Two stories surfaced this week that would, in any other context, be treated as the kind of material a satirist invents when the real world has temporarily run out of material. In the first, a self-described prophet publicly claimed to have opened a supernatural portal over a government building in Washington, D.C., through which divine intelligence was being channelled directly to political leaders. In the second, a separate figure operating within the same broad charismatic ecosystem made an almost identical claim about a state legislature, adding that the portal had been sealed by corporate prayer and was now functioning as a permanent conduit between heaven and the halls of power. Both figures have large audiences, active subscription ministries, and media presences that dwarf those of most mainstream journalists. Neither story appeared on the front page of a national newspaper. Both appeared, without evident embarrassment, in the newsletters, livestreams, and social media feeds of a movement that describes itself as the cutting edge of Christian spiritual warfare.
This piece is not going to mock those audiences. The people listening to these prophets are, in the overwhelming majority, ordinary individuals navigating anxiety, political uncertainty, and a world that provides very few reliable sources of meaning or reassurance. What this piece is going to do is take the claims themselves seriously as claims, hold them to the same evidential standards that this blog applies to every other supernatural assertion it encounters, and explain what the New Apostolic Reformation and the broader charismatic prophecy industry actually are, how they operate, why failed prophecies do not seem to cost their authors anything, and what all of that tells us about the psychology of belief in unfalsifiable systems. The claims deserve serious engagement precisely because they are being made seriously, with political consequences that are entirely real even if the portals are not.
1. What Is the New Apostolic Reformation, and Why Does It Matter Now
The New Apostolic Reformation, abbreviated in the relevant literature as the NAR, is not a denomination in any conventional sense. It has no central headquarters, no binding confession of faith, and no single ordaining body. What it has instead is a theology of authority, a network of relationships organised around that theology, and a set of claims about the present moment in history that make it, to its adherents, arguably the most important religious movement on earth right now. Understanding why those claims are made, how the movement is structured, and what political work the prophecy industry performs within it is the necessary starting point for any serious engagement with the portal stories.
The NAR emerged in something like its current form in the 1990s through the work of theologian and missiologist C. Peter Wagner, who spent most of his career at Fuller Theological Seminary before becoming the movement’s most systematic theorist. Wagner drew on an older strand of charismatic theology, particularly the Latter Rain movement of the late 1940s, which had been condemned as heretical by the Assemblies of God in 1949 but had never entirely died out. The central claim of Latter Rain theology was that God was restoring to the contemporary church the offices of apostle and prophet, which cessationist mainstream Protestantism had declared closed at the end of the biblical canon. Wagner systematised this claim, added an explicit political theology drawn from Dominionism, and produced what he called the “second apostolic age,” which he dated, with some precision, to around the year 2001. The argument was that God was raising up a new generation of apostles and prophets who would exercise genuine spiritual authority over nations, influence governments, and ultimately bring about a Christianised social order prior to the return of Christ.
This is not fringe theology in the sense of being unknown or confined to small rural congregations. A 2023 study published by the Public Religion Research Institute estimated that roughly a quarter of American Protestants hold beliefs broadly consistent with NAR theology, including the active operation of apostolic and prophetic gifts in the contemporary church, the reality of spiritual warfare over geographic territories, and the idea that Christians are called to exercise dominion over the so-called seven mountains of cultural influence: government, education, media, arts and entertainment, religion, family, and business. The seven mountains framework, developed independently by Loren Cunningham and Bill Bright in the 1970s and subsequently absorbed into NAR theology, provides the explicit rationale for why prophets are interested in government buildings in the first place. If government is one of the mountains that Christians are commissioned to claim for God, then opening a supernatural portal over a legislature is not an eccentricity. It is, within the internal logic of the system, a military operation in an ongoing spiritual war.
The political stakes of this theology became apparent to a wider audience in the run-up to the 2020 American presidential election, when a network of NAR-affiliated prophets, including figures such as Jeremiah Johnson, Kat Kerr, Robin Bullock, and the late Kim Clement (whose prophecies were being retrospectively interpreted by his daughter after his death), publicly and emphatically prophesied that Donald Trump would win re-election. Several of these figures did not merely suggest that Trump might win but stated with the authority of divine revelation that his victory was certain, that God had spoken it, and that anyone who doubted the outcome lacked sufficient faith. When Trump lost the election and every legal challenge to its result failed, the prophetic record became, briefly, an object of serious scrutiny. It remained so for approximately as long as it takes a charismatic community to reorganise its interpretive framework, which, as we shall see, is not very long at all.
2. Taking the Portal Claims Seriously as Claims
Before moving to the question of why failed prophecy does not damage prophets, it is worth pausing to take this week’s specific claims seriously on their own terms, because they deserve the scrutiny and because the exercise is instructive. The claims are, in summary: that a human being performed a set of ritual actions near or at a government building; that those actions caused a non-physical aperture to open in the fabric of space, connecting the physical location to a supernatural realm; that through this aperture, a divine intelligence is now transmitting information or influence to political decision-makers; and that this constitutes an event of significant political and spiritual consequence. What would it take to establish any of this as true?
