What dominionism and the New Apostolic Reformation are and what they have to do with Spokane

Every few days, former Army intelligence officer and Washington state legislator Matt Shea sits down to broadcast. The show begins with a highly produced title sequence that shows Shea hopping from a shiny black sedan in downtown Spokane and slipping his spectacles into the breast of his blazer. As the bass track pounds, the shot zooms out into space, suggesting an omniscient perspective on global events, and Shea’s voice-over promises “the story behind the story and the news behind the news.”

The title throws to Shea, sitting at a dark wood desk. Framed square to the camera, he addresses the audience directly. On the wall behind him hang a series of analog clocks set to different time zones. The set conjures a mid-century newsroom with the modern addition of a MacBook on his desk and two flat-panel monitors hanging behind him showing rotating geospatial maps of the Americas and the globe.

The clocks display the time in Spokane and world capitals Beijing, Moscow, Washington DC and, in the center: Jerusalem.

The studio is styled in cool grays and blues. Shea often wears a gray button up with a gray jacket. The studio lights focus on him directly, with the set fading to shadow at the edges of the screen. The only warm colors on display are a bright red panic button at the edge of his desk and a bright red sticker on the back of Shea’s laptop that reads, in white letters, “ DOMINION .”

If you watch enough of the video podcast Patriot Radio, you will become versed in the people, nations and beliefs that Shea — who became a pastor in 2020 after the State Republican Caucus removed him following an investigation that found he engaged in domestic terrorism — believes are destroying America. But to better understand who Shea believes are his allies in this fight, we need to start with that sticker.

So, what is dominion?

Dominionism: Christian nationalism, animated

Though the sticker only occupies a tiny portion of the space on the screen, it contains the entire meaning of Shea’s mission: to elevate Christians above every other kind of person in society. This mission lines up neatly and conspires with the political project — which includes Project 2025 — driving Donald Trump’s base, of which Shea is an enthusiastic minister.

If that sounds like Christian nationalism, that’s because it is, but it’s important to understand that Christian nationalism comes in many flavors.

The most basic version, which most American Christians embrace , is relatively passive. It says the United States was founded on Christian principles and should be governed by a similar moral code — don’t lie, steal or kill — though it’s not always tied to specific laws. In this strain, democracy is not at risk, and the goal is to elect leaders who will push for laws aligned with some interpretation of scripture.

Though hard to find today, Christian nationalist arguments have been used in American history to promote progressive causes. In a recent interview with On the Media , the scholar Matthew D. Taylor invoked the second great awakening, in which American Protestants believed God wanted the United States to abolish slavery.

“ If you go and read the lyrics to the Battle Hymn of the Republic , which is a Christian nationalist hymn written by an abolitionist in the middle of the Civil War, it’s envisioning the kingdom of God as marching on with the Union troops,” said Taylor, a Protestant scholar with the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies .

If 19th century abolitionists represented the left-wing of the movement, and most Christians today exist somewhere in the middle, dominionism is the most potent form of Christian nationalism on the right.

Dominionism as an ideological movement arose in the 1970s, long predating our current moment, but it’s only recently taken full hold of the political right. The first faith leader to fully embrace Donald Trump was the evangelical leader Lance Wallnau, and since he endorsed the firebrand businessman in 2016, the policies contemporary dominionists put forward are largely consonant with Trumpism.

Enshrined in Genesis 1:26 , dominion is the authority God gave humans to rule all earthly creation. Shea shared in a 2021 sermon that he believes Adam and Eve gave this gift to Satan when they ate from the Tree of Good and Evil. To get it back, Christians must exert control over not just the land and its creatures, but over their fellow humans.

“We’re not talking about souls being saved,” Shea said in that sermon at North Spokane ministry Covenant Christian Church, where Ken Peters was the lead pastor. He was talking “about the expansion of the kingdom, His government on earth.”

