An Unconventional War is one in a series of nine Transformations movies produced since 1999 by George Otis, a pioneer of the New Apostolic Reformation. In the film, a prayer movement led by Apostle Julius Oyet is credited with weakening Kony’s Lord Resistance Army (LRA) and ending a decades-long conflict in Uganda through “spiritual warfare in Jesus name.” The 2005 “documentary” claims that: 1) surviving youth were treated by deliverance of demons, 2) parents who prayed hardest got their children back first, and 3) the Acholi of Northern Uganda were fortunate to be forced into interment camps (by the Ugandan government) so they could hear the gospel and be shielded from Islam. Julius Oyet and President Yoweri Museveni are the godly heroes, representing “a unique church-state collaboration” against Kony, the demon-possessed villain.

According to this version of the conflict, Kony’s LRA was allowed by God to terrorize the Acholi people because they needed to repent of false beliefs. This is the story of Uganda presented as an advertisement for Christian supremacism.All of these messages are tucked into a tear jerker with a happy ending about Kony’s young victims.  The exploitation seen in this film and many other Western evangelical media productions, may help to explain why war-weary viewers threw stones at a screening of Kony 2012 in Lira in Northern Uganda this past week.

The Transformations Movies

The Transformations movies are part of a global attack on religious pluralism and secular democracy, promoted in the guise of prayer, charity, and social justice. The films can not be dismissed as emerging from the fringes, considering the evangelical pedigrees of the those involved. Throughout these movies, world leaders – including presidents, prime ministers and politicians – are filmed in interviews, with some actually participating in dramatic reenactments of past events.

The Transformations series is marketed under the the TransformNations trademark and The Moving Cloud logo of The Sentinel Group, a non-profit ministry founded by George Otis, Jr., author of the first books on “spiritual mapping.” Otis was one of the pioneers, along with C. Peter Wagner, Ed Silvoso, and Cindy Jacobs, of the New Apostolic Reformation.  Their partnership and access to the larger evangelical world was forged during a massive missions program in the 1990s called AD2000 and Beyond. It provided an international platform for teaching “Dominionist” ideology and church/state/business partnerships as a way to speed up the evangelization of the world.

The writer, director, and producer of An Unconventional War, is the son of the late George Otis Sr., a Lear Jet executive, whose second career was founding Christian radio stations in the Middle East that became part of Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcast Network. In his obituaries, Otis, Sr. was credited with prophesying to Gov. Ronald Reagan (in the late 1960s) that he would occupy the White House.  In an article in this month’s Charisma magazine, Otis, Jr. describes a time during his preteen years when the major leaders of the Charismatic renewal movement were meeting regularly in his home.

Otis, Jr. founded The Sentinel Group in 1990.  The board includes George Otis, III; Apostle Doug Stringer, who led part of the Gov. Rick Perry’s August 2011 prayer rally in Houston; and Jeff Farmer, former vice chair of the executive board of National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) and current chair of the Pentecostal Charismatic Churches of North America.

An Unconventional War opens with a credit to the Living Stones Foundation Charitable Trust of the Ken Eldred family, which provides funding to The Sentinel Group. Lisa Otis, wife of George Otis, Jr. is a director on the Living Stones Foundation board. Eldred is also one of the funders of the multi-million dollar effort to register five million evangelicals through United in Purpose/Champion the Vote prior to the 2012 election.

United in Purpose’s partner (and sole grantee on their available 990 tax forms) is Samuel Rodriguez’s National Hispanic Christian Leadership Council, the largest evangelical Hispanic organization in the U.S.  United in Purpose produced a two-hour movie for church and home viewing titled One Nation Under God featuring James Dobson, Newt Gingrich, David Barton, Rodriguez, and others, with the purpose of impacting the 2012 elections.

Although the movies have become more sophisticated over the years, the Transformations provide a feel good indoctrination to the NAR’s brand of spiritual warfare. The elaborate reenactments feature singing and clapping Charismatic evangelicals, celebrating their conquest of demonic villains and the transformation of their communities – including claims of the miraculous termination of crime, disease, and even environmental degradation. The publicity for the first video begins,

Imagine a community where 92 percent of the population is born again; where city jails have been closed for lack of crime; where agricultural productivity has reached biblical proportions.

The initial movies were accompanied with books and seminars on spiritual warfare, including ones led by Charismatic groups from within Mainline Protestant denominations.With the release of the first movie as a training tool, Transformation organizations also burst onto the scene in cities around the word, including those under the leadership of Apostle Ed Silvoso’s International Transformation Network (ITN).  The Transformation movies are credited with inspiring the Global Day of Prayer, founded by South African businessman and ITN leader Graham Power, and launched worldwide in 2005. U.S. participation was centered in Dallas with the help of Rick Warren, who also launched his P.E.A.C.E. program in 2005 for transforming the globe through a church/business/state partnership.

The first Transformations movie was  released in 1999 and included a vignette about Kenya starring Thomas Muthee, who later anointed Sarah Palin at Wasilla Assembly of God. The second film, Transformations II: The Glory Spreads, included a segment on Uganda, with claims that the nation and its government was transformed by a national prayer movement at the close of the 1990s and a ceremony including the President and First Lady covenanting the nation to Jesus. The film shows the culmination of this covenant in miracles, including claims of supernatural healing of HIV/AIDS.

The message in each of the Transformations movies is that societal problems can only be addressed through prayer and submission of society, including government, to the correct brand of evangelical belief.  In An Unconventional War, Apostle John Mulinde compliments Yoweri Museveni and his military leaders for being willing to address the spiritual aspect of their war against Kony and the LRA.

“When you find a leadership that understands the serenity of God and begins to turn to God for the solution of things that they can’t solve, then you get this very strategic partnership between church and state.”

An Unconventional War (Trailer)The first half of the movie is a dramatic reenactment of the story of the “Aboke girls” – 139 students abducted in 1996 from a Catholic girls’ school.  Following their abduction, a nun bravely followed the LRA into the bush to try to negotiate their release.  Kony and the LRA let her take 109 of the girls back with her, but kept 30 of the students.  Most of the girls in this group would be captives for years and some did not survive.

The recreation of the story includes heartbreaking interviews with the parents and graphic scenes of both dead and surviving, but mutilated, victims interspersed throughout the movie. Kony is portrayed as having supernatural powers and contact with demonic beings that alert him when and where the Ugandan military (UPDF) will strike. Kony’s cousin Alice Lakwenna was his predecessor and leader of the Holy Spirit Movement rebellion against Museveni in the 1980s.  She is described in the film as having gained her powers when she,

“conversed with the spirits for one month, under the waters of the Nile.”

Link to a booklet on The Water Spirit Kingdom written by a member of the International Intercessory Team coordinated by World Vision, the international charity featured throughout An Unconventional War.In 2002, Sudan opened its borders to the UPDF and “Operation Iron Fist.”

After initial success in fighting the LRA, retaliation by the rebels against Acholi civilians actually increased.  At about 50 minutes into 90-minute movie, the morality play begins to develop.

The prominent Ugandan apostles in the movie – John Mulinde and Julius Oyet – explained that the war could not be won through military means since it had a spiritual component. “Operation Gideon” is launched with a revival meeting led by Oyet in Gulu.  President Museveni also happened to be in town, states the narrator, and called for Oyet to meet with him and his military leaders.

Oyet convinced Museveni and the UPDF to join in a spiritual warfare assault on the mountain altars claimed to be the source of Kony’s demonic powers.  Oyet then lead a full-scale military expedition against the altars, complete with troops and helicopters. One of the scenes of the spiritual warfare shows a pool of water at an altar that is supposedly so poisonous that anything that touches it dies. After the “eco-healing” as it is called, the soldiers were baptized in the purified water. Following this destruction of Kony’s source of supernatural powers, the LRA weakened and many of the kidnapped youth, used as soldiers and sex slaves, were able to return home.

In the midst of the jubilant scenes that followed, a liaison with the organization of parents of abducted children, the Concerned Parents Association, stated,

“And the parents who identified most with God, actually are the parents whose children came out first.”

As the youth returned they were first placed in rehabilitation centers, many run by World Vision, an international aid organization with a 1.6 billion dollar budget (2007), over 20,000 employees, and one of the largest recipients of faith-based USAID funding. The narrator and World Vision workers described the difficulties in rehabilitating the returning youth.

Narrator: World Vision is playing a major role in the rehabilitation of child abductees.  Although their broad based programs are a godsend for thousands of lost and broken children, staff counselors have detected a disturbing phenomenon.

World Vision Counselor:  You find them waking up, you find them waking up and it’s like they want to do something. They want to do something, and what they want to do – they want to kill.  There is a power, there is a force, something that forces them into doing what they would not ordinarily do.

Liaison to Concerned Parent’s Association: It’s beyond the normal psychological explanation.  There is more to it.

Word Vision Counselor: That is why in this war the church has a very, very crucial role.

Narrator: As  committed Christians, Worldview staff members know what to do.

Counselor: They pray over those children, and when they pray over the children, they are freed, in other words deliverance has taken place.

The meaning of deliverance is described in more detail in Charisma Magazine, the flagship publication of the Charismatic/Pentecostal world, in a June 2006 article titled Uganda’s Miracle.  The article is subtitled, “Amid war and persecution, Christians are experiencing a revival in Uganda that is marked by church growth, an unprecedented drop in AIDS prevalence, and a changing political landscape.

More than 15,000 former soldiers have found refuge at World Vision’s Children of War Rehabilitation Center in Gulu. In addition to offering education and healthcare services, World Vision staff address spiritual needs. When a child enters the program, “all of the staff get together and lay hands on the child,” says World Vision program manager Jackson Omona. “We pray and cast out the demons that the child has picked up in the bush.”

Coincidentally, the next paragraph in the Charisma article is about Invisible Children.

Although abductions have become less common in recent months, children who live in vulnerable areas make a nightly exodus to safe zones such as the Noah’s Ark and Doctors Without Borders compounds in Gulu. After visiting northern Uganda in 2003 and witnessing the phenomenon of the night commutes, three 20-something Christians created a film titled Invisible Children, which documents their plight.

The middle portion of the Charisma article is dedicated to the “Uganda Miracle” in reversing the rise of HIV/AIDS and credits both miraculous healing and the abstinence program. The reality is that Uganda had an excellent safe sex education program in the 1990s, but that approach was abandoned to emphasize abstinence-only programming over the last decade.  Today Uganda is the only country in East Africa with a rising HIV/AIDS rate.  Nevertheless, the Transformations movies have been touted around the world as part of a larger propaganda effort claiming the shift in emphasis to abstinence worked and is a “Uganda miracle.” For more on the NAR’s role in this tragic sequence of events, see Bruce Wilson’s compilation Transforming Uganda and an accompanying article with short biographies of the major figures. As An Unconventional War comes to a close, the viewer is told that the Internal Displacement Camps that housed approximately 1.6 million Acholi after they were herded when forced from their villages, served a “redemptive purpose.”

“God has allowed them in come in the camps, whereby all of them can hear the word of God and come to Jesus Christ, and if we don’t use this window of opportunity, the Muslims are there. They’re eager to come and take them.”  [The last phrase is accompanied with a scene of a mosque.]

The narrator states that the mystery of the Acholi’s people’s suffering has been solved.

Narrator: The cause of her wound is no longer a mystery.

Apostle John Mulinde:  There is a strong connection between the bloodshed and the witchcraft.

Apostle Julius Oyet: What God is saying is that rebellion and idolatry can separate you far from me.

The narrator continues,

Salvation and deliverance have finally come to Northern Uganda.

The movie includes interviews with: Uganda President Museveni; Sen. Sam Brownback (now governor of Kansas); Els de Temmerman, Belgian founder of the Rachele Rehabiliation Center; and Betty Bigombe, chief mediator with the LRA.

The Rachele Rehabilitation Center founded by Els de Temmerman was named after the nun who risked her life to try to save the girls in her care.  The center closed in 2006, after aiding about 2500 LRA abductees to readjust and return to their families.  Els de Temmerman worked as editor of New Vision, a Ugandan paper partially owned by the government, from 2006 to 2010.

It’s doubtful that everyone interviewed in the movie would have been aware of all of the religious and political messages in the final product. However, Sam Brownback has regularly participated in New Apostolic events, including The Call, led by Lou Engle and appears in other apostolic and prophetic media.

Julius Oyet, the religious hero of production, is now internationally known for his active role in promoting the draconian Anti-Homosexuality bill in Uganda and was recognized by the Parliament when the bill was first introduced. Oyet participated in Lou Engle’s TheCall Uganda in May 2010, which became a rally in support of the bill.  Oyet has multiple ties to U.S. ministries, including heading the Uganda division of the NAR’s Association of International Healing Rooms and leading the Uganda branch of the Atlanta-based College of Prayer.