The first and most obvious observation is that every element of the claim is, in principle, the kind of thing that could leave evidence. Portals, if they exist as structural features of reality, would interact with physical space in detectable ways. A divine intelligence influencing political leaders would produce decisions that deviate from what those leaders would otherwise have made, which is in principle detectable by careful analysis of their behaviour before and after the alleged intervention. The transmission of information from a supernatural source would, if it produced accurate predictions about future events, generate a trackable prophetic record that could be assessed against outcomes. None of these investigative approaches are, in principle, beyond the reach of ordinary inquiry. The problem is that the movement insists they are, and has constructed its claims so as to guarantee that insistence will hold.
As Jerry Coyne observed in Faith Versus Fact: “Claims of supernatural phenomena like the efficacy of prayer are rendered unfalsifiable by the assertion that ‘God will not be tested.’ (Of course, if the tests had been successful, then testing God would have been fine!)” The parenthetical remark is more than a witticism. It identifies the operational double standard that runs through charismatic prophecy as a system. When a prophecy appears to be fulfilled, the fulfilment is cited as evidence for the reality of the prophetic gift and, by extension, for the supernatural system that underwrites it. When a prophecy fails, the failure is attributed to insufficient faith among believers, to spiritual interference from demonic forces, to a misreading of the divine timeline, or to the claim that the prophecy was conditional rather than declarative. The asymmetry is complete: success confirms the system, and failure is absorbed by the system without disturbing it. Whatever else this method may be, it has no contact with the standards of evidence that the word “knowledge” actually requires.
The portal claim adds a further layer of difficulty, because it is not even framed as a prediction that could, in principle, be tested against subsequent events. It is a claim about an invisible, non-physical structure located at a specific geographic address, perceivable only by those with the relevant spiritual sensitivity. The prophets who make such claims are not offering them as hypotheses to be tested. They are offering them as revelations to be received. The distinction matters enormously, because it means that the claim can never, under any circumstances, be disconfirmed by evidence. No instrument, however sensitive, could detect the portal’s absence, because the claim’s proponents would simply argue that material instruments are the wrong kind of instruments for perceiving spiritual structures. No political decision made by leaders allegedly under divine influence could ever demonstrate that the influence was absent, because the absence of obvious divine guidance could always be attributed to free will, to sin, or to demonic counter-interference. The claim is constructed, from the ground up, to be immune to evidence. That is not a feature of revealed truth. It is the defining characteristic of a belief system that has prioritised its own survival over its own accuracy.
David Hume laid out the foundational principle for evaluating this kind of claim in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding three centuries ago, and it has not been improved upon since. The question is always whether it is more probable that the testimony is mistaken or that the event actually occurred as described. The testimony here is the prophet’s own account of what they experienced and accomplished. The competing explanations include sincere but deluded religious experience, motivated self-presentation to an audience that rewards spectacular spiritual claims, and straightforward confabulation born of a tradition that makes such claims normal and expected. Against those explanations stands the hypothesis that a non-physical aperture connecting a government building to a divine realm was actually opened by a prayer ritual. The question, as Hume would frame it, is which is the greater miracle: that a human being was mistaken about an extraordinary experience, or that the extraordinary experience actually occurred exactly as described. The answer is not a difficult one to reach.
The honest answer, once the evidential question has been framed properly, is that the portal claim fails not because it conflicts with some specific piece of physical data but because it is constructed in a way that guarantees it can never be evaluated against any physical data at all. A claim that has been deliberately shielded from falsification has not been made stronger by that shielding. It has been made epistemically empty. The strength of a claim is not demonstrated by the confidence with which it is asserted, or by the size of the audience that receives it, or by the sincerity of the person making it. It is demonstrated by the evidence that supports it and by the tests it has survived. The portal claim has survived no tests because no tests are permitted. That is not a technicality. That is the central problem.
3. The Prophetic Economy: How the Industry Actually Works
Understanding the portal claims requires understanding the economic and social infrastructure that makes them not merely possible but rational, from the perspective of the people making them. The charismatic prophecy industry is, among other things, an industry, and it operates according to recognisable market logic even when its rhetoric is entirely supernatural in character.
A contemporary NAR-affiliated prophet typically operates across several revenue streams simultaneously. There is the direct ministry income from donations, tithes, and offerings at live events and online services. There is subscription revenue from “prophetic schools,” online courses, and membership communities that offer access to the prophet’s teachings and, frequently, personalised prophetic words delivered by the prophet or their team for a fee. There is revenue from books, courses, and conference registrations. There is revenue from the prophet’s apostolic network, through which they may collect fees or percentages from affiliated ministers whom they have formally “covered” or “commissioned” under their spiritual authority. And there is, increasingly, revenue from the political consulting and prayer-covering services that the seven mountains theology makes available to politicians who wish to be seen as operating under divine protection and apostolic sanction.
