A scripture sign on a fence post outside a house in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, on August 28, 2024.Caroline Gutman
There’s a quickly growing religious movement whose followers believe Christians are called to wage a spiritual battle for control of the United States. The New Apostolic Reformation, as it’s known, seeks an explicitly Christian command of the highest levels of the government, including the presidency and the Supreme Court—but its leaders are working on the hyper-local level, too.
In the latest episode of Reveal, my colleagues traveled to a church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to see how these Christian nationalists have inserted their ideology into the very fabric of local civic life rather than merely be the “head-in-the-sand, Jesus-loves-you kind of Christians.”
To Pastor Don Lamb, this is not a Christian takeover. Yet his congregation is influenced by the elusive, hard-to-pin-down New Apostolic Reformation movement whose followers believe that Christians are called to control the government and that former President Donald Trump was chosen by God.
There are prophets and apostles, and a spiritual war is underway, not just in Pennsylvania. “Estimates of Christians influenced by NAR vary widely, from 3 million to 33 million,” wrote Mother Jones reporter Kiera Butler in her feature story on the movement in our latest magazine issue. As Butler noted, “Its laser focus on starting a spiritual war to Christianize America has led the Southern Poverty Law Center to call NAR ‘the greatest threat to US democracy that you have never heard of.’”
This week, Reveal’s Najib Aminy and Butler explain what the New Apostolic Reformation is and what happens when it seeps into small-town churches like Lamb’s.
