The other day I praised Religion News Service for jumping into the Twitter tornado caused by the Rev. Paula White’s wild sermon thundering about the powers of the “marine kingdom” and the miscarriage of “satanic pregnancies” and lots of other stuff.
It was just another day in America’s shattered and splintered public discourse.
Here’s the New York Times summary of what that Right Wing Watch clip unleashed:
The video shows part of a nearly three-hour-long service at the City of Destiny church in Apopka, Fla., on Jan. 5. In it, Ms. White can be seen talking about fighting witchcraft and demonic manipulation. She called for any “strange winds that have been sent to hurt the church, sent against this nation, sent against our president, sent against myself” to be broken.
“In the name of Jesus, we command all satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now,” Ms. White said. “We declare that anything that’s been conceived in satanic wombs, that it’ll miscarry. It will not be able to carry forth any plan of destruction, any plan of harm.”
As of Monday, the video had been watched more than eight million times.
It appeared that no one in this shouting match had the slightest interest in promoting understanding. Some commentators weren’t even interested in accurate, honest disagreements.
However, Adelle Banks and Bob Smietana wrote a short explainer that provided crucial information about what White was saying and, most importantly, what she was not saying. Click here to see my piece on that: “RNS pros offered crucial context for 'Satanic pregnancies' sound bite.”
Now I would like to do something that I rarely do: I want to point mainstream journalists and concerned readers to another explainer digging deeper into this topic. This one is by David French, a Harvard Law graduate and First Amendment expert who is one of the most quoted #NeverTrump conservatives in American political life.
In recent weeks, the former National Review star has been doing some brilliant religion-news analysis for his new publication — The Dispatch. His new piece (“Satanic Pregnancies, Explained”) is not an attempt — obviously — to support Paula White or her political master, President Donald Trump. However, it is an attempt to explain why White’s critics, especially scribes in the mainstream press, need to slow down and try to grasp what charismatic and Pentecostal Christians believe on the topic of fierce prayer and “spiritual warfare.”
Why do this? Start here for French’s sermon:
White isn’t asking for babies to die. She’s doing something else — engaging in an overt and very aggressive form of a spiritual practice of millions of fellow Americans and hundreds of millions of fellow Pentecostal Christians across the globe. She’s waging spiritual warfare.
Unless you’ve had much exposure to American Pentecostal Christianity or to the growing Pentecostal church in the global South — and unless you’ve spent lots of time with poor and working-class Christians in both urban and rural America, you’ve likely not experienced much Pentecostalism — there’s a good chance you just did a double, or perhaps triple take.
Millions of Americans recognize what’s happening here? Those millions are supplemented by hundreds of millions of fellow believers around the world??
Let’s restate part of that: How many professionals at The New York Times have much experience in blue-collar and impoverished churches in American and around the world?
What? Diversity programs don’t get into that kind of cultural diversity? Do newsrooms need people who understand Pentecostalism 101, seeing as how it is one of the fastest growing religious movements IN THE WORLD?
Yes, covering this story would require information and theology and church history. Sorry about that.
French notes:
Pentecostals reject a Protestant doctrine called cessationism, which holds that God has withdrawn most of the supernatural gifts that the apostles exercised in the early church, including prophecy, tongues, and gifts of healing. Those gifts, they argue existed for a time and a purpose. They exist no longer, at least not in the common practice of the church.
Pentecostal Christians reject that form of rigid Protestantism. (French is an evangelical Presbyterian, by the way, not a Pentecostal believer.) Why should journalists care about that?
Well, the question is whether journalists want to cover the world in which we now live. Let’s keep reading:
Rarely has a spiritual movement grown more potent more quickly. And rarely has a religious revolution gone more unnoticed by the Western elite. In 1906, there were a few hundred folks gathered at the Apostolic Faith Mission in Los Angeles. By 2020, the number of Pentecostal believers hit more than half a billion worldwide.
Most Pentecostals believe in the gift of tongues. They believe in the gift of prophecy. They believe in gifts of healing. And they most definitely believe in spiritual warfare.
To be clear, the concept of spiritual warfare isn’t unique to Pentecostal Christianity. Cessationist Christians believe in angels and demons. The Catholic Church carries out exorcisms. It’s impossible to believe the Bible is the word of God and not see that there exists a spiritual realm. The difference is that Pentecostal Christians — more than virtually any other branch of Christianity — emphasize the spiritual realm as the critical sphere of battle not just for salvation, but also for health, prosperity, and even national well-being.
OK. Let’s end with one more long, but essential passage.
How does this play out in real life, apart from Paul White? How does this make Pentecostal Christians — especially those deeply involved in spiritual warfare — different from Evangelicals who also believe in angels and demons but who do not have the same theology of spiritual warfare?
Let’s imagine a Baptist church is sending missionaries to a city. The pastor and congregation would likely pray that the people who hear their message would have “eyes to see and ears to hear” the Gospel. They may pray that God “open doors” and that people would have “soft hearts and open minds.” They’ll also pray that God grant the missionaries extraordinary courage and wisdom. Each of these prayers represents a request for supernatural intervention, but they are not specifically aimed at heavenly beings.
A Pentecostal church sending missionaries to the same place is likely to pray quite differently. In addition to the prayers above, they’ll also pray to “bind the strongman” (the demonic entity) Satan has sent to govern the demons of the city. They’ll “take authority” (declare their power) over all demonic spirits. And as the prayer warriors are receptive to the Holy Spirit during the prayer, they’ll get even more targeted—naming and calling out very specific kinds of demonic spirits.
Think of this as the spiritual equivalent of softening the beaches in advance of the Normandy invasion.
There are readers who will look at all this and scoff at the weirdness of it all. They’ll be amazed that anyone “falls for this.” If you’re a prosperous, successful lawyer, it’s doubtful that you pray to bind the demonic commander of the courthouse before you deliver a closing argument. You have confidence in your words. If you’re a surgeon, it’s doubtful you’re directly challenging any demons before operating on a human spine. You might pray for calm and endurance, but then you go to work.
But remember that Pentecostal Christianity was born out of America’s poor and working-class communities — people who feel the tremendous, grinding weight of poverty, of addiction, of oppression — and it is sweeping through the global south in communities who face many of these same challenges.
These people are not privileged. They don’t have the power and confidence of America’s prosperous Christian class. The Holy Spirit bursts into their lives like a supernova of hope.
This is especially important for journalists who are trying to understand millions and millions of people whose lives are rarely covered accurately and fairly in the mainstream press.
FIRST IMAGE: From the classic Pew Forum study of modern Pentecostalism around the world.