Right-wing evangelist Andrew Wommack is a Christian nationalist who believes that Christians such as himself "are supposed to be ruling in this world." From his perch at Charis Bible College, which he founded in 1994, Wommack mused last year that with just the people associated with his school, they had the power to "take over" the local community of Woodland Park, Colorado.
Now it appears as if Wommack has set out to do just that, starting with local school boards, which have increasingly become a target of right-wing ire in recent years.
Wommack—a hard-line anti-LGBTQ zealot who has declared that gay people should be required to “put a label across their forehead" declaring that homosexuality “can be hazardous to your health"—spoke to the religious-right organization City Elders in Oklahoma last Friday, where he bragged about his efforts to take over school boards and his work sending "spies" into local schools to uncover the presence of LGBTQ-friendly books.
"We decided that we were going to take Colorado back," Wommack said. "Colorado is a very liberal place, and so we've got a thing in place, and during the last election cycle we started with the school boards. We singled out five districts in Colorado, and we put out 417,000 voter guides. The GOP got incensed at us because we asked, 'How do you feel about men competing in women's sports? What do you think about critical race theory?' They did not want those things to be public. So, we asked all the candidates—Democrat and Republican—and we put out these voter guides, and out of 178 people that we were supporting, we got ... somewhere around 78 or 80 of them elected. So, we're beginning to make an inroad, and we've got some big plans in place this year."
"I sent a spy into our public school system to check out what the books are," Wommack revealed later in his speech. "I got a list of I think it was 54 books in the Woodland Park School System—and this is a small place, 7,000 people in the community—and there's 54 homosexual books that we know off. I've got a list of that, and I've got people that are on my staff that go to every school board meeting, and as soon as we get [the books] looked at so that we can defend what we're saying, we're going to stand up in the school board."
"We now have a number of our Charis graduates that are on school boards, and we've got Christians in places," he added. "Praise God, we're seeing things change."
