Nearly by definition if something is getting covered at Get Religion it could be because it's not getting substantial coverage in other outlets. Julia Duin had a piece a few months back on the significance of Jericho March participants being more charismatic/Pentecostal than "other" evangelicals. Regular readers may remember this one:
There is a massive cat fight going on right now among evangelical and Pentecostal Christians that mainstream religion reporters have all but ignored.
Other than one story by Religion News Service — that ran mainly because famed Southern Baptist Bible teacher Beth Moore has gotten involved — there’s been little coverage on the schism between two evangelical camps as to whether President Donald Trump won or lost last month’s election.
That Pentecostals can be identified as evangelical (not fundamentalist as a general rule) but that charismatics are not necessarily evangelical (since charismatics can be Catholic (Mark Driscoll emphasizes this point in his more recent books, in fact) or Episcopalian/Anglican (which is also not necessarily evangelical) is something mainstream reporters are not particularly good at distinguishing.
For that matter even among the Mars Hill diaspora I'm not convinced people who were there are much good at keeping the categories clear. That there has been a contingent of evangelical never-Trumpers is not something that the press seems interested in keeping track of because, well, if I have to make a guess it's because many journalists are deliberately religiously illiterate to the point where they bracket Paula White, Beth Moore, Franklin Graham and any white Christian who is or seems conservative into a single bracket.
Being an ex-Pentecostal who ended up being a Presbyterian (i.e. Reformed) I admit to paying attention to these kinds of details. It is significant that the now supposedly no longer Calvinist Mark Driscoll's soteriology can be categorized as Amyraldian ("limited unlimited atonement") because few Reformed denominations would let that fly if he had bothered to train in a traditional denominational context. I'm not against Amyraldianism, by the way, but that's yet another reason why I'm part of the laity.
I say all that by way of example that if you're going to wade into these waters it helps to have some knowledge of what you're talking about. So I'm not surprised by Duin's reporting that since the last few weeks' worth of events there is a civil war brewing within Pentecostalism and that some who prophesied Trump's re-election are publicly admitting they were wrong.
Last week’s riot at the U.S. Capitol has ignited a civil war among many Christians.
Whereas white evangelicals are being creamed in the media for their (nearly) unwavering support of President Donald Trump, their Pentecostal/charismatic cousins have hardly been mentioned. The latter is an evangelical subset little known to the media, and many of its adherents remain fiercely pro-Trump.
Why is this important, besides the fact that Pentecostalism is the fast growing form of Christian faith in the world? Well, for starters, its most famous leader here in America, the Rev. Paula White-Cain, is Trump’s personal pastor.
White-Cain, by the way, is someone I considered a Word-Faith prosperity teacher heretic even back in my Pentecostal days. But then White-Cain as a stumper for Trump is not unlike Frank Schaeffer as a stumper for Obama.
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Some have said that these charismatic and Pentecostal leaders are part of a New Apostolic Reformation, described in Holly Pivec’s and Douglas Geivett’s 2014 book. It’s not a creedal movement, but its basic tenet is that God has restored a cadre of apostles and prophets to lead worldwide Christianity in the 21st century.
Things are rocky, right now, among the NAR crowd. There’s a war going on in that group concerning the “prophets” who have set the tone for much of Pentecostal America. These are individuals who claim to have foretold Trump’s 2016 victory. For the past few years, almost to a person, their prophets said God had planned a 2020 repeat victory for Trump.
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Cracks are showing. Charisma magazine openly calls the election “stolen” in its interview with Rodney Howard Browne, the first pastor in the country who was arrested for having mask-less services. But others are confronting those claiming to be prophets.
There’s hell to pay right now and folks are angry. This makes great copy and even greater interviews. I haven’t even gotten to Denver evangelist Loren Sandford’s Jan. 7 apology, a video of which which is at the top of this page.
Now if I'm right, that Loren Sandford is the son of John and Paula Sandford, who have been known in charismatic/Pentecostal circles as specialists on deliverance and inner healing (which are related but not necessarily equivalent concepts to exorcism and spiritual warfare). Sandford has issued an apology for getting things wrong and botching a prophecy. Having read some of the Sandford's books over the years I am not surprised that among charismatic/Pentecostal clergy a Sandford would issue a mea culpa about a bad oracle. That might be the exception that proves the rule.
