Is President Trump going to restart nuclear weapons testing? When will this federal shutdown end? Will Californians pass Proposition 50, scramble the state’s congressional maps and shake up next year’s midterm elections?
Amid a swirl of high-stakes standoffs and unprecedented posturing by Trump, Gov. Gavin Newsom and other leaders in Washington and Sacramento, the future of U.S. politics, and California’s role therein, has felt wildly uncertain of late.
Political debate — around things such as sending military troops into American cities, cutting off food aid for the poor or questioning constitutional guarantees such as birthright citizenship — has become so untethered to longstanding norms that everything feels novel.
The pathways for taking political power — as with Trump’s teasing a potential third term, installing federal prosecutors without Senate confirmation, slashing federal budgets without congressional input and pressuring red states to redistrict in his favor before a midterm election — have been so sharply altered that many Americans, and some historians and political experts, have lost confidence in U.S. democracy.
“It’s completely unprecedented, completely anomalous — representative, I think, of a major transformation of our normal political life,” said Jack Rakove, a Stanford University emeritus professor of history and political science.
“You can’t compare it to any other episode, any other period, any other set of events in American history. It is unique and radically novel in distressing ways,” Rakove said. “As soon as Trump was reelected, we entered into a constitutional crisis. Why? Because Trump has no respect for constitutional structures.”
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement that “President Trump’s unorthodox approach is why he has been so successful and why he has received massive support from the American public.”
Jackson said Trump has “achieved more than any President has in modern history,” including in “securing the border, getting dangerous criminals off American streets, brokering historic peace deals [and] bringing new investments to the U.S.,” and that the Supreme Court has repeatedly backed his approach as legal.
“So-called experts can pontificate all they want, but President Trump’s actions have been consistently upheld by the Supreme Court despite a record number of challenges from liberal activists and unlawful rulings from liberal lower court judges,” Jackson said.
There are many examples of Trump flouting or suggesting he will flout the Constitution or other laws directly, and in ways that make people unsure and concerned about what will come next for the country politically, Rakove and other political experts said. His constant flirting with the idea of a third term in office does that, as does his legal challenge to birthright citizenship and his military’s penchant for blasting alleged drug vessels out of international waters.
On Wednesday, Trump raised the prospect of further breaching international law and norms by appearing to suggest on social media that, for the first time in three decades, the U.S. would resume testing nuclear weapons.
“Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis,” Trump wrote — leaving it unclear whether he meant detonating warheads or simply testing the missiles that deliver them.
There are also many examples, the experts said, of American political norms being tossed aside — and the nation’s political future tossed in the air — by others around Trump, both allies and enemies, who are trying to either please or push back against the unorthodox commander in chief with their own abnormal political maneuvers.
One example is House Speaker Mike Johnson (R.-La.) refusing to swear in Adelita Grijalva, despite her being elected in September to represent parts of Arizona in Congress. Johnson has cited the shutdown, but others — including Arizona’s attorney general in a lawsuit — have suggested Johnson is trying to prevent a House vote on releasing records about the late Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced billionaire sex offender whom Trump was friends with before a reported falling out years ago.
Uncertainty about whether those records would implicate Trump or any other powerful people in any wrongdoing has swirled in Washington throughout Trump’s term — showing more staying power than perhaps any other issue, despite Trump’s insistence that he’s done nothing wrong and the issue is a distraction.
The mid-decade redistricting battle — in which California’s Proposition 50 looms large — is another prime example, the experts said.
Normally, redistricting occurs each decade, after federal census data comes out. But at Trump’s urging, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott agreed to redraw his state’s congressional lines this year to help ensure Republicans maintain control of the House in the midterms. In response, Newsom and California Democrats introduced Proposition 50, asking California voters to amend the state Constitution to allow Democrats to redraw lines in their favor.
As a result, Californians — millions of whom have already voted — have been getting bombarded by messages both for and against Proposition 50, many of which are hyper-focused on the uncertain implications for American democracy.
“Let’s fight back and democracy can be defended,” a Proposition 50 backer wrote on a postcard to one voter. “It is against democracy and rips away the power to draw congressional seats from the people,” opponents of the measure wrote to others.
H.W. Brands, a U.S. history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said, “Americans who are worried about democracy are right to be concerned,” because Trump “has broken or threatened many of the guardrails of democracy.”
But he also noted — partly as a reflection of the dangerous moment the country is in — that Trump has long rejected a particularly “sacred” part of American democracy by refusing to accept his loss to President Biden in 2020, and Americans reelected him in 2024 anyway.
“Americans have always been divided politically. This is the first time (with the exception of 1860) that the division goes down to the fundamentals of democracy,” Brands wrote in an email — referencing the year the U.S. Confederacy seceded from the Union.
High stakes
The uncertainty has festered in an era of rampant political disinformation and under a president who has a penchant for challenging reality outright on a near-daily basis — who on a trip through Asia this week not only said he’d “love” a third term, which is precluded by the Constitution, but claimed, falsely, that he is experiencing his best polling numbers ever.
The uncertainty has also been compounded by Democrats, who have wielded the only levers of power they have left by refusing to concede to Republicans in the raging shutdown battle in Washington and by putting Proposition 50 to California voters.
The shutdown has major, immediate implications. Not only are federal employees around the country, including in California, furloughed or without pay checks, but billions in additional federal funding is at risk.
Democrats have resisted funding the government in an effort to force Republicans to back down from massive cuts to healthcare subsidies that help millions of Californians and many more Americans afford health coverage. The shutdown means Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits could be cut off for more than 40 million people — nearly 1 in 8 Americans — this weekend.
California and other Democrat-led states have sued the Trump administration, asking a federal court to issue an emergency order requiring the USDA to use existing contingency funds to distribute SNAP funding.
Jackson, the White House spokesperson, said Democrats should be asked when the shutdown will end, because “they are the ones who have decided to shut down the government so they can use working Americans and SNAP benefits as ‘leverage’ to pursue their radical left wing agenda.”
The redistricting battle could have even bigger impact.
If Democrats retook the House next year, it would give them a real source of oversight power to confront Trump and block his MAGA agenda. If Republicans retain control, they will help facilitate Trump’s agenda — just as they have since he took office.
But even if Proposition 50 passes, as polling suggests it will, it’s not clear that Democrats would win all the races lined up for them in the state, or that those seats would be enough to win Democrats the chamber given efforts to pick up Republican seats in Texas and elsewhere.
The uncertainty around the midterms is, by extension, producing more uncertainty around the second half of Trump’s term.