This economic structure creates strong incentives for spectacular claims. A prophet who says that God is broadly at work in the world and that believers should pray regularly is correct according to the theology but economically unremarkable. A prophet who says that God has specifically revealed to them that a supernatural portal has been opened over a government building, and that through their ministry this portal is now channelling divine intelligence to political leaders, is offering something that justifies a subscription, a conference ticket, and a donation. The claim is not merely theological. It is a product, and it is priced accordingly. The more dramatic the revelation, the more valuable the prophetic brand that delivers it, and the more powerful the incentive to escalate the drama of subsequent revelations in order to retain audience attention in a crowded spiritual marketplace.
The political dimension of this economy deserves particular attention. Several NAR-affiliated prophets have built explicit relationships with politicians who welcome their blessing, their prayer covering, and, in some documented cases, their strategic counsel. Politicians who receive prophetic endorsement gain access to a motivated and highly organised base of voters who regard supporting the endorsed candidate as a spiritual obligation rather than merely a civic preference. Prophets who provide the endorsement gain access to the political figure’s platform, institutional legitimacy, and, in some cases, their financial networks. The relationship is mutually beneficial in purely material terms, regardless of what either party sincerely believes about the theology. This does not require either participant to be cynical about it. People can simultaneously believe with genuine fervour in divine guidance and benefit materially from the structures that belief creates. The two are not mutually exclusive, which is precisely what makes the system so durable and so difficult to challenge from outside.
The prophetic word itself, as a cultural product within this ecosystem, has undergone a subtle but important transformation over the past two decades. In the older charismatic tradition, a prophecy was understood to be a specific, testable claim about future events: a healing that would occur, a business that would prosper, a political outcome that would be realised. The word carried risk because it could be falsified by subsequent events, and communities had, at least in principle, mechanisms for evaluating prophetic accuracy. The contemporary NAR prophetic word has, in most of its mainstream manifestations, evolved away from testable specificity toward what might be called prophetic impressionism. The prophet speaks of what God is doing in a season, of spiritual atmospheres that are shifting, of portals that are opening and rivers of revival that are flowing. These formulations are evocative, emotionally resonant, and almost entirely immune to disconfirmation because they do not make specific predictions that could be falsified at a specific moment in time. The portal claim represents a partial exception to this rule, because it does make a specific claim about a specific location, which is precisely why it is worth examining with care rather than dismissing as merely too strange to address.
4. Why Failed Prophecy Does Not Cost Prophets Their Following
The most instructive moment in recent NAR history is not the portal story from this week but the aftermath of the 2020 election prophecy failures. When the prophets who had declared Trump’s re-election to be divinely certain were confronted with the fact that he had not won, the responses fell into a small number of recognisable patterns that illuminate the psychology of unfalsifiable belief far more clearly than any abstract philosophical argument could.
The first pattern was denial, expressed through the claim that the election result itself was fraudulent and that the true, divinely ordained outcome had been stolen by human wickedness and demonic interference. This move was elegant in its simplicity: if the prophecy had not failed, then the election result must be false, and the task of the prophetic community was to intercede until the true result was revealed and restored. Several major prophetic figures adopted this position and sustained it for months, investing their credibility in a series of further predictions about dates on which the truth would be publicly exposed, courts that would reverse the result, or divine interventions that would restore the rightful president to office. Each of these secondary predictions also failed. Each failure was absorbed by the same mechanism, with a new date or a new mechanism proposed in its place, the community’s attention redirected toward the next anticipated breakthrough before it had time to reckon with the failure of the last one.
The second pattern was partial repentance, which deserves examination in some detail because it superficially resembles the kind of intellectual accountability that would actually be appropriate but in fact functions as a mechanism for preserving the prophet’s authority rather than genuinely questioning it. Several prominent figures, including Jeremiah Johnson, issued public apologies for having prophesied falsely. Johnson’s apology was sincere in tone and received serious attention in both religious and secular media at the time it was issued. What it did not do, and what none of the repentance statements across the movement did, was question the underlying claim that genuine prophetic gifts exist in the contemporary church, that the prophets issuing the apologies possess such gifts, or that the theological system underwriting those claims is sound. The apology was for the specific error, not for the framework that produced it. Within weeks of his apology, Johnson was prophesying again, his credibility among his audience largely restored by what his followers interpreted as a demonstration of humility and integrity. The accountability had functioned, paradoxically, as a mechanism for reinforcing trust in the system rather than subjecting it to any genuine scrutiny.
The third pattern was reinterpretation, through which prophets who had stated plainly that Trump would win re-election retrospectively claimed that their prophecies had been conditional rather than declarative, or had referred to a future period rather than the 2020 election specifically, or had been partially fulfilled in a spiritual sense that was not visible to secular observers who lacked the discernment to perceive it. The reinterpretation is not dishonest in the sense of being consciously fabricated by people who know they are lying. It is a natural consequence of a theological system that treats the prophetic word as inherently layered, symbolic, and multi-valent. In a system where prophecies have multiple legitimate meanings and where the prophet’s interpretive authority over their own words is treated as absolute and divinely sanctioned, any prediction can, in retrospect, be shown to have been accurate at some level of meaning. This is not a bug in the system. It is its central operational feature, and it is what makes the system so robust against the evidential pressure that would destroy a scientific or journalistic institution making comparable errors at comparable scale.