That false prophecy abounds across the spectrum is not really a surprise. People who anticipated a Trump victory look to be catastrophically wrong but the likelihood of them changing their minds, if they aren't already admitting they were wrong, is low.
Here we are in 2021 and was Frank Schaeffer really right about the Obama administration? If he was then how, exactly, did we get Trump? As an ex-Pentecostal who doesn't disdain everything about that tradition but who is not in the scene as of decades ago, I think it can be easier for people to remember the dubious oracles they provide because they claim overt oracle access, whereas some blowhard like Frank Schaeffer can be forgotten or maybe forgiven since he switched from religious right to backing Democrats even though he's still as bellicose and strident as ever. Frank Schaeffer is someone I regard as more a propagandist and an agitator than a thinker.
I regarded Trump as in that category of propagandist Jacques Ellul described as the populist agitator, someone who doesn't have a set of coherently attainable policy goals so much as an eagerness to appeal to a standard of living or way of life, and that this sort of figure shows up in the United States (and, of course, elsewhere). But even though I'm an evangelical, moderately conservative, and not technically a cessationist, thanks to those categories a whole bunch of people might presumptively bracket me in with Jericho March types. I thought Gulf War II was a bad idea and not defensible in terms of responsible foreign policy or international relations, like anyone should really care what I think about that but I mention that to say that, for instance, I could say I think the United States is the latest iteration of Leviathan or Babylon the Great and it wouldn't matter. :) Thanks to the way people often behave on social media I find people now behave worse than people in the 2003-2008 period of Mars Hill and I don't say that as hyperbole or merely for effect.
Particularly as I watch people I've known from my Mars Hill days, there's a temptation in some quarters to scapegoat a generically defined "evangelical" as to blame for the rise of Trump rather than, say, trawl through the electoral shifts on Rust Belt Catholics or ask why ANY black or Latino people voted for Trump. I was surprised to hear one of my black friends explain at some lengthy just why he voted for Trump and also why, had Sanders gotten the nomination instead of HRC, Bernie probably could have won. So despite living in Seattle I can say that at least one of my black friends cheerfully voted for Trump for reasons that I disagree with. Among former Mars Hill members, however, I have seen a temptation to broad brush all of evangelicalism for the cumulative sins of white mainstream culture. My issue with that, as someone with half-Native American lineage, is that it wasn't the fundamentalists who were running the Native American boarding schools, was it?
It's a bit too easy for contemporary progressives, especially recent converts to progressivism in the 21st century, to not do any serious study on how overtly white supremacist progressivism from a century ago often was or how selectively a progressive might entertain an African American man as a guest of honor while regarding Native Americans as beneath consideration. We're living in an era in which, as I've complained before, white progressive and conservative pundits have made an industry of scapegoating each other as a way to agitate their respective bases. That there are evangelicals who have always regarded Trump as a dubious demagogue and regard the kinds of prophetic claims on his behalf as heretical is probably not going to exist in any practical sense among those who see in evangelicalism in general but white American evangelicalism in particular (never mind what it even is, just use it as a general slur) in ways that make it seem like a shibboleth and a slur.
I won't miss Trump when he's gone but it does sometimes seem as though when the Russian angle didn't stick that scapegoating white evangelicals rather than consider why POC or Rust Belt Catholics might have turned the electoral tide is the easier thing to do.
That there's a civil war brewing within charismatic and Pentecostal groups in the United States may not get much coverage at all. If the would-be prophets for Trump turn out to be wrong then that's something none of us should want to forget. I think they were wrong, by and large, before they decided to endorse him but four years on it's not like I have an especially big readership compared to the final two years of the late Mars Hill. I've been disappointed to see the ways in which people trying to distance themselves from that scene are still acting in the same ways but for different teams but that's probably a topic for another post at another time.
UPDATE 1-13-2021 7.07PM
