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.
Call to Worship
In a piece for the Washington Spectator, Anne Nelson described her experience at Michigan’s Courage Tour meeting: “At the outset, the Courage Tour looks like an updated version of an old-fashioned Elmer Gantry-style revival, complete with Bible verses, Christian rock and the promise of faith healing for sufferers of anything from arthritis to sciatica. There were no snakes in evidence in Michigan, but there was plenty of kinetic worship.”
The worship, led by Catherine Mullins, included such songs as “We Kneel to King Jesus,” “The Devil Can’t Have My Family,” “Our God is Fighting,” “Sing Like the Battle is Over” and “All Hail, King Jesus.” They also sang the Elevation Worship song “Praise,” which includes the lyrics, “Praise is the water my enemies drown in.”
The worship was “reminiscent of a high-energy stadium rock concert, with fist-pumping vocals and pounding percussion,” Nelson said. “Younger people moved to the front and giddily jumped in time to the music; older folk swayed and grooved in place.”
Alice Herman attended the Courage Tour event in Wisconsin and reported similar observations: “By 9 a.m. on Monday, hundreds of worshipers who had gathered under a tent in Eau Claire, Wis., were already on their feet. Praiseful music bumped from enormous speakers. The congregants had gathered in northwestern Wisconsin for the Courage Tour, a traveling tent revival featuring a lineup of charismatic preachers and self-styled prophets promising healing.”
The event Taylor attended began with 45 full minutes of worship music.
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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As Taylor puts it, “In other words, the Capitol riot was righteous and lamentably unsuccessful.”
The speakers at the Courage Tour tend to be the same ones who spoke at The Return and the Jericho Marches. So, there’s a lot of talk about fighting spiritual warfare for the sake of the children while being inspired by the Canaanite conquest narratives in the Bible.
In an interview with the Straight White American Jesus podcast, Nelson said the Courage Tour had “a lot of commentary about the need to fight demons, and suggesting that was saying that the opposition, referring to Democrats, are demons or possessed by demons, or controlled by demons, and that this is a stage of spiritual warfare.” She later added there was a “very clear and definite attempt to use these religious arguments about spiritual warfare and demonic influences to win this vote over.”
The Altar Call
Rather than having every head bowed and every eye closed as the evangelist attempts to convince people to raise their hands for salvation, rededication or commitment to full-time Christian service, the altar calls at The Courage Tour are about mobilizing the congregation for grasping political power.
“My job for all of you is to find the unfinished assignment because America is too young to die,” Wallnau told the worshipers.
And when it comes to electing Trump and MAGA Republicans, there are plenty assignments to go around. After the worship, the event “took on all of the characteristics of a political rally, recruiting worshipers for door-knocking, letter-writing, phone banking and election oversight, driven by Pentecostal fervor and fear of the devil,” Nelson said.
Herman added the event she attended had a “political message: Register to vote. Watch, or work, the polls. And help deliver the 2024 election to Donald Trump.”
One of the concerns evangelical leaders have is that Trump may already have reached the peak of his support from white evangelicals. So one way the Courage Tour seeks to build on his support is by promoting a Leon Benjamin-led movement called MAGA Black, which targets Black communities by utilizing Black pastors and merchandise such as MAGA Black hats and swag bags.
READ: Understanding Why Christians Are Seduced by QAnon and Conspiracy Theories
Another commitment the Courage Tour asks is for followers to download the “As One America” app. According to the app description, its “unique community activism feature empowers you to make a real difference right from your neighborhood. Whether it’s calling voters, knocking on doors or sending postcards, this app equips you with the tools you need to engage voters and encourage them to vote on election day.”
While the app provides news from right-wing media, it is more importantly a tool that allows the designers to access a user’s contacts for sending messages about where, when and how to vote. And it also has the capability to be used for data harvesting to direct political advertising.
You may have noticed in the sermon quotes how those on the right are concerned about the left supposedly indoctrinating the nation’s kids. So another commitment they’re calling for is for women to join the “Don’t Mess With Our Kids” campaign by coming to Washington, D.C., for a march Oct. 12. They’re aiming to have a million women present.