Carl Sagan identified the structural problem with prophetic systems with characteristic precision in The Demon-Haunted World: “Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science?… No other human institution comes close.” The contrast Sagan draws is not merely rhetorical flourish. Science makes predictions that are specific, testable, and falsifiable, and its credibility rests precisely on the fact that failed predictions cost scientists their standing in ways that failed prophecies do not cost prophets theirs. A physicist whose predictions consistently fail does not retain their audience by claiming that the particles were not yet ready to behave as predicted, or that demonic interference corrupted the experimental results, or that the original prediction was conditional on sufficient faith among the observers. The falsifiability that makes science epistemically reliable is precisely the feature that prophets systematically engineer away from their claims.
The psychological mechanisms that allow followers to absorb prophetic failure without abandoning the prophet are well documented in the social science literature. Leon Festinger’s landmark 1956 study When Prophecy Fails, conducted with colleagues Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter, observed a UFO doomsday cult in the immediate aftermath of the predicted catastrophe’s failure to occur, and found that the result was not the disintegration of the group but an intensification of its beliefs and an acceleration of its proselytising activities. Festinger’s concept of cognitive dissonance describes the psychological discomfort that arises when a belief is contradicted by evidence, and his observation was that people often resolve this discomfort not by revising the belief but by reinterpreting the evidence, seeking social reinforcement from fellow believers, and increasing their public commitment to the belief as a way of reducing the psychological cost of having been wrong. The NAR prophetic community’s response to the 2020 election failures is a textbook illustration of this dynamic, playing out in public and at considerable scale, with the added dimension that the reinterpretive moves are themselves sophisticated theological productions rather than simple rationalisations.
There is also a more straightforward social explanation for why prophets retain their followings after failure, and it is worth stating plainly because it is often overlooked in accounts that focus exclusively on the theological machinery. For many members of charismatic prophetic communities, the community itself is the primary social world. It is where friendships are maintained, where personal identity is constructed and affirmed, where meaning is found in times of difficulty, and where practical support is available when ordinary life becomes unmanageable. Abandoning the prophet means, in many cases, abandoning the community, which imposes social costs that are immediate and concrete in ways that the epistemological costs of sustaining a failed belief system are entirely abstract and diffuse. The decision to remain is not, from this perspective, primarily a theological decision. It is a social one, and it is perfectly intelligible given the available alternatives. Recognising this does not require us to pretend that the prophets’ claims are true. It does require us to understand why intelligent people remain committed to systems whose track record would be comprehensively disqualifying in any other field of human endeavour, and to direct criticism at the systems and their architects rather than at the individuals those systems have embedded.
5. The Biblical Standard for Prophecy, and Why the NAR Abandons It
For the sake of rigour, the NAR’s casual attitude toward failed prophecy is not simply a product of modern religious flexibility or a decline in theological seriousness. It is, in fact, a departure from the tradition the movement claims to inhabit and to be restoring. The Hebrew Bible’s standard for prophetic authenticity was explicit, demanding, and conspicuously unforgiving on the matter. Deuteronomy 18:20-22 states plainly that if a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord and the thing does not come to pass, that prophet has spoken presumptuously, the people shall not be afraid of them, and the penalty is death. The Deuteronomic standard is, in other words, 100 per cent accuracy. A prophet who is occasionally right and frequently wrong is, by the standards of the movement’s own foundational text, not an imperfect prophet working through a learning process but a false prophet whose claims do not originate from the source they claim. No retrospective reinterpretation, no claim of conditional prophecy, and no apology tour changes that assessment, because the Deuteronomic standard does not make provision for any of those escape routes.
The NAR’s response to this inconvenient biblical datum takes several forms, and each of them is instructive. Some within the movement argue that New Testament prophecy operates under a different standard from Old Testament prophecy, citing Paul’s instruction in 1 Corinthians 14 that prophetic words should be “weighed” by the congregation as evidence that contemporary prophecy is inherently partial and fallible, and therefore cannot be expected to achieve the same accuracy as the canonical prophets. This argument has some internal coherence within Pauline theology, but it faces an obvious difficulty: the NAR’s prophets do not present their words as partial impressions to be weighed by the congregation and accepted or rejected on the basis of communal discernment. They present them as direct divine revelations spoken with apostolic authority, delivered to audiences who are expected to receive and act upon them rather than to evaluate them critically. You cannot simultaneously claim the status and authority of a biblical prophet when your predictions are confirmed and the reduced accountability of a fallible Pauline charismatic when they are not. The inconsistency is not incidental to the system. It is structural to it, and it is what allows the system to claim the benefits of prophetic authority while avoiding the costs of prophetic accountability.
Other figures within the movement have developed increasingly elaborate pneumatological frameworks that distinguish between different levels or types of prophetic utterance, creating a taxonomy that allows almost any failed prediction to be reclassified as a lower-level or conditional form of prophecy that was never intended to carry the weight of certainty that the audience and the media attributed to it. The effect is to make the prophetic system entirely self-sealing: the high-authority claims are made when the audience is receptive and the political stakes are high, and they are reclassified as lower-authority impressions when accountability becomes necessary. The theology becomes, in practice, whatever the prophet needs it to be at any given moment in order to maintain their authority and their audience. This is not a revelation of divine truth operating through fallible human vessels. It is a rhetorical strategy dressed in theological language, and its consistency of function across the movement as a whole strongly suggests that it has been selected for its survival value rather than arrived at through genuine theological reflection.
