Some may only be tangentially connected to C. Peter Wagner’s original leadership networks, but NAR leaders have become masters at networking with others who (on the surface, at least) may be perceived by the public as less fringe.
The NAR-influenced Truth & Liberty Coalition, for example, is allied with Southern Baptist minister Rick Scarborough and his nonprofit Recover America, which is engaged with conservative activism on school boards in Texas. Recover America lists Houston’s Second Baptist Church as one of its partners in training “Biblical Pastors” and “their people” to confront “the darkness of the culture.” It’s through these amorphous alliances between today’s “mainstream” Christian Right and the NAR that both “spiritual” and political warfare are waged against LGBTQ people in schools and society.
The Truth & Liberty Coalition’s Board of Directors includes David Barton, a key figure in the NAR’s growing influence on education, who disseminates anti-LGBTQ propaganda at Wallnau’s Courage Tours. And, bringing us full circle, Barton was recently appointed by Ryan Walters to a committee of advisors overhauling Oklahoma’s social studies curriculum.
Both Barton and his WallBuilders organization (whose curriculum teaches that the separation of church and state is itself unconstitutional) promote the notion that affirmation of LGBTQ identities leads to national weakness. In addition to warning that public schools are grooming children into an “LGBTQ lifestyle,” they’ve worked with the Alliance Defending Freedom on anti-LGBTQ legislation.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg of the institutionally subtle but politically powerful influence exerted by the NAR, whether through its allied organizations and leaders, or simply through the dissemination and absorption of its theological and political perspectives. It makes sense, then, that Americans know little about the harm that LGBTQ students experience in schools operated or influenced by the New Apostolic Reformation. In a political environment increasingly influenced by the NAR, hard-won legal protections for LGBTQ students (to say nothing of efforts to create new ones) are under serious threat.
Secular education and democratic society itself has come under increasing attack fueled by NAR activists calling for the establishment of Biblical Law in all of America’s institutions. Oklahoma is just the latest; whether they’re aware of it or not, multiple states have felt the influence of NAR leadership networks and their teachings. Should their efforts continue to be successful, the mainstreaming of NAR-influenced education would not only be a threat to the wellbeing of individual students, but it would produce many more adults subject to a toxic mix of demon-obsessed religion, anti-LGBTQ propaganda, and authoritarian politics. And it certainly isn’t difficult to see how that would pose a significant threat to democracy itself.
