The New Face of Christian Zionism

The far-flung networks of independent Pentecostal and charismatic churches and other institutions that comprise the NAR arguably represent the most significant religious movement in recent U.S. history. The movement was integral to Donald Trump’s three presidential campaigns dating back to his first run in 2015, and since his first victory, it has worked its way into the upper echelons of political power, with televangelist Paula White-Cain — also a spiritual advisor to Trump — recently installed as head of the new White House Faith Office.

The NAR is also at the cutting edge of Christian Zionism, a global movement of primarily evangelical, Pentecostal and charismatic Christians who believe that the Bible mandates unqualified support for the state of Israel.

As global outrage grows against Israel’s eliminationist, expansionist agenda, Trump’s second term seems to be shaping up as even more aggressively pro-Israel than his first. In his first weeks in office, Trump called for the ethnic cleansing of more than two million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and for U.S. occupation of the beleaguered territory, which remains devastated after nearly a year and a half of Israeli bombardment and invasion. Key Trump administration appointees have also pledged support for Israel’s annexation of the West Bank, including White-Cain, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who promised Trump will bring changes of ​“biblical proportions” to the Middle East.

Israeli leaders, for their part, know where their strongest support lies. During his February visit to Washington, D.C., Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t meet with any U.S. Jewish leaders, but made time for a 90-minute gathering with evangelical leaders. At least three of those leaders were key NAR figures, including White-Cain, who reportedly held a separate, lengthy meeting with Netanyahu and conducted an extensive interview with the prime minister for Israeli TV.

All of this makes clear that, as the U.S.-Israel ​“special relationship” enters a dangerous new phase, the NAR will play a pivotal role. 

Apostles and prophets

The NAR isn’t just any religious movement, but, in the words of political scientist Paul Djupe, is one that represents a ​“fundamental shift” in U.S. Christianity, as its political vision has spread beyond the charismatic/​Pentecostal camp it was born in to now dominate the far larger category of U.S. evangelicalism.

As a cross-denominational movement that evolved from multiple roots over a century, NAR was identified and named in the mid-1990s by the late C. Peter Wagner, a professor at the evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary who observed that independent or nondenominational churches were growing the fastest in both the United States and worldwide. In their explosive growth, Wagner saw an emerging paradigm shift that he and his associates eventually sought to shape, organize and lead.

This broad paradigm features networks of NAR churches and ministries that reject many historic Christian doctrines, denominations and leadership roles while gradually restoring offices of the first century church as outlined in the biblical book of Ephesians. Among those offices are the movement titles of apostle and prophet, such that Lou Engle bears the title of an NAR prophet and Paula White-Cain is an NAR apostle.

NAR also embodies a dynamic vision of religious and political control known as the ​“Seven Mountain Mandate”: a metaphorical political blueprint that charges believers with establishing ​“dominion” over the ​“seven mountains” of societal power — government, religion, family, education, media, arts/​entertainment and business.

Elements of the movement often envision themselves as an End Times army, destined to wage ​“spiritual warfare” in the heavens via prayer, but perhaps also through physical warfare against the ​“demonic” forces of liberalism, democracy, LGBTQ and reproductive rights and other enemies.

That’s no mere rhetorical excess. What makes NAR and its growing political clout particularly concerning is that normal political and religious differences are seen as demonic — the work of supernatural spirits creating problems at all levels, from quotidian daily life issues to international conflicts. Such demons, to the NAR, may control anything from individual people to entire nations and are seen as the principal opposition to advancing the Kingdom of God on Earth. For example, Apostles Ché Ahn and Lance Wallnau, among others, claim that former Vice President Kamala Harris is ​“a type of Jezebel” — literally a demonic spirit.

NAR’s worldview is spreading rapidly. According to a 2024 survey by Djupe, more than 60% of U.S. Christians agree that ​“there are modern-day apostles and prophets.” About half believe that ​“there are demonic ​‘principalities’ and ​‘powers’ who control physical territory” and that the church should ​“organize campaigns of spiritual warfare and prayer to displace high-level demons.” And 42% directly embrace NAR’s dominionist mandate in agreeing that ​“God wants Christians to stand atop the ​‘7 Mountains of Society.’”

As a movement, NAR also helps rally the MAGA troops. NAR leaders like White-Cain and Wallnau were some of the earliest and most enthusiastic evangelical backers of Trump’s candidacy in 2015. The same leaders were also prominent in the 2020 election denial movement, with various apostles and prophets helping build momentum ahead of the Jan. 6 riots by holding prayer rallies outside the Capitol where they called on God to smite his enemies and blew shofars — the ram’s horn used as a battlefield instrument in ancient Israel and which has been widely appropriated by NAR-influenced Christians.