6. Spiritual Warfare, Territorial Spirits, and the Theology Behind the Portal
To understand why the portal claim is made at all, rather than simply dismissed as obviously implausible even within a charismatic theological framework, it is necessary to understand the theology of spiritual warfare that underpins it. NAR theology draws heavily on a reading of the New Testament, particularly the Pauline epistles and the book of Revelation, that sees the physical world as the surface of a deeper spiritual conflict between angelic and demonic forces operating at every level of human social organisation. Ephesians 6:12, with its reference to “principalities, powers, rulers of darkness of this world, and spiritual wickedness in high places,” is the locus classicus for this reading, and it is invoked constantly in NAR teaching as evidence that the political and cultural struggles of the present day are ultimately spiritual battles being fought in invisible realms that overlap with and determine the outcomes of visible ones.
The concept of territorial spirits, developed most systematically by C. Peter Wagner in his 1991 book Warfare Prayer, holds that specific demonic entities are assigned authority over specific geographic territories, and that these entities exercise their influence through the cultural, political, and social systems of those territories. This is why a corrupt government, a crime-ridden city, or a nation that has not been Christianised is understood, within this framework, not merely as a social failure produced by identifiable human causes but as evidence of demonic territorial control that can only be addressed through spiritual warfare. Conversely, a government that is receptive to Christian influence or that has been formally prayed over by apostolic figures is understood as a territory that is being reclaimed from demonic control and opened to divine governance. The portal, within this theological framework, is the mechanism through which divine authority enters a previously demonically controlled territory. It is not an eccentric metaphor or a colourful way of saying that people are praying for their government. It is the logical culmination of a coherent, if entirely evidence-free, theological system with its own account of political causation.
The prayer practices associated with spiritual warfare in the NAR tradition include what is called “strategic-level spiritual warfare,” which involves identifying the territorial spirits over a given area, engaging them in intercessory battle, binding their influence through declaratory prayer, and replacing their authority with divine authority through prophetic proclamation. Prophets and apostles are understood to have particular authority in this process, by virtue of their spiritual offices and the divine commission that those offices carry. The acts of declaring portals open, praying canopies of protection over political figures, and anointing buildings or geographic sites with oil are all understood as military operations in this spiritual campaign, carried out by qualified spiritual officers against specific identified opponents. They are tactical moves in a war whose stakes are understood to be eternal and whose battlefield is the physical world that secular observers can see, combined with a spiritual world that only the spiritually discerning can perceive and navigate. This is why the prophets who make these claims do so without apparent embarrassment or awareness that they require justification to an outside audience. Within their framework, they are reporting operational military intelligence, not making extraordinary claims that require extraordinary evidence.
Understanding this framework makes the portal stories less puzzling and considerably more alarming. The people making these claims are not confused about what they are saying, and they are not speaking loosely or metaphorically. They are operating within a theological system that has its own internal logic, its own epistemology, its own account of evidence, and its own understanding of what political action looks like and who has the authority to take it. The problem is not that the system is incoherent within its own terms. The problem is that its terms have no contact with the physical reality whose governance it is claiming the right to direct, and that the people who hold those terms are exercising real and documented influence over real political processes on the basis of claims that would not survive five minutes of examination by anyone operating outside the system’s carefully maintained self-referential boundaries.
7. The Political Consequences of Prophetic Theology
The temptation, when confronted with claims about supernatural portals, is to dismiss them as too eccentric to matter in any serious political analysis. This would be a significant mistake, and the evidence of the past decade makes it one that responsible observers cannot afford to continue making. The NAR and the broader charismatic prophecy movement have demonstrable and documented influence over American politics at the state and federal level, and that influence is growing rather than diminishing as the movement continues to expand its organisational infrastructure and deepen its relationships with elected officials.
The prayer rally called “The Response,” organised in 2011 by then-Texas Governor Rick Perry and explicitly framed by its NAR-affiliated organisers as a spiritual warfare event aimed at the cultural and political transformation of America, drew 30,000 participants to Reliant Stadium in Houston and featured multiple prominent NAR figures including Lou Engle, Mike Bickle, and Cindy Jacobs. Several of these figures have made statements that, in any other context, would be immediately disqualifying from political proximity: Jacobs has claimed to have healed individuals of HIV through prayer, attributed mass bird deaths and fish kills to the legalisation of homosexuality, and prophesied a range of political outcomes that did not subsequently occur. Engle’s ministry has been documented as a significant financial and organisational supporter of anti-homosexuality legislation in Uganda, including legislation that initially proposed the death penalty for homosexual conduct. These are not peripheral figures in American evangelical politics. They are central ones, with documented access to politicians, media platforms, and donor networks that make them consequential in ways that no secular equivalent would be permitted to become without extensive public scrutiny and accountability.