The Religio-Political Messaging in An Unconventional War

There are subtle messages in the movie that might not be noticeable to viewers unfamiliar with the ideology of the NAR or the geo-political situation in Uganda.

The concept of prayer taught in these movies refers to “targeted intercession,” also described as Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare in more advanced training materials. Publicity for the movie explains,

…many of the difficulties and conflicts in our communities have spiritual roots. We must also learn how to identify these roots of darkness and wage spiritual warfare in Jesus’ Name. Prayer must be Biblical and targeted in order to destroy the foundations of darkness in our communities.

The “foundations of darkness” include other religions and philosophies. This particular movie is actually less overt than some of the others in this regard.  For example, the first Transformations movie includes claims that spiritual mapping and warfare resulted in the spontaneous burning of a transcendental meditation center.  Other NAR media has included descriptions of prayer warfare destroying the buildings or icons of other religions.Although the apostles embrace Charismatic Catholics, the NAR is virulently opposed to the institutionalized Roman Catholic Church and claims that it is also controlled by demonic forces.

The movie is friendly in its portrayal of the heroic nun who rescued 109 of the 139 girls abducted in 1996, and George Otis appear to speak with current Catholic leadership of the school in the film. But there is a subtle reference to the anti-Catholic and anti-institutional ideology of the NAR. It’s not only witchcraft and Islam, but the institutionalized Catholic Church that is credited with the Acholi people’s misfortune. “The church has failed before,” states the narrator as a brief scene from an obviously  Catholic service is shown.  The same technique is used in a more overt way in the comment about Islam and an exterior shot of a mosque.

The Gulu revival led by Julius Oyet in the film, is claimed to have drawn thousand of participants, who were told to discard their “witchcraft” items on the stage.  A different description of this event is described in the Ph.D. dissertation by Robert Ochola-Lukwiya on the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative.  According to this account, Oyet almost provoked a riot at the event, when he called for participants to bring their rosary beads and condoms to be burned.

It is curious that the Africa Faith and Justice Network, a Catholic organization, promotes both An Unconventional War and the original Invisible Children movie in a 2006 “tool kit,” still available for download on the website and marked as a “hot item.”  The content of more recent tool kits for activism posted on the site would indicate that their activism may be in conflict with that of Invisible Children.  As a Catholic organization, there is no doubt that their interests conflict with the NAR.

The Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative includes both Muslim and Christian leaders from several different denominations and promotes an interfaith approach to peace in the region.  For many religious leaders, the goal is peace and stability for the nation and the promotion of religious pluralism, as opposed to exploitation of the conflict for proselytizing.

A similar dynamic can be seen in Sudan, where the conflict is generally portrayed in the American press as Muslim vs. Christian, despite the fact that there are some Muslims working to promote secular government and a pluralistic society, as Frederick Clarkson reports in Religious Dispatches.

“…the broad struggle is more accurately seen as one between rising state sponsored Arabist Islamic nationalism, against racial and religious pluralism.”

Religious supremacists, both Muslim and Christian, sometimes benefit by pouring fuel on the flames of conflicts that are not necessarily religious in origin.

Kony’s Supernatural Powers

In much of the media on Kony, religious and secular, he is portrayed as having supernatural powers that aid him in escaping capture.  This is a central theme of An Unconventional War. The turning point in the story takes place when Julius Oyet uses his good magic (divinely-sourced supernatural powers), to destroy Kony’s bad magic.

Numerous activists and journalists have pointed out the extent to which Western journalists have regurgitated the claims that Kony has demonic powers, perhaps helping to advance the Kony mythology.  Jane Bussman, a British comedian and Uganda activist, references the assertion made in the New York Times that Kony “is a former altar boy who became possessed by spirits,”  She describes this statement as “additional reporting presumably by the Times’ Afterlife Bureau.”

Those who have promoted the myths about Kony’s supernatural ability to avoid capture, failed to question which flesh and blood humans might be tipping off Kony, or to ask whose agenda in this complex geo-political conflict might be served by spreading the belief that Kony has demonic powers.

An Unconventional War is an example of how an apparently noble cause can be exploited in ways that most Americans may not have even imagined.

Also see this extensive 2008 report compiled by Talk2action contributors titled Spiritual Mapping and Spiritual Warfare: Muthee and the Transformations Franchise.

There may be no continent on Earth where the influence of the New Apostolic Reformation is more pervasive than in Africa. The NAR has close ties to Uganda’s president and first lady – who have several times held official state dinners for top NAR leader Ed Silvoso. Janet Museveni even traveled in 2006, with an entourage, to Silvoso’s yearly conference in Argentina. In 2007, both Musevenis were billed as speaking at the same yearly conference though I have not so far been able to confirm their presence.

Now, due to the 2011 appointment of justice Mgoeng Mgoeng as SA Chief Justice, the NAR may be positioned to advance its dominionist, “Seven Mountains” agenda in South Africa also – with erosion of womens rights and LGBT rights, and secular government, as possible outcomes.

Last summer, South African president Jacob Zuma nominated judge Mogoeng Mogoeng to be SA’s new chief justice. Mgoeng Mgoeng was then serving as a lay pastor at Johannesburg’s Winners Chapel International and, as the LA Times reported, he was criticized for his alleged stance on women’s and LGBT rights; South Africa’s City Press quoted a senior pastor at Winners Chapel International (WCI) as stating, “We transform such behaviour (homosexuality) through prayer and counselling according to the teachings of the Bible.” Described City Press,

“When church services at Johannesburg’s Winners Chapel International (WCI) end, congregants can report to an office where a string of pastors stand ready to rescue souls, drive out illnesses and cure “deviations”.Among the “deviations” the church can apparently cure through prayer and counselling is homosexuality.”

[ video, below: WCI church head David Oyedepo came to widespread international attention recently due to a video that showed him slapping, during a church service, a women who confessed to him that she was a "witch for Jesus". Rather than offer sympathy, Oyedepo declared the women to be damned to hell ]

As Mogoeng Mogoeng explained in testimony before South Africa’s Judicial Service Commission in early September 2011,

“My church’s opposition to homosexuality is not something peculiar to it, nor does the church have as its core value, the attitude that homosexuality should not be practised, or is a deviant behaviour.It is based purely on the Biblical injunction that a man should marry a woman and that there shall be a husband and a wife. The opposition to homosexuality is not therefore, a sine qua non (main reason) for the existence of Winners Chapel International.

The position it has adopted in this regard is similar to that of almost all Christian churches and religions, to which many other judges belong. It is unlike, for example, the Klu Klux Klan, whose core value is racial supremacy. The core values of our church relate to Biblical teachings and the church is not founded on homophobia. It is founded on the Holy Bible. I exercise my freedom of religion as a judge, alive to the commitment (to the constitution) I have made publicly.

As it happens Mgoeng’s WCI church, Winners Chapel International, is a branch church under David O. Oyedepo –  one of the 5 wealthiest pastors in Nigeria, according to Forbes.

Oyedepo has been an active participant in C. Peter Wagner’s emerging New Apostolic Reformation movement :

In the book Out of Africa: How The Spiritual Explosion Among Nigerians Is Impacting The World, that Wagner co-edited (with  senior Nigerian pastor at Ted Haggard’s New Life Church, Joseph Thompson), which features a chapter contributed by David Oyedepo, Peter Wagner writes, in his introductory chapter to the book,

“I convened a Nigerian Apostolic Summit, under the auspices of the International Coalition of Apostles. Meeting with those Nigerian apostles was a remarkable experience. Four of the five most prominent Nigerian apostles attended (William Kumiyi could not make it) as well as many others. All four have written stimulating chapters in this book. Before the meeting ended, I realized that I was in the presence of unusually gifted servants of God. These four apostles seated together in that room constituted the most powerful coalition of anointed Christian leadership in one place I had ever seen.” (Out Of Africa, Regal Books/Gospel Light, 2004, pages 10-11)

Oyedepo played a central role in the event, according to Wagner, who writes,

“One of the four leading apostles, Bishop David Oyedepo, the author of chapter 10, agreed to host the apostolic summit. He generously took care of all the accommodations and food.”

As Charisma editor J. Lee Grady, who has served as one of C. Peter Wagner’s International Coalition of Apostles members, wrote for the April, 2002 issues of Charisma,

“[Oyedepo] is proud to claim faith preachers such as Hagin, Kenneth Copeland and Fred Price as valued mentors. And he often brings American faith preachers to speak at his church’s sprawling facility–which is as big as most American sports arenas.It was during a trip Oyedepo made to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the 1980s that he says he heard God say to him: “Make My people rich.” Since that visitation he has focused his ministry on teaching Nigerians to be generous–so they can give their way out of poverty, establish businesses and become successful.

“Every time I see lack it taunts me on,” Oyedepo told Charisma. Noting that poverty statistics went down when a Christian revival swept South Korea in the last century, Oyedepo says he expects “an industrial revolution” to transform Nigeria in the next decade.

[...]

…This move of God is not to redecorate the church. It is to redecorate the world.”

Also playing a major role in the 2002 ICA-sponsored Nigerian Apostolic Summit, recounted Wagner, was Redeemed Christian Church of God General Overseer Enoch A. Adeboye.

In 2003, according to the Vol. 4, No. 3 July – September issue of Wagner’s Global Harvest Ministries Global Prayer News, Adeboye, Sunday Adelaja, Emmanuel Nuhu Kure, and David Oyedepo were among the Nigerian apostles to be featured at a scheduled October 23-25, 2003 “Light The Nation – Rekindling The Flame” conference at Rev. Ted Haggard Colorado Springs, CO New Life Church.

Along with Emmanuel Kure, one of the officially listed apostles on C. Peter Wagner’s ICA “short list” has been Sunday Adelaja, who founded a megachurch in Kiev, Ukraine and went on to build a church empire with churches, stated Wagner, in Israel, Russia, the United States, the United Arab Emirates, and the Netherlands.

As Wagner describes, Nigeria has been exporting its pastors around the world. Why such success, for Nigerian Christianity? Explains Wagner,

“It is happening in the New Testament way. Jesus sent His disciples out to heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out demons and preach the kingdom of God… As a former American missionary, I can personally attest to the fact that at least some of us were taught not to expect to see the sick healed, demons cast out or the dead raised through our ministry. Some of our theologians relegated such things to the lunatic fringe of Christianity.
Nigerians don’t seem to have the same intellectual, exegetical, theological or philosophical problems that most American theologians have had… They expect that these signs will follow every believer: “They will cast out demons; they will speak with new tongues; they will take up serpents; and if they drink anything deadly, it will by no means hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover (Mark 16:17-18).
American Christian readers who receive up-to-date information such as the Barna Report lament the fact that evangelism has all but stalled out in America today. We have much to learn from Nigeria.” (Out Of Africa, pages 15-16)

While raising the dead and curing the sick are positive endeavors, the pervasive obsession with demons that haunts New Apostolic Reformation doctrine casts a dark shadow on the NAR’s faith healing paradigm.

The central organizing concept of C. Peter Wagner’s New Apostolic Reformation is radically utopian – God’s kingdom can be brought to Earth, and a utopian millennial kingdom established, when all of the demon spirits and demonic principalities believed to currently have power over the Earth are driven out and destroyed.

As part of that utopian project, it is necessary to drive out, from people, institutions, or geographic areas, demons associated with incorrect religious, political, and ideological beliefs, or with basic personality characteristics (such as non-heterosexual sexual preferences.) It is through the practice of Spiritual Mapping Spiritual that the demons – and also human beings associated with the alleged demons – are mapped out (geographically located), for future targeting.

In the leading video propaganda series of the NAR, George Otis, Jr.’s Transformations videos, people accused of witchcraft and sorcery are hounded by mobs and police, or even found sliced in half by swords. “Enemy” institutions “miraculously” burn to the ground, and objects associated with competing belief systems are incinerated.

In a 2006 conference speech, C. Peter Wagner, who has played a pivotal role in organizing the emergent New Apostolic Reformation, made very clear his view that “Spiritual Warfare” was not relegated merely to the spiritual realm – it extended, as part of a seamless continuum, into actual warfare, with bullets and napalm.

[update: for related story, see Gingrich Faith Coalition Leader: Punch To Gut Healed Stomach Tumor]

Dutch Sheets is a member of Newt Gingrich’s Faith Leaders Coalition — as confirmed in January by researcher Rachel Tabachnick and noted in a February 27, 2012 story in The Nation). In a February 19, 2009 podcast, Sheets detailed (transcript below) an ambitious Internet-driven plan to “infect” one million young Americans per year with the dominionist Seven Mountains vision – that believers should infiltrate and take places of influence in key sectors of society and culture.

