I’ve been complaining for years that journalists aren’t schooling themselves adequately on the prophetic movement (among charismatics) that some call the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). Since the Jan. 6 uprising, they’ve started writing about it.

But be careful what you wish for. Not all that glitters is gold. I’ve read more than a few stories that sound like something out of a horror flick: An ominous theocratic movement involving millions of people, under uber-controlling leaders with a few White Christian nationalists thrown in.

The two pieces I’ll be addressing is Elle Hardy’s Aug. 23 story in The New Republic: “The Right-Wing Christian Sect Plotting a Political Takeover,” and Rolling Stone’s July 11 story on Sean Feucht. Both typify current Christian trends as scary movements with an end game of sending Donald Trump to the White House in 2024 and sending America back to the Middle Ages.

Hardy’s story had ambitious goals. It began with a summation of this movement starting from 1994 with a revival at a church once known as the Toronto Airport Vineyard. Also known as a “laughing revival” for the odd laughing fits folks had, it made major changes in North American Christianity and swept across the English-speaking world. (Three years later, I was interviewing folks in Iceland who said they were dramatically influenced by Canadian missionaries spreading its benefits.)

All this grew into the NAR, the author says, and (drum roll):

And they have one clear goal in mind — ruling over the United States and, eventually, the world.

NAR, as it’s often called, is a shadowy movement, rather than an organization; many who are considered a part of it deny that it even exists. Broadly, it seeks to return church structures to the fivefold ministry of the Bible (defined roles of apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor, and teacher). The key roles in this pecking order are prophets, who have the visions, and apostles, the anointed ones who put ideas and networks into practice and, critically, to whom everyone else must submit.

OK. I did my first master’s thesis (in 1992) on authority and submission practices in the charismatic communities that were so popular among evangelicals in the 1960s and 1970s, plus I wrote a 2009 book that deals substantially with this issue. And I can tell you that the NAR folks did learn a thing or two about the mess caused by the 1970s “discipleship movement” which was deeply into one submitting oneself to an elder who was himself (usually this person was male) submitted to a higher elder in a hierarchical line reaching up to a small group of people.

They’re not going that same route today.