The seven mountains mandate provides the explicit theological rationale for this political engagement, and it is worth being entirely clear about what that mandate actually entails in practice, because it is frequently misrepresented by its defenders as a benign call to civic participation. The goal is not, as those defenders occasionally suggest, simply to encourage Christians to be responsible citizens who participate in public life and bring their values to bear on political questions through ordinary democratic means. The goal is the comprehensive transformation of all seven cultural mountains so that they operate according to explicitly Christian principles as defined and interpreted by NAR apostles and prophets who claim divine authority over that interpretation. This is a programme for theocratic governance, however incrementally it is pursued, and it is advanced not through the ordinary mechanisms of democratic persuasion, parliamentary debate, and electoral accountability but through spiritual warfare, prophetic declaration, apostolic authority, and the strategic placement of theologically committed individuals in positions of cultural and political power. The movement’s leaders are entirely explicit about this. Dominionist theology has not concealed its ambitions. It has stated them clearly and repeatedly, in print, in video, and in the titles of books that sit in the upper ranks of Christian bestseller lists and are taught in churches attended by millions of people.
The specific danger of prophetic theology in a political context is that it provides a mechanism for bypassing rational deliberation entirely and replacing it with claimed divine mandate. If a political leader has received a divine mandate through prophetic declaration, then opposition to that leader is not merely political disagreement that can be resolved through argument, compromise, and democratic process. It is spiritual rebellion against God’s anointed, which is a category of opposition that democratic institutions were not designed to adjudicate and cannot easily handle. Several politicians who have received NAR prophetic endorsement have spoken in terms that reflect this logic, framing their political opponents not merely as mistaken on policy grounds but as spiritually opposed to divine purposes and therefore as adversaries in a cosmic rather than a political sense. That is not the language of a functional democracy navigating competing interests through peaceful institutional means. It is the language of a theocracy, arriving at the political arena wearing the institutional legitimacy that religious belief commands in American public life, and using that legitimacy to insulate itself from the ordinary requirements of democratic accountability.
8. What This Tells Us About Unfalsifiable Belief Systems
The charismatic prophecy movement is, in many respects, an unusually clear case study in the operation of unfalsifiable belief, precisely because it makes claims that are specific enough to be interesting but structured in ways that make them immune to ordinary evidential evaluation. Drawing out what the case study reveals about the psychology and sociology of such systems more generally is worthwhile, because the lessons extend well beyond the specific context of NAR theology and apply wherever authority is grounded in claims that have been deliberately shielded from scrutiny.
The first lesson is that unfalsifiability is not an accidental feature of a belief system that happens to have been poorly designed by people who did not think carefully enough about epistemology. In mature supernatural belief systems, unfalsifiability is an evolved characteristic that has been selected for over generations because it dramatically increases the system’s survival fitness against evidential pressure. A religious or prophetic system that made specific, testable predictions and held its authorities accountable to those predictions would be subject to the same corrective pressures that make science self-correcting over time. It would accumulate accurate predictions, or it would lose credibility and membership as its track record accumulated and became visible. The systems that survive and grow across centuries are the ones that have, whether through conscious theological engineering or through the gradual elimination of practices that reduced audience loyalty, developed effective immunities against falsification. The NAR’s elaborate theology of conditional prophecy, spiritual warfare interference, apostolic interpretive authority, and layered prophetic meaning is not a corruption of an originally more rigorous prophetic tradition. It is the product of theological adaptation in response to evidential pressure over a long period, and it works precisely as well as it does because it has been refined by that pressure.
The second lesson is that social belonging is a more powerful determinant of belief maintenance than evidential assessment, and that this is not a finding that reflects badly on the intelligence of believers. It is a finding that appears consistently across the psychology of belief formation and revision in every domain and every culture studied. People form beliefs within communities and revise them in response to community pressure more readily than they revise them in response to external evidence. This means that the question “why do intelligent people continue to believe in systems that have repeatedly failed to predict anything accurately?” has an answer that does not require any assumption of stupidity or dishonesty. It requires only recognition of the fact that human beings are profoundly social animals for whom community membership is a more immediate and pressing concern than epistemological consistency. The rational response to this understanding is not contempt for believers but a clearer analysis of the institutions and authority structures that exploit social belonging as a mechanism for insulating belief from scrutiny. The proper target of criticism is the system and its architects, not the individuals embedded in it.
The third lesson is that the line between sincere belief and deliberate manipulation is frequently blurry and sometimes non-existent as a practical matter, which makes the moral assessment of prophetic figures considerably more complicated than it might initially appear. Some prophets within the NAR ecosystem are, by any reasonable assessment, cynically exploiting their audiences’ credulity for financial and social gain, and the combination of spectacular claims, subscription models, and political access fees makes the financial incentives for doing so very large indeed. Others appear to be genuinely convinced of their own prophetic gifts and to experience real distress when their predictions fail, processing that distress through the available theological frameworks rather than through any external standard of accountability. Many are probably operating somewhere between those poles, in a state of motivated belief that is neither pure sincerity nor pure calculation but a mixture of genuine conviction, social performance, and careful management of their own uncertainty about claims that they have staked everything on. This complexity does not exculpate the harm done by the system or reduce the urgency of holding it accountable. It does complicate the moral analysis in ways that intellectual honesty requires acknowledging, particularly for a blog that is committed to criticising ideas and institutions rather than attacking the character of individuals.
