Desperate Souls- The Dangerous Logic in Mike Johnson's Head
“This isn’t a church, James. It’s a hospital.” Worship Leader, New Life Church, Madison, WI - 1995
Anthropologists love a good indigenous metaphor - church as hospital definitely qualifies.
In this field site, though, the proverbial “natives” were Midwestern Baby Boomers and a smattering of elders, most of whom had crashed out of emotionally stable middle-class life through various forms of addiction, traumatic domestic abuse, and mental illness (in some cases, all three).
Every Sunday at New Life Church, alongside an arterial highway snaking through the low-density suburbs of Madison, WI, hundreds of people gathered in a repurposed warehouse to enter into a very literal, mystical communion with the Holy Spirit.
To a secular academic like me, this was as bizarre a place as the annual goat sacrifice to a lineage deity in rural Tamil Nadu I witnessed a few years later (which also included possession by the deity).
New Life was a late 20th-century, rock ' n ' roll, sweatpants and T-shirt descendant of a much more well-known, more formal religious movement, birthed right after 1900 - Pentecostalism.1 New Life and its ritually affiliated sister churches were dealing with the initial social fallout from drug addiction and a collapse in mental health care that accelerated after the 1960s. Heroin. Cocaine. Ecstasy. Crack. And noncompliant mentally ill adults ricocheting around the well-dusted and vacuumed hallways of suburbia due to ‘modern’ laws preventing involuntary psychiatric commitment.
It turns out that severe mental illness and addiction to brain-damaging drugs can do a lot of emotional and financial damage to families and local social networks with no physical violence at all. We are just starting to accept this reality as a country that values individual privacy and liberty to an extent that is unparalleled anywhere else on the planet.
In 1995, however, the broken adult who crashed on the jagged shores of individualism had better access to healing centers like New Life church than they did to professional therapy and addiction medicine. Religion and magic still offered the cheapest, easiest solution to psycho-social implosion. For many Americans, this remains the case, despite the United States being the wealthiest nation on Earth.
Moreover, back in the 1990s, many of us, including myself, openly mocked anyone who sought either form of healing. That’s how little we wanted to discuss these issues openly. That’s how much we prayed at the altar of self-control and personal responsibility. We worshipped a secular God who enabled our lack of community obligation and compassion for the broken.
Yet, there was something else going on at New Life, something I failed to notice because I didn’t have easy access to quantitative historical data on religious movements that we now have, and because the hypothesis just didn’t occur to my inexperienced brain.
This lurking danger at New Lige was a growing belief in a phenomenon known as spiritual warfare. Spiritual warfare is a potent metaphor actively stoked in Pentecostal and charismatic Christian churches as an idiom of power. Instead of guns, believers wield the Holy Spirit as a magical tool for aggressive (but generally nonviolent) worldly action. The original belief is that intercessory prayer affects worldly outcomes. It is magical thinking at its most primal. And it seems harmless enough…until you examine the symbolic logic more closely and consider where it can lead the evangelical mind when it becomes intensely frustrated and alienated by social changes around it.
Teaching Spiritual Warfare to the BrokenI mentioned earlier that the dramatic histrionics of charismatic Christian ritual originated in early 20th-century Pentecostalism. The latter began as a fringe faith movement among the urban poor at the height of industrial blight in the West, and subsequently spread globally among working-class Christians in Latin America, Africa, and India. The financial and physical despair of workers in meatpacking plants, steel mills, ironworks, and coal mines is infamous in American social history. It does not take much imagination to understand why industrial workers before unionization might be tempted into otherworldly, escapist rituals where they could have some semblance of empowerment.
One of the primary focuses in any Pentecostal or charismatic church service is the display of spiritual gifts during the service itself. The most dramatic ‘gift’ may be “speaking in tongues,” which I heard regularly during my fieldwork at New Life. To me, though, this was less interesting and less common than what happens during a moment in the service known as “the altar call.”
This is a moment when the pastor will invite worshippers up front to “receive the Holy Spirit” and possibly be healed. When I use the word ‘receive,’ I mean it literally. I mean that worshippers intend to become possessed by the third pillar of the Holy Trinity (the most ignored in mainstream Protestant theology and ideology). Only some worshippers will ‘receive’ in any one service, though many will raise their hands and try. “Reception” is a form of spiritual test, a test of the individual’s spiritual thirst and moral purity.
Receiving the Holy Spirit is a form of cathartic mystical communion familiar to cultural anthropologists who have studied thousands of different rituals of divine possession, primarily in preliterate societies and similarly less educated populations. Catharsis is a form of healing, when viewed from an anthropologist’s desk, but not as pointed as “faith healing,” also practiced in charismatic and Pentecostal circles.
Some of you reading this may read “receiving the Holy Spirit” and think of the snake-handling churches in West Virginia, which film documentarians made famous decades ago for their particularly terrifying ritual - handling venomous rattlesnakes while receiving the Holy Spirit for ‘protection.’2 If the worshipper dies of a snake bite, they were unrepentant sinners…a terrifyingly cruel logic common to those who believe in something called spiritual warfare.
Despite the snake-handing ‘stereotype’, receiving the Holy Spirit today looks more like this:
Image courtesy of The Rhode Island Catholic https://www.thericatholic.com/stories...Raising one's hands high over one's head is the first phase of the process - making oneself physically submissive to divine power. This comes more naturally to individuals who feel socially vulnerable or otherwise feel out of control or broken. You won’t find a lot of private equity bankers doing this. The second phase of the ritual is when individuals surrender to the Spirit, so to speak, and fall to their knees or lie down on their backs near the altar area. Often, it is a literal collapse from a standing position. Charismatics refer to this as being “slain in the spirit.”
