Chuck Darwin on Nostr: “I personally feel like if you would like to stay with us, then I would ask if we ...
“I personally feel like if you would like to stay with us,
then I would ask if we could lay hands on you and pray,” a woman said.
“We won’t hurt you,” another woman said.
“We just take everything to God,”
a woman sitting next to me said.
“Don’t take it personally.”
The praying began, and I waited for the judgment.
How all of this came to be is a story with many starting points,
the most immediate of which is Trump himself.
In the lead-up to the 2016 election, establishment leaders on the Christian right were backing candidates with more pious pedigrees than Trump’s.
He needed a way to rally evangelicals,
so he turned to some of the most influential apostles and prophets of the NAR,
a wilder world where he was cast as
God’s “wrecking ball”
and embraced by a fresh pool of so-called prophecy voters,
people long regarded as the embarrassing riffraff of evangelical Christianity.
But the DNA of that moment goes back further,
to the Cold War, Latin America, and an iconoclastic seminary professor named
C. Peter Wagner.
He grew up in New York City during the Great Depression,
and embraced a conservative version of evangelical Christianity when he was courting his future wife.
They became missionaries in Bolivia in the 1950s and ’60s,
when a wave of Pentecostalism was sweeping South America,
filling churches with people who claimed that they were being healed,
and seeing signs and wonders that Wagner initially dismissed as heresy.
Much of this fervor was being channeled into social-justice movements taking hold across Latin America.
Che Guevara was organizing in Bolivia.
The civil-rights movement was under way in the United States.
Ecumenical organizations such as the World Council of Churches were embracing the theology of liberation,
emphasizing ideas such as the social sin of inequality
and the need for justice not in heaven but here and now.
In the great postwar competition for hearts and minds, conservative American evangelicals
—and the CIA, which they sometimes collaborated with
—needed an answer to ideas they saw as dangerously socialist.
Wagner,
by then the general director of the Andes Evangelical Mission,
rose to the occasion.
In 1969, he took part in a conference in Bogotá, Colombia,
sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association
that aimed to counter these trends.
He wrote a book
—"Latin American Theology: Radical or Evangelical?"
—which was handed out to all participants,
and which argued that concern with social issues
“may easily lead to serving mammon rather than serving God.”
Liberation theology was a slippery slope to hell.
After that, Wagner became a professor at "Fuller Theological Seminary",
teaching in the relatively experimental field of church growth.
He began revisiting his experience in Bolivia,
deciding that the overflowing churches he’d seen were a sign that the Holy Spirit was working in the world.
He was also living in the California of the 1970s,
when new religions and cults and a more freewheeling, independent, charismatic Christianity were proliferating,
a kind of counter-counterculture.
Droves of former hippies were being baptized in the Pacific
in what became known as the "Jesus People" movement.
Preachers such as John Wimber,
a singer in the band that turned into the Righteous Brothers,
were casting out demons before huge crowds.
In the ’80s, a group of men in Missouri known as the "Kansas City Prophets" believed they were restoring the gift of prophecy,
understanding this to be God’s natural way of talking to people.
then I would ask if we could lay hands on you and pray,” a woman said.
“We won’t hurt you,” another woman said.
“We just take everything to God,”
a woman sitting next to me said.
“Don’t take it personally.”
The praying began, and I waited for the judgment.
How all of this came to be is a story with many starting points,
the most immediate of which is Trump himself.
In the lead-up to the 2016 election, establishment leaders on the Christian right were backing candidates with more pious pedigrees than Trump’s.
He needed a way to rally evangelicals,
so he turned to some of the most influential apostles and prophets of the NAR,
a wilder world where he was cast as
God’s “wrecking ball”
and embraced by a fresh pool of so-called prophecy voters,
people long regarded as the embarrassing riffraff of evangelical Christianity.
But the DNA of that moment goes back further,
to the Cold War, Latin America, and an iconoclastic seminary professor named
C. Peter Wagner.
He grew up in New York City during the Great Depression,
and embraced a conservative version of evangelical Christianity when he was courting his future wife.
They became missionaries in Bolivia in the 1950s and ’60s,
when a wave of Pentecostalism was sweeping South America,
filling churches with people who claimed that they were being healed,
and seeing signs and wonders that Wagner initially dismissed as heresy.
Much of this fervor was being channeled into social-justice movements taking hold across Latin America.
Che Guevara was organizing in Bolivia.
The civil-rights movement was under way in the United States.
Ecumenical organizations such as the World Council of Churches were embracing the theology of liberation,
emphasizing ideas such as the social sin of inequality
and the need for justice not in heaven but here and now.
In the great postwar competition for hearts and minds, conservative American evangelicals
—and the CIA, which they sometimes collaborated with
—needed an answer to ideas they saw as dangerously socialist.
Wagner,
by then the general director of the Andes Evangelical Mission,
rose to the occasion.
In 1969, he took part in a conference in Bogotá, Colombia,
sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association
that aimed to counter these trends.
He wrote a book
—"Latin American Theology: Radical or Evangelical?"
—which was handed out to all participants,
and which argued that concern with social issues
“may easily lead to serving mammon rather than serving God.”
Liberation theology was a slippery slope to hell.
After that, Wagner became a professor at "Fuller Theological Seminary",
teaching in the relatively experimental field of church growth.
He began revisiting his experience in Bolivia,
deciding that the overflowing churches he’d seen were a sign that the Holy Spirit was working in the world.
He was also living in the California of the 1970s,
when new religions and cults and a more freewheeling, independent, charismatic Christianity were proliferating,
a kind of counter-counterculture.
Droves of former hippies were being baptized in the Pacific
in what became known as the "Jesus People" movement.
Preachers such as John Wimber,
a singer in the band that turned into the Righteous Brothers,
were casting out demons before huge crowds.
In the ’80s, a group of men in Missouri known as the "Kansas City Prophets" believed they were restoring the gift of prophecy,
understanding this to be God’s natural way of talking to people.