What will Trump do, particularly if Republicans stay in power? Is he stationing troops in American cities as part of some broader play for retaining power, as some Democrats have suggested? Is he setting the groundwork to challenge the integrity of U.S. elections by citing his baseless claims about fraud in 2020 and putting fellow election deniers in charge of reviewing the system?
Is he really gearing up to contest the constitutional limits on his tenure in the White House? He said he’d “love” to stay in office this week, but then he said it’s “too bad” he’s not allowed to.
Fire with fire?
According to David Greenberg, a history professor at Rutgers University, it is Trump’s unorthodox policies and tactics but also his brash demeanor that “make this a more unsettled moment than we are used to feeling.”
“Sometimes when he’s doing things that other presidents have done, he does it in such an outlandish way that it feels unprecedented,” or is “stylistically” but not substantively unprecedented, Greenberg said. “Self-aggrandizing claims, often untrue. The brazenness with which he insults people. The way he changes his mind on something. That all is highly unusual and unique to Trump.”
In other instances, Greenberg said, Trump has pushed the boundaries of the law or busted political norms that previous presidents felt bound by.
“One thing that Trump showed us is just how much of our functioning system depends not just on the letter of the law but on norms,” Greenberg said. “What can the president do? What kind of power can he exert over the Justice Department and who it prosecutes? Well, it turns out he probably can do a lot more than should be permissible.”
However, the appropriate response is not the one seemingly gaining steam among Democrats — to “be more like Trump” themselves or “fight fire with fire” — but to look for ways to strengthen the political norms and boundaries Trump is ignoring, Greenberg said.
“The more the public, citizens in general, feel that it’s OK to disregard long-standing ways of doing things that have stood the test of time until now, the more likely we are to enter into a more chaotic world — a world in which there will be less justice, less democracy,” Greenberg said. “It will be more subject to the whims or preferences of whoever is in power — and in a liberal democracy, that is what you are striving to fight against.”
During the summer of 1997, my wife and I picked up our 9-year-old daughter from a ballet camp in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and drove to the nearby Gettysburg National Military Park, which they had never seen and I barely remembered from a boyhood visit. The park’s presentation of history left much to be desired. The visitor center’s small museum and the numerous monuments scattered across the battlefield conveyed a great deal about how the battle had been fought in July 1863, while offering almost no explanation of why the combatants were fighting. The park commemorated the Union’s greatest military victory, but its emotional centerpiece was the disastrous southern assault known as Pickett’s Charge, identified, in the romantic glow of nostalgia, as the “high-water mark” of the Confederacy. In labels accompanying the display of historic artifacts and images, the words valor and glory were almost always applied to soldiers who fought for the South, not for the Union.
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That the place where the Civil War reached its turning point had become a shrine to the courage of those who fought to destroy the nation and preserve slavery should not have been a surprise. It has long been a commonplace that the South lost the Civil War but won the battle over historical memory. For decades, almost from the moment of surrender, the ideology of the Lost Cause shaped both popular and scholarly understanding of the conflict.
As Elizabeth R. Varon observes in Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South, her compelling new biography of James Longstreet, Robert E. Lee’s second in command, the Lost Cause was far more than a military narrative. It provided a comprehensive account of the war’s origins, conduct, and consequences. The conflict, in this telling, had little to do with slavery, but instead was caused, depending on which book you read, by the protective tariff, arguments over states’ rights, or white southerners’ desire for individual liberty. Confederate soldiers were defeated not by superior generalship or greater fighting spirit but by the Union’s advantages in manpower, resources, and industrial technology. And the nation’s victory was marred by what followed: the era of Reconstruction, portrayed as a time of corruption and misgovernment, when the southern white population was subjected to the humiliation of “Negro domination.” This account of history was easily understandable and, like all ideologies, most convincing to those who benefited from it—proponents of white supremacy.
Just how widely and publicly memorialized the Lost Cause narrative remained more than 150 years later became glaringly clear in the fallout from tragic events such as the Charleston, South Carolina, church massacre in 2015; the deadly altercation in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017; and the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers in 2020. The legacy of slavery was propelled to center stage in today’s culture wars. With unexpected rapidity, the Confederate battle flag came down from many public buildings. And dozens of monuments to southern military leaders—most of them erected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to help provide historical legitimacy for the Jim Crow system of racial inequality, then being codified into law—were removed from their pedestals.
Of course, omission, not simply falsehood, can be a form of lying (as Alessandra Lorini, an Italian historian, noted earlier this year in an excellent survey of debates about historical monuments, titled Le Statue Bugiarde, or, roughly, “Statues That Lie”). For many years, the Civil War was remembered as a family quarrel among white Americans in which their Black countrymen played no significant role—a fiction reflected in the paucity of memorials indicating that enslaved men and women had been active agents in shaping the course of events. Lately, some historical erasures have begun to be remedied. For example, a memorial honoring Robert Smalls, the enslaved Civil War hero who famously sailed a Confederate vessel out of Charleston Harbor and turned it over to the Union navy, and later served five terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, is now on display in Charleston’s Waterfront Park.
Back when we visited, the Gettysburg battlefield was beginning to be swept up in changing views of history. The site is strewn with monuments, memorials, markers, and plaques—1,328 of them, according to the National Park Service, approximately a quarter of which memorialize Confederate officers and regiments. (Visitors sometimes ask guides whether all these monuments “got in the way of the battle.”) The Park Service and the Gettysburg Foundation, which jointly administer the site, were raising funds to build a new museum and visitor center. And in 1998, an equestrian statue was installed of James Longstreet, one of the Confederacy’s most successful generals, present at the battle but never before memorialized at Gettysburg. Longstreet had warned Lee in vain that Pickett’s Charge courted disaster. (To Lee’s credit, after the attack, which left about half of the 12,500 Confederate troops dead or wounded, he declared, “All this has been my fault.”)
But the defeat at Gettysburg was not what explained Longstreet’s exclusion from the pantheon of southern heroes. Rather, his conduct during Reconstruction was the problem—an assessment that was endorsed by the branch of the Sons of Confederate Veterans that commissioned his statue. The general, the group explained, was being honored for his “war service,” not his “postwar activities.” What were those activities? After the war, Longstreet had emerged as a singular figure: the most prominent white southerner to join the Republican Party and proclaim his support for Black male suffrage and officeholding. Leading the biracial Louisiana militia and the New Orleans Metropolitan Police, he also battled violent believers in white supremacy.