The fourth lesson is that the combination of unfalsifiable claims and real political power is genuinely dangerous in a democratic society, not merely philosophically unsatisfying to people who care about epistemology. When a political leader makes a decision on the basis of prophetic counsel, and that counsel is by design immune to evidential evaluation by anyone outside the prophetic community, the decision-making process has been insulated from the kinds of rational scrutiny that democratic accountability requires and depends upon. You cannot hold a prophet accountable for bad policy advice in the way that you can hold an economist, a scientist, or a policy analyst accountable, because the prophet’s authority is grounded in divine mandate rather than demonstrable expertise, and the failure of their predictions is always explicable within the system’s own terms without any concession to outside criticism. The portal over the government building is not merely a strange story from the margins of American religious life. It is a symptom of a system that is actively trying to make political decision-making answer to a source of authority that is, by its own account, beyond the reach of human evaluation, challenge, or democratic correction.
9. The Question of Accountability
What would genuine accountability look like for the Christian prophecy movement, and is there any realistic prospect of it emerging from within or from outside the movement? These are practical questions with real consequences for how secular civil society should respond to the NAR’s growing political ambitions, and they deserve answers that go beyond the observation that the movement is epistemically problematic.
Within the movement, there are voices that have called for stricter prophetic accountability, and their existence is itself instructive about the structural limits of internal reform. Michael Brown, a charismatic theologian who is broadly sympathetic to the prophetic movement but who publicly challenged the post-election prophecy failures, argued in his 2021 book Why So Many Christians Have Left the Faith that the prophetic community’s failure to hold false prophets accountable was causing serious damage to the credibility of the broader charismatic renewal and driving away precisely the thoughtful, searching people the movement most needs to retain. Brown’s position attracted significant criticism from within the movement and demonstrated the structural difficulty of internal reform with considerable clarity: the theological framework that produces prophetic claims is the same framework that provides prophets with the interpretive authority to reclassify those claims as something other than failures when they do not come to pass. You cannot use the tools of NAR theology to impose the kind of accountability that NAR theology systematically prevents, because the tools and the prevention mechanism are the same mechanism operating in different directions.
From outside the movement, there are several realistic and proportionate points of pressure that deserve more consistent application than they have received. Journalism that tracks prophetic predictions systematically, records them at the time they are made rather than after their fulfilment or failure has been determined, and follows up on their accuracy with the same rigour applied to any other public claim is perhaps the most important. The Right Wing Watch project, operated by People For the American Way, has performed this function for many years and has maintained a detailed archive of NAR prophetic statements and political activity that provides an invaluable resource for understanding the movement’s actual track record. Academic study of the movement’s theology, sociology, and political networks has expanded significantly since the 2020 election cycle, with scholars including Brad Christerson, Richard Flory, and Holly Pivec producing detailed analyses that make the movement’s operations legible to outsiders in ways that the movement’s own self-presentation carefully avoids.
Tax accountability is a more contentious but not unreasonable point of discussion in this context. Many of the ministries that produce these prophetic claims operate under charitable status that exempts them from taxes on income that, in many cases, functions in practice as payment for what are essentially spiritual consulting services provided to political actors and campaigns. The question of whether providing prophetic blessing to a political candidate, in exchange for platform access and financial support, constitutes a form of political activity that should affect a ministry’s tax-exempt status is not a frivolous legal question, and it is currently under-examined by the relevant regulatory bodies, partly because the theological framing of the activity makes it difficult to classify under existing categories and partly because the political sensitivities involved discourage regulatory attention.
Perhaps most importantly, education about the movement’s theology, structure, and political ambitions is a necessary precondition for informed democratic response to it. The seven mountains mandate is not a secret doctrine revealed only to initiates. It is published, taught, celebrated, and explicitly connected to political action in materials that are freely available to anyone who takes the time to look. The goal of exercising apostolic and prophetic authority over government is not a fringe aspiration whispered among insiders and deniable in public. It is the explicit, publicly stated purpose of a movement with millions of adherents and documented relationships with elected officials at every level of American government. Democratic citizens who are unaware of this are operating with a significant deficit of politically relevant information, and closing that deficit is a responsibility that educators, journalists, and commentators who take the relationship between religious authority claims and democratic accountability seriously cannot in good conscience continue to defer.
10. Reason, Evidence, and the Portal That Was Not There
Returning, finally, to this week’s portal stories: what should a reasonable person make of them, having followed the argument this far through its historical, theological, psychological, and political dimensions? The reasonable conclusion is that the portal was not there, and that the claim that it was there is best understood not as evidence of supernatural activity but as evidence of how a particular kind of authority system functions when it has sufficient social support to make extraordinary claims without facing proportionate scrutiny from within or from without.
