What about the 7 Mountain Mandate?

Since few of you readers of this blog are conservative evangelical Christians, many of you may know little about what is called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). The NAR, which includes the “7 mountain mandate,” is prominent in the current Christian nationalism movement in the U.S.  

The “7 mountain mandate” is part of the dominionism rooted in the teachings of R.J. Rushdoony and forwarded currently by Lucas Wallnau among many others.* The latter is also an ardent supporter of Donald Trump and JD Vance. 

C. Peter Wagner served as a missionary in Bolivia for 15 years and then was a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary from 1971 to 2001. He founded the New Apostolic Reformation movement and coined the term itself. He also authored many books, including influential ones on “spiritual warfare.” 

The NAR seeks to institute a nation governed by Christians, and it advocates the establishment of Christian dominion (=control) over seven “mountains”: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government. This article is only about the last of those seven. 

“The greatest threat to US democracy that you have never heard of”: that is how the Southern Poverty Law Center characterized the NAR last year.  

The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy is the title of a book published this month. Matthew D. Taylor, the author, is a Protestant Christian scholar. Much of his recent writing is about Christian involvement in the events of January 6 (2021). 

For detailed information regarding the involvement of conservative evangelical Christians in the latter debacle, I highly recommend viewing the 25-minute movie Spiritual Warriors: Decoding Christian Nationalism at the Capitol Riot, embedded in this 2/24 Substack post by Taylor. 

One of the main leaders in the NAR movement for the past decade is Lance Wallnau (b. 1956), notably introduced in the above movie. He has been referred to as the "father of American dominionism," and in 2013 he was the co-author of Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate. 

Wallnau's influence began to grow in 2015, the year he stated that God asked him to support US presidential candidate Donald Trump—and he prophesied that Trump would win the election. Not surprisingly, after Trump was elected in 2016, Wallnau was regularly welcomed at the White House and Mar-a-Lago. 

Currently, he and many other adherents of the NAR still refuse to acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 election. As clearly portrayed in the movie mentioned above, Wallnau was at the Capitol on January 5-6, leading public prayers for God to lead in overturning the election results.  

Several top U.S. politicians have been linked to the NAR and the 7 mountain mandate. They include Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.)—and also Donald Trump’s spiritual advisor Paula White.  

Wallnau has been prominently involved in The Courage Tour mass meetings in the seven main swing states in the upcoming election. On September 27-28, that tour was in Pittsburgh, and JD Vance was there—although he was careful not to be photographed with the 7 mountain mandate leader.**  

As most of you know, in last month’s VP debate, when asked about the 2020 election, Vance declined to say that Trump lost in 2020. Candidate Walz called what Vance did say a "damning non-answer." 

Speaker Johnson is also refusing to acknowledge Trump’s defeat in 2020. Sunday on ABC News’s “This Week,” he would not say that Trump lost the previous presidential election. That is a troubling situation as he is the most important person in the House of Representatives. 

As before, I am quite confident that VP Harris will win the popular vote in the November 5 election. I am less confident that she will win the necessary 270 electoral votes, but I still think she will.  

Sadly, I have little confidence that Trump—and the NAR—will accept defeat without a fight. November 6 until January 6 could well be worse than all that happened from the 2020 election until Jan. 6, 2021. Let’s pray that it will not be so. 

_____ 

  * Rushdoony (d. 2001) was born on April 25, 1916, and on the 100th anniversary of his birth, I posted a blog article under the title “Reluctantly Remembering Rushdoony,” which you can read by clicking here.  

** Vance is linked with the NAR because of Trump, but as a Roman Catholic, he is more closely aligned with what is called Catholic integralism, a form of traditional Catholicism that falls under the dominionist umbrella—and is much older than Protestant dominionism that began only 50~60 years ago.  

Reluctantly Remembering Rushdoony

It was 100 years ago that Seinan Gakuin was founded as a small school for junior high boys in Fukuoka City, Japan. June and I have just arrived in Japan to see old friends and to participate in the centennial activities of Seinan Gakuin. I will share more about those events next month.

It was also 100 years ago, on April 25, 1916, that a baby was born in New York City and given the name Rousas John Rushdoony. His parents were recently arrived Armenian immigrants, having fled the Armenian Genocide of 1915. His ancestors had lived for generations in a remote area near Mount Ararat.

R.J. Rushdoony followed his father and many of his ancestors into the ministry. He was ordained by the Presbyterian Church USA in 1944 and later transitioned to the more conservative Orthodox Presbyterian denomination.

In the early 1950s, Rushdoony became a reader of, and then a contributor to, the Christian libertarian magazine Faith and Freedom, which advocated an “anti-tax, non-interventionist, anti-statist economic model” in opposition to FDR’s New Deal.

Rushdoony moved to Los Angeles in 1965 and founded the Chalcedon Foundation. The monthly Chalcedon Report, which Rushdoony edited, began appearing in October of that year. In the early 1970s, his daughter Sharon married Gary North (b. 1942), an economic historian. Rushdoony and his son-in-law worked together, and later separately, on what is known as Christian Reconstructionism.

Rushdoony’s major work, and the foundational book for Reconstructionism, is his 890-page book The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973). His key ideas of theocracy (“government of a state by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided,” according to Merriam-Webster) and theonomy (rule by God’s law) are found in that book.

Rushdoony’s ideas are also known as Dominionism, the belief that Christians following God’s law should have dominion over civil affairs. As Rationalwiki.org puts it “Dominionists are, for all intents and purposes, the literal Christian equivalent of Islamists demanding Sharia law.”

“Dominion Theology” is succinctly explained in Sara Diamond’s authoritative book Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (1995). (See especially pages 246~9.)

A recent and also notable book on the subject is Michael J. McVicar’s Christian Reconstruction: R.J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism (2015). In it also there is a brief section titled “Dominion Theology” (pp. 197~201).

As noted in these two books, Rushdoony’s greatest influence was in the late 1970s and 1980s. I briefly wrote about him and his influence in my book Fed Up with Fundamentalism (see pp. 48~51). That influence was seen in his contact with Pat Robertson (and his appearances on Robertson’s “700 Club”), with Jerry Falwell, and with Francis Schaeffer, who, to his credit, later repudiated the Reconstructionist movement.

While his influence may not be as great now as it was 30 years ago, neither is it negligible. Among current right-wing politicians, perhaps Sen. Ted Cruz has, partly through his father, been most influenced by Rushdoony’s view of Christianity.

In Christian Nation, the dystopian novel that I wrote about on Feb. 14 (see here), Rushdoony is mentioned repeatedly.

So, because of his historical significance as a “mover and shaker” of the Christian Right, R.J. Rushdoony is someone who needs to be remembered on this 100^th anniversary of his birth. But I remember him reluctantly because of the justifiably negative reactions toward the kind of Christianity he espoused and for his failure to have a more enlightened view of God, the Bible, and the responsibility of Christians in the world.