The 7M mandate has been promoted extensively by the NAR, including by Kenyan pastor Thomas Muthee, prior to his blessing of Sarah Palin, as shown in 2005 church footage (see links, above) that emerged during the 2008 election. The Seven Mountains are: business and finance, religion, the family, education, media, arts and entertainment, and government.

Dutch Sheets is a major leader in the movement coalescing within born-again charismatic Christianity known as the New Apostolic Reformation. The NAR is the dominant tendency in Gingrich’s Faith Leaders Coalition. The New Apostolic Reformation was covered in two full WHYY NPR Fresh Air segments, hosted by Terry Gross, aired in August and October 2011.

The NAR’s sprawling national and state-level prayer networks serve as hubs for political organizing, and while NAR doctrine is heavily infused with the need to combat demons, the movement also advances a radical form of theocratic libertarianism. NAR leaders are currently distributing, in California, prayer guides that attack unions.

NAR politics skews toward the Tea Party spectrum, and is infused with paranoid anti-communist conspiracy theory. One of the NAR political ventures, the Oak Initiative, has promoted the claim that the Obama Administration’s health care reform legislation contained a provision for the creation of a left-wing constabulary force like the Nazi brownshirts. The Oak Initiative (see link, above) heavily demonizes Islam.

While the other NAR-associated leaders in the Gingrich Faith Coalition – notably George Barna and Jim Garlow – (Barna especially) have crafted lower-key public personas, Dutch Sheets is a firebrand within the NAR movement who serves as a “spiritual father” to one of the most virulently antigay pastors associated with the NAR, Damon Thompson, and has touted a form of faith healing in which pastors physically assault, onstage, advanced-stage cancer patients. Sheets also maintains that Barack Obama is a Muslim.

Notable aspects of the NAR teaching include the doctrine that believers should destroy or neutralize, by burning, smashing, or flushing down toilets, objects deemed to be unholy, including profane books and “idolatrous” religious texts (such as Books of Mormon), religious relics (such as statues of Catholic saints, the Buddha, or Hindu gods), and native art (such as African masks, Hopi Indian Kachina dolls, and totem poles.)

While the NAR came to widespread public attention due to Texas governor Rick Perry’s August 6th, 2011 The Response prayer event, which was dominated by C. Peter Wagner’s apostles and prophets, by November 2011 NAR leaders were beginning to shift their support from Perry to Newt Gingrich – whose alliance with the hard religious right goes back decades.

Dutch Sheets’ specific vision, described in his February 2009 podcast, of infecting a million young adults per year with the Seven Mountains ideology and vision, for Christian takeover of society, may not have come to fruition.

But the New Apostolic Reformation relentlessly targets young Americans, including through an ambitious nationwide effort, in which NAR ministries are participating, to establish Christian clubs in public schools throughout America – the subject of a new book by journalist Katherine Stewart, titled The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children.

Stewart can be seen discussing her book, in the video below, during a February 7, 2012 panel discussion hosted by Mark Crispin Miller and held at the McNally Jackson NYC bookstore.

[below: transcript of Dutch Sheets talk, in which he outlines a plan to "infect" one million young Americans per year with the Seven Mountains dominionist agenda.]

“What if I said to you that God has given us a strategy through which we can release a minimum of one million young people a year into different parts of our culture, with an understanding that they are sent there by God to change that part of society?There’s actually been a lot of talk lately about the “Seven Mountains”, or pillars of our culture and society, that influence everything else – the Religion Mountain, the family, arts and entertainment, media, education, government, and business. We know that if we can impact each of those mountains and really bring the kingdom of God and its influence there, we can change our culture.

What if I said to you that we can send a million young people into those mountains every year, with a true revelation from God that they are called there, called to be a minister of the Lord there? That’s ten million young people over the next ten years. If we could do that, we could change America.

We have that strategy, and we’ll be releasing that at the conference this year, of the United States Apostolic Alliance, March 30th through April 2nd.

What if I said to you that we have identified 23 states that, according to Chuck Pierce in the vision he saw, have a righteous root that we can call on, or use, let’s say – in other words, that state has something that God has done there that is a root put there by his spirit that can release, or out of it can grow life, etc. – we believe there are 23 of those states. And there are 27 that don’t have that righteous root.

What if I said to you that we have a plan to begin to target those 23 states and move them toward awakening and reformation? Well, that doesn’t mean we’re going to abandon the other 27. We’re not about to do that. It just means that we now have a strategy from the Lord of knowing what to do in each state.

You need to know where yours fits in that. You need to know, “Am I one of the 23, with a righteous root? And, if so, this should be our strategy.” You need to know, “I’m one of the 27. This needs to be our strategy.” You need to know where we feel like we should start. Because I believe there’s six, seven, maybe eight states this year that we need to begin to target in a very significant way. We’re going to talk about that at the conference this year. I really hope you can join us.

God has also given us a plan that I believe is very critical for where he wants to take us in this awakening and reformation. And that is, the joining of the generations in a more significant way. In fact, I believe God has put on my heart what I’m calling at this point a Reformation Institute.

And I believe – I’m very confident – that God has given us a plan through which we can infect these young people with the understanding that they’re called to transform these mountains but then also to begin to prepare them to do that.

It’s a web-based institute, it’s going to incorporate not only who I am, what God has taught me, but many, many, many ministries that are functioning in our nation today – so that we can awaken these young people to what God is saying to them, put destiny in them, and then move them into the right website – so that they can hear the teaching they need to fulfill these assignments.

We have a plan to do this. I’m actually inviting several who have a voice to this young generation to this year’s conference. We’re going to try to marry who we are, the forties, fifties, sixty year olds, with this younger generation, and I believe there’s a true joining that will take place this year that I think will launch us into the new.

And, again, my prayer is that you will join us. I believe these strategies will work, I can’t implement them without you, it’s not going to be enough if you hear about them through the grapevine or secondhand. Come, listen, pray with us, join us, we’re going to pray together, we’re going to worship together, we’re going to have some very long seasons of just worship – waiting in the Lord – seeking his presence.

I believe this will be, for some of us, perhaps the greatest gathering we’ve ever been a part of. Last year’s national conference of USAA, many people told me, was the best they’d ever been a part of. I’m not satisfied with that, I believe this year’s can be better. So would you pray about joining us? – Actually, don’t pray about it, just come. And I’ll see you there. God bless you.”

The 2012 California prayer guide includes the the kind of open warfare on unions that is typical of Christian Reconstructionist Gary North, who has been attacking unions for for more than three decades. In 2011, the `Biblical economics’ taught by Gary North was the topic of an article in the New York Times titled “Christian Economics Meets the Anti-Union Movement.”

The prayer guide lists the largest unions in California:

SEIU – Service Employees International Union
AFSCME – American Federal, State county, Municipal Employees
CCPOA – California Correctional Peace Officers Association
CTA – California Teachers Association
CFT – California Federation of Teachers
CNA – California Nurses Alliance
UNAC/UHCP – United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Healthcare Professionals

This list is followed by a “Pray in Faith and Declaration” that includes:

-That financial contributions of unions intended to manipulate the voice of the vote would be shut up and shut down-That God will break the power and control of these unions off of our California government

-That the financial contributions given by unions to influence the vote will be rerouted for righteousness sake in this upcoming election

-That union members can break free of the entrapment of the unions political pressure

I’ve seen numerous examples of hostility toward unions from NAR leaders, but this is more blatant than most. It’s also interesting to see how much emphasis is put on the unions.  This guide is typical of the ones promoted by the NAR prayer warrior networks, divided into sections according to issues related to each of the “Seven Mountains.”

The Seven Mountains is a mandate is to take dominion over: arts, business, education, family, government, media, and religion.  The anti-union prayers are in the Economy/Business section. Other prayers follow under the headings of Family and Government.

The California Prayer Guide  2011 included a section for each of the Seven Mountains.  This guide also included one anti-union prayer point under the subheading of Business.

The California Fast Forward guide was prepared by Vicki Nohrden, the Apostolic Coordinator for the state of California.  She is also the Western States Apostolic Regional Leader for Region 12.  Nohrden is under the apostolic authority of Cindy Jacobs (RPN) and John Benefiel, head of the Heartland Apostolic Network.

California has a number of overlapping apostolic and prophetic prayer initiatives including Pray California, California Canopy of Prayer, the California Listening Team and LIFT California.

The Local Precinct LIFT Strategy includes mobilization by precinct.  Training is provided for building local precinct teams with a goal of an “activation team” of four individuals per precinct.

The Local Precinct Captain is to meet weekly with team members, maintain demographics, and formulate get out the vote efforts.The Precinct Activator administrates a 15-block area.

The Local Precinct Prayer Coordinator has a list of tasks including praying over the precinct map.

The Precinct Prayer Strategy includes knocking on doors and inviting neighbors to local prayer rallies.  The Precinct LIFT Communicator sends out periodical mailings and emails and gathers local survey information and statistics.

The instructions continue,

“Consider your adopted precinct as your Mission Field.”

The LIFT California website links to the Pacific Justice Institute “How We Can Help You” page. One of the subheadings is “Unions” followed by,

“Equip religious objectors to have their union dues go to a charity of their choice.”

The California Listening Team, LIFT California, and other prayer initiatives sponsored the Rose Bowl Gathering 11/11/11 event that was held at the same time as TheCall Detroit.  The event featured Apostle Bill Hamon, member of the ICA Apostolic Council and head of the Christian International Ministries network.  Vicki Nohrden led participants in prayer for the Prop 8 battle and for abortion to be eradicated from the state and a message was also delivered by one of Israel’s Deputy Prime Ministers, Daniel Meridor, thanking participants for support for Israel.

A report following the event stated,

Special recognition was given to Pastor Rick Wright & Dr. David Andrade [CA Listening Team event organizers] for their heart felt efforts to include & recognize Israel at this stategic time in God’s prophetic plan. The Knesset honored David Andrade and Rick Wright with a Certificate of Recognition as friends linking nation with nation, Israel & America.

The event was titled “A Line in the Sand” and was advertised with a dramatic trailer that begins with a woman swinging a sword.

The Reformation Prayer Network in California has launched “Demonstrating the Kingdom,”

-a yearlong 58 county week by week prayer initiative in response to the Lord’s appointment to our state to shift a nation in preparation for the 2012 election.

The end of the message from Vicki Nohrden, RPN California State Leader, reads,

By little and little I will drive them out from before thee, until thou be increased, and inherit the land. Exodus 23:30 County by county we go…………..

Apparently one of the things that must be driven out is labor unions.

[note: this is the second in a three part series. Part 3 will address the eliminationist nature of the Spiritual Mapping paradigm promoted by Harold Caballeros, C. Peter Wagner, and other top NAR leadership]

In January 2012, NAR apostle Harold Caballeros officially entered the realm of international politics, joining the administration of new Guatemalan president Otto Pérez Molina as the head of Guatemala’s Foreign Ministry. Caballeros brings with him troubling political ties to his country’s recent violent past (see this article), as well as a record of promoting the New Apostolic Reformation’s characteristically supremacist religious and ideological views (see story, below, for details.)

Harold Caballeros is considered to be both a significant leader and also a major theoretician within the NAR, who has helped to pioneer the New Apostolic Reformation’s distinctive ideas and practices on Spiritual Mapping and spiritual warfare.

His many roles in C. Peter Wagner’s burgeoning NAR include being listed as an apostle in the International Coalition of Apostles, from when the ICA was first launched in 2001 up through 2010, the year that the ICA took down its publicly-accessible “short list” of apostles from the ICA website and moved the list to a password-protected section of the site accessible to ICA members only.The ICA has billed itself as comprising over 500 apostles globally. Its apostles claim to advise heads of Fortune 500 companies and run multimillion dollar international corporate ventures, have prayed together with Barack Obama and claim to advise his presidential administration, have been granted official state dinners by the President and First Lady of Uganda, and claim the current president of South Korea as one of their own. 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was extensively tied to the NAR and its ICA apostles.