During the Biden administration, Wallnau and other NAR leaders were featured speakers during stops on the ​“ReAwaken America” tour — a series of rallies led by former Trump adviser and retired general Michael Flynn, which mixed calls for spiritual warfare with conspiracy theories about QAnon, the election, Covid-19 vaccination and more. This past September, then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance headlined a stop on the ​“Courage Tour,” another political roadshow and voter mobilization training organized by Wallnau in five swing states.

While NAR influence on U.S. public life has been growing for years, with Trump’s reelection, that influence is finally being recognized more widely, including through major media coverage of the movement’s domestic impact. But amid this new attention, the movement’s global impact, especially in the Middle East, still remains underreported.

Israel and the End Times

For decades, Christian Zionist leaders in the United States and worldwide have worked with the Israeli Right to deepen apartheid, ethnic cleansing and domination in Palestine. In recent years, the movement has advocated for increased U.S. aid to Israel, Israel’s annexation of the West Bank, belligerence against Iran, defunding Palestinian refugee relief, suppressing criticism of Israel and other far-right policies. Put simply, Christian Zionism is the backbone of U.S. and global support for Israel. If that sounds surprising, consider that the most prominent U.S. Christian Zionist organization, the Texas-based Christians United for Israel (CUFI), claims more than 10 million members — a constituency roughly 50% larger than the entire U.S. Jewish population.

To the extent that the broader public is aware of Christian Zionism, they may know about CUFI and its leader, Pastor John Hagee. This is partly because the high-profile annual CUFI conference draws leading political figures, but also because, in late 2005, Hagee infamously suggested that the Holocaust was part of God’s plan to bring the Jews to Israel, by sending Hitler as his divinely-appointed ​“hunter.” ​“Hitler’s Nazis,” Hagee claimed in his 2006 book Jerusalem Countdown, drove Jews out of Europe ​“back to the only home God ever intended for the Jews to have — Israel.”

Since its launch in 2006, CUFI has become the evangelical counterpart to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a key pro-Israel lobbying organization frequently associated — though often misleadingly—with the U.S. Jewish community. CUFI aggressively lobbies Congress for a range of policies favored by the Israeli Right, and Israeli leaders regularly lavish praise upon Hagee for his steadfast support. 

But Hagee represents an earlier form of Christian Zionism epitomized by white evangelicals like Jerry Falwell and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind novels. This older form of Christian Zionism held to a ​“dispensationalist” vision of the End Times, wherein faithful Christians would escape apocalypse via an event called ​“the Rapture” while Israel and the world are engulfed in the fiery wars of Tribulation.

But with the rise of the NAR, amid the broader growth of the Pentecostal and charismatic population, the dominant Christian Right End Times theology is shifting. Rather than waiting to be raptured to heaven, many evangelicals have become more invested in building their vision of God’s kingdom on earth. This includes seeking to reclaim ​“territory” from demons via a form of prayer they call ​“spiritual warfare” as well as engaging in nuts-and-bolts electoral politics.

It also involves an intensified emphasis on the role the NAR envisions Israel playing in their vision of the End Times — which they believe is currently underway. The NAR believes it can bring about the millennial utopia — 1,000 years of perfect Christian rule — by expanding Israel’s sovereignty over ​“biblical” land, supporting the immigration of Jews to Israel and converting Jews to faith in Jesus. Citing Genesis 12:3, where God tells Abraham, ​“I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse,” the NAR believes that only by ​“blessing Israel” can nations secure God’s favor. 

Thus, although the NAR is often lumped in with broad notions of U.S. Christian nationalism, the central nation in their religious and political vision is actually Israel. If the United States doesn’t sufficiently back Israel, they believe, America will be doomed, whereas, if they succeed in aligning U.S. and global support behind Israel, that will — somewhat paradoxically — help realize their broader project of establishing Christian dominion worldwide. Like older forms of Christian Zionism, this tends to cast Jews and Israel as what scholar S. Jonathan O’Donnell calls theologically ​“overdetermined …fetish objects invested with supernatural power” — that is, ultimately mere instruments in an overarching narrative of Christian redemption.

