Prophets of America

[Nevilledog]

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https://theswordandthesandwich.substack.com/p/prophets-of-america

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As mainstream American Christianity shrinks, the prophetic movement within the evangelical church is growing. “Charismatic Christianity,” the font from which the modern prophets spring, is similar to Pentecostal worship: observing the self-proclaimed prophet Cindy Jacobs give her predictions for 2022, one is struck not only by the zodiacal generalities of her predictions (“good things will come for you”; “the Lord says teamwork is dreamwork”; “the Lord sees greatness in you”) but how similarly the prophet acts to any other preacher in the world of ecstatic Christian worship. She breathes on her congregants, and they fall back as if knocked over by a divine wind; she speaks in tongues; lays her hands on them in benediction, and pants out her predictions in her Texas drawl, her shirt glittering in the megachurch spotlights.

Following in the footsteps of other “prophets”—Hal Lindsey, whose bestseller The Late Great Planet Earth set the Tribulations of Mankind in the 1980s, and televangelist Pat Robertson’s frequent predictions of asteroids that would strike the wicked—the Charismatic prophets claim their authority directly from God. You can see it on the faces of Jacobs’ congregants—a hunger for the divine, a yearning beyond the needs of the body. “They’ve combined multi-level marketing, Pentecostal signs and wonders, and post-millennial optimism to connect directly with millions of spiritual customers,” Bob Smietana wrote of the Charismatics in Christianity Today. There is a certain QVC-ish hucksterism to Jacobs’ prophesies: “The Lord just wants you to know that He is going to give you solutions,” she wrote in June. “There are solutions coming for you.”

Despite her seemingly benign prognostications, Jacobs’ influence is leveled directly towards political ends. When Roe v. Wade was overturned, she wrote, “I prophesied twenty years ago that one day a memorial to the holocaust of the unborn children would be built on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and that will happen!” In 2016, several influential members of Morningstar Ministries, a charismatic organization of which she was a member, prophesied that Trump would win the Presidency; Lance Wallnau, a Charismatic prophet, wrote a book entitled God’s Chaos Candidate in which he called Trump a “rugged voice from the wilderness” who would save America from its “fourth crucible” of violent turmoil. A common belief in Charismatic circles about Trump was that he would restore Israel to peace under Jewish control, expediting the Second Coming and the end of days. In so doing, he would become like the king once fulsomely praised by the prophet Isaiah: he would become Koresh.

By 2020, the prophets were no longer content to merely prognosticate: they began to march. The “Jericho Marches”—in which participants rallied against the certification of the presidential election results, in which Trump lost convincingly—were organized by prophets like Jill Noble, whose “apostolic” visions predict an imminent apocalypse. “We are in the days that the early church longed to see,” she wrote on July 11. “There is a remnant of Believers who refuse to align with the Babylonian system. This company of passionate whole-hearted lovers of God will be small in number and will demonstrate supernatural power.”

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