It looks like this -
Lying on a dirty church floor is a perfect symbolic inversion of middle-class norms designed to shock attendees into suspending disbelief. Rituals of possession also need to demarcate the possessed from mere onlookers very clearly, physically.
Connected to “becoming slain by the Spirit” is a more critical supporting belief - a belief that we all live in a completely fallen world controlled by an aggressive, insatiable, almost psychopathically ingenious Satan against whom believers must use the Holy Spirit as their magical defense, lest they succumb to dark temptations like drugs, alcohol, or abusive husbands.
In charismatic churches, it is a sporadic occurrence for worshippers to raise their hands to receive, only to find the Devil taking control of their convulsing bodies. I witnessed this once in 1995 as one of the tortured, upper-middle-class addicts in the church began shrieking and swearing obscenities at the rest of the worshippers. Prayer leaders immediately surrounded this individual as a form of battle prayer and eventually calmed her down. My mind immediately went to the film, The Exorcist.
This is the kind of extreme ritual practice that causes some to never return to these churches, I assure you. And I’m sure this is extremely disturbing to read about for some of you. But you need to understand that this is the spiritual worldview of Pete Hegseth, Mike Johnson, and televangelist Paula White, among others in Trump’s inner orbit.
From a mainstream religious perspective, this all seems creepy and incredibly superstitious, even cult-like. If you’re just learning about this religious behavior by reading this essay, though, you are experiencing the outcome of America’s deep lifestyle fragmentation that has allowed this particular religious movement to grow and grow without your awareness, now reaching all the way into the House speakership and White House.
It’s beyond the point where the center can ignore where such a spiritual belief system can take people and politicians who believe in it.
The Key Social Fact: Spiritual Warfare Has Spread Deep Into the Middle-ClassRegardless of anyone’s secular cringe, millions of Americans attend these kinds of charismatic churches every Sunday morning, despite their innocuous exterior and cheery names. There are roughly 9,000 independent, non-denominational churches in America today, a number that is growing every year as demand for this spiritually intense ritual increases among disaffected individuals. 3 America excels at producing addicts and abused individuals despite all its knowledge and wealth.
Although 26% of Americans are evangelicals,4 most of the latter do NOT support the belief structure or ritual practices of the Pentecostal/Charismatic crowd, especially speaking in tongues or becoming slain in the Spirit. Spiritual warfare is NOT their thing. They may be fundamentalists, but they regard charismatic practices and spiritual warfare as idolatrous misinterpretations of scripture. They do not believe in magic, only a strict moral adherence.
Belief in spiritual warfare and charismatic protection from the Devil is part of a broader, pan-denominational movement known by academic theologians as Renewalism. It is very much a religious critique of modern social life and its ills. Mike Johnson is an active proponent.5 Some Renewalists never attend charismatic or Pentecostal churches, in part, because these magical beliefs can easily be practiced in private prayer rituals almost anywhere. And because there is still a stigma around this kind of worship.
According to one recent study, 25% of American evangelicals claim they have spoken in tongues.6 If valid, this means that at least 7% of American adults are ‘believers’ in the same cosmology that incorporates a passionate belief in spiritual warfare common to all charismatic churches.
For the recovered addict or felon, a mystical cosmology of spiritual warfare invites the wounded in for social validation and healing. Then it allows them to move past the messy therapeutic reality of their own personal responsibility for past sins (i.e., atonement). Instead, a worldview anchored in spiritual warfare distracts believers with a never-ending, paranoid battle with the Devil as a form of public service (i.e., to prevent others from being ‘taken’).
The nondenominational charismatic movement emerged in the 1970s and spread into a host of non-denominational churches with cryptic, inoffensive names. Its regular adherents only represent 1% of American adults today, according to Pew’s latest work, but the broader Pentecostal movement promoting the same emphasis on spiritual gifts represents an additional 6%. And then there are the unidentified cross-over individuals who occasionally go to charismatic churches for ‘healing’ while primarily attending mainline churches. I met several of these folks in my 1990s research.
I’m guessing that anywhere from 7-10% of American adults, or 18-26 million people, believe in this cosmology of spiritual warfare and charismatic protection and healing. When we dive into this world of mostly non-denominational evangelicals, we find that they are surprisingly similar to the general population of American adults when it comes to educational attainment and household income.
6% of Americans are non-denominational evangelicals (heavily charismatic):
40% are college grads (vs. 38%)
37% are $100K+ households - (vs. 41%)
According to Pew’s recent work, self-identifying charismatic Christians have almost identical attributes as a population. These folks, including most of those at New Life back in 1995, are everyday middle-class Americans, not the oppressed industrial laborers that birthed the Pentecostal movement in 1900.
Today’s Pentecostal movement remains a world of the urban and rural poor:
15% college grads (vs. 38% in the general population)
16% are $100K households - (vs. 41% in the general population)
The most significant takeaway from the widespread adoption of charismatic Christian practices (i.e., receiving spiritual gifts) over the last 30-40 years is that it has effectively brought Pentecostal ritual into the mainstream American middle class. No longer is receiving the Holy Spirit a “white trash” snake-handling affair or the ‘balm of the working class’ as Karl Marx might put it.
Perhaps more importantly, Millennial and Gen Z practicing Christians are twice as likely to experience ‘spiritual gifts’ linked to the Charismatic movement.7 In other words, the evangelical or born-again movement is trending toward charismatic religious experiences of divine power and spiritual warfare cosmology.
This mainstreaming of an extreme worldview anchored in spiritual warfare matters because it means that wealthy evangelicals affiliated with the charismatic revolution can fund political races that bring the worldview of spiritual warfare against