How the Alabama IVF Ruling Was Influenced by Christian Nationalism

News clip: Bombshell ruling from the Alabama Supreme Court that frozen embryos can be considered children.

Brooke Gladstone: This week, we learned about a fringe Christian sect that greatly influenced that decision and others like it. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Also on this week's show, several of this year's Oscar nominations were for movies adapted from prizewinning books, but the power of literary prizes doesn't stop there.

Alexander Manshel: Even a high-profile book is taught zero times in a university classroom, but it ends up on as many as 15 syllabi when it wins.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, Cord Jefferson, now up for an Oscar for American Fiction, left journalism for Hollywood because he was sick of being pigeonholed as the Black correspondent, but.

Cord Jefferson: It wasn't long before people were coming to me and saying, "Do you want to write this movie about a Black person being killed by the police?" "Do you want to write this movie about a slave?"

Brooke Gladstone: It's all coming up after this.

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Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York. This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Last week, reproductive healthcare took another hit from a gavel.

News clip: Bombshell ruling from the Alabama Supreme Court that frozen embryos can be considered children. The state's largest hospital now says it will pause IVF treatments, leaving couples with fertility problems with nowhere to go.

Brooke Gladstone: By Thursday, two additional IVF clinics in Alabama pause their treatments in fear of retaliation.

News clip: This is so much like everything we've been reading about post-jobs, right? Doctors feeling intimidated, a culture on a climate of chaos for providers, folks not being able to get the care that they need when they need it.

Brooke Gladstone: A climate of chaos. An apt description for our post-Roe v. Wade world, where reproductive rights are defended court by court, state by state, but what made the Alabama decision unique was the particular legal weapon wielded by the chief justice in his concurring opinion.

News clip: Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker quoted the Bible and the Alabama Constitution, section 36, which argues that each person was made, he said, in God's image, that even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing His glory.

Brooke Gladstone: Parker's allegiance to Christian fundamentalism has been on display since his election to the court in 2004. In fact, several of the chief justice's writings in past cases were used as crucial scaffolding for the arguments that successfully overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, but Parker's preferred brand of Christian fundamentalism mostly flies under the radar. He subscribes to the charismatic evangelical Christian leadership networks known as the New Apostolic Reformation, or the NAR a term coined in 1996.

Matthew D. Taylor: It centered around a seminary professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. His name was C. Peter Wagner.

Brooke Gladstone: Matthew D. Taylor is a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore, and he spent a lot of time tracing how the NAR, once on the fringe of Americans'religious, landscape, slowly emerged as a political force.

Matthew D. Taylor: Wagner was fascinated with the world that today scholars would call the independent charismatic sector of Christianity.

Brooke Gladstone: Give us the religious meaning of the word charismatic.

Matthew D. Taylor: The term charismatic derives, at least in this modern usage, from the New Testament, from Christian scriptures, where there's a lot of talk about the spiritual gifts, the gifts that are given through the Holy Spirit to Christians, or at least to the members of the early church, they wouldn't have necessarily called themselves Christians. This idea is that our mundane life can be suffused with these supernatural manifestations, these giftings from God that are meant to exhort and uplift the church, to serve the church community. To be charismatic in Christianity is to seek those supernatural power from the Holy Spirit.

Brooke Gladstone: How would that manifest itself? Are we talking about, like, faith healing?

Matthew D. Taylor: Yes, absolutely. Faith healing would be considered one manifestation of a spiritual gift. Things like prophecy and prophecy, as in modern prophecy, people who identify today as prophets, who share these prophecies with other people, even miraculous manifestations that occur in worship, miracles that have, at least for these folks, no other explanation must be derived from the Holy Spirit.

Brooke Gladstone: Wagner was fascinated with how these nondenominational charismatic Christian movements were growing like gangbusters in the '70s, but if you bring it into the third millennium, you've observed that they became increasingly politicized.

Matthew D. Taylor: Yes. Wagner's central idea in the New Apostolic Reformation is that in the 21st century, God is going to commission new apostles and prophets to lead the global church into revival. If you think back to the New Testament, the apostles are the original disciples of Jesus. They found the Christian church in conventional Christian theology, and the prophets are characters who hear directly from God and speak the words of God. The idea is, and Wagner even said that in the year 2001, we begin the second apostolic age.