Among the challenges of writing the history of the Reconstruction period is avoiding the language devised by the era’s contemporary opponents as terms of vilification. One such word is scalawag, applied to a white southerner who supported Reconstruction. White-supremacist Democrats viewed scalawags, who could be found in many parts of the South, as traitors to their race and region. The largest number were small farmers in up-country counties where slavery had not been a major presence before the Civil War—places such as the mountainous areas of western North Carolina and northern Alabama and Georgia. There, many white residents had opposed secession and more than a few had enlisted in the Union army. Even though supporting Reconstruction required them to overcome long-standing prejudices and forge a political alliance with Black voters, up-country scalawags saw Black male suffrage as the only way to prevent pro-Confederate plantation owners from regaining political power in the South. All scalawags were excoriated in the white southern press, but none as viciously as Longstreet.
Longstreet’s life (1821–1904) spanned the era of sectional conflict, Civil War, and Reconstruction. Although unique in many ways, his postwar career illuminates both the hopes inspired by the end of slavery and the powerful obstacles to change. To write his biography requires a command of numerous strands of the era’s complex history. Varon, a history professor at the University of Virginia, is the author of a general account of the conflict. She has also written books about the coming of the war and Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and is as adept at guiding the reader through the intricacies of Civil War military campaigns as she is at explaining the byzantine factional politics of Reconstruction Louisiana. Her knowledge of the historical context is matched by her balanced appraisal of Longstreet’s attitudes, personal and political.
Longstreet’s unusual postwar political career, Varon insists, did not arise from lack of enthusiasm for slavery or doubts about southern independence. The owner of several slaves, he was a true believer in the Confederate cause. His grandfather was a plantation owner in Edgefield District, South Carolina, widely known as a center of cotton production, proslavery ideology, and secessionism. He was brought up by his uncle Augustus Longstreet, a prominent jurist who made very clear his belief in Black inferiority. Educated at West Point, Longstreet resigned from the U.S. Army in 1861 to join the Confederate war effort. Varon points out that unlike Lee, who on occasion recklessly risked casualties that his army could not afford by attacking Union forces, Longstreet preferred to fight on the defensive. This is why he advised Lee not to send Major General George E. Pickett’s troops to assault the well-fortified Union lines at Gettysburg. But defenders of the Lost Cause—especially those who could never forgive Longstreet’s strong embrace of political rights for former slaves—would blame him retroactively for the defeat at Gettysburg, accusing him of sabotaging Pickett’s Charge by deliberately arriving late on the battlefield with his troops.
Longstreet was at Lee’s side in the tiny village of Appomattox Court House in April 1865 when a note arrived from Ulysses S. Grant demanding the surrender of Lee’s army to avert further bloodshed. Longstreet, who had known Grant since their West Point days, was impressed by the leniency of his old friend’s terms of surrender, which allowed Confederate soldiers to return home on “parole.” They would remain unpunished, and even keep their personal weapons, so long as they did not take up arms against the nation or violate local laws.
In her earlier work on the Appomattox surrender, Varon offered a provocative interpretation of the long-term consequences of Grant’s generosity, making a case that Lee’s officers and many ordinary soldiers saw it as a kind of homage to Confederate bravery. Indeed, a substantial number, she now writes, expected to receive another call to go to war for southern independence. They later argued that the radical expansion of Black rights forced on them during Reconstruction violated the terms of surrender. Those terms, they claimed, did not empower the Union to impose its will on the white South. Thus, resistance to Reconstruction did not violate the promise that paroled soldiers would obey the law.
Longstreet rejected any such interpretation of Lee’s surrender, seeing in it “the flaw of hubris.” He understood that Grant’s terms were an effort to facilitate reconciliation (among white citizens) in the reunited nation and in no way justified political violence. In urging the white South to accept the reality of defeat, Longstreet made the obvious point that the losing party should not expect to impose its perspective on the victor. The white South, Longstreet declared in 1867, had “appealed to the arbitrament of the sword,” and had a moral obligation to accept the outcome: “The decision,” he wrote, “was in favor of the North, so her construction becomes the law.” He believed Confederates should accept that the Union’s victory demonstrated the superiority of a society based on free labor over one based on slavery, and seize the opportunity presented by Reconstruction to modernize the South. Longstreet’s understanding of the lessons and consequences of Confederate defeat, Varon writes, helps explain the mystery of how a man who went to war to destroy the nation and protect slavery decided to join the Republican Party and work closely with Black political leaders during Reconstruction.
Soon after the surrender, Longstreet moved his family to New Orleans, where he established a cotton brokerage and became the president of an insurance company. Then, as now, New Orleans was a city with a distinctive history and an unusually diverse population. Occupied by Union forces early in the war, it harbored a large anti-secession white population. Its well-educated, economically successful free Black community was positioned to take a leading role in the Reconstruction project of revamping southern society, eliminating the vestiges of slavery, and establishing the principle of equal citizenship across racial lines. Many Black men—both those recently liberated and those already free before the war—were elected to public office after Congress, in 1867, ordered the creation of new governments in most of the former Confederate states. New Orleans, and by extension Louisiana, seemed to be a place where Reconstruction could succeed. But the newly created Republican Party was beset by factionalism as various groups jockeyed for political influence. The city was also home to a belligerent population of former Confederates willing to resort to violence to restore their dominion over Black residents.
Very quickly, Longstreet plunged into Louisiana politics, having applied for a pardon from President Andrew Johnson, Abraham Lincoln’s successor. This would enable him to hold public office and retain his property, except for slaves. Johnson refused, but in 1868, as provided in the Fourteenth Amendment, Longstreet received amnesty from the Republican Congress. Lee, who had appealed to Grant personally for immunity from charges of treason but declined to condemn the violence of the Ku Klux Klan, chastised Longstreet for recognizing the legitimacy of Congress’s Reconstruction policy.
But Longstreet, as Varon relates, was adamant that he was anything but a traitor to the white South. The first requirement of reconciliation, he wrote, was to accept frankly that “the political questions of the war” had been settled and should be “buried upon the fields that marked their end.” There was no avoiding Black suffrage and the participation of Black men in southern government. In 1868, Governor Henry Clay Warmoth, a former Union-army officer, created the biracial Metropolitan Police Force, where Longstreet went on to play a leading role. The sight of armed Black men patrolling the streets of New Orleans outraged much of the local white population. Longstreet was also appointed adjutant general of the state militia, which was racially segregated but had Black and white officers.