In the  July-August 2000 issue of Ministry Today Magazine (an offshoot of Charisma magazine) C. Peter Wagner mentioned Harold Caballeros as being in one of the original elite leadership entities of the New Apostolic Reformation, the New Apostolic Roundtable, a group of no more than 25 that Wagner described as his personal accountability group in the NAR.*

In the secular world, including academia, there has been astonishingly little notice of the New Apostolic Reformation, let alone Harold Caballeros’ extensive involvement in the growing NAR movement – with one exception being a March 2007 Americans United For Separation of Church and State post which noted a January 2007 Charisma article (link to Internet Archive partial version) that discussed Harold Caballeros’ involvement in the International Coalition of Apostles within the context of his 2007 bid for Guatemala’s presidency (for more on Caballeros and Guatemalan politics, see this Talk To Action article.)

As the Charisma story, which appeared in the January 2007 print edition, described,

Church leaders in Africa, Asia and Latin America have been more willing to run for political office than U.S. ministers, said C. Peter Wagner, founder of Global Harvest Ministries and leader of the International Coalition of Apostles, of which Caballeros is a member.”Christians in the global South are way ahead of us in this area,” Wagner said. “The values of the kingdom of God should penetrate every level of society, and they understand that. … [Caballeros is] doing it right, going right to the top and taking dominion.”

[...]

“Jesus came to restore what the first Adam lost,” he said. “That’s the core of the dominion mandate.”

In his writings and NAR conference speeches, Peter Wagner has elaborated at length about what the “dominion mandate” means and at a 2008 NAR conference declared (see link, above for video footage),

“Dominion has to do with control. Dominion has to do with rulership. Dominion has to do with authority and subduing and it relates to society. In other words, what the values are in Heaven need to be made manifest here on earth. Dominion means being the head and not the tail. Dominion means ruling as kings. It says in Revelation Chapter 1:6 that He has made us kings and priests – and check the rest of that verse; it says for dominion. So we are kings for dominion.”

Spiritual Mapping, and The Spiritual Warfare Network

One of the most important early entities that preceded the official launch of the NAR, and the International Coalition of Apostles, was the Spiritual Warfare Network (link to Google Books text from Holvast book on Spiritual Mapping. See pages 103-107), which Wagner traces back to 1990 – around the same time period that the movement’s distinctive Spiritual Warfare and Spiritual Mapping ideas and practices were being pioneered by Peter and Doris Wagner, Harold Caballeros, Ed Silvoso, Cindy Jacobs, George Otis, Jr., and others.

The Spiritual Warfare Network functioned, through the 1990s, as the premier organizational network of leadership that would during the following decade metamorphose into overtly apostolic networks and groups of the NAR, especially as launched in 1999 through 2001 under C. Peter Wagner.

In 1998, Harold Caballeros hosted the Second International Spiritual Warfare Meeting, in Guatemala City. The meeting — according to a July 31, 2000 article in Charisma Magazine, which has served as the unofficial flagship publication of the New Apostolic Reformation (Charisma founder and owner Stephen Strang, and its longtime editor J. Lee Grady, have served as ICA apostles) — was in part to kickoff an initiative, headed by Harold Caballeros, to evangelize Spain and Portugal.

The implication is that Wagner’s and Caballeros’ evolving movement did not consider the Iberian peninsula to be sufficiently Christian. As Charisma described,

“[It was a] a mission aimed at motivating and mobilizing believers around the world to work together to plant 1,000 churches on the Iberian peninsula by 2010.The mission was launched in October 1998 during the World Congress on Intercession, Spiritual Warfare and Evangelism in Guatemala. At that gathering 1,150 believers and ministers from 50 nations committed their prayers and finances to the project. Since then, churches from Singapore, Uruguay, New Zealand, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Puerto Rico have committed to send church planters to Spain.”

During the late 1990s, while Harold Caballeros was serving as the “Spiritual Warfare Network regional coordinator for the Spanish-speaking world”, as Peter Wagner describes in his 1998 book Confronting the Queen of Heaven (Wagner Institute For Practical Ministry, 1998), Caballeros was one of a small group of top leaders consulted by Spiritual Warfare Network Strategic Projects Task Force coordinator Ana Mendez (whom Caballeros, as SWN coordinator for Latin America, would have appointed to the position) concerning a planned expedition to Mount Everest, to attack a global level demon identified as the “Queen of Heaven”.

Mendez’ subsequent expedition, with an elite prayer warfare team that allegedly (per NAR leadership accounts) scaled the lower heights of Mount Everest, was intended to dislodge the “Queen of Heaven”, which NAR theologians claimed was blocking prayers of Muslims and Catholics from reaching heaven, and promoting idolatry worldwide.

The New Apostolic Reformation’s factual account of the alleged operation, dubbed “Operation Ice Castle”, has been challenged and extensively debunked by researchers from so-called Christian “discernment ministries”, which also accuse the NAR of heresy. Nonetheless, NAR leaders celebrated “Operation Ice Castle” as having helped cause the deaths of Princess Diana and Mother Theresa.

New Apostolic ideological animosity towards competing beliefs verges on the extreme; Wagner and top NAR leaders such as Cindy Jacobs, Ed Silvoso, and Chuck Pierce, advise believers to burn, smash, flush down toilets, or otherwise dispose of “objects or materials related to false religions” including Mormonism, Islam, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Hinduism, eastern religions, Christian Science, native religions, and Baha’i.

Specific objects singled out include Books of Mormon, religious relics (such as statues of Catholic saints, the Buddha, or Hindu gods), and native art (such as African masks, Hopi Indian Kachina dolls, and totem poles.) Some of the videos in the “Transformations” series by George Otis, Jr. (see below), such as Let The Seas Resound (2005), depict the burning of native art objects.

While New Apostolic Reformation leadership is not always in complete ideological or doctrinal agreement, the movement’s religious and ideological supremacy clearly extends to Harold Caballeros who, in typically eclectic NAR fashion, targets both Catholism and pre-Christian religious tradition.

As described in Paul Freston’s book Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa and Latin America, during Guatemala’s 1990 presidential campaign candidate Jorge Serrano Elías, who had moved to and become a lay leader at Harold Caballeros thriving El Shaddai church,

“[W]as promoting a ‘spiritual warfare’ project of national exorcism known as ‘Jesus is Lord of Guatemala’, to free the country from a curse relating to pre-Christian religion. A leaflet by the pastor of El Shaddai explained that ‘our entire country was dedicated [in 300 BC] to Satan”.

David Stoll adds to his account, in his chapter “Jesus Is Lord of Guatemala”: Evangelical Reform in a Death-Squad State”, published in the anthology Accounting For Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements (1994, University of Chicago Press.) In his article, Stoll describes how, during a construction project carried out by Caballeros’ church, excavation revealed a serpentine Mayan mound with a carved stone head of a snake:

“Three hundred years before Christ, pastor Haroldo Caballeros announced, the serpent mound had been built to dedicate the entire country to Satan. Ever since that offering to the plumed serpent, the Mesoamerican god Quetzalcoatl, Guatemala and all of Latin America had been cursed. Why else would a continent so rich in resources and faith be among the poorest and most indebted of the earth? Why else would a country so green and blessed by God be afflicted by violence and poverty?…   Funded by a well-heeled congregation, Caballeros mounted a national prayer campaign to take the vision for overcoming the serpent’s curse to every evangelical pastor in the country. Fifty thousand prayer warriors were needed to battle the territorial demons controlling Guatemala, Caballeros declared.” [page 99]

Catholicism, it would seem, was incapable of dislodging the demons. But that is likely unsurprising for Caballeros who, during a keynote address at an October 2006 Sociology conference hosted by the University of Southern California, stated:

“In 30 years, Guatemala has gone from 1.2 percent, Christians in the population, to 40 percent today: an amazing growth, an amazing growth curve that now puts Guatemala along the line of South Korea in the number of conversions, I mean the number of born-again believers in the world. Not only that, but 60% of those believers today are Pentecostals.”

The growth of evangelical Protestant and born-again Christianity over the past several decades in Guatemala has indeed been very impressive. But most estimates would place the 1976 Catholic segment of the population of the country as having been in the majority, rather than 1.2 percent. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Caballeros does not consider Catholics to be Christian at all.

One useful treatment of Harold Caballeros’ involvement with the New Apostolic Reformation, and Spiritual Mapping, can be found, starting on page 95, in Dutch missionary Rene’ Holvast’s 2005 doctoral dissertation, written for the University of Utrecht, Spiritual Mapping: The Turbulent Career of a Contested Missionary Paradigm, 1989-2005 [link to PDF file of Holvast's 284 page dissertation - which Holvast later revised and published, in late 2008 through Brill, as Spiritual mapping in the United States and Argentina, 1989-2005: a geography of fear.]

In his 2005 dissertation, Holvast adds details, as related by C. Peter Wagner, of the 1990 spiritual warfare campaign Caballeros waged on behalf of presidential candidate Jorge Serrano Elías,

Caballeros started to send out Spiritual Mapping teams on a national level to `clear the way’ for the national elections. The teams did Spiritual Mapping in each state in Guatemala. They identified `three powerful human beings who were being used by the spiritual forces of darkness as strongmen’, two of whom were presidential candidates, rating higher in the polls than Serrano. The first two candidates dropped out after warfare prayer, resulting, according to Wagner, in a record-breaking victory for Serrano. The deciding factor, still according to Wagner, was Spiritual Mapping, the key to Guatemalan politics and church growth. Wagner likewise attributes the demise of the Peruvian Shining Path movement to a visit of Caballeros to Peru. [Holvast pages 96-97]

Holvast notes that Wagner – whose seminal role in organizing (and naming) the emerging New Apostolic Reformation is widely acknowledged by other top NAR leaders such as Cindy Jacobs – considers Harold Caballeros one of the pioneering theoreticians and practitioners of Spiritual Mapping.

The Wagner-edited 1993 book Breaking Strongholds In Your City: How To Use Spiritual Mapping To Make Your Prayers More Strategic, Targeted and Effective (Regal/Gospel Light 1993) features chapter written by many of the acknowledged pioneers of Spiritual Mapping as a practice including C. Peter Wagner, Cindy Jacobs, George Otis, Jr., and Harold Caballeros.

Caballeros’ chapter in the book, “Defeating the Enemy with the Help of Spiritual Mapping”, emphasized an often overlooked element in the emerging doctrine of Spiritual Mapping, which involves more than simply the identification of demon spirits that in the Spiritual Mapping paradigm are held to exert malevolent power over geographic areas (e.g. cities, towns, regions, or even entire continents) as well as people groups. Beyond simply mapping demons, Spiritual Mapping also involves the targeting of flesh-and-blood human beings.

As Caballeros writes, Spiritual Mapping “plays the same role that intelligence and espionage do during war” (p. 125). Then, on page 144, in a subsection titled “Naming The Strongman”, he describes how one of the teams in his Spiritual Mapping efforts in Guatemala came to identify a person who was serving as the human locus of the alleged territorial demon Caballeros’ research teams had identified:

“[O]ne day God showed the historical factors team an area where there were archaeological remains and how they related to basic characteristics of witchcraft and idolatry dating back to the Mayan civilization. Those of the physical factors team simultaneously located a vacant house in exactly the same area where idolatry and witchcraft meetings were taking place. Afterward, God showed the intercessors of the  spiritual factors team that a territorial spirit ruling over the area was using a human being as the strongman. His life-style included practicing the occult, witchcraft and idolatry.”

While Caballeros sought to temper this point with a reference, often cited by practitioners of Spiritual Mapping and Spiritual Warfare, to Ephesians 6:12, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world” (KJV), in a later book apostle Caballeros made the point more bluntly.

In his 2001 book Victorious Warfare: Discovering your Rightful Place in God’s Kingdom (Thomas Nelson, 2001), Caballeros writes,

“[T]here are persons who dedicate themselves to weaving line of communication with the devil. Usually we call them warlocks or sorcerers.  It is men or women who, in order to obtain power, praise, and worship establish covenants with Satan. The result is what we find in the Bible as a strong man, a person who is “connected” to Satan, who serves him, and through whom the devil exercises authority or power over a territory, community, or a social conglomerate… The Scriptures teach us that demons seek a human body in which to live (Matthew 12:43 and Luke 11:24)…Our interest in this subject derives from the fact that we have seen over and over again that when the strong man is vanquished in a given territory, the inhabitants become free to receive the light of the gospel.”

As described in the Talk To Action article NAR Apostle Harold Caballeros Heads Guatemala Foreign Ministry, in 2007 the then-head of Guatemala’s National Police, Erwin Sperisen, made a television show appearance which he appeared to credit Harold Caballeros with helping to inspire the activity, which Sperison called “holy”, of government-backed, church-based death squads.

*Note: several NAR and charismatic movement websites listed Harold Caballeros as being in the original 1999 group which comprised the Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders. At least four websites reprinted what was purported to be a prophetic declaration from ACPE –published by longtime ACPE member (and now acting head) Cindy Jacobs, on her Generals.org website– that listed Caballeros’ name in ACPE membership. However, Internet Archive cached versions of the referenced statement on Jacobs’ website do not list Caballeros (Hector Torres takes Caballeros’ place in the ACPE members list.)