The self-appointed apostle Lou Engle says God gave him the idea in a dream where a million women were in D.C. while another woman preached about Esther and said the word “Nazgul.”
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“I exploded out of the dream instantly knowing what it meant because I watched the third part of The Lord of the Rings, where the Nazgul Witch King is destroying the armies of men and he says, ‘No man can kill me.’ But the king’s daughter takes off her helmet, lets her hair down and says, ‘I am no man,’” Engle reported.
Thus, God supposedly wants a million women to meet in D.C. to promote the election of Donald Trump. “Come to the Mall on the Day of Atonement and dare to believe that God will shift history, save a nation, as we pray, fast and stand on behalf of the children!” Engle declared.
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.”
According to their mission statement, they are “a community of Christians united together as one, who are committed to taking our cities, schools and government back.” They say they “empower Christians, guided by the Holy Spirit, to reclaim influence in government and shape our nation. Whether running for office or volunteering, every effort counts in reforming the mountain of government.”
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Taylor also had a chance to speak with Standifer himself. “He told me his background was in doing opposition research for a major Republican firm in D.C. Then he got disillusioned with how corrupt and business-like Republican politics were. So, he moved back to Nashville and started Lion of Judah,” Taylor recalled. “He said they’re active in all 50 states but are especially focused on the swing states,” same as Wallnau’s Courage Tour — highly targeted.
Wallnau added his voice of support to the Lion of Judah plan. According to Taylor, “At one point in the event, Wallnau said to the roughly 2,500 Wisconsinites and Minnesotans present, ‘If we don’t get every person here convinced they need to become a poll watcher or an election worker or helping to mobilize more voters (for Trump), then we haven’t done our job.’”
Taylor also noted how there were about 50,000 people watching the livestream and “millions of charismatic Christians who view him as a literal prophet.”
With all of those conspiracy theorists watching people they think are prophets sent by God, Standifer pitches his vision: “On election night, what happens is when the polls start to close or chaos unfolds, they’re going to kick the volunteers out. You are actually going to be a paid election worker. You’re going to be trained by your local municipality. I call this our Trojan Horse then. They don’t see it coming, but we’re going to flood election poll stations across the country with Spirit-filed believers.”
In other words, they want 2020 election deniers to be the ones counting the votes.
How Concerned Should We Be?
While conspiracy theorists are pretending to have a revival in the form of pursuing power, those of us who are living in the real world need to consider how these people counting our votes might affect the 2024 election.
Taylor had a minor concern that these conspiracy theorists planted as Trojan Horses in the vote-counting process might try to cheat. But his bigger concern is that these people aren’t cheaters as much as they are simply “deluded, true-believer, conspiracy types.” Remember, the independent charismatics are the ones who once climbed Mount Everest in Operation Ice Castle to fight an invisible dragon and an invisible demon called the Queen of Heaven who they dreamed had an ice castle on the top of Mount Everest.
Despite the complete lack of any evidence that the 2020 election was stolen, Taylor is concerned these people may “see it as their duty to become election workers to stop that happening again.”
After all, according to the Lion of Judah website, the instructions for their election workers who discover any fraud in the 2024 election is not to contact their election officials first, but to contact the Lion of Judah hotline first.
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So, while the 2020 election didn’t have any evidence of being affected by fraud, the plan seems to be planting these conspiracy theorists into the election process through the Trojan Horse of making them official election workers in order to legitimize their claims of fraud in the 2024 election by saying they came from official election workers.
They are certain the 2020 election was stolen, just like some of them are certain there are demon portals over the White House or that they fought invisible dragons and queens in invisible ice castles on Mount Everest.
To this day, they aren’t embarrassed by those stories. They’re convinced those stories are real.
So, Taylor said, “I can actually imagine these true-believer types manufacturing evidence of voter fraud while believing in their heart it’s real. … These delusional reality-deniers attempted to overturn a legit election four years ago. Now, they’re smarter and more determined.”
This article was originally published at Baptist News Global, a reader-supported, independent news organization providing original and curated news, opinion and analysis about matters of faith. You can sign up for their newsletter here. Republished with permission.