Over the course of eight years, Longstreet was active on a remarkable number of fronts in Reconstruction New Orleans. Grant appointed him to the lucrative position of customs surveyor. He sat on the New Orleans school board, which began operating the city’s public-education system on a racially integrated basis. Meanwhile, the legislature enacted a pioneering civil-rights law, barring racial discrimination by transport companies and in some public accommodations. Louisiana Republicans split over this measure, with many white leaders—including Governor Warmoth, who vetoed it—opposing it as too radical, while Black officials embraced it. Realizing that Black voters constituted, to use a modern term, the Republican Party’s “base,” Longstreet aligned himself with the state’s activist Black leaders, including P. B. S. Pinchback, who served briefly as the country’s first Black governor after Warmoth was impeached. Uniquely among prominent ex-Confederates, Longstreet frequently spoke out in favor of Black voting rights, further eroding his reputation among white Democrats. Being condemned as a Judas only bolstered his support for Reconstruction.
Violence was endemic in Reconstruction Louisiana, and Longstreet played a major role in trying to suppress it. Terrorist groups such as the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia flourished. In 1874, after a series of disputed elections in Louisiana, the White League launched an armed assault on the state’s Reconstruction government. In charge of defending the city, Longstreet took part in the fighting. But the militia and police were overwhelmed, and only the intervention of federal soldiers restored order. The event exposed a reality that recent scholars such as Gregory Downs have strongly emphasized: The presence of Union troops was essential to Reconstruction’s survival. In 1891, anti-Reconstruction Democrats erected a stone obelisk paying tribute to what they called the Battle of Liberty Place. The accompanying text, added in 1932, celebrated the insurrection as an attempt to restore “white supremacy.” The memorial was removed in 2017, two years after then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu had approved a city-council resolution to do so.
Illustration by Justin Jenkins
By 1875, the persistent violence had convinced Longstreet that Reconstruction should proceed more slowly and try not to “exasperate the Southern people”—by whom he meant white people. Meanwhile, in response to what Varon calls a giant “misinformation campaign” by southern newspapers and Democratic politicians that depicted the South as mired in government corruption, northern support was on the wane, an ominous sign for the future of Reconstruction. Longstreet essentially abandoned participation in Louisiana politics and moved his family to Georgia, where he soon became a leader of that state’s Republican Party.
With Reconstruction ending, southern Republicans searched for ways to stabilize their party and maintain a presence in southern government. In Georgia, Longstreet pursued a strategy different from the course he had embraced in New Orleans. Instead of cultivating alliances with Black leaders, he now worked more closely with white Republicans, many of them scalawags, who urged northern Republicans to help “southernize” the party by boosting the power of its white members and limiting that of Black politicians. The “colored man,” Longstreet wrote to Thomas P. Ochiltree, a politician from Texas, had been “put in the hands of strangers who have not understood him or his characteristics.” By “strangers,” he was alluding to carpetbaggers (another of those tainted terms), northerners who took part in Reconstruction in the South and were derided by Democrats as merely seeking the spoils of office. Varon calls this letter “a blatantly racist piece of paternalist pandering.” Despite Longstreet’s efforts to reduce the political power of Black Republicans, white Democrats accused him of trying to “Africanize the South.” He remained popular, however, with Black Americans after Reconstruction ended, even winning praise from Frederick Douglass for his continued endorsement of Black suffrage and his condemnation of lynching. Longstreet also spent much of his time setting the record straight, as he saw it, regarding his wartime accomplishments. In 1896, he published a 690-page memoir, roundly denounced by adherents of the Lost Cause.
Varon offers a mixed verdict on Longstreet’s career. He could be arrogant and opportunistic, eager to bolster his own reputation. He benefited personally from the numerous positions to which he was appointed (in particular the patronage posts he enjoyed after the end of Reconstruction, including ambassador to the Ottoman empire and federal marshal for northern Georgia). But he also demonstrated remarkable courage, refusing to abandon the Republican Party, as many scalawags eventually did, or to change his mind about Black citizens’ political and civil rights.
Longstreet seems to have thought of himself, Varon writes, as “a herald of reunion.” And yet, she notes, his life exemplified the “elusiveness” of various kinds of postwar reconciliation—between white northerners and white southerners, between white and Black Americans, between upholders of the Lost Cause and advocates of a “New South.” His willingness to work closely with Black Americans, speak out in favor of their rights, and even lead them into battle in the streets of New Orleans overshadowed his military contributions to the Confederacy in the eyes of most white southerners. As a letter to a Georgia newspaper declared, when “it became a question of [the] negro or white man,” Longstreet chose the former and could never be forgiven. No statues of Longstreet graced the southern landscape.
Varon closes with a brief look at memorialization, focusing on the efforts of Longstreet’s second wife in the 1930s and ’40s to raise money to build a statue at Gettysburg. A formidable woman 42 years his junior, Helen Longstreet at age 80 worked as a riveter in a factory building bombers during World War II. The service of Black soldiers inspired her to defend Black voting rights, a stance much praised in the African American press. She died in 1962 at the age of 99. One wonders what she would have thought of the descendants of Confederate veterans who finally installed her husband on horseback at Gettysburg yet felt obliged as late as 1998 to dissociate themselves from his efforts to secure the equal rights of all Americans.
Longstreet believed that peaceful and just reunion would be possible only when the white South moved beyond the myth of the Lost Cause. The end of his erasure from historical memory highlights what a long and complicated evolution that has proved to be. Perhaps his restoration is also a sign that the time has come to shift attention from taking down old monuments to erecting new ones, including some to the Black and white leaders of Reconstruction, who braved white-supremacist violence in an effort to bring into being the “new birth of freedom” that Abraham Lincoln envisioned at Gettysburg.
This article appears in the December 2023 print edition with the headline “A Traitor to the Traitors.”
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On the day she heard God tell her to buy a mountain, Tami Barthen already sensed that her life was on a spiritual upswing. She’d recently divorced and remarried, an improvement she attributed to following the voice of God. She’d quit traditional church and enrolled in a course on supernatural ministry, learning to attune herself to what she believed to be heavenly signs. During one worship service, a pastor had even singled her out in a prophecy: “There’s a double door opening for you,” he’d said.
But it was not until two years later, in June of 2017, that she began to understand what that could mean, a moment that came as she and her husband were trying to buy land for a retirement cabin in northwestern Pennsylvania. They’d just learned that the small piece they wanted was part of a far larger parcel—a former camp for delinquent boys comprising 350 acres of forest rising 2,000 feet high and sloping all the way down to the Allegheny River. As Tami was complaining to herself that she didn’t want a whole mountain, a thought came into her head that seemed so alien, so grandiose, that she was certain it was the voice of God.