ACPE’s elite group of prophets are held to be able to receive prophetic revelations from God, also known within the NAR as the “Rhema word”, which can augment Biblical scripture (though such revelations, stresses C. Peter Wagner, cannot contradict scripture.)

[Update, March 2, 2012: I have uncovered some additional information concerning the New Apostolic Reformation and the dictatorship of Guatemalan president Efraín Ríos Montt , now on trial, accused of genocide and crimes against humanity carried out by Guatemala's military against civilians during Montt's brief presidential administration in 1982-1983. Montt has ties to C. Peter Wagner's International Coalition of Apostles member Dennis Peacocke - see footnote.]In January 2012, with the inauguration of former military general Otto Pérez Molina as Guatemala’s president, NAR apostle Harold Caballeros took charge of Guatemala’s foreign ministry under the new Molina administration – solidifying Caballeros’ position as one of the most internationally prominent leaders in C. Peter Wagner’s New Apostolic Reformation.

Along with his extensive participation in the NAR, Caballeros’ links to government figures accused of human rights violations and perhaps death squads, and his demonizing of religious beliefs held by Guatemala’s native Mayan population – targeted by the military for massacres and torture during Guatemala’s civil war, raise troubling questions.

Originally trained as a lawyer, Harold Caballeros has pursued graduate studies at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and delivered a keynote addressat a recent major American sociology conference.

But as a parallel track, Caballeros’ involvement in the NAR, and NAR guru Peter Wagner’s demon-obsessed stream of charismatic Christianity from which the movement emerged, traces back over two decades.

In keeping with Wagner’s movement, which demonizes all competing belief systems and calls for the destruction of their religious texts and relics, Caballeros has publicly suggested that Catholics are not Christians and claimed Guatemala and Central America are cursed due to an ancient Mayan pact with Satan.

Guatemala’s Mayan Indians, roughly half their country’s population, have historically held Catholic, and also pre-Christian indigenous, religious beliefs.

One of the first items on Caballeros’ likely agenda as head of Guatemala’s foreign minsitry: as the Associated Press reported January 12, 2012, President Molina wants the U.S. to lift a long-standing ban on military aid to his country, imposed due to human rights concerns.

Molina has long denied the extensively documented, widespread massacres and torture of civilians during Guatemala’s more than 3-decade civil war that killed several hundred thousand men, women, and children, mostly Mayan Indians.

Human right groups have accused Molina of presiding over wartime atrocities, while serving as a general in the Guatemalan military.

Among recent academic studies, Guatemala’s 36-year civil war takes a place alongside other well-known cases of 20th Century mass political violence: Cambodia, Rwanda, East Timor, Armenia, Bosnia, and the Holocaust.

Several European publications, from the independent Ceasefire magazine to the conservative Economist have wondered what Molina’s campaign promise, to address Guatemala’s rampant drug and gang activity related crime rate with an “iron fist”, may portend in light of his past. As the Economist quoted one human rights advocate,

“Anyone who served in the army then “cannot be innocent of the atrocities that happened,” says Fernando Girón of the Myrna Mack Foundation, a human-rights group named for one of the conflict’s victims. Memories of the horrors are still fresh. Last month four former soldiers were each sentenced to 6,060 years in jail for massacring over 200 villagers in 1982. Many were killed with sledgehammers and then thrown down a well.”

Writing for Ceasefire magazine, Sebastião Martins notes that Otto Pérez Molina was trained at the infamous Ft. Benning, GA School of the Americas, which has taught torture and counterinsurgency techniques to military officers of some of the most violent Latin American regimes of the 20th Century.

Molina was also present, notes Martins, in Gautemala’s Ixil Triangle region during the period when hundreds of massacres were carried out on Mayan villages, under the short lived 1982-1983 regime of evangelical president Efraín Ríos Montt .

As researcher and author Sarah Diamond described in her 1995 book Roads To Dominion: right-wing movements and political power in the United States (1995, The Guilford Press), Ríos Montt was converted to charismatic evangelical Christianity when “a group of young California “Jesus freaks” brought their Gospel Outreach church to earthquake-ravaged Guatemala in 1976.”

After his first, failed bid at the presidency, Ríos Montt turned, in 1978, for solace to Gospel Outreach’s Guatemala City Verbo Church. Verbo church elders went on to join Ríos Montt, as powerful civilian advisers within his subsequent presidential administration. Diamond adds,

“some Gospel Outreach members reportedly took part in the regime’s espionage and torture-interrogation operations. Entire villages were annihilated, while Ríos Montt’s U.S. backers justified the “scorched Earth” campaign in religious terms. In one interview a Gospel Outreach pastor defended the killings:

“The army doesn’t massacre the Indians. It massacres demons, and the Indians are demon-possessed; they are communists. We hold brother Efraín Ríos Montt like King David of the Old Testament. He is the king of the New Testament.” ” (page 238)

The founding of Caballeros’ Guatemala City El Shaddai church in the early 1980s reportedly siphoned off much of the Verbo Church membership. Several years after, one of the most notable new members to join El Shaddai was Jorge Serrano Elías, who in 1990 made a successfull bid for Guatemala’s presidency, contending with Ríos Montt (who was popular but forced to withdraw, disqualified due to his tainted civil war record.)

Within the New Apostolic Reformation, Harold Caballeros is acknowledged as one of the pioneers of the movement’s distinctive ideas and practices concerning “Spiritual Mapping”. But as Rene’ Holvast, author of a dissertation and book about the NAR and Spiritual Mapping describes, these practices are anything but apolitical or purely “spiritualized”.

During the 1990 election year, as Holvast describes in his 2005 dissertation (link to PDF of dissertation) written for the University of Utrecht,

“Caballeros started to send out Spiritual Mapping teams on a national level to `clear the way’ for the national elections. The teams did Spiritual Mapping in each state in Guatemala. They identified `three powerful human beings who were being used by the spiritual forces of darkness as strongmen’, two of whom were presidential candidates, rating higher in the polls than Serrano. The first two candidates dropped out after warfare prayer, resulting, according to [C. Peter] Wagner, in a record-breaking victory for Serrano.”

Other academic accounts of Caballeros’ campaign, which was titled “Jesus is Lord of Guatemala”, describe the El Shaddai pastor’s ambitious attempt to reach out to every evangelical protestant pastor in the country, in order to build a prayer warrior army fifty thousand people strong that could break an ancient curse Caballeros claimed afflicted his country.

El Shaddai church flyers distributed in the campaign and written by Caballeros claimed “our entire country was dedicated [in 300 BC] to Satan”.

In his writings, Caballeros has asserted that poverty and violence which have troubled Guatemala and Central America can be blamed, rather than on historical factors such as the legacy of Spanish colonialism or United States military interventions, on a pact that Caballeros says the ancient Mayan people made with Satan through worshiping the serpent god Quetzalcoatl.

Caballeros’ El Shaddai church member Jorge Serrano Elías had a mixed record as president. While he worked to rein in the power of Guatemala’s military and restore civil authority, in 1993 the president attempted an “auto-coup” by illegally dissolving Congress and the Supreme Court, and suspending the constitution. When a broad coalition of institutions and factions refused to go along with Elías’ authoritarian bid, he fled the country.

In 2007 Harold Caballeros himself launched a bid for Guatemala’s presidency. An article in the January 2007 print edition of Charisma magazine, which has served as a de facto journalistic flagship publication for the New Apostolic Reformation quoted C. Peter Wagner concerning Caballeros’ candidacy:

” “Christians in the global South are way ahead of us in this area,” Wagner said. “The values of the kingdom of God should penetrate every level of society, and they understand that. … [Caballeros is] doing it right, going right to the top and taking dominion.” “

In his writings Peter Wagner has elaborated at length about what the “dominion mandate” means and at a 2008 NAR conference declared,

“Dominion has to do with control. Dominion has to do with rulership. Dominion has to do with authority and subduing and it relates to society…  Dominion means being the head and not the tail. Dominion means ruling as kings.”

Caballeros’ 2007 presidential candidacy was declared invalid due to an error in paperwork filing with the government. Had the campaign continued, it would likely have been impacted by a scandal that broke out in March 2007, concerning alleged extra-judicial executions said to have been ordered by top Guatemalan government officials, including the head of Guatemala’s National Police force, Erwin Sperisen – who was reported to have then been a member of Harold Caballeros’ El Shaddai church.

In the years following Guatemala’s traumatic civil war, a more recent problem has been a rise in gangs and gang violence. In response, Guatemala has seen a wave of assassinations, known as limpieza social, or “social cleansing”, said to target alleged drug members but which, in practice, are often indiscriminate. In March 2006, as reported in an April 19, 2006 report from the Boston Globe,

“US State Department last month cited extrajudicial killings by police, vigilantes, or former members of security forces as the leading human rights violation in both Honduras and Guatemala. Extrajudicial executions are rarely investigated, and perpetrators are almost never prosecuted, according to human rights group Amnesty International.”

In February 2007, a major scandal broke out when three members of the El Salvadoran Congress traveling in Guatemala were waylaid and murdered by four elite members of Erwin Sperisen’s Guatemalan National Police force. The four, who may have confused the slain Salvadoran politicians with drug traffickers, were rapidly apprehended, placed in prison, then themselves murdered under suspicious circumstances.

The incident gained international media attention, including a March 5, 2007 New York Times story that quoted an unnamed United Nations official who alleged that the death squad activity was tied to Guatemala’s evangelical churches:

“A high-ranking United Nations official here, who requested anonymity to protect his diplomatic neutrality, said he believed the Interior Ministry and the National Police created death squads over the last three years, trying to combat the wave of violent crime by gangs like the notorious Mara Salvatrucha, a group started in Los Angeles by the children of Central American civil-war refugees of the 1980s.The officers in those squads belong to evangelical churches, the official said, and see the extrajudicial killings of gang members, known here as ”social cleansing,” as holy work. But they have also begun to commit crimes for their own profit. ”It gets out of their hands,” the official said. ”They create a Frankenstein.” “

Amidst the ensuing investigation, several top ranking government officials, including National Police head Erwin Sperisen, resigned and later fled the country. But before fleeing to Switzerland, where he enjoys dual citizenship, Sperisen made an appearance on his weekly television show “Valor and Service”, that was broadcast on a Guatemalan network reported to reach up to one million viewers, in which Sperisen stated*,

“La estimulación moral y espiritual estuvo a cargo del Profeta y Apóstol de Cristo, el hermano Harold Caballeros y de su esposa, la profetista Cecilia de Caballeros, de quienes soy humilde servidor, instrumento y medio para llevarlos al Poder de Guatemala y tener un Gobierno de Dios.”( “Moral and spiritual stimulation [for this show] was given by the Prophet and Apostle of Christ, Brother Harold Caballeros and his wife, prophetess Cecilia Caballeros, of whom I am a humble servant, instrument, and means to bring them to power in Guatemala and have a government of God” )

Sperisen then went on to openly acknowledge that church-based government death squads, connected to the Ministry of the Interior, had been carrying out so-called limpieza social and would continue to do so:

“Está no es una justificación, es, más bien, una reconocimiento humilde cuando uno está y es un instrumento de la JUSTICIA DIVINA.   …   Los escuadrones de la muerte que funcionan aún adentro de la PNC y el Ministerio de Gobernación, son un trabajo santo y está organizado por agentes y personal de las iglesias evangélicas que sabemos nuestras obligaciones con la sociedad… Tengo que reconocer que lo que publicó el diaro New York Times el 5 de marzo de este año, es cierto, la limpieza social que junto a Carlos Vielman como Ministro de Gobernación llevamos a cabo en la institución, se tenia que hacer y se tiene que continuar, como tengo entendido que se ordenó a las nuevas autoridades…”( “It is not a justification; it is, rather, a recognition that when one is humble and is an instrument of DIVINE JUSTICE. … The death squads that still operate in the PNC and the Ministry of the Interior, are a holy work that is organized by officers and staff of the Evangelical churches that know our obligations to society … I have to admit that the story published in the New York Times on 5 March of this year is true; “social cleansing”, with Carlos Vielman as Minister of the Interior, took place at the institution, had to be done and must be continue, as I have understood the new authorities have ordered …” )

It is not difficult to see how Sperisen might have understood Harold Caballeros’ teaching as advocating or condoning extrajudicial killings. In his 2001 book Victorious Warfare: Discovering your Rightful Place in God’s Kingdom (Thomas Nelson, 2001), Caballeros wrote,

“[T]here are persons who dedicate themselves to weaving line of communication with the devil. Usually we call them warlocks or sorcerers. It is men or women who, in order to obtain power, praise, and worship establish covenants with Satan. The result is what we find in the Bible as a strong man, a person who is “connected” to Satan, who serves him, and through whom the devil exercises authority or power over a territory, community, or a social conglomerate… The Scriptures teach us that demons seek a human body in which to live (Matthew 12:43 and Luke 11:24)…Our interest in this subject derives from the fact that we have seen over and over again that when the strong man is vanquished in a given territory, the inhabitants become free to receive the light of the gospel.”

