Dominionist leaders attending the youth-focused Turning Point USA AmericaFest conference in Phoenix over the weekend portrayed Donald Trump’s election as a spiritual warfare victory, and urged Christian-right activists to “occupy” more territory by building a bigger Republican majority in Congress.
The AmericaFest speaker lineup included Trump, other MAGA politicians, right-wing commentators like Tucker Carlson, and dominionists like Lance Wallnau. House Speaker Mike Johnson cancelled a planned appearance after becoming the target of MAGA rage over a bipartisan budget deal that was attacked by Elon Musk.
In recent years, TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk has made a public shift from promoting a kind a snarky, irreverent libertarianism to embracing an aggressive Christian nationalism that characterizes much of the MAGA movement today.
Broadcasting from AmericaFest’s media row on Thursday night was “FlashPoint,” a show launched by televangelist Kenneth Copeland’s Victory Channel in the fall of 2020 that has been a platform for pro-Trump propaganda and prophesying. One panelist was Pastor Rob McCoy, a spiritual mentor to Kirk, who told viewers that he had been at TPUSA’s headquarters on election night, and that when Pennsylvania was called for Trump, Kirk started weeping and said, “All glory to God.”
A recurring theme from the show’s host Gene Bailey and his panelists was that Trump’s victory is no reason for the church to relax. Wallnau said that conservative evangelical Christians are the key to keeping the political pendulum swinging to the right in the midterm elections two years from now:
It’s a spiritual battle…The swing to the right is going to impact the midterms if we seize the moment. And the secret is 40 million evangelical Christians, who know apocalyptically that America is right now in an early phase of an awakening. We have to push that issue, and all we’ve gotta do is flip about 20 seats, and we could see the sustained reformation Trump is attempting for 48 months continuously.
“Advance! Advance! Advance!” urged Wallnau, a promoter of Seven Mountains Dominionism who believes that right-wing Christians are meant to take control of every sphere of influence in society. Leading up to the 2024 election, Wallnau partnered with the America First Policy Institute, a think tank founded by former Trump administration officials, to merge revival-style worship and pro-Trump voter turnout in a “Courage Tour” of key swing-state counties.
One aspect of the increasingly dominionist religious-right movement in America is hostility toward Christians who do not share their religious and political “biblical worldview.” Joining Wallnau and McCoy on FlashPoint was Lucas Miles, senior director for faith at TPUSA. “We’re going to eradicate wokeism from the American pulpit,” Miles vowed. He said TPUSA’s American Pastor Project would pressure pastors to make a commitment to what TPUSA considers “primary historical biblical Christianity doctrine” and encourage congregants to leave churches that don’t sign on. He called it a plan to see “the woke church defunded.”
Joining the conversation was Pastor Keith Craft of Elevate Life Church in Frisco, Texas. Craft said that God told him in advance that Trump would win the election. He quoted a passage from the biblical book of Isaiah that “the government shall be upon his shoulder” and “to the increase of his government there shall be no end.”
Craft said that only 4 percent of Christians have a biblical worldview. The idea that very few evangelicals have an acceptable worldview is promoted by evangelical pollster George Barna, who is affiliated with the Family Research Council’s Center for Biblical Worldview. The assertion that most evangelicals and their pastors don’t meet FRC’s standard reveals just how narrowly religious-right leaders define acceptable views of the Bible.
Christian-right podcaster and producer Kylie Jean Tannehill also joined the panel, saying the Holy Spirit is the movement’s “ultimate weapon of warfare that is often underutilized.”
“The Bible is really clear: ‘on Earth as it is in Heaven,’” she said. “That means I don’t just sit around, I get to occupy…I’m not living life on Earth waiting to be in Heaven, I’m bringing Heaven to Earth.”