“Yes, but I do,” the voice said.
She decided this must be the beginning of her divine assignment. She would use $950,000 of her divorce settlement to buy the mountain. She would advance the Kingdom of God in the most literal of ways, and await further instructions.
What happened next is the story of one woman’s journey into the fastest-growing segment of Christianity in the country—a movement that helped propel Donald Trump to the White House, that fueled his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and that is becoming a radicalizing force within the more familiar Christian right.
It is called the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, a sprawling ecosystem of leaders who call themselves apostles and prophets and claim to receive direct revelations from God. Its congregations can be found in cities and towns across the country—on landscaped campuses, in old supermarkets, in the shells of defunct churches. It has global prayer networks, streaming broadcasts, books, podcasts, apps, social-media influencers, and revival tours. It has academies, including a new one where a fatigues-wearing prophet says he is training “warriors” for spiritual battle against demonic forces, which he and other leaders are identifying as people and groups associated with liberal politics. Its most prominent leaders include a Korean American apostle who spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally prior to the January 6 insurrection and a Honduran American apostle whose megachurch was key to Trump’s evangelical outreach. Besides Trump, its political allies include school-board members, county commissioners, judges, and state legislators such as Doug Mastriano, a retired Army intelligence officer whose outsider campaign for Pennsylvania governor last year was widely ridiculed, even as he won the GOP nomination and 42 percent of the general-election vote.
The movement is seeking political power as a means to achieving a more transcendent goal: to bring under biblical authority every sphere of life, including government, schools, and culture itself, establishing not just a Christian nation, as the traditional religious right has advocated, but an actual, earthly Kingdom of God.
For that purpose, the movement has followers, each expected to play their part in a rolling end-times drama, and that is what Tami Barthen, who is 62, was trying to do.
I called her recently and explained that I was in Pennsylvania trying to understand where the movement was headed, and had found her on Facebook, where she follows several prominent prophets. She said that she was willing to meet but that I should first do three things.
One was to go see a film called Jesus Revolution, and this I did that afternoon, the 2 o’clock showing at an AMC Classic outside Harrisburg. As the lights dimmed, scenes of early-1970s California washed over the screen. What followed was the story of a real-life pastor named Chuck Smith, who opened his church to bands of drugged-out hippies who became known as “Jesus freaks,” a transformation depicted in scenes of love-dazed catharsis and sunrise ocean baptisms—young people rejecting relativism for the warm certainty of God’s one truth. The film, a full-on Hollywood production starring Kelsey Grammer and produced by an outfit called Kingdom Story Company, has earned $52 million so far.
The second thing was to visit a church in Harrisburg called Life Center, whose senior pastor had been among the original California Jesus freaks and now held the title of apostle. I arrived at a glass-and-cement former office building for the midweek evening service. In the lobby, screens showed videos of blue ocean waves. The books on display included Now Is the Time: Seven Converging Signs of the Emerging Great Awakening and It’s Our Turn Now: God’s Plan to Restore America Is Within Our Reach. The apostle was out of town, so another pastor showed visitors into the sanctuary, a 1,600-seat auditorium with no images of Jesus, no stained-glass parables, no worn hymnals, no reminders of the 2,000 years of Christian history before this. Instead, six huge screens glowed with images of spinning stars. On a stage, a praise band was blasting emotional, surging songs vaguely reminiscent of Coldplay. Rows of spotlights were shining on people who stood, hands raised, and sang mantra-like choruses about surrender, then listened to a sermon about submitting to God.
The last thing was to attend a touring event called KEY Fellowship, which stands for “Kingdom Empowering You.” So I headed to a small church in State College, Pennsylvania, the 44th city on the tour so far. On a Saturday morning, 100 or so attendees were arriving, a crowd that was mostly white but also Black, Latino, and Korean-American. They all filed through a door marked by a white flag stamped with a green pine tree and the words An Appeal to Heaven—a Revolutionary War–era banner of the sort that rioters carried into the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. “We thank you, Father, that you have chosen us,” said the woman who’d organized the event, explaining that its purpose was to “release spiritual authority” over the region. And then the releasing began. The band. The singing. The shouting: “Lord, have your dominion.” Several men stood and blew shofars, hollowed-out ram’s horns used in traditional Jewish worship, and meant in this context to warn demons and herald the gathering of a modern-day army of God. Out came maracas and tambourines. Out came long wooden staffs that people pounded against the floor. Others waved American flags, Israeli flags, more pine-tree flags. The point, I learned, was to call the Holy Spirit through the prefabricated walls of the church and into the sanctuary, all of this leading up to the moment when a local pastor, a member of the Ojibwe-Cree Nation, came to the stage.
She was there to declare the restoration of the nation’s covenant with Native American people, which, in the movement’s intricate end-times narrative, is a precondition for the establishment of the Kingdom. A sacred drum pounded. “Father, we pray for a holy experiment!” someone shouted. A white man cried. Then people began marching in circles around the room—flags, tambourines, maracas, staffs—as a final song played. “Possess the land,” the chorus went. “We will take it by force. Take it, take it.”
Once I had seen all of this, Tami said I could come.
The view from Tami’s house (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)
The road to the mountain runs through the small town of Franklin, an hour or so north of Pittsburgh, then winds uphill and through the woods before branching off to a narrower road marked private. At the entrance is a Mastriano sign, left over from when Tami served as his Venango County coordinator.
“We don’t really do politics,” she was saying, riding onto the property with her husband, Kevin. “But then we heard God say, ‘You need to do this.’”
She had raised and homeschooled three children, been the dutiful wife of a wealthy Pennsylvania entrepreneur who traded metals, but as I came to learn over the next few weeks, so many new things had been happening since she started following the voice of God.
“All this is ours,” Kevin said, passing old cabins, a run-down trailer, and other buildings from the property’s former life.
“And right up here is where it all happened,” Tami said.
They parked and went over to a wooden footbridge, part of the only public path through the property. This is where they’d been walking when Tami had first seen the spot for their retirement cabin, at which point she had looked down and seen three blue interlocking circles stenciled onto the bridge, some sort of graffiti that she took as a sign.
“I said, ‘Kevin, we’re at the point of convergence,’” she recalled.
Convergence. Spiritual warfare. Demonic strongholds. These were the kinds of terms that Tami tossed off easily, and knew could make the movement seem loopy to outsiders. But they were part of a vocabulary that added up to a whole way of seeing the world, one traceable not so much to ancient times but rather to 1971.