In a chapter Caballeros contributed to the C. Peter Wagner-edited 1993 book Breaking Strongholds In Your City: How To Use Spiritual Mapping To Make Your Prayers More Strategic, Targeted and Effective (Regal/Gospel Light 1993), Harold Caballeros described a case in which one of his El Shaddai Church’s Spiritual Mapping teams was divinely informed that a single individual was responsible, operating as Satan’s local agent, for occult powers that were oppressing a specific geographical area. God then revealed that person’s identity:

“While we were in prayer the Lord spoke and said, “Tomorrow I will give you the man’s first and last name in the newspaper.” He also told us on which page it would occur. It was something absolutely supernatural and exciting to discover right on that page the full name of the person dedicated to these activities.”

Caballeros is one of the stars in the first “Transformations” video, Transformations I (1998), by George Otis, Jr., which depicts charismatic Christians creating mini-utopias by vanquishing demon powers, and humans held to be in league with the demons, from cities, towns, and whole regions.

Along with Caballeros, another star in Transformations I is Kenyan evangelist Thomas Muthee, a “valued personal friend” of C. Peter Wagner who is shown in Otis, Jr.’s video vanquishing, with prayer warfare and also, as shown in the video, the help of local police, a woman accused of witchcraft. Footage that surfaced during the 2008 US presidential election showed Muthee blessing Sarah Palin, in a 2005 church ceremony, against “every spirit of witchcraft”.

In August 2010, the government of Guatemala ordered the arrest of 18 former senior government officials and police, including Erwin Sperisen, for the extrajudicial killings of Guatemalan prisoners. According to a BBC report,

“The arrest orders followed an investigation by the UN-backed international commission against impunity in Guatemala (CICIG).The accused “formed part of a criminal organisation based in the interior ministry (ministerio de gobernacion) and civil police that was dedicated to extrajudicial executions of people detained in prisons,” CICIG said in a statement.

The group was also involved in other crimes including “murder, drug trafficking, money-laundering, kidnapping, extortion and the theft of drugs”, it further alleged.

Among the accused are the former interior minister Carlos Vielman and the former head of the civil police, Erwin Sperisen, both of whom are thought to have fled the country.”

*Footnote: Erwin Sperisen’s April 2007 disclosure, attesting to the existence of government-backed, church-based death squads, on Guatemala’s Canal 27 television station, is described in an academic paper by Dennis A. Smith, Communication, Politics and Religious Fundamentalisms in Latin America, originally presented at a conference of the Latin American Studies Association, for a panel discussion on “Religious Responses To Neoliberalism in Latin America”. As described in his paper, linked above, Smith is a mission co-worker of the Presbyterian Church (USA) who has worked in Guatemala since 1977 and coordinates the Communications Training and Publication program of the Central American Evangelical Center For Pastoral Studies (Cedepca).

*footnote: In his book Dominion: How Kingdom Action Can Change the World, C. Peter Wagner notes the enthusiastic reception that the administration of Guatemalan president Efraín Ríos Montt initially received from evangelical leaders and media, writing,

“I recall the elation among U.S. Christian leaders when Efraín Ríos Montt became Guatemala’s first born-again president back in the early 1980s. He had a noble vision of ending corruption and overcoming the Marxist guerrilla bands ravaging the nation. The U.S. evangelical media, including Charisma, Christianity Today, Pat Robertson’s CBN, Jerry Falwell, Luis Palau and others, raised hope of authentic social transformation of that nation. Palau said of Ríos Montt, “The hand of God appears to be on him.”

Wagner goes on to acknowledge the genocidal level of killing under Ríos Montt but tries to shift blame away from president Ríos Montt himself:

“under Ríos Montt’s regime the violence in Guatemala reached unprecedented heights, with some two hundred thousand fatalities, mostly among innocent, civilian indigenous peoples. He undoubtedly was up against high-level spiritual forces of evil that were having their way. Despite all his good intentions, he could not control his own military, and after only seventeen months in office, he was deposed by a coup. Transformation did not occur despite the backing of the international Body of Christ and influence at the highest governmental level.”

Subsequent developments have cast a shadow over Wagner’s extremely revisionist take on Ríos Montt’s role in Guatemala’s genocidal “dirty war”, with Ríos Montt now on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity. As described in a January 27, 2012 Christian Science Monitor post,

“On Thursday, Efrain Rios Montt appeared in a Guatemalan court on genocide charges. During the hearing, the government presented evidence of over 100 incidents involving at least 1,771 deaths, 1,445 rapes, and the displacement of nearly 30,000 Guatemalans during his 17-month rule from 1982-1983, according to the Washington Post, BBC, Siglo XXI (in Spanish), and the LA Times.Rios Montt did not speak during today’s hearings, but it looks like he will be able to test his “I was never on the battlefield” defense. Tonight, judge Carol Patricia Flores determined that there is enough evidence to try Rios Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. The prosecution wanted him incarcerated because of his potential for flight but the judge ruled that he can remain out on bail. He has now been placed under house arrest and will be watched by the Guatemalan National Civil Police (PNC).”

C. Peter Wagner was somewhat closer to the topic than he acknowledged – one of the longtime members of Wagner’s International Coalition of Apostles has been Dennis Peacocke, who was listed as an ICA member from the dues-paying organization’s inception in 2001 up until the ICA put its membership list, previously publicly available on the ICA website, behind a password-protected firewall, in 2010.

But Wagner’s ties to Peacocke go back much farther – the two were original members of the Coalition on Revival. As researcher Rachel Tabachnick describes,

“The Coalition on Revival (COR) brought together Religious Right figures from many different theological backgrounds. In the 1980s, they produced a set of Worldview Documentslaying a ideological foundation for activism to take authority over 17 various areas of culture and government.The Coalition on Revival included several Charismatic leaders who are now a part of the New Apostolic Reformation, including Dennis Peacocke and Bob Weiner, formerly head of Maranatha Campus Ministries. C. Peter Wagner is listed as a signer of the COR’s Christian Manifesto for the Church. The concept advanced in the COR’s 17 Worldview Documents, has now been simplified by apostles of the New Apostolic Reformation into the Seven Mountains mandate, a campaign for taking control of: arts and entertainment, business, education, family, government, media, and religion.”

In 1984, the year that Dr. Jay Grimstead called together the 112 Christian leaders who comprised the Coalition on Revival, and the year after Efraín Ríos Montt was deposed in a coup, COR member Dennis Peacocke held a seminar that featured Ríos Montt as a keynote speaker, according to researcher Sara Diamond.

As described in Diamond’s book Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right (South End Press, 1989),

“Peacocke’s political organization, Alive and Free, is based in Northern California and has sponsored various right-wing conferences including one on “pro-family” issues featuring Phyllis Schafly. In December 1984, Peacocke conducted a seminar, called “Marxism On The Doorstep: Conflict To The South” which included presentations from various intelligence operatives and a keynote address by former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. Peacocke and his associates have also been active in efforts to destabilize Nicaragua.” [Diamond, page 128]

Diamond’s book contains substantial research on the degree to which conservative evangelical missions work, especially by charismatic, born-again evangelicals, aligned during the 1980s with U.S. anti-communist foreign policy initiatives (often covert in nature) that were antagonistic to the establishment of democracies in the developing world and were commonly associated with substantial human rights violations. Writes Diamond, on page 161,

“One of the hallmarks of the Reagan era was the increasing “privatization” of U.S. foreign policy, the government’s deployment of groups and individuals unaccountable to citizens through constitutionally mandated channels. The Christian right has an integral role to play in this “private” pursuit of the “national interest”, particularly in the execution of “total conflict” warfare strategy known as “low intensity conflict”. Briefly, “low intensity conflict” (LIC) posits that in order for the United States to achieve its political objectives in the Third World, what is required even more than brute military force is a comprehensive, coordinated set of tactics designed to create desired attitudes–and corresponding political responses–both domestically and in “target” countries…[...]

But from Vietnam to El Salvador, the euphemisms “low intensity” and “counterinsurgency” translate into real terms: death squad assasinations napalm and, as in Nicaragua, the kind of prolonged economic sabotage that takes its toll in escalated infant mortality rates.” [Diamond, page 161]

The charismatic Christian right has evolved relentlessly since the 1980s, with the development of the Spiritual Warfare/Spiritual Mapping paradigm as one of its signature innovations. The SWSM paradigm appears to function as an extension of “low intensity conflict” doctrine and practice, such that areas of interest to C. Peter Wagner’s New Apostolic Reformation, as designated by George Otis, Jr.’s “Transformations” video series, sometimes converge neatly with countries and regions of especial interest to U.S. geopolitical strategists.

While George Otis, Jr.’s Transformations videos depict political and ideological conflict through a spiritualized lens, C. Peter Wagner made quite clear, in a talk given at a November 2-4, 2006 NAR conference near Seattle, that Spiritual Warfare was part of a continuum of conflict that merges seamless with actual warfare. In the talk, Wagner expressed his strong dislike for anti-war movements which, he suggests, may be under satanic influence (video link, to Wagner’s 2006 talk):

“we must reject anti-war movements. We must reject anti-war movements. And I have, I hate to report it, well I hate to report that one of the things that’s slowing us down in the war in Iraq is anti-war movements.I mean, I remember Vietnam – you know, don’t you? I mean, you know who helped, who helped – ’cause that’s the first war we ever lost. You know what helped us lose that war? – Jane Fonda. See? Now, she’s changed back, she’s been converted and everything since but I’m telling, but some of the influences she had, in the anti-war movement, she didn’t help America, she helped the enemy. See? And, um, and we can’t put up with this in spiritual warfare. We can’t put up with anti-war movements.

And, there are some, I hate to report it, there are some people who are against war. And I think that should stop. I think the whole Body of Christ needs to get on the page that we are in war.

There are some people who are against Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare – remember what I said that is – principalities and powers? And there are some people who are against Ground Level Spiritual Warfare. Casting out demons.

I mean, they won’t admit that but, but they will not allow any church in their whole denomination to have a deliverance ministry and – well I’ll get to that, let me take these one by one. Let me just explain the strategic level and then the ground level, and then what the anti-war movements have.

And the reason I’m saying this, and putting it on the DVD, is because I think it needs to be exposed. We can’t just go along and pretend that everything in the Body of Christ is OK, because it’s not OK in this particular area. We’re not, there are people who don’t – I can’t help but thinking that the enemy is encouraging them.”

Case study: the Acholi of Northern Uganda

The example of the Acholi of Northern Uganda presents a case study of the divergence between the New Apostolic Reformation’s mythologized narratives, depicting the application of Spiritual Warfare/Spiritual Mapping, and the horrific underlying realities that can lie beneath such propagandistic veneer.

George Otis, Jr.’s 2005 video An Unconventional War depicted NAR apostle Julius Oyet supernaturally triumphing over the Lord’s Reformation Army, which had been preying on the Acholi tribespeople of Northern Uganda’s Gulu region, such that the LRA was defeated by 2005, with peace slowly returning to the to the conflict-wracked region.

Produced with help from Yoweri Museveni’s presidential media team, An Unconventional War functions as government propaganda that obscures the real nature of what has happened in Northern Uganda since the mid-1990s.

The real sources of the conflict, it is likely, have little to do with spirituality and stem from inter-tribal racism and competition, on the part of wealthy and powerful agents within the Ugandan power structure, for access to rich deposits of minerals and oil, and fertile farmlands, of Northern Uganda.

In the late 1990s, at least one million Acholi tribespeople were forced into concentration camps along Northern Uganda’s border, by the Ugandan army. In some cases, the Ugandan army shelled Acholi villages to drive Acholi into designated concentration camp areas.

In the crowded, poorly-protected concentration camps, the Acholi languished for the better part of the decade. While the camps were ostensibly defended by Ugandan army troops – which had a tendency to melt away during Lord’s Reformation Army attacks.

