American Dominion

The Rise and Radicalization of a New Christendom

How did a predictable “family values” evangelical politics become the engine of an anti-democratic movement with unprecedented access to American power?

This is the question of the hour, isn’t it?

American Dominion, a new book by Keri Ladner, tackles the question head-on by teasing out the thread of dominionism—“a radical strain of evangelical Christianity that frames political authority as a biblical mandate and treats democracy less as a safeguard than as an obstacle to overcome.”

Here’s an overview:

“Ladner argues that the alliance between Donald Trump and the evangelical right cannot be explained by political expediency alone. Dominionist pastors were among Trump's earliest allies in the 2016 Republican primaries, and after his 2024 election the movement has gained extraordinary influence within the party and the state, including direct proximity to national leaders at the highest levels.

Rooted in an intense, literalized reading of Scripture, dominionism is animated by spiritual warfare: demons are not metaphors but actors, and demonization becomes both a theology and a tool of political mobilization. In this worldview, conspiracy cultures such as QAnon find ready spiritual reinforcement, deepening polarization and accelerating radicalization within the modern Republican coalition.

Moving from the early twentieth-century Pentecostal-charismatic revival movement to today's networked megachurches, Ladner shows how a once-obscure religious fringe built durable institutions and mass appeal through dramatic healing revivals, disciplined teaching, and a steady drumbeat of “chosen nation” rhetoric. She maps the formation of a religious counterculture-often presented as conventional conservatism-shaped by curricula that traveled from homeschooling into wider educational spaces. The result is a vibrant, fast-growing religious movement that promises spiritual power and national renewal, even as it places America's democratic norms under increasing strain.”

Keri was kind enough to offer an excerpt of her book, and she selected a portion on a figure familiar to many of us: Sean Feucht.

Read on:

Sean Feucht had gone on numerous mission trips from the time he was a preteen. With Burn 24-7, he traveled all over the world to lead worship in some of the most dangerous locations for Christians – Iraq, North Korea, Afghanistan, to name just a few. These experiences of gathering with Christians who knew that they could be killed for their faith led him to develop a concept of what Christian persecution is, as well as a resolve to show what he called “brazen faith” in the midst of it.

So when the covid pandemic led to global shutdowns in the spring of 2020, he thought that he knew what he was dealing with. California Governor Gavin Newsom implemented strict lockdowns to help slow the spread of the virus, and one thing these lockdowns meant was that church services had to transition from in-person to online. Feucht figured that this move was fine for the first couple of months. After all, he had just lost a primary election that he was so certain God would cause him to win. This defeat had led him into a state of depression as he questioned everything about God and faith. Taking a break and staying home with his wife and four children came like a reprieve.

Then came the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020, and lockdowns meant nothing as cities across the country erupted into rioting and sometimes violence. Instead of staying home, people took to the street to protest police brutality and racist policies that have led to countless deaths of African Americans. Where was the church? Feucht wondered. As the country descended into the chaos of racial unrest during the covid summer of 2020, while churches were unable to hold in-person services, he reached the boiling point.

In July, Governor Newsom issued an order that churches that had begun meeting again could not sing. To Feucht, this order meant that Christians could no longer worship. He had smuggled Bibles into difficult-to-access countries, and now an American government was preventing Christians from worshiping together – at least worshiping as Feucht understood it. “So when we break the law overseas because foreign governments condemn Christian worship and evangelization, what are we to do when the laws of our own nation forbid the same practices?” he wrote in his second memoir, published in 2022. “Then, as tighter and tighter restrictions closed in around us in California, I started getting texts from connections I had made in those dangerous places overseas, asking me things like, ‘What’s going on with your government? I thought you had religious freedom, and they’re saying that you can’t gather, you can’t preach without a mask, and now that you can’t sing?” And then the ultimate question, a challenge really: “What are you going to do, brother?”

What he was going to do is use the greatest weapon that God had given to the church to tear down the strongholds that were gripping the country.

He was going to worship.

A few days after Governor Newsom’s order, Feucht gathered a crowd at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. He saw prophetic significance in the location, as “one of the gates in Jerusalem that leads to the Temple Mount is called the Golden Gate, and it was through this that Jesus entered Jerusalem.” Through the worship that he would lead on July 9, 2020, he would open up the “Golden Gate” to the West for Christ. Hundreds of people came. In Feucht’s telling, police officers who patrol the bridge for suicide jumpers thanked him. This event marked the first event in his “Let Us Worship” tour, a cross-country series of massive worship rallies that defied covid lockdowns and called on the church to wage spiritual warfare against a government that was trying to silence it.

With his guitar, he had what America needed at this critical hour. “Bold worship is like fervent prayer,” he wrote of the tour’s impact. “It is like the army marching tirelessly… It shouts and declares God’s faithfulness in the face of enemy fortifications. It forces the walls of the enemy to absorb the roar of victory before the victory becomes a reality.”

But then the question becomes,

Who is the enemy?

From Latter Rain to Columbine to the 7 Mountains Mandate, from homeschoolers and Tea Party activists to J6, Mike Johnson, and Project 2025, this book pulls together the disparate pieces that have combined to bring us to where we are now.

You can pick up a copy of American Dominion at your favorite local bookstore, or here at Bookshop.org.

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Regular Convocation listeners, have no fear! We’re returning from our two-week hiatus with a live episode today at 5pm ET.

Bring your questions, and we’ll share all the things we’ve been up to.

With Hegseth’s crusade against Iran, Trump’s battle against the pope, and Trump/Jesus/doctor post, we have a lot of catching up to do.