The first apostolic age was the era of the early church. He believed that starting in 2001, God was unleashing those gifts again and that new apostles and prophets and Wagner thought of himself as one of these apostles would transform the global church, but then over time, this movement became more and more politicized, more and more interested not just in reforming the church, but in transforming society.

Brooke Gladstone: And adopted an aggressive paradigm of Christian thought known as dominion theology.

Matthew D. Taylor: Yes, dominion theology. The concept was coined by a group of radical Calvinist theologians called the Christian reconstructionists in the 1960s and 1970s, these ideas were very influential in the rise of the religious right in the 1980s. It was this aggressive style of Christian theology that said Christians need to fulfill what they would talk about as the dominion mandate, take dominion over societies, and rule in the name of Christ. The main vehicle for this idea in NAR circles is something called the Seven Mountain Mandate that became a charismatic rebranding of these Calvinist dominion theology ideas that Wagner and his cohort mixed together into the Seven Mountain Mandate.

Brooke Gladstone: In fact, Justice Parker referred to the Seven Mountain Mandate in an interview he did with an NAR profit named Johnny Enlow and it was published the same day as the court's decision that embryos count as people. The Seven Mountain Mandate means that you have to go into the institutions of government, and what else?

Matthew D. Taylor: The seven mountains are family, religion, education, government, arts and entertainment, media, and business or commerce. The idea is, if you divide up society into these seven spheres is sometimes language that you'll hear used as well. The idea is that those mountains, those spheres of society, are either ruled over by demonic forces or by the kingdom of God. The goal for Christians is to rise to the top of each of the seven mountains in every society and to displace the demonic powers through spiritual warfare, through prophecy, and take over, conquer the mountains, and then let Christian influence flow down from the top.

If you think about conventional religious right mobilization, it has tended to filter or channel conservative Christian indignation into democratic means. This is a vanguard move. This is not a grassroots change society. This is take over positions of power in society and govern from the top down.

Brooke Gladstone: As a practical matter as well as a moral and spiritual one. They can't be very hot on the Constitution or of the idea of the United States as a secular state.

Matthew D. Taylor: They are definitely not in favor of the separation of church and state. They'll often say, "Well, you can't separate church and state because the government is one of the mountains." They would affirm many parts of the Constitution, but their interpretation of the First Amendment would not allow for a real separation of church and state.

Brooke Gladstone: I don't know how you follow the Constitution while knocking away one of its fundamental principles.

Matthew D. Taylor: Well, in my forthcoming book, I argue that actually, it was the NAR leaders who were the central orchestrators for Christians to show up in Washington DC on January 6th and protest against what they believed was the stealing of the election, but again, this was not appealing to constitutional principles. They believed that they were engaging in spiritual warfare against demons stealing the election.

Brooke Gladstone: How much of this rhetoric is metaphorical? Are we talking about real demons? When they talk about picking up weapons, are they talking about real weapons?

Matthew D. Taylor: They would say it's not metaphorical. They believe the demons are real, but they would say they are only talking about spiritual warfare. Now, the challenge is, if you go and listen to their rhetoric, it is incredibly violent, and they are pointing at actual people. They're pointing at the democratic party, pointing at disloyal Republicans as they view them and saying, "Those people are not actually responsible for their actions because they are being orchestrated by demons, and we need to fight the demons."

This literal demonization of their enemies is one of the major contributing factors to the chaos on January 6th. Because they are pointing at them and saying, "That building is infested with demons, we need to fight the demons." It's only a matter of time if you keep doing that before someone says, "Yes, we need to fight against those people." The NAR leaders are careful. They know where the line is between truly irresponsible speech that could get you in legal trouble. None of them have been prosecuted or even faced any legal consequences for their role in January 6th. They know what is protected by free speech and they walk right up to that line, but they're always careful not to cross it.

Brooke Gladstone: What are your thoughts on Parker's decision regarding the embryos? Charles Blow writing in the Times the headline says, "Parker's ruling shows our slide towards theocracy isn't just about abortion, but about the subjugation of women."

