"Spiritual Warriors: Decoding Christian Nationalism at the Capitol Riot"

The backstory to the new documentary film.

My employer, the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore, has generously funded and shepherded the production of a new film based on my research entitled “Spiritual Warriors: Decoding Christian Nationalism at the Capitol Riot.”

This 25-minute documentary traces how nondenominational charismatic Christians — particularly as instigated by the networks of New Apostolic Reformation leaders — created the Christian nationalist religious fervor that we all witnessed that day. I thought I’d explain here the backstory to this film and why we think it’s so important.

Immediately after January 6th, I began researching and digging into who were the Christian leaders and what were the Christian theologies that gave rise to the numerous manifestations of Christian spirituality that accompanied the storming of the US Capitol. This research led me to the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a previously obscure set of charismatic Christian leadership networks that are now one of the driving forces in right-wing politics and Christian supremacist ideology in the United States. As I began to realize just how significant the NAR role in January 6th had been, I began looking for possible avenues to publicize this research and get this vital information to the American public.

In the summer of 2022, I reached out to Bradley Onishi, producer of the hit podcast Straight White American Jesus, to see if he’d be interested in helping me create a podcast series on the NAR and January 6th. Brad, a leading public scholar of religion and a true mensch, had been searching for a way to address the NAR and embraced the project, even though we had no funding for it. Brad enlisted the help of Scott Okamoto as our sound engineer and musical composer for the series, and we were off! What came of our collaboration was Charismatic Revival Fury, a five-part audio documentary that aired in the SWAJ podcast feed in December 2022—January 2023.

I have been overwhelmed by the response to Charismatic Revival Fury, with dozens of reporters following up on stories related to the series and invitations to share about this research in numerous venues. These invitations included a book contract from Broadleaf Books to write my forthcoming book The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening Our Democracy (arriving September 2024), a more fulsome and footnoted rendering of this research.

But as we discussed at ICJS how we could strategically communicate about these dangers, we realized that an 8-hour podcast series isn’t everyone’s information-consumption medium, and the book will not be available until later this year. So ICJS enlisted the help of a long-time friend Michael Ivan Schwartz to direct a short film that could visually and viscerally capture this story. Michael Ivan himself had navigated the early NAR circles in the 1990s and recognized many of the leaders in the film from his younger days.

We had an amazing launch of the film in Baltimore last night (1/31) with more than 400 people in attendance at the Senator Theatre. Thank you to all our Baltimore friends who came out! Now we are offering this film free on YouTube.

“Spiritual Warriors” is the best condensation we could create of this complicated but unbelievably urgent story, and I’m so glad that it’s now available to the public. Please spread the word, share the video, and join myself and ICJS in calling people of good will and good faith to defend American democracy this year against the rising tide of Christian nationalism and authoritarianism that the NAR and January 6th represent.

We aren’t out of the woods yet, and this year portends to be another bruising election that could well spark political violence (particularly right-wing, Christianity-inflected violence) like we saw on January 6th, but we are together in standing for pluralism, freedom for religious and non-religious people, and the promise of an America for everyone.