Clearing Out The In-Box -- Sunday, January 19, 2025

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Breaking: TikTok is restoring service now that Trump signals he will save it -- 12:10 p.m. CT, Sunday, January 19, 2025. Those sermons calling for prayer this morning must have worked.

The Anti-Social Century. Link here. I honestly have no idea what to make of this article. It's almost as if the author was trying to come to terms with his own "issues." The next big thing: someone needs to figure out how to build / market "cruise-ship"-like mega-residential centers for "healthy" "about-to-become seniors who no longer want to maintain a big house/home and /or no longer want to live a solitary life.

Project 2025: folks may want to take another look at this with inauguration day tomorrow. Also, the Center for Renewing America. The movers and shakers inside the Trump circle are already getting ready for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination fight.

The Army of God: the New Apostolic Reformation. Link here. Across the entire nation, this group concentrated on nineteen swing / pivotal counties. It probably made the difference. The Left still doesn't get it. Right, wrong, indifferent, it seems the Left needs to pay attention.

From the linked article:

On the Thursday night after Donald Trump won the presidential election, an obscure but telling celebration unfolded inside a converted barn off a highway stretching through the cornfields of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The place was called Gateway House of Prayer, and it was not exactly a church, and did not exactly fit into the paradigms of what American Christianity has typically been. 

Inside, there were no hymnals, no images of Jesus Christ, no parables fixed in stained glass. Strings of lights hung from the rafters. A huge map of the world covered one wall. On the others were seven framed bulletin boards, each representing a theater of battle between the forces of God and Satan—government, business, education, family, arts, media, and religion itself. 

Gateway House of Prayer, it turned out, was a kind of war room. 

And if its patrons are to be believed, at least one person, and at peak times dozens, had been praying every single minute of every single day for more than 15 years for the victory that now seemed at hand. God was winning. The Kingdom was coming.

What was happening in the barn in Lancaster County did not represent some fringe of American Christianity, but rather what much of the faith is becoming. 

A shift is under way, one that scholars have been tracking for years and that has become startlingly visible with the rise of Trumpism. At this point, tens of millions of believers—about 40 percent of American Christians, including Catholics, according to a recent Denison University survey—are embracing an alluring, charismatic movement that has little use for religious pluralism, individual rights, or constitutional democracy. 

It is mystical, emotional, and, in its way, wildly utopian. It is transnational, multiracial, and unapologetically political. 

Early leaders called it the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, although some of those same leaders are now engaged in a rebranding effort as the antidemocratic character of the movement has come to light. And people who have never heard the name are nonetheless adopting the movement’s central ideas. These include the belief that God speaks through modern-day apostles and prophets. That demonic forces can control not only individuals, but entire territories and institutions. That the Church is not so much a place as an active “army of God,” one with a holy mission to claim the Earth for the Kingdom as humanity barrels ever deeper into the End Times.

If you were curious why Tucker Carlson, who was raised Episcopalian,recently spoke of being mauled in his sleep by a demon, it may be because he is absorbing the language and beliefs of this movement. 

If you were questioning why Elon Musk would bother speaking at an NAR church called Life Center in Harrisburg, it is because Musk surely knows that a movement that wants less government and more God works well with his libertarian vision.

If you wanted to know why there were news stories about House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Southern Baptist, displaying a white flag with a green pine tree and the words An Appeal to Heaven outside his office, or the same flag being flown outside the vacation home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, a Catholic, the reason is that the Revolutionary War–era banner has become the battle flag for a movement with ideological allies across the Christian right. The NAR is supplying the ground troops to dismantle the secular state.

And with whom did it begin? 

C. Peter Wagner. It's worth reading his wiki entry.

And perhaps with help from the CIA.