The prophet who claimed to have opened the portal is not, in all probability, a straightforward fraud in the sense of knowing with certainty that no portal was opened and saying otherwise purely for financial gain. They are more likely someone who has spent years operating within a theological and social ecosystem that teaches them to interpret certain kinds of intense spiritual experience as prophetic revelation, that rewards spectacular claims with social and financial capital, and that provides elaborate interpretive frameworks for dealing with any evidence that might otherwise challenge the claim from any direction. Within that ecosystem, the experience of opening a portal over a government building carries the same subjective weight of reality and significance as any other experience within a person’s framework of meaning. The tragedy is not that the prophet is lying. The tragedy is that the framework is built to make the lie unnecessary, because it converts whatever the prophet sincerely experiences into evidence for the system’s claims, regardless of what actually happened at the government building.
The proof that never comes is the defining characteristic of supernatural claims across their entire range, and the charismatic prophecy industry is only the most politically consequential contemporary example of a pattern that runs through the entire history of organised religious belief. The pattern is consistent: make a claim that cannot be tested by any means acceptable to the claimant; interpret any apparent confirmation as evidence for the system; reinterpret any apparent disconfirmation as a misreading, a conditional fulfilment, or a spiritual event not visible to material instruments; and preserve the authority of the system and its architects against any challenge that originates outside the system’s own terms of evaluation. This is not a method for finding truth about the world. It is a method for maintaining power within a community, and it is a method that works remarkably well in communities where the social costs of scepticism are high and the social rewards of belief are substantial and immediately available.
The chess with a pigeon analogy is apt here: engaging with an NAR prophet on the question of whether a supernatural portal was actually opened is not a productive enterprise if the goal is to persuade the prophet through evidential argument, because the prophet is not playing the same evidential game. The rules governing what counts as relevant evidence, what constitutes a successful prediction, and who has the authority to interpret the results of any test are entirely different in the prophet’s framework from the rules operating in the conversation that sceptics are trying to have. What one can do, and what this piece has attempted to do, is describe the claims with accuracy, evaluate their evidential status against the standards that every other claim about physical and political reality must meet, trace their political consequences with the rigour that those consequences demand, and explain the systems that generate and sustain them without pretending that the conversation is taking place on epistemically level ground or that good faith engagement with the claims themselves will resolve the disagreement.
The broader problem of pseudo-science and the evidence of God is precisely the problem that charismatic prophecy exemplifies at its most politically dangerous: the use of superficially authoritative-sounding categories, revelation, portals, divine intelligence, apostolic mandate, to make claims about the physical and political world that have been deliberately structured to be immune to the scientific and evidential evaluation that applies to every other claim about the physical and political world. The certainty with which these claims are advanced is not a product of the evidence behind them. It is a product of a social and theological system that has been refined over decades to make certainty feel like the most natural and spiritually correct response, and to make doubt feel like a form of faithlessness that exposes the doubter to spiritual danger. Certainty maintained by that mechanism is not knowledge. It is a performance of knowledge that functions to protect a system of authority from the accountability that knowledge claims in a democratic society are supposed to carry.
The portal was not there. The divine intelligence is not flowing through it. The political leaders beneath the allegedly opened heavens are making their decisions on the basis of the same mixture of ambition, calculation, fear, and occasional principle that has always governed political decision-making, and will continue to do so regardless of how many prayer rallies are held on the steps of government buildings or how many prophetic words are declared over the offices of the powerful. None of this means that the people praying for their government are insincere, or that their sincerity is not deserving of respect as a human phenomenon expressing genuine concern for the common good. It means only that sincerity is not evidence, that the intensity of a conviction is not a measure of its accuracy, and that the political consequences of governing by prophetic mandate are real and measurable in ways that the portals themselves are demonstrably not. A democracy that allows supernatural authority claims to function as a substitute for rational deliberation has not merely made a theological error about the nature of divine revelation. It has made a structural political error whose costs are borne by everyone who lives under the policies it produces, regardless of what they believe about portals, regardless of which mountain they occupy, and regardless of whether they have ever heard of the New Apostolic Reformation at all.
The honest answer, to return to a formulation this blog uses because it remains the right one, is that we do not need portals to understand what is happening in government buildings. We need journalism, transparency, the consistent application of evidential standards to the claims of everyone who seeks political authority, and the willingness to take unfamiliar religious movements seriously enough to understand what they actually believe and what they actually want. The last category, supernatural authority claims to political governance, is the one that most urgently needs scrutiny, precisely because it is the one that has been most successfully insulated from scrutiny by the very mechanism it uses to claim its authority. The portal is not a curiosity. It is an argument about who has the right to govern, and that argument deserves a serious answer from everyone who believes the answer should be accountable to something other than divine revelation.
References
Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., and Schachter, S., When Prophecy Fails, 1956
Wagner, C. P., Warfare Prayer, 1991
Christerson, B., and Flory, R., The Rise of Network Christianity, 2017
Pivec, H., and Geivett, R. D., A New Apostolic Reformation?, 2014
Coyne, J., Faith Versus Fact, 2015
Sagan, C., The Demon-Haunted World, 1996
Hume, D., An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748
Brown, M., Why So Many Christians Have Left the Faith, 2021