Mike Johnson Gathers Far-Right Christians to Cast Out Demons

Tim Dickinson
·7 min read
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House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and two dozen members of Congress assembled at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., last week for the second-annual National Gathering for Prayer and Repentance. The event was chock-a-block with Christian nationalist pastors and featured a clarion call for spiritual warfare, with members of Congress beseeching fellow Christians to “tie the hands of Satan” and to “bind the demonic forces” that are supposedly possessing America.

The National Gathering for Prayer and Repentance is the brainchild of Johnson, a religious zealot who is second in line for the presidency and who, as Rolling Stone has reported, is convinced that America is “dark and depraved” and deserves God’s wrath. The gathering is staged as a far-right counterweight to the National Prayer Breakfast, a longstanding ecumenical religious event, which was also held in Washington last week. That gathering was attended by President Joe Biden, who offered a bland prayer that America should remember its character of “honesty, decency, dignity, and respect,” and find strength in togetherness.

The NGPR, by contrast, featured extremist calls for Christians to stand in opposition to sinful American culture — in particular the rise of LGBTQ freedoms, the environmental movement, and the practice of abortion. The kind of repentance sought by the speakers was often less for personal failings than for the failure of Christians to exert power and control over those who don’t obey their theology.

Pastor Ché Ahn, for example, is a far-right Christian nationalist who spoke at the “Stop the Steal” protest seeking to keep 2020 election loser Donald Trump in office, a day before the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Ahn is a leader of the New Apostolic Reformation, an ascendant, power-obsessed religious movement that calls on Christians to take dominion over the nations of the world in order to hasten the return of Jesus. In his call for repentance, Ahn lamented: “We have abdicated our responsibility to occupy until You come.”

Other NAR leaders who took the stage included the “apostle” Dutch Sheets, who preaches that Christians “have been given legal power and authority from Heaven,” and Lou Engle, who prayed at NGPR for 100,000 LGBTQ Americans “to be saved and transformed by the power of God.” Matthew Taylor, a religion scholar who has written about the rise of Christian nationalism for Rolling Stone, argues that the NGPR event showcased “the creeping influence of anti-democratic theologies and practices among our elected officials.”

While extremist preachers inveighed against demons and false gods, Johnson played it relatively straight — praying for Solomonic wisdom to execute God’s will. The NGPR ceremony was emceed by its co-founders Jim Garlow, also considered an “apostle” in the NAR movement, and Tony Perkins, who leads the Focus on the Family, a stalwart organization of the old-school religious right. Both men are longtime mentors of Johnson, who became speaker in October.

As a faith leader, Garlow comes out of Charismatic Christianity, which believes in “gifts of the spirit” like faith healing and speaking in tongues. The NAR movement takes this embrace of the supernatural even further, insisting that prophesy and divine revelation are not biblical bygones, but alive in our present world — as is a constant struggle between angels and demons, which humans can influence through prayer or so-called “spiritual warfare.”

Perkins comes out of an extremely conservative, but more traditional, Southern Baptist religious practice. Yet at NGPR, the usually stiff-starched Perkins was speaking the expansive language of the Charismatics.

“We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age,” he told the crowd.

“We must battle in the heavenlies,” Perkins exhorted attendees, because, he insisted, “the sexual perversion and confusion that has gripped our nation and our children — that’s not a political agenda. That is a demonic attack.” Perkins also pointed to abortion and the environmental movement (what he called “placing the planet above people”) as “rooted in the spiritual attacks on mankind.”

NAR leaders like Garlow fetishize Old Testament worship practices, and the NGPR proceedings began with a bearded man simultaneously blowing two shofars, or trumpets fashioned from animal horns. As Garlow explained, one symbolized a “call to arms,” and the other represented “the sound of travail before a holy and righteous God.”

The keynote speaker for NGPR was the controversial “messianic rabbi” Jonathan Cahn. Cahn grew up Jewish but accepted Christ as his savior, and he now leads the Beth Israel Worship Center in New Jersey. He is perhaps best known for his mystical, pop-religion bestsellers. NGPR attendees received a copy of Cahn’s book The Return of the Gods, which Garlow insisted is “explains what is happening in America … more than any other one single book I am aware of.”

In his address, Cahn recapped the theological argument of that book — that America is not fighting nameless demons, but against the influence of three pagan gods from the age of the Old Testament. Cahn preached that because America has abandoned the Christian God, this “dark trinity” is staging a “repossession” of the country.

Cahn named these three false gods as Baal, “the spirit that drives God out of every realm of public life”; Ishtar, “the spirit of sexual immorality” and “unbridled lust”; and Moloch, who tempts parents to engage in “the sacrifice of their own children.” Cahn’s sermon presented the culture wars (over secularism, sexual and LGBTQ rights, and abortion) as a holy war against insidious false deities, and he didn’t speak as if this were a metaphorical struggle. “We must pray for the power of God to cast out the spirits of darkness, from our land, from the halls of our Capitol here,” Cahn insisted, shouting: “Cast out the gods, cast out the spirits, and set America free!”

Following Cahn’s fire-and-brimstone address, the soft-spoken Johnson then led a procession of lawmakers to the stage, who were all wearing work suits and their congressional pins, to make personal professions. The assembly included House lawmakers as well as at least one senator, James Lankford of Oklahoma.

Many of the congressional prayers were revealing — showing some lawmakers apparently do not see themselves as representing members of other faiths, or of no faith at all. At least two representatives made direct invocations of the kind of spiritual warfare promoted by Cahn and the organizers.

Republican Rep. Greg Steube serves a swath of Florida’s Gulf Coast. He is a younger member of Congress who wears slicked-back hair and a trim beard. His prayer began: “We decree repentance from sin shall begin to rise across the United States of America; people everywhere shall turn from their wicked ways.” Steube then invoked a supernatural struggle. “We bind the demonic forces … of resistance and rebellion among God’s people!” He then added: “We prophesy that the intellectualists, who refuse instruction, will not trample the efforts of those who desire God’s grace and mercy to invade our land.”

Fellow Florida Republican Rep. María Elvira Salazar, who serves much of Miami, spoke in a mixture of English and Spanish. Invoking “the power that we have as Christians,” she declared, “We tie the hands of Satan and all his demons, and send them under the feet of Jesus.” Salazar continued: “In the name of Jesus, we declare that each person — regardless of the race, nationality, language — will serve You and will praise You as Lord.” Invoking a Christian nationalist understanding of America, she continued: “We will preserve this country the way You formed it, and the way You envisioned it,” concluding: “Lo declaramos en el nombre de Jesús, amen.”

Wearing a sharp suit and his rounded glasses, Johnson then stepped to the dais. He offered no critique of the supernatural or anti-democratic sentiments of his colleagues. Instead, he declared simply, “How encouraging it is to hear the humble prayers of those in authority.” The speaker quickly added: “If anybody asks you if there’s any ‘salt and light’ left in Washington, you tell them there is.”

Johnson has argued that God lifted him into his own position of authority, and he has told other audiences that he speaks personally to the Lord — who prepared him for a “Red Sea moment,” in which he would be a Moses-like figure leading a divided GOP through roiling waters. At NGPR, Johnson invoked another Old Testament figure, Solomon, praying that God might give him the latter’s “wise and discerning heart” so that Congress, he said, “can govern and administer justice in a way that is pleasing, and honorable, to You.”

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