Matthew D. Taylor: Well, the NAR and really the independent charismatic world are distinct among American evangelicals. In that they are very much in favor of women leading in the church. Where many forms of Christian nationalism are deeply patriarchal. This is actually a style of Christian nationalism that is more inclusive of female leaders. That said, the NAR leaders have some of the most extreme anti-abortion positions I've ever encountered. I say that as somebody who grew up evangelical, has anti-abortion activists in my extended family. These folks are truly at the far end of the spectrum.

In fact, for many NAR leaders, when they talk about abortion, they don't talk about it in policy terms. They don't talk about it as needing to balance between the rights of a woman's to have bodily autonomy and the rights of a fetus for life. That's not the conventional anti-abortion argument. They would say that abortion is a form of child sacrifice that empowers these demonic principalities and powers to hold control over the United States.

At that point, there's no negotiation. There's no compromise, there's no like, "Oh, well, let's meet in the middle and say let's have a 16 week ban." They are abortion abolitionists. What we see in Tom Parker's ruling is more or less that rationale, using theology and Bible references to back that up and then pointing to his own belief in the Seven Mountains and saying, "This is why I did it."

Brooke Gladstone: You suggested that the NAR could be set apart from mainstream evangelicals. I know evangelicalism is a huge umbrella term, in the fact that it is more welcoming in some ways to women. How does it distinguish itself from evangelicals writ large?

Matthew D. Taylor: The NAR leaders view everything through these lens of spiritual warfare. Where many evangelicals, even many Christian nationalist evangelicals tend to think to be a Christian nationalist, is to be concerned about the boundaries of the United States, the history of the United States, and trying to Christianize United States. When I talk about the NAR as a form of Christian supremacy, there's a transnational dimension to that Christian supremacy. They're not only concerned with the US. In fact, many of these NAR leaders are constantly traveling overseas. Many of the networks that are attached to the NAR in Brazil helped to mobilize Christians for the Brazilia capital riot that happened just about a year ago. There's a transnational dimension to this as well, that is not merely concerned with making America great again. Their intent is to see a global revival and a global takeover of societies using paradigms like the Seven Mountains.

Brooke Gladstone: Why do you think that the NAR has pretty much escaped the media spotlight?

Matthew D. Taylor: I talked to a lot of reporters about this and we're all in agreement. This stuff is very hard to write about. If you have 2,000 or even 3,000 words, how do you get from C. Peter Wagner, apostles and prophets, spiritual warfare, Seven Mountains, January 6th, and then finally you get to the story that you actually want to write about? It's very hard to encapsulate all of this because it feels so foreign to most of us who are mainstream news consumers.

Brooke Gladstone: The environment is foreign, but it seems that their pronouncements are pretty straightforward.

Matthew D. Taylor: Yes, and the NAR leaders are celebrities. There is an entire world of charismatic media, of charisma news, of television channels that are devoted to prophecy. YouTube prophets. Social media is infused throughout with all these charismatic leaders, and yet most of us aren't paying attention to that world. When it breaks into our world through somebody like Tom Parker, we're shocked by it. For people in that world, these are people that they are tracking and following all the time. These are the prophets that they are listening to.

Brooke Gladstone: Now that we know who they are, what role do you think they'll be playing in the rest of this campaign?

Matthew D. Taylor: The NAR leaders were the most effective Christian propagandists for Donald Trump's election lies in 2020. I expect that what we will see in 2024 will look a lot like what we saw in 2020. Rolling out of spiritual warfare campaigns, manifestations of these things. If Donald Trump wins, then they will celebrate jubilantly. If Donald Trump loses and I expect Donald Trump will not accept losing, then they will back him up, and they will use prophecies, and they'll use spiritual warfare, and they will mobilize Christians to show up and protest and we could very well see another January 6th.

Brooke Gladstone: Matthew, thank you very much.

Matthew D. Taylor: Thank you, Brooke.

Brooke Gladstone: Matthew D. Taylor is a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore. He's also the author of the forthcoming book, The Violent Take It by Force. The Christian Movement that is threatening our democracy. Coming up, who really cares about book awards? Turns out, Hollywood. This is On The Media.

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