This interpretation of scripture expands the central requirement of all believing Christians to not merely follow Jesus and lead people to him (though they’re supposed to do that, too). For dominionists like Shea, the primary mission for Christians is to claim political and social power, and rule in the name of Christ.

Dominionism, then, is a form not merely of Christian nationalism but of Christian supremacy, which Taylor defines as “the idea that Christians are better than other people, therefore Christians or Christianity should exercise maybe even a coercive influence on people who are not Christian.”

Rev. Ben Cremer, a Boise pastor who grew up in a far-right church but now advocates against Christian nationalism, said the dominionist view is an inaccurate interpretation of Genesis, from the perspective that God intended humans to live in harmony with his creation.

“God is clearly creating power with and for all of creation in the beginning,” Cremer told RANGE. Shea’s version of dominionism “is a misreading of the definition of power, is what it comes down to. How you define power is going to shape how you interpret the text.”

While many Christians believe Christ taught them to focus more on the salvation that would grant access to the Kingdom of Heaven in the next life, for folks like Shea, dominion is about soldiering to remake society in God’s image in this life.

It’s an idea explicitly embodied in “ The Seven Mountains Mandate ,” (7M) a concept pioneered by Wallnau, with whom Shea says he has rubbed shoulders. According to 7M, Christians are commanded to conquer Wallnau’s seven social realms of influence, which Shea rattled off in a sermon last September at On Fire Ministries: “education, religion, family, business, government-slash-military, arts and entertainment and the media.”

The proposed policies of such a government are largely outlined in Project 2025 , the vast policy platform that Donald Trump-connected Christian nationalists are marketing even as Trump’s presidential campaign tries to distance itself from it. Among many other things, Project 2025 seeks to eliminate queer rights, bar women from divorcing their husbands unless they can prove wrongdoing, deny care for transgender people, and establish a “Department of Life” that tracks women who seek abortions.

The NAR network

Dominionism is not gaining prominence in a vacuum. It is promoted by a loosely organized but rigorously networked web of Protestant and evangelical organizations — armed with a sophisticated media strategy — with folks like Shea as the conductive tissue between the national movement and local believers.

Shea is “part of the rising class of local Christian independent charismatic pastors who are trying to use this independent charismatic style of Christian nationalism to exert local control and coercion over other communities as a means of Christianizing America as a whole,” Taylor told RANGE in a phone interview.

Scholars — including some on the Christian right — call this network the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), an evolving maze of connections and concepts that must be constantly reevaluated.

The term New Apostolic Reformation was coined by the charismatic missionary C. Peter Wagner — who along with Wallnau was one of the first prominent Christians to endorse Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign — to describe a century-long movement of churches focused on establishing Christian rule.

Frederick Clarkson, a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates , told RANGE that the people and organizations that make up NAR want to put aside doctrinal differences that have historically divided denominations, seeing political dominion as transcending petty beefs between them.

It believes, “We’re not all in competition, we’re in cahoots,” Clarkson told RANGE.

Because NAR is more of a label that describes a group of connected belief systems and not a specific orthodoxy (like Catholicism or Presbyterianism), there aren’t specific tenants, and many people who even conservatives like Wagner would place under the NAR banner reject the label, as Shea has.

Taylor has documented that the January 6, 2021 insurrection took place after NAR-aligned figures — like Pasadena, California, pastor Ché Ahn — riled crowds the day before. And during the attack, many people in the crowd “were waving the Appeal to Heaven flag , which is the battle flag of the New Apostolic Reformation,” said Clarkson, who’s studied far-right Christians including Shea for 40 years. “They were at war. … They were there to make sure that democracy didn’t work and that their guy, Trump, would stay in office because they believed he was anointed by God to be there.”

Shea has defended people who were prosecuted for participating in the insurrection and spent the summer organizing events with election deniers like former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. He has stated he believes January 6 was a false flag operation by deep state operatives and leftists posing as Trump supporters.

