Summary
The “Courage Tour’ is a traveling worship spectacle passing through key battleground states ahead of the upcoming presidential election. Organized by Lance Wallnau, a sixtysomething Texas-based evangelical with a salesman’s persona, the three-day event was a marriage of the religious and the political.
The belief in a Trump prophecy has only grown stronger since the former president survived an assassination attempt in July. These Christians see Trump as a modern-day Cyrus the Great, the powerful empire builder and nonbeliever. They believe that under Trump’s protection, American Christians will rise up, defeat their demonic enemies.
Wallnau may be “the most important political theologian of evangelicalism in this century so far,” a scholar says. “We have to operate at a level where we can go against the gates of hell,’ he says.
Four years after an election that many of these Christians continue to think was stolen, Wallnau and his faithful are on the campaign trail. “People don’t know. They’re going to look back on it in the future,” Wallnua promised the crowd in Michigan.
The main tent, an open-air structure filled with rows of folding chairs, exuded a festival-like atmosphere. The air was sticky with humidity, Christian rock blared from the speakers, and people were cheery.
Neo-charismatics are more effective when physically directed toward and in close proximity to the evil they are meant to address. An hour into the event, Wallnau strode onto the stage with an easy and strikingly white smile.
Neo-charismatics are commanding and assisting angels in the spiritual realm. The movement doesn’t dismiss prayer for individual struggles and certainly enjoys opposing the occult. The real appetite is for national and ultimately global control of the earthly realm.
Neo-charismatics want to wipe civic and societal institutions clean of demonic forces. They want to populate those institutions with people who will implement and uphold a Christian society.
For years, the NAR remained on the fringes of evangelical Christianity. But everything changed with Trump’s election. Once Trump became president, he drew prominent NAR members into his White House.
The “Appeal to Heaven” flag was resuscitated by the NAR from its origins in the American Revolution. The Alabama Supreme Court briefly outlawed in vitro fertilization.
Author: More than 50 neo-charismatic Christian leaders were in Washington that day. One NAR leader broadcast daily prayers ahead of the rally.
I saw a man who was disarmingly goofy. Twice during the three-day event, Wallnau recounted, in full detail, a scene from the movie Gladiator.
The man in the video was Wallnau, and he was leading Mastriano supporters in an “As one!” Gladiator chop. The secular world had undeniably, in this instance, distorted a rather benign action.
A woman had been possessed with holy laughter, which some of the faithful can by seized with for hours at a time. The wife of the pastor of Floodgate, we were told, had once laughed for four straight days.
I sat through sessions that presented convoluted (and wildly incorrect) evidence that the 2020 election had been stolen. I watched a representative of the group My Faith Votes propose a letter-writing campaign. I saw one woman urge people to stop supporting “woke companies”
One speaker, while displaying an image of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, screamed, with true fire-and-brimstone energy, “I prophesy they’re going to jail!” Another lecturer, a man named Joshua Standifer, came onstage the first day just as a soft rain began to fall. “They say rain is a sign of blessing,” he said, to appreciative audience laughter.
Wallnau's vision for his great revival hinged on another Trump administration. The stakes meant that there was no room for a divergent outcome.
According to neo-charismatic prophets, the assassination attempt on Donald Trump on July 13 had been foretold. After Trump did indeed survive an assassination attempt that wounded his ear, neo-Charismatic evangelicals spoke of the incident as “proof” of “miracles”
Wallnau and other NAR leaders first rallied behind the former president as a kind of savior figure. The consensus on his righteous role is nearly universal among that segment of charismatics.
When millions of Americans believe that Harris is literally possessed by a demon, or that her party is acting on behalf of the devil, that could have repercussions for how they expect their elected representatives to govern. “They believe if God is not in control of something, automatically the devil is; it’s an either/or,” said Karrie Gaspard-Hogewood, a sociologist at Tulane University.
“They’re suffering. They’ve been given drugs that have worse side effects than what’s actually wrong with them. They don’t have the time to take off work to get well. That compassion grips me. It consumes me”
Many of these attendees were desperately seeking healing and answers. They were, in some way or another, deeply disappointed in society. But they were bound together by shared suffering.
On the final night, Murillo healed the whole tent. He had everyone lay hands on their neighbors, pray in tongues. He called on those who could not walk to move their legs, to stand.