But the most pernicious impact was probably epidemiological and nutritional. In the early years of the concentration camps, the Ugandan government made little to no provision to insure that Acholi in the concentration camps had adequate access to food, water, and medical care. Consequently, during the years of internment Acholi were dying in the camps at a rate estimated to be approximately one thousand excess deaths per week – especially from malnourishment and disease.

During the period of Acholi internment, the population group was the focus of intense international media attention due especially to Lord’s Reformation Army kidnapping of Acholi children, and evangelical missions organizations treated the Acholi as a fruitful target for evangelizing. But, as writer Jane Bussmann observes, media failed to ask the simple question – how did the Acholi wind up in concentration camps in the first place?

[2008 video, below, presents plight of the Acholi. See, especially, 2:59]

described by the New York City-based Blackstar News service, which has covered extensively the human rights abuses of the Museveni regime,

Nearly 26 years ago, shortly after Ugandan president General Yoweri K. Museveni came to power, his regime began herding about two million people — nearly 90% of the Acholi population, into concentration camps euphemistically referred to as Internally Displaced People’s camps (IDPs).At the height of the displacement period, the death rates in the more than 200 camps that eventually mushroomed was more than 1,000 per week, according to a report by the World Health Organization (WHO), a unit of the United Nations. People in the camps died from planned neglect. Lack of food, lack of water, lack of adequate sanitation, lack of medical facilities, and; targeted rapes which spread diseases, by government soldiers.

In the nearly quarter century of the camps’ existence, it is possible that more than one million Acholis perished — a conservative estimate, using the UN statistics referenced. The camps were ordered closed by the WHO in 2005.

The widespread belief during the height of the forced displacement of the Acholi was that Gen. Museveni sought to collectively punish all Acholis for their perceived opposition to his regime. Acholi soldiers comprised the bulk of the army defeated by Museveni’s insurgency.

[below: In 2010 video, Ugandan opposition party leader Olara Otunnu outlines case of alleged war crimes perpetrated by the Ugandan army upon the Acholi.]

Blackstar News noted, Yoweri Museveni has been accused of intentionally engineering a slow genocide against the Acholi, and in late 2010, American academic David Todd Whitmore, who studies Acholi culture and its relationship to Christianity, produced a memo, allegedly written in 1986, by now-president Yoweri Museveni, to his bother Salim Saleh, that sketched out a plan to depopulate the SAcholi region of Northern Uganda:

“The memo, titled, “Subject: RETHINK” describes an aerial flyover of northern Uganda by Tremor 1, and his subsequent change of mind on policy towards the North. Previously, Tremor 1 thought that the victorious National Resistance Movement (NRM) should forget about the “backwards northerners,” particularly “the Chimpanzees called Acholis,” due to the lack of developmental prospects in the North. However, the flyover changed Tremor 1’s mind. There is a “Gold Mine” of fertile land in the North. Therefore, it is best that the NRM take it over. Such control, says Tremor 1, will require finding ways to “drastically reduce the population” and to “eliminate some old politicians who are likely to give us troubles.” “

A May 18, 2007, ABC News story by Asa Eslocker – one of the few mentions of the ongoing suffering of the Acholi to be found in U.S. mainstream media – described,

“Documentary filmmakers in Uganda were subjected to intimidation and coercion and were the victims of break-ins while attempting to film what a former U.N. official calls “Uganda’s secret genocide” in the northern part of that country. The filmmakers say these threats came from Ugandan officials and secret intelligence organizations there… Despite the efforts at intimidation, the filmmakers obtained dramatic footage of what they say is fresh evidence of atrocities and inhumane living conditions in the Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps, where millions of displaced Ugandan minorities live in squalor and disease. The filmmakers says it’s a humanitarian crisis that has been covered up by the Ugandan government and largely ignored by the Western media. “We walked across mass graves, through an inferno of burning huts and across a field of bodies that were just left to decompose by a government that didn’t even care enough to dig a hole and bury them,” said Tiffany Gravel, the American director, as she recounted her trip through Uganda’s northern civil war-ravaged countryside in 2006. “

As the Blackstar News service details, while the Acholi have gradually left the internment camps since 2005, tens of thousands now face eviction from their lands, by an internationally-connected Ugandan investor with ties to the Museveni regime. The Acholi are also fighting for a portion of revenues from oil fields due to be opened in their region in 2012.

Sheets is an internationally known leader of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and one of the apostolic authorities over the 50-state prayer networks. Other NAR apostles, including Lance Wallnau, promoted Gingrich through these networks prior to the South Carolina primaries. Participants were encouraged to read an 18-page letter from Jim Garlow citing reasons for his support of Gingrich and the validity of his spiritual “restoration,” and also directed participants to a link to audio of a January 12 conference call with Gingrich and South Carolina pastors.

It’s impossible to measure the impact of the NAR’s support on the outcome in South Carolina, but it is becoming clear that NAR leadership is getting in line behind Gingrich despite the endorsement of Rick Santorum by James Dobson and other “old guard” of the Religious Right.

Jim Garlow is a national co-chair for the Gingrich campaign’s Faith Leaders Coalitionwhich was formed prior to the South Carolina primary, and includes George Barna (chair), Don Wildmon, Matthew Staver, Richard Lee, Tim and Beverly LaHaye, and J.C. Watts. Michael Youseff was also added to the list this week.

Garlow also heads Renewing American Leadership (ReAL) founded by Gingrich and Rick Tyler in 2009. David Barton, the nation’s most prominent promoter of Christian nationalist history, is also on the board and has traveled around the nation with Gingrich speaking at Pastors Policy Briefings. Both Garlow and Barton have worked closely with the NAR apostles for years, as noted in previous Talk2action.org articles.

Garlow led a conference call on January 9, to introduce pastors “from South Carolina and across the country.” Garlow introduced George Barna, chairman of the Faith Leaders Coalition, who remarked that in twenty-plus years he had never endorsed a person or a product, but that he was supporting Gingrich out of sense of urgency for the future of the nation. Barna was followed by Donald Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association and then Gingrich, who began with testimony of his spiritual development.  Right Wing Watch has pulled a few short audio clips from the call.

Other South Carolina messaging was directed to participants in the apostolic prayer networks, including a plea from Wallnau, lead spokesperson for the Seven Mountains mandate, for participants to read a letter from Garlow explaining why Gingrich is the best candidate.  Garlow’s 18-page letter goes into great detail about Gingrich’s “restoration” and essentially inoculates him from his past. Garlow also describes why he believes Gingrich is preferable to the other GOP candidates.

Garlow is presented to the prayer warriors as being in a “covenant relationship with Cindy Jacobs.”  (This in reference to networks of apostolic authority or apostle-prophet relationship, not personal relationships.)

Pastor Jim Garlow is our nation’s pastor. For those of you that don’t know him, he is connected in covenant relationship with Cindy Jacobs of Generals International, and he spends time with key governmental leaders.

Jacobs is one of the best known New Apostolic Reformation leaders in the country and one of the other two authorities over the 50-state apostolic networks.  The third is Apostle John Benefiel.  Jacobs also leads the gathering of the inner circle of prominent prophets, called the Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders.

Both Jacobs and Benefiel endorsed Rick Perry’s Houston prayer event in August 2011, but Sheets did not.  Perry’s “The Response” event was led throughout the day by leading apostles and prophets, and many more had publicly endorsed the gathering.  Perry announced his candidacy for president one week later, but it was almost immediately obvious that Perry was an incompetent campaigner at the national level and would not have a chance at the nomination.

Perry’s failure as a candidate left the Religious Right in disarray and desperate to unify behind a candidate to challenge Mitt Romney.  Over 100 leaders gathered in Texas a week prior to the South Carolina primary in an effort to determine whether to throw their support to Gingrich or Santorum.  In the first ballot, there were only nine votes difference between Gingrich and Santorum.  On the third ballot, Santorum was declared the winner, but the outcome was not unanimous and within days it was clear that the leaders were still divided.

Building a Prayer Warrior Army for 2012

For those unfamiliar with the New Apostolic Reformation, this is an international and post-denominational movement that emerged out of the Charismatic/Pentecostal sector. It’s mission is to dissolve barriers between denominations and unite born again Christians under a network of apostles and prophets. The purpose is to “transform communities” by taking “dominion” over society and government in preparation for the end times.

The movement is highly controversial inside the evangelical world, because it has been able to form networks that overlay existing denominations and is widely disseminating the movement’s unique ideology to evangelicals across the country.

The NAR, also described as the apostolic and prophetic movement, first received attention in the mainstream press because of the role of apostles in organizing and leading Rick Perry’s Houston’s prayer event.  In August 2011, I was interviewed by numerous media outlets concerning the political potential of the movement, including by Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air.  In October, octogenarian and leading architect of the movement, C. Peter Wagner, was also interviewed on Fresh Air.

Following his 80th birthday, Wagner began passing down his roles to leading NAR apostles and prophets, including Dutch Sheets, Cindy Jacobs, Chuck Pierce, and Che Ahn, among others.

[Graphic at right:  Sam Brownback with Dutch Sheets and John Benefiel at The Call Nashville on 7/07/07.]

As authorities over the 50-state networks, Sheets, Jacobs, and John Benefiel have been working to build a base of 500,000 prayer warriors to impact the 2012 elections through prayer and mobilization, including get-out-the-vote efforts. Jacobs announced the effort repeatedly throughout 2011, including speaking at Wasilla Assembly of God. (See Right Wing Watch video.) Cindy Jacobs’ refers to these efforts as “prayer activism.”

The effort has the goal of getting 10,000 participants per state, as seen on the websites of some of the state leaders, including Florida’s 10KFL and Michigan’s Tenacious 10K. These leaders are networked nationally through the lead apostlic authorities to whom the state leaders answer – Sheets, Jacobs, and Benefiel – as can be seen on the Taking the Land ministry in South Carolina. Prior to each primary, a prayer guide tailored for that state is disseminated along with information on registering and getting out the vote.

State-by-State Strategy

Gingrich’s Faith Leaders’ Coalition has an array of apostolic and prophetic leaders in addition to Garlow and Sheets. Several were announced as members of the campaign’s Florida Faith Leaders Coalition on Wednesday.  Included on the list is Apostle Ken Malone.

Malone was leading the 2006 apostolic prayer network conference call in which U.S. Senate candidate Katherine Harris prayed that God would “bring the hearts and minds of our Jewish brothers and sisters into alignment.”  Later in the prayer she referenced the leadership of apostles including Cindy Jacobs and Dutch Sheets.  A controversy ensued when the audio of the call was made public.

Also on the Florida Faith Leaders list is Mario Bramnick, head of the Broward Pastors Network, an organization that has the following mission.

To – Facilitate the unity of the Pastors in Broward County in order to bring transformation and revival to our County.To – Encourage the Pastors in advancing the Kingdom of God through unity, prayer and impartation.

To – Establish an apostolic and prophetic counsel for our county.

To – Unite the apostolic leadership of the city for establishment of apostolic government.

To – Provide an environment of edification, encouragement and consolation to the Pastors through the power of the Holy Spirit.

To – Network with local governmental officials to encourage those who are in authority and to pray for the transformation of our County.

None of the Newt 2012 biographies of the Faith Leaders Coalition mention their roles in apostolic and prophetic networks, including the bio of Dutch Sheets.

Apostle Dutch Sheets

Sheets has been featured regularly in Talk2action.org posts in his role as a national leader of the NAR.  Bruce Wilson posted audio of Sheets in which he clearly states that President Obama is a Muslim.

God has now turned us over to our enemies. He only does that, he only disciplines the ones he loves…. We have a Muslim president.

 

The apostolic prayer networks 2012 election efforts are called “Fast Forward” and were kicked off at the beginning at a “Gathering of Eagles” event in Washington D.C.  Jacobs and Sheets were joined by NAR Prophet Harry Jackson and Family Research Council’s Pierce Bynum.  Right Wing Watch posted video of Sheets describing the movement’s efforts to “rule the earth.”  (See the second video in the article.)

As i noted in a previous article, Sheets explains to the audience that the Christians will not completely dominate the world until Jesus return because there will continue to be “sheep” and “goat” nations, in other words holy and unholy nations.  He has a little fun with the audience by first denying that they can rule the world and then adding, “but we’re supposed to try.”

I am not at all implying as some try to teach that we’re going to take over everything and rule the earth completely before the Lord; that He has to wait for that until He returns.We’re not teaching that, but we’re supposed to try. (Audience responds.) It is our commission.

I know that there are going to be sheep and goat nations when he comes. There’s no insinuation here that we’re going to take over everything. But our assignment until he comes is to bring his Kingdom rule into the earth, so that our region looks like heaven again.