“Matt Shea typifies that independent charismatic style and … displays the ways that it can blend with other far right ideologies and militia organizing and notions of real world combat,” Taylor — who was careful to clarify he couldn’t say for certain whether Shea is a part of the NAR — told RANGE.

As a state legislator in the mid-2010s, Shea sent detailed military plans to fellow lawmakers and militia operatives to take over local governments in the American West, building dominionist societies from the ashes. If any community didn’t play along, Shea wrote it was biblically mandated to “kill all males” in that community. In 2020, Shea didn’t seek reelection to the seat he’d held for the previous 12 years, after being accused of domestic terrorism for those activities.

But his goal is the same today — an explicitly Christian society aligned with the broader project of dominionism, empowered by a group of believers who reach from the grassroots to the Trump campaign and share the worldview and approach of NAR, even if they reject the name.

Spiritual warfare

The NAR is not an organization and lacks a centralized membership structure. In fact, some churches and figures who seem to fit the NAR bill — including Shea — say it’s a term used as a pejorative by leftists who want to discredit normal Bible-believing Christians. “We keep putting them in boxes, and they keep throwing open the boxes, [saying], ‘No ribbon’s gonna get tied on us,’” Clarkson said.

But the NAR does have identifying characteristics. Many NAR dominionists believe they can succeed through “spiritual warfare:” fighting for God on the supernatural battlefield through prayer and worship.

Religion scholar Bradley Onishi, who once identified as a White Christian Nationalist, argues in his book “Preparing for War” that January 6 was the first Christian nationalist battle to conquer the secular United States.

That attack was perhaps the most significant touchstone in the spiritual war many Christians believe they are waging against the powers of Satan acting on earth, but they claim other big victories, too. Taylor pointed, for example, to the prominent NAR apostle Robert Henderson, who in 2022 claimed Christian prayer helped kill US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Ginsburg died in office of cancer — a critical victory for dominionism because Trump, who’d promised to install justices who’d eliminate reproductive rights, appointed as Ginsburg’s replacement Amy Coney Barrett. Barrett helped overturn Roe v. Wade . It was the first time in US history that a constitutional right was rescinded.

As RANGE has documented in Washington, Christians waging spiritual warfare gather at Capitol buildings , outside reproductive care clinics and on the apron of the Monroe Street Bridge to cast out “powers and principalities” of Satan they say have seized society. They blow shofars, the same battle horns Joshua’s army blew as they laid siege to the City of Jericho in the Bible before they invaded and “utterly destroyed … man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.” The battle for Jericho was the first attack in the Israelites’ conquering of the promised land after centuries of slavery and decades of stateless wandering.

They say the fighting goes both ways. On September 10, Wallnau claimed Kamala Harris employed “witchcraft” in her debate this week against Trump, which she is widely perceived to have won.

Spiritual warfare is a prominent part of the Christian zeitgeist, popularized in the exorcism films that are practically a genre unto themselves and popular novels like Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness and Stephen King’s The Stand , which depict battles between Godly forces and demons.

People who believe in spiritual warfare often call themselves “prayer warriors,” meaning they pray that God will act for desired outcomes and, specifically, against demonic forces they believe have established strongholds in the physical world. The spiritual battles they fight aren’t traditionally political — prayer warriors often ask God to cure illnesses like cancer — but that ambiguity also allows believers to claim a certain innocence or naivete when engaging in politics.

In 2023, when RANGE asked then-City-Council-candidate Earl Moore about her presence at the same rally where Matt Shea prayed for former Mayor Woodward, she tried to distance herself, saying , “I have no comment. I am a prayer warrior. I went there to pray. End of conversation.”

But in the contemporary atmosphere of Christian nationalist organizing, the prayer warrior has a more overtly political role. Taylor told RANGE many of these prayer warriors “believe they are endowed with incredible authority in the spiritual realm that then dictates their activity in the political realm.”

Additional reporting by Luke Baumgarten .

The post What dominionism and the New Apostolic Reformation are and what they have to do with Spokane appeared first on RANGE Media .