That was when an evangelical missionary named C. Peter Wagner returned to California after spending more than a decade in Bolivia, where he had noticed churches growing explosively and where he claimed to have seen signs and wonders, healings and prophecies. A professor at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Wagner began studying what he believed were similar forces at work in the underground house-church movement in China and certain independent Christian churches in African countries, as well as Pentecostal churches in the U.S. He eventually concluded that a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit was under way across the globe—a supernatural force that would erase denominational differences, banish demonic spirits, and restore the offices of the first-century Christian Church as part of a great end-times battle. By the mid-1990s, Wagner and others were describing all of this as the New Apostolic Reformation, detailing the particulars in dozens of books.
The reformation meant recognizing new apostles—men and women believed to have God-given spiritual authority as leaders. It meant modern-day prophets—people believed to be chosen by God to receive revelations through dreams and visions and signs. It meant spiritual warfare, which was not intended to be taken metaphorically, but actually demanded the battling of demons that could possess people and territories and were so real that they could be diagrammed on maps. It meant portals: specific openings where demonic or angelic forces could enter—eyes or mouths, for instance, or geographic locations such as Azusa Street in Los Angeles, scene of a seminal early-20th-century revival. It meant the rise of the Manifest Sons of God, an elite force that would be endowed with supernatural powers for spiritual and perhaps actual warfare. Most significant, the new reformation required not just personal salvation but action to transform all of society. Christians were to reclaim the fallen Earth from Satan and advance the Kingdom of God, and this idea was not metaphorical either. The Kingdom would be a social pyramid, at the top of which was a government of godly leaders dispensing biblical laws and at the bottom of which was the full manifestation of heaven on Earth, a glorious world with no poverty, no racism, no crime, no abortion, no homosexuality, two genders, one kind of marriage, and one God: theirs.
Wagner helped convene the International Coalition of Apostles in 2000. It became the model for what remains the loosely networked structure of a movement that is both decentralized and inherently authoritarian. Apostles would lead their own ministries and churches, sometimes with the counsel of other influential apostles. The movement grew rapidly, creating its own superstars whose power came from the following they cultivated, and who were constantly adding prophecies that sought to explain how current events fit into the great end-times narrative.
Broad-brush terms like Christian nationalism and white evangelicals have tended to obscure these intricacies. NAR’s growth has also gone largely undetected in conventional surveys of American religiosity, with their old categories such as Southern Baptist and Presbyterian. It is most clearly reflected in the rise of nondenominational churches—the only category of churches that is growing in this country—though not fully, because many followers do not attend church. A recent survey by Paul Djupe of Denison University hints at its scope, finding that roughly one-quarter of Americans believe in modern-day prophets and prophecies. Those who have tracked and studied the movement for years often say it is “hiding in plain sight.”
Yet Trump-allied political strategists, such as Roger Stone, understand the power of a movement that offers the GOP a largely untapped well of new voters who are not just old and white and Bible-clinging, but also young and brown, urban and suburban, and primed to hear what the prophets have to say. Recently, Stone told one interviewer that he saw a “demonic portal” swirling over Joe Biden’s White House. “There’s a live cam where you can actually see, in real time,” Stone said. “It’s like a smudge in the sky, almost looks like a cloud that doesn’t move.”
Like Many in the movement, Tami doesn’t use the phrase New Apostolic Reformation, but she first encountered its kind of Christianity in 2015, when a friend gave her a book called Song of Songs: Divine Romance. It is part of a series called The Passion Translation, described by its author, a pastor named Brian Simmons, as a “heart-level” version of the Bible.
At the time, Tami had just extracted herself from what she described as a long and difficult marriage. She had left the traditional evangelical church she’d attended for years, where she said the pastor tended to side with her wealthy husband. She was estranged from some of her family. She was alone and at a vulnerable point in her life when she opened Simmons’s book and began reading passages such as “I am overshadowed by his love, growing in the valley,” and “Let him smother me with kisses—his Spirit-kiss divine,” and “So kind are your caresses, I drink them in like the sweetest wine!”
She had never felt so loved in her life, and she wanted more. The friend who’d given her the book attended Life Center, and Tami signed up for a conference at the church called “Open the Heavens,” where she learned more about prophecy, spiritual warfare, and the idea that she herself had a role to play in advancing the Kingdom of God, if she could discern what it was.
Among the speakers she heard was a rising apostle named Lance Wallnau, a former corporate marketer whose social-media following had grown to 2 million people after he prophesied that Donald Trump was anointed by God. Tami had voted for Trump in 2016, but her interest in Wallnau at this point had more to do with what he’d branded as “the Seven Mountains mandate,” or 7M, the imperative for Christians to build the Kingdom by taking dominion over the seven spheres of society—government, business, education, media, entertainment, family, and religion. Wallnau gives 7M courses and holds 7M conferences, and that is how Tami learned about convergence: the notion that there are moments in life when events come together to reveal one’s Kingdom mission, as Wallnau writes, “like a vortex that sucks into itself uncanny coincidences and ‘divine appointments.’”
That was exactly how Tami felt as she considered buying the mountain. Divine appointments everywhere. At Life Center, a man told her that he’d had a vision of God “pouring onto the mountain” everything she would need. Someone else shared a vision of Tami as a princess riding a horse, which she found ridiculous but also, as a woman who’d always felt under the thumb of some man, compelling. And then she herself heard the voice of God telling her what to do.
“See that?” she said now, back in the car, passing a rusted oil tank where someone had spray-painted what appeared to be a yellow Z.
“I’ll explain that later,” Tami said.
An oil tank on Tami’s property (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)
She and Kevin drove to the former camp director’s home where they now lived. Inside was a piano with a shofar and two swords on top, which Tami had bought to remind herself that she is a triumphant warrior for Christ. On a wall hung a portrait she had commissioned, which depicted her clad in medieval armor. An Appeal to Heaven flag was draped over a chair. She opened a sliding-glass door to a deck overlooking the Allegheny River, and explained what happened after she and Kevin had closed on the mountain: how they began to envision building a “Seven Mountains training center.” How that led to someone from Life Center introducing her to an apostle from the nearby city of New Castle, who visited the mountain and wrote Tami a prophecy—that what was happening was “bigger than whatever you could dream or imagine.” How he introduced her to a group of five men who claimed to be connected to anonymous Kingdom funders, and how, not long after that, the group came to the mountain, where Tami, full of nerves, presented a plan that included a lodge, a conference center, an outdoor stage, and some yurts along the river.
