It’s been three years since the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, and much of the initial public horror at the violence has faded, at least on the right. Polling has found Republicans less and less likely to view the Jan. 6 rioters as “violent”; most now think it’s “time to move on.” Some of the insurrectionists have even become martyrs or folk heroes. And, perhaps most tellingly, the new speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, was considered one of the primary architects behind the Stop the Steal movement.

Johnson’s more genteel way of politics may not fit with the image of a rabid crowd storming the Capitol, but he does have something in common with many of the Jan. 6ers: a profound religious conviction in his own cause. In many ways, Johnson seems like a classic leader of the Christian right. His legal career focused on elevating protections for “religious liberty” over the rights of the LGBTQ community. At a more personal level, he hits the traditional cultural markers, taking, for example, his commitments to marriage and avoiding porn to extremes. Scholars of the Christian right have characterized him as a textbook Christian nationalist.

But he’s also something newer. As reporting from the fall showed, Johnson has deep ties to a movement called the New Apostolic Reformation—a network of politically ambitious church leaders, largely pulled from a kind of Christianity called Neo-Charismatic Pentecostalism. NAR leaders (typically known as “apostles”) have been credited with stoking the large and influential Christian nationalist contingent at the Jan. 6 insurrection.

It can be hard to keep track of all these movements and groups—Neo-Charismatic Pentecostalism, the NAR, Christian nationalism, and so on—and tempting to write it all off as a matter of right-wing Christians getting worked up for Donald Trump. But a new book, focused on the political strategies of Neo-Charismatic Pentecostals, makes the case that to really understand the anti-democratic impulse of some of the Christian right, it’s worth examining the segment that believes in a literal battle for the country between the supernatural forces of good and evil—the segment Johnson already has ties to.

The book is American Evangelicals for Trump: Dominion, Spiritual Warfare, and the End Times, written by André Gagné, professor and chair of the theological studies department at Concordia University in Montreal. It was first published for a French audience in 2020, and Gagné has recently released an updated version for an English-speaking American audience.

To better understand how these Neo-Charismatic Pentecostals........

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