A new Christian Zionism

The influence of NAR is evident across the U.S. pro-Israel movement. NAR pastors and congregations regularly organize and attend pro-Israel rallies and conferences and join state and federal lobbying efforts arranged by groups like CUFI. As In These Times previously reported, in the spring of 2024, NAR leaders staged impassioned protests against supposed campus antisemitism outside several universities, with protesters scaling the gates of Columbia University and hurling epithets at students. At these rallies, evocations of the End Times mixed with demonization of Muslims and calls for the conversion of Jews, highlighting the intertwined antisemitism, anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim bigotry animating the NAR’s support for Israel.

This past October, the Heritage Foundation’s Antisemitism Task Force released a 33-page plan, entitled ​“Project Esther,” to use lawsuits, surveillance and other repression tactics to crush the Palestine solidarity movement and the broader Left. Most reporting on Project Esther framed it as a Republican or Christian nationalist effort, missing the influence of NAR and Christian Zionism. 

One leader of Heritage’s Antisemitism Task Force is Apostle Mario Bramnick, a Cuban-born pastor of a small church in Florida and president of the Latino Coalition for Israel, which calls itself the ​“largest Hispanic Pro-Israel organization in America.” Bramnick is also part of the Supernatural Global Network led by Apostle Guillermo Maldonado, a native of Honduras who hosted the 2020 launch event for Evangelicals for Trump at his Miami megachurch El Rey Jesús.

“We know that a lot of the efforts of the task force that we launched are now being implemented by the Trump White House,” Bramnick announced on a prayer call with other NAR leaders this February, celebrating Trump’s recent executive orders and other moves by the administration to pressure universities to deport students, stifle speech and more. (Organizers of the video prayer call initially declared it off-limits for the media, but subsequently uploaded it to YouTube.)

Bramnick’s activism in what NAR calls the ​“mountain” of government is extensive, and he uses his government influence primarily to lobby for increased support for Israel. A key evangelical adviser to Trump since 2016, as well as a special envoy for the White House’s Faith and Opportunity Initiative during Trump’s first term, Bramnick also often meets with Benjamin Netanyahu, including during his most recent visit this February. Following that visit, Bramnick told supporters that Trump and Netanyahu had ​“been called and commissioned by God” to establish the ​“prophetic destiny of nations.”

In 2018, after Trump fulfilled a major Christian Zionist policy goal by moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, Bramnick claims to have met with at least eight other heads of state, including far-right leaders Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, attempting to convince them to follow suit.

During a celebration of the embassy move in 2019, Bramnick declared, ​“it is a miracle that God appointed Donald Trump to be a modern Cyrus,” invoking the popular NAR idea that God is using the immoral Trump to carry out his purposes, just as God once used the pagan king Cyrus to bring the biblical Israelites out of exile.

But speaking at the Jerusalem Prayer Breakfast — a gathering of influential Christian Zionist, Israeli and U.S. Jewish leaders held at Mar-A-Lago this January — Bramnick updated the biblical lens through which he views Trump’s role. Trump, he claims, has now taken on ​“a new mantle”: that of Cyrus’ successor, Darius. According to Bramnick, this represents a ​“finishing anointing” to further Israeli expansion and dominance.

“For the first time since the Six Day War, IDF is beyond enemy lines in Gaza, Southern Lebanon and Syria, supernaturally,” Bramnick declared. ​“We’re in a tipping point moment,” in which what God started in the first Trump administration will now be completed.

This March, Bramnick went further, declaring during a gathering in Jerusalem that ​“God has given Israel a blank check with the election of Trump.” Bramnick was speaking at the Israeli launch of the Conference of Presidents of Christian Organizations in Support of Israel, a group he cofounded with other Christian Right leaders last September in order to advance pro-Israel policy and grassroots mobilization at the federal, legislative and state levels. During March’s event, also attended by Wallnau, Israeli annexation of the West Bank was a top demand.

Bramnick isn’t the only influential NAR leader in the orbit of the new Trump administration. Not only is Paula White-Cain leading Trump’s new White House Faith Office, but two other leading apostles, Cindy Jacobs and Jim Garlow, spoke at the Jerusalem Prayer Breakfast.

“When we try to divide up the land of Israel, the land given by God, it doesn’t make God happy!” Jacobs declared, granting theological justification for Israeli annexation of occupied territory and the expansion of regional war. ​“Over and over we have handcuffed Israel, just when they could have gone on and finished the task.”