“The main thing they asked is whether we were Kingdom,” Tami said.
She told them that she and Kevin were Kingdom all the way; they told her that God wanted her to double the size of the project, and then told her to “add everything you can possibly dream of,” Tami recalled.
So they did—adding plans for an outdoor pistol range, an indoor pistol range, a tactical pistol range, and a rifle range, along with a paintball course, a zip line, and other recreational facilities. They printed brochures for the Allegheny River Retreat Center, which, Tami said, was now a $120 million project.
As they waited and waited for funding, the 2020 presidential election arrived. Tami again voted for Trump, this time in concert with prophets who said he was an instrument of God. She soon began listening to an influential South Carolina apostle named Dutch Sheets, who had for years advocated an end to Church-state separation and co-authored something called the “Watchman Decree,” a kind of pledge of allegiance that included the phrase “we, the Church, are God’s governing Body on the earth.” Sheets was among a core group of apostles and prophets spreading the narrative that the election had been stolen not just from Trump, but from God. He began promoting daily 15-minute YouTube prayers and decrees, which were like commandments to those in the Kingdom. He branded them “Give Him 15,” or GH15, and at their peak, some videos were getting hundreds of thousands of views.
Tami began reading Sheets’s decrees aloud at sunrise every morning, videotaping herself on the deck overlooking the Allegheny River and posting her videos to Facebook.
“Lord, we will not stop praying for the full exposure of voter fraud in the 2020 elections,” she read on November 12.
“We refuse to take our cue or instructions from the media, political parties, or other individuals,” she read on November 17. “We believe you placed President Trump in office, and we believe you promised two terms. We stand on this.”
She started receiving lots of friend requests and was getting recognized around town. She bought an Appeal to Heaven flag, which Sheets had popularized as a symbol of holy revolution. She kept seeing signs that made her wonder whether the mountain might have a specific purpose in what she was coming to see as a global spiritual battle.
One day the sign was a dove flying across the sky as she read the morning decree, and the dove feathers she found on her doorstep after that. Another day, two women who’d seen her videos showed up at her door with bottles of water from Israel, saying they needed to pour it in “strategic” places along her riverfront that God had revealed to them. Another day, Sheets himself announced that he was holding a prayer rally at the headwaters of the Allegheny River—two hours north of Tami—part of a swing-state prophecy tour as Trump challenged election results.
Tami went. And when Sheets and other apostles and prophets urged followers to convene at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, she felt God telling her to go there, too. So she and Kevin boarded a bus that a friend had chartered to Washington, D.C., where she read the daily decree, the Washington Monument in the background, as Kevin held the Appeal to Heaven flag.
“Let the battle for America’s future be turned today, in Jesus’s name,” she said. From what she described as her vantage point outside the Capitol, the big story of the day was not that a violent insurrection had occurred but rather that a movement of God was under way, another Jesus Revolution. “It was one of the best days of my life,” Tami said.
When she got back to the mountain, she kept recording the daily decrees from her deck, in front of a pink flower pot with an American flag.
“We refuse to allow hope deferred and discouragement to cripple the growth of your people in their true identity—the army you intended them to be,” she read after Joe Biden took office.
She flew to Tampa, Florida, for a stop on the “ReAwaken America” tour. She drove to another one a few hours away from her home, then watched others online, events featuring a roster of prophets alongside the headliner, retired General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, who was now declaring the nation to be in a state of “spiritual war.” She always came home with a cellphone full of new contacts. She began introducing herself as “Tami Barthen, the one who bought a mountain for God.”
Tami and Kevin in a demonstration of prayer (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)
Left: The flag that Tami hangs on her deck, where she reads prayers from Dutch Sheets at sunrise. Right: Tami shows a visitor the feathers that she found on her doorstep. (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)
Occasionally she said this with a note of sarcasm, because the Kingdom funding had yet to come through, and at times she was not sure where all the signs were ultimately pointing. In those moments, she sought more prophecies.
She messaged a prophet who’d appeared on a Dutch Sheets broadcast, asking him what God might tell him about her project. “This is what I hear the Lord saying,” he wrote back. “God says this came forth from His heart and He has already orchestrated the completion.”
At a Kingdom-building conference in Oregon, she asked Nathan French, a prominent prophet, what God was telling him and recorded the answer on her iPhone: “I feel like that mountain is like Zion, and I feel like God is even saying you can name it Mount Zion … I see the Shekinah coming,” he said, using the Hebrew term for God’s presence, “the shock and awe.”
Tami had rolled her eyes at this grand new prediction, but when she got home, another sign appeared.
“The Z on the oil tank,” she said now, sitting on her porch.
It was spring. She took the Zion prophecy, which she had transcribed and printed on thick paper, and slipped it into a binder, where she archived the most meaningful ones in protective plastic covers. She was trying to figure out what it was all adding up to.
“Why was Dutch Sheets at the headwaters of the Allegheny? Why is there a Z on the oil tank? Why am I meeting all these people? There are all these pieces to the puzzle, but I don’t know what it’s supposed to be yet,” Tami said.
A new piece of the puzzle was that Trump had been indicted in New York on charges of falsifying business records related to payoffs to the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels. Tami had watched coverage on an online show called FlashPoint, which has a cable-news format, except that the news bulletins come from prophets.
“This is not just a battle against us; this is a battle against the purposes of God,” one had said about the indictment, and Tami understood this to be an escalation. A few days later, an apostle named Gary Sorensen called. He was an engineer who had been among the group claiming to represent the Kingdom funders. He was calling to invite Tami on a private spiritual-heritage tour of the Pennsylvania capitol, which was being led by one of the most powerful apostles in the state.
Tami took it as another sign, and she and Kevin drove to Harrisburg.
She was slightly nervous. The apostle was a woman named Abby Abildness, who heads a state prayer network that was part of the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, a fixture of the religious right. During the legislative session, she convened weekly prayer meetings with state legislators along with business and religious leaders. She had a ministry called Healing Tree International, which claimed representatives in 115 countries, and focused on what she described as “restoring the God-given destinies of people and nations.” She was just back from Kurdistan, where she had met with a top general in the Peshmerga, the Kurdish military. To Tami, Abildness was like a high-ranking Kingdom diplomat.
“So,” Abildness began. “The tour I do is about William Penn’s vision for what this colony would be. And it starts—if you look up, we have the words he spoke on the rotunda.”
Tami looked up at the gilded words beneath a fresco of ascending angels.
“There may be room there for such a Holy Experiment,” Abildness read. “And my God will make it the seed of a nation.”