Building on 2010 Election Efforts

New Apostolic leadership is working to improve upon the mobilization achieved with similar activities and outreach prior to the 2010 election, some of which were also led by Jim Garlow in his role at Gingrich’s Renewing American Leadership.  Gingrich and Rick Tyler stepped down from their positions at ReAL early in 2011, prior to Gingrich’s announcement of his candidacy.

There is much more to come on the ways that the apostles and prophets are working to impact the election.  Stay posted…

Also see:
Eight Reasons Why Newt Gingrich is Emerging as the Religious Right’s Anybody-but-Mitt Candidate

It appeared that the contest for anybody-but-Romney might swing Rick Santorum’s way following support of major Religious Right leaders at the Texas conclave last weekend. But news quickly leaked out of the continuing divisionamong the attendees of the Texas gathering, including charges that the published results did not accurately reflect the strength of Ginrich’s support.  Following are seven reasons why the thrice-married Newt Gingrich has much more support among the Religious Right than might be expected.

1. Gingrich has been courting Religious Right leaders for decades, but with increased intensity in the last few years.

In 2009, Gingrich and his longtime aide Rick Tyler founded Renewing American Leadership (ReAL), with the mission to “preserve America’s Judeo-Christian heritage”  and promote the involvement of conservative evangelicals and Catholics in politics.  The religio-political organization is led by emerging power brokers of the Religious Right including Jim Garlow, who spearheaded support for Proposition Eight in California, and David Barton, the former vice chair of the Texas Republican Party and the nation’s most prominent promoter of Christian nationalist history narratives.

2. Gingrich is best positioned to receive the support that has been cultivated across the nation through years of Pastors Policy Briefings.

Many thousands of ministers and their wives have attended these seminars to hear the featured GOP candidates and Religious Right leaders.  The core message of these events has been captured in a DVD for church and house parties distributed by United in Purpose/Champion the Vote, a well-financed campaign to register conservative evangelical voters.  Although the Pastors Policy Briefings have included a number of GOP candidates over the years, the current “One Nation Under God” DVD includes only one candidate – Newt Gingrich – along with James Dobson, Samuel Rodriguez, and other Religious Right leaders. (Video excerpt and full two-hour video.)

Some of the Pastors Policy Briefings and media have promoted Gingrich’s 2006 book titled Rediscovering God in America.

3. Gingrich is best positioned to tap in support built through the related The Response prayer event and networking.

Rick Perry’s campaign was kicked off with The Response in Houston on August 6.  The stadium prayer event was financed by the American Family Association (AFA) and led by an array of apostles and prophets of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR).  The AFA receives funding from Ken Eldred, one of the funders of United in Purpose/Champion the Vote, and has partnered with Champion the Vote in the Pastors Policy Briefings. (Eldred’s funding of the AFA and NAR activism is covered further in Bruce Wilson’s article on the Champion the Vote DVD.)

Rick Perry’s campaign was a devastating failure, wrecking any plans of unity for the array of Religious Right leaders who attended and endorsed his event.  Perry finished his campaign with another The Response prayer event in Greenville, South Carolina on Tuesday and on Thursday endorsed Newt Gingrich.  Although Perry was drawing only a small percentage of voters in polling, his immediate endorsement of Gingrich sends a message to those in the networks of the leaders involved in The Response, including the 50-state apostolic networks of the NAR.  In the 2008 election these networks had aggressively promoted Sarah Palin, who has also endorsed Gingrich.

4. Gingrich’s past history may be forgiven and may even enhance his “redemption” testimony.

Rick Perry’s endorsement of Gingrich was perhaps one of the most eloquent moments of his otherwise disastrous campaign.  He dealt firmly with Gingrich’s Achilles heel, stating,

“Newt is not perfect but who among us is? The fact is that there is forgiveness for those who seek God. And I believe in the power of redemption, for it is the central tenet of my Christian faith.”

A message of redemption from a life of debauchery resonates among conservative evangelicals.  Bill Dallas, the head of Church Communication Network and chief executive of United in Purpose also narrates the DVD “One Nation Under God.”  Dallas, a former real estate developer convicted of embezzlement, regularly speaks about his redemption, including  in an Christian Broadcast Network interview titled “Sanctified at San Quentin.”

Many of the testimonies of conservative evangelical leaders are filled with stories of their previous drug use, sexual sins, and more.  Some of the popular speakers on the circuit claim to be former Muslim terrorists, saved in dramatic conversion experiences.

Gingrich’s three marriages and other personal issues may not be as big of an issue as might be expected. There was a similar miscalculation in the 2000 election, since George W. Bush’s alcoholism and previous lifestyle was seen by many conservative evangelicals as a validation of the power of his redemption experience. In 2007, Gingrich confessed his sins on James Dobson’s radio show.  Ironically, Dobson has been one of the leading voices speaking out against Gingrich in the past week.

Gingrich’s challenge will be to overcome the current gender gap seen in polls with more support from evangelical men than evangelical women.

5. Of the remaining candidates, Gingrich best verbalizes the politics of resentment.

His expertise was on display last night when he received a standing ovation for the tongue-lashing he gave CNN’s John King.  Gingrich turned his most glaring fault into a positive by going on the offensive and claiming that the press was smearing Republicans in order to help President Obama.

After many years of work with the Religious Right, Gingrich has the capability to tap into the fears that Christian America is under siege from a Marxist/homosexual/Islamic conspiracy.  Gingrich spoke at John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church in 2011, telling the audience that his grandchildren could end up living in a

…secular, atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.

This statement was ridiculed in the press, but makes perfect sense to those who have been indoctrinated in a worldview in which the combined forces of socialism, secularism and Islam are working together to intentionally destroy Christian American patriots.

Gingrich is a former history professor and has a Ph.D., but he often rallies audience with  opposition to the intellectual elites he claims are destroying American society.  In the “One Nation Under God” DVD, Gingrich is on a stage flanked by two large screens advertising Renewing American Leadership.  He tells the audience of pastors that he can’t imagine having an atheist president and then continues,

I for one am tired of the long trend toward a secular atheist system of talk dominating our colleges…..Half of what is taught in American colleges and universities is false.  It is a lie.  We ought to take it on head-on.

Gingrich also understands how to tap into the dualism of the Religious Right and the need to portray the opposition as not just wrong, but as literally evil.  A  New Yorker article about Gingrich states,

In 1990, when he was not yet Speaker, he pressed a memo on Republican candidates for office, instructing them to use certain words when talking about the Democratic enemy: “betray,” “bizarre,” “decay,” “anti-flag,” “anti-family,” “pathetic,” “lie,” “cheat,” “radical,” “sick,” “traitors,” and more. His own vocabulary of contempt has grown only more poisonously flowery. President Obama’s actions cannot be understood except as an expression of “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.” Liberals constitute a “secular-socialist machine” that is “as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.” There is “a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us” and “is prepared to use violence.”

6. Gingrich has a long history with Christian Zionists and Jewish organizations that object to a Palestinian state.

The linked video is a clip of Newt Gingrich speaking at the 2nd annual Christians United for Israel summit in 2007, at which he stated,

If George W. Bush wanted to send a signal to Hamas tomorrow morning, he could move the embassy to Jerusalem tomorrow…

At the Republican Jewish Coalition 2012 Candiates Forum,Gingrich declared he would move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in the first two hours following his inauguration.

The Republican National Committee appears to have abandoned any pretence of supporting a two-state resolution in the Israeli -Palestinian conflict.  A unanimously adopted resolution was produced at the RNC meeting in New Orleans last week and states,

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the members of this body support Israel in their natural and God-given right of self-governance and self-defense upon their own lands, recognizing that Israel is neither an attacking force nor an occupier of the lands of others; and that peace can be afforded the region only through a united Israel governed under one law for all people.

The rest of the resolution is filled with bible verses and references to the land as “God-given.” Many Jewish Republican leaders have been outspoken in their support for Mitt Romney, despite the fact that he has little appeal to Christian Zionist voters and has no record of participation in Christian Zionist activism.

Rick Santorum as also been a CUFI speaker and a regular in the Islamophobia speaking circuit, including his  2007 speech during  ”Islamo-Facism Awareness Week”  in which his answer to Islam was to,  “We must educate, engage, evangelize, and eradicate.” However, Gingrich has a more direct pipeline into the intersection of Christian Zionism and its right-wing Jewish partners.  Evidence of this is the influx of cash from Sheldon Adelson to the Winning our Future Super PAC which resuscitated Gingrich’s campaign.

Gingrich and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have a long and parallel history, with Gingrich attempting to make the kind of come-back that Netanyahu achieved.  During the Clinton administration Netanyahu and Gingrich worked together to counter Clinton’s efforts to advance the peace process.

7. Gingrich has an understanding of the GOP’s need to increase its populist appeal.

This can be seen in his success in going after Romney and his role in Bain Capital.  Some Religious Right leaders hesitated to support Mike Huckabee in 2008 because they were concerned that he was not sufficiently dedicated to what would now be described as a Tea Party economic and anti-government message.

Gingrich has been able to appeal to Tea Party leadership while simultaneously going after Rommey’s “crony capitalism.” Navigating the message of right-wing populism requires an ability to adhere to the gospel of godly capitalism while portraying a small segment of the business and financial world as villains. Furthermore, the select chosen scapegoats must then be portrayed as a product of liberal, secular humanist evil.  Gingrich has had exposure to some of the best in the business at portraying economic calamity as products of left-wing demonic conspiracies, including John Hagee.

Gingrich has also worked closely for years with David Barton, as described in #1, which leads to the final point.

8. Gingrich is the remaining candidate most involved in the GOP’s effort to recruit Hispanics and African American voters.

This point may be hard to believe considering his performance in the debates, including his latest sparring with Juan Williams during the Fox News-sponsored debate.  As counterintuitive as this sounds, Gingrich’s message aligns with the narrative being used to appeal to Hispanic and African American voters.  This point requires some explanation.

David Barton and other Religious Right leaders are traveling around the country with a narrative that portrays the Democratic Party as the source of racism throughout the nation’s history.  By omitting the “Southern Strategy” and shifts that have taken place in the parties, Barton presents an elaborate narrative that credits Democrats with racism from the Civil War and Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Era and into the present.

In these narratives, a straight line is drawn from the Democratic Party of the past to the one of today, with today’s Democrats engaging in a diabolical plan to enslave minorities through government programs and a slow genocide through abortion. For religious audiences, this narrative also includes a claim of the Democratic Party being under the control of demonic influence.

The narrative credits conservative religious leaders with providing the impetus to end slavery and promote the Civil Rights Movement.  Martin Luther King, Jr. is claimed to have been a Republican supporting conservative positions on social issues and the KKK is described as a weapon of Democrats against Republicans.

This is the narrative that has been used by David Barton and leading NAR apostles in outreach efforts to African American churches in Texas.  Apostle Alice Patterson and Rev. C.L. Jackson stood next to Rick Perry as he spoke at the August 6 prayer event in Houston, as silent representatives of the message of recruiting minorities into the GOP.

Another major player in promoting this narrative and the view of government as the oppressor of minorities is president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC) Samuel Rodriguez. Rodriguez, a New Apostolic leader, was one of the founders of the Oak Initiative, a religio-political entity founded in 2009 which promotes minority outreach while literally demonizing a claimed Marxist/homosexual/Muslim conspiracy. (Rodriguez resigned from his position with the Oak Initiative in late 2011, when articles by this author presented him as something quite different the “moderate evangelical” persona he has in press.)

Rodriguez’s has officially partnered the NHCLC with United in Purpose/Champion the Vote to register Hispanic voters and is one of the speakers on the “One Nation Under God” DVD and also participated in Rick Perry’s Houston prayer event.  Rodriguez encourages white evangelicals to abandon their anti-immigrant stance and embrace Hispanic immigrants as a bulwark against the Islamization of America.

As a board member of the Affordable Power Alliance, he has challenged the validity of global warming and argued against the need to regulate mercury emissions.   Rodriguez is one of the most prominent figures among evangelical leaders who have been able to promote a right-wing anti-government and anti-regulatory message and religious supremacism under the banner of “social justice”for poor and minority voters.

This effort to embrace minorities and immigrants is not uniform in the Religious Right by any stretch of the imagination, but it is taking root in the growing Charismatic and Pentecostal sectors and with the apostles and prophets of the New Apostolic Reformation.

Thus far, Gingrich’s Spanish language advertisements in Florida have focused on a Romney gaffe in 2007 and Romney’s position on immigration.  But the Religious Right has laid a foundation that Gingrich can build upon with their evil-secular-government-oppression-of-minorities message and a shift away from the typical GOP anti-immigrant position.