Meanwhile, Lou Engle, best known for leading a years-long, multi-national series of NAR gatherings named ​“The Call,” plans to take his new ​“A Million Women” campaign on the road both around the United States and the world. ​“A Million Women wasn’t just an event,” Engle recently declared on his website, ​“it was the starting line. Now it’s time to mobilize.” To that end, he has announced a major rally in São Paulo, Brazil, this October ​“as we go global with this Esthers movement!”

And in February, prominent Apostle Tim Sheets said in a livestream appearance that NAR prophets are visiting Trump at the White House, where they ​“pray over him, prophecy over him.”

“There are others in his Cabinet that are the same way. So, thank God that we have someone that’s paying attention to what the church has to say,” Sheets continued. ​“Miracles [are] taking place every day.”

A global movement

The strongest influence of NAR on Christian Zionism may be across the Global South, where many countries have long been critical of Israel in international forums like the United Nations but where the rapid growth of non-denominational forms of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity in recent decades has created new, millions-strong movements of people who ​“bless Israel.” 

“You can really see the Global South is awakening regarding Israel,” said Jurgen Buhler, a leading NAR apostle and president of the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem (ICEJ), in a 2022 interview. With branch offices and representatives in more than 90 countries and claiming to represent tens of millions of Christians, ICEJ is the largest Christian Zionist organization in the world. In addition to coordinating extensive global church outreach, lobbying and fundraising in support of Israel, ICEJ also hosts a massive Christian pilgrimage, the Feast of Tabernacles, bringing thousands of tourists to Jerusalem during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. 

Apostle Rene Terra Nova, ICEJ’s Brazilian director and head of a global apostolic network of more than seven million members, has held massive pro-Israel rallies in Brazil — a country where researchers estimate there will soon be more Pentecostals and charismatics than Catholics — as well as helping lead thousands on Feast of Tabernacles pilgrimages to Israel. 

Nigerian Apostle Enoch Adeboye, named by Newsweek as one of the 50 most influential people in the world, oversees a sprawling church network that they claim reaches more than five million people in Nigeria and which works to influence millions more worldwide, with outposts in more than 110 countries. Adeboye pledged his network in support of Israel after October 7 and is a regular speaker at ICEJ assemblies. 

Other NAR leaders and organizations, like the Missouri-based International House of Prayer, organize coordinated global days of Israel-focused prayer and fasting, like the Isaiah 62 Fast and Global Esther Fast, which mobilize millions across Pentecostal and charismatic networks in Uganda, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, India and more.

These NAR networks represent what Rutgers professor Joseph Williams has called the ​“Pentecostalization” of Christian Zionism across the Global South, where the growing ​“international appeal” of ​“experience-oriented, Jewish-themed practices and identities…tied to distinctive views of Jews and Israel” helps bolster both the Israeli and transnational far Right.

In São Paulo in 2014, for example, the Pentecostal Universal Church of the Kingdom of God — founded by Bishop Edir Macedo, who, as part of the wider NAR movement, has described himself as a ​“prophet” and has called for ​“apostolic governance” in Brazil — opened a new $300 million megachurch complex, which they claim is a full-size replica of Solomon’s Temple, the ancient Israelite temple in Jerusalem which, according to prophecy, will be rebuilt in the End Times. With seating for 10,000, the floor and walls of the megachurch are covered in stone brought from Jerusalem.

“We wanted to help people turn to Israel, support its existence and give them an opportunity to touch Jerusalem stones, which for them is a big deal,” explained a representative of the church at the time.

Macedo’s ​“Temple of Solomon” was one ostentatious manifestation of a broader rightward evangelical shift with significant political implications. While in 2014, the year the temple was opened, Brazil condemned Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip and recalled its ambassador to Tel Aviv, by 2018 Macedo helped marshall evangelical support for the election of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, a staunch supporter of Israel.

Global vision

From the Temple of Solomon to the ​“A Million Women” rally, the NAR’s growth exemplifies how the Right’s popular adage that ​“politics is downstream from culture” applies to religion as well. Indeed, religion is often at the center of culture — so much so that Pat Buchanan, the hard-right politician who launched the term ​“culture wars” into our political lexicon, described it as nearly interchangeable with the idea of a ​“religious war.”

Today, the same war continues, even if the players and the battlefield have evolved and expanded, with the Global South emerging as a major part of the fight. NAR leaders certainly understand it this way.

And as NAR continues to grow as a major religious and political global force, we can expect the Christian Zionist movement to become even more militant, aggressive and bent on what they call ​“world transformation.” Progressives can’t afford to lose sight of this in order to adapt our own strategies to defend democracy and transform U.S. foreign policy.