“Wow,” Tami said.
They were the kind of words and images found in statehouses all over the country, but which Abildness understood not as historical artifacts but as divine instructions for the here and now.
They headed down a marbled hallway to the governor’s reception room.
“So this is William Penn,” Abildness said, pointing to a panel depicting Penn as a student at Oxford, before he joined the Quaker movement. “He’s sitting in his library and a light comes into the room, and he knows something supernatural is happening.”
They moved on to the Senate chamber.
“Here you are going to see a vision of what society could be if the fullness of what Penn planted came into being—a vision of society where all are recognizing the sovereign God,” Abildness said as they walked inside.
Tami looked around at scenes of kings bowing before Christ, and quotes from the Book of Revelation about mountains.
“You see here, angels are bringing messages of God down to those who would write the laws,” Abildness said.
They moved on to the House chamber.
“This is The Apotheosis,” Abildness said, referring to an epic painting that included a couple of Founding Fathers, and then she pointed to a smaller, adjacent painting, depicting Penn making a peace treaty with the Lenape people.
Tami listened as Abildness explained her interpretation: God had granted Native Americans original spiritual authority over the land; the treaty meant sharing that spiritual authority with Penn; later generations broke the covenant through their genocidal campaign against the Native Americans, and now the covenant needed to be restored in order to fulfill Penn’s original vision for a Holy Experiment. Nothing less than the entire Kingdom of God was riding on Pennsylvania.
Tami listened, thinking of something she’d always wondered about, a sacred Native American site across the river, visible from her deck, known as Indian God Rock. It is a large boulder carved with figures that academic experts believe have religious meaning. As the tour ended, she kept thinking about what it all could mean.
“People I hang with think we’re moving from a church age to a Kingdom age,” Sorensen was saying.
“It’s like, what are all these signs saying?” Tami said.
Left: Tami’s King Solomon sword. Right: A wall in her living room features a painting of her as a spiritual warrior. (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)
Sorensen was involved in various organizations devoted to funding and developing Kingdom projects. There was Reborne Global Trust, and New Kingdom Global, and Abundance Research Institute, among others. He told Tami not to worry about her benefactors coming through. He said $120 million was peanuts to them. He said one funder was an Australian private-wealth manager. He said others were “international benefactors,” as well as “sovereigns,” people he described as “publicly known royal and ruling families of well-known countries.”
“We are looking into establishing a Kingdom treasury,” he said, elaborating that some of the funders were setting up offshore banking accounts. “Outside the central banking system—so we can’t get cut off if we’re not voting right.”
Everything would be coming together soon, he told her.
Driving back to the mountain, Tami and Kevin listened to ElijahStreams, an online platform that launched after the 2020 election. It hosts daily shows from dozens of prominent and up-and-coming prophets, and claims more than 1 million followers.
There were so many apostles and prophets these days—the old standards like Dutch Sheets, and so many younger ones who had podcasts, apps, shows on Rumble. By now Tami followed at least a dozen of them closely, and what she had noticed was how politically involved they had become since the 2020 election and how in recent months, their visions had been getting darker.
Lance Wallnau, whom Tami thought of as fairly moderate, had spoken on Easter Sunday about hearing prophecies of “sudden deaths,” and he himself predicted that “the disciplinary hand of God” would be coming down.
Now, as she and Kevin were winding through the woods, she was listening to a young prophet from Texas named Andrew Whalen, who was being promoted on popular shows lately. He described himself as “close friends” with Dutch Sheets, and on his website, characterized the moment as a “context of war,” when “a new generation is preparing to cross over into ‘lands of inheritance’—places that Christ has given us authority to conquer.”
“I’m boiling on the inside,” he was saying, describing a dream in which he saw the angelic realm working with “earthly governments and militaries.” He continued, “I just say even today, let Operation Fury commence, God. We say let the fury of God’s wrath break forth against every evil work, against systems of demonic and satanic structure.”
Tami listened. And in the coming weeks, she kept listening as Operation Fury became a page on Whalen’s website where people could sign up to help “overthrow jezebel’s influence from our lives.” She kept listening as Trump was indicted a second time, for mishandling classified documents, and a prophet on FlashPoint described the moment as a “battle between good versus evil.”
She sometimes felt afraid when she imagined what was coming.
“It’s going to get bad. It’s going to get worse,” she said. “It’s spiritual warfare, and it’s going to come into the physical. What it’s going to look like? I don’t know. God said to show up at Jericho, and the walls came down. But there are other stories where David killed many people. All I can say is if you believe in God, you’ve got to trust him. If you’re God-fearing, you’ll be protected.”
The morning after her tour in Harrisburg, Tami went out on her deck and recorded the daily decree.
“We use the sword of our mouths just as you instructed,” she read. “The king’s decree and the decrees of the king are hereby law in this land.”
After that, she went to her office.
On her desk were bills she had to pay. On a table were towers of books she’d read about spiritual warfare, demon mapping, the seven mountains. In a file were all the prophecies she’d tried to follow, all the signs.
She thought about Operation Fury, and what Abby Abildness had said about Pennsylvania, and Indian God Rock, and as she began putting all the signs together, she had a thought that filled her with dread.
“I don’t want this job,” she said. “What if I mess up? Why me?”
She pulled out a 259-page book called The Seed of a Nation, about what William Penn envisioned as a “Holy Experiment” in the colony of Pennsylvania, opening it to the last page she had highlighted and underlined.
“See?” she said. “I only got to page 47.”
She thought that maybe the funding was not coming through because she had missed a sign. Maybe she had not been obedient enough. Maybe she, Tami Barthen, was the one delaying the whole Kingdom, and now instead of listening to the voice of God, she was listening to her own voice saying something back: “I’m sorry.”
She thought for a moment about what would happen if she let it all go, if instead of being a Christian warrior on a mountain essential to bringing about the Kingdom of God, she went back to being Tami, who had wanted the peace of a retirement cabin by the river.
Tami in her driveway (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)
“I can’t think of a Plan B,” she said, so she reminded herself of how she had gotten here.
She had been living her life, trying to pull herself out of a dark period, when she felt the love of God save her, and then heard the voice of God tell her to buy a mountain. And who was she to refuse the wishes of God?
So she had bought a mountain, 350 acres redeemed for the Kingdom. Now she would wait for word from the prophets. She reminded herself of a favorite Bible verse.
“He says, ‘Occupy until I come,’” Tami said. “Like the Bible says, ‘Thy kingdom come.’”
