Growing up as an independent fundamentalist Baptist, the highlight of each year for our church was the weeklong revival meeting, where we be
Rick Pidcock at Baptist News Global:
Growing up as an independent fundamentalist Baptist, the highlight of each year for our church was the weeklong revival meeting, where we began each night with songs that prepared our hearts for a sermon by a fiery evangelist who then gave an altar call to get us to commit our lives to the cause. So, imagine if that same formula were applied to the 2024 election by a group of conspiracy theorists who openly admitted their plan was to be a “Trojan Horse” at polling stations in order to “make history this November.”
What might the worship look like? What would the sermon be about? What would the altar call be for? And how concerned should the rest of us be? Unfortunately, we don’t have to imagine because that’s exactly what is happening at The Courage Tour, which is branded as a “revival in seven key states … marking the dawn of our nation’s Third Great Awakening.” The Courage Tour has been organized by Lance Wallnau, an independent charismatic apostle who is popular in the New Apostolic Reformation and a promoter of the Seven Mountain Mandate call for Christians to dominate every part of society. According to Matthew Taylor, author of The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy, Wallnau is “Donald Trump’s most effective spiritual propagandist.” In addition to Wallnau, the Courage Tour also features speakers such as Lou Engle, Allen West, Marjorie Taylor Greene and many others. Meetings this year have targeted Michigan, Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, with additional swing states slated in the coming months.
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The sermon
With hearts prepared to celebrate kingship, resistance to demons, a God who fights, victory and enemies drowning, the worshipers listened to the likes of Wallnau, who took the stage with the power and authority of a traveling evangelist.
The promo video includes clips of speakers saying:
America is under a spirit of delusion.
America has abandoned God.
Women are being used as pawns, which is exactly what the Left does.
We’ve given the keys to our church to the government and said: “Government, you run this church. You make the decisions for me.”
When we vacate the public square and leave that to chance, something fills the void.
When liberty hangs in the balance, and your children, your grandchildren, your nieces and nephews come to you and they say, “Where were you when tyranny knocked on our door,” what are you going to tell them?
What’s it actually going to take? Seriously, what kind of trigger point will cause the church just to come out of this zombie stupor and say: “OK that’s it. I’ve had it”?
The church shouldn’t be in a bunker waiting on the rapture, but it ought to be invading the mountains of influence for the glory of God.
We have to save our nation. We have to save our children.
We don’t have the luxury of disunity.
Fighting for liberty and freedom is difficult. It is hard. Choose your hard.
When the mothers suddenly see and perceive the organized threat against their little boys and their little girls, then they will rise up.
You’ve got a nation to save. You’ve got grandchildren to save.
Remember, those are the comments they were willing to highlight in their promo video. One wonders what may have been said they weren’t willing to highlight.
Common themes include spreading conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection. At one of the events, Wallnau said: “January 6 was not an insurrection. It was an election fraud intervention.”
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The ‘Lion of Judah’ election workers
But perhaps the most concerning call to action at the Courage Tour is their recruitment of election workers through Lion of Judah, an organization that assists Christians to register as election workers with a cause. “Just imagine. It’s election night. Chaos is happening. The polls are closing. They go and the volunteers are getting kicked out,” Lion of Judah’s founder Joshua Caleb Standifer told the Courage Tour crowd. “But what if we had Christians across America and swing states like Wisconsin that were actually the ones counting the votes and making sure it was happening?” Lion of Judah is composed of election deniers who say, “What happened in 2020 can never happen again!” This is precisely why they were so popular at the Courage Tour. Taylor noted, “I was present throughout the Courage Tour event on Monday, and it was rife with 2020 election denialism from the stage, in conversations among attendees and in the literature at the booths.”
Rick Pidcock writes for Baptist News that far-right election denial and conspiracy theories linked to Christian nationalism are a big concern, such as The Lion Of Judah outfit whose goal is recruitment of election workers in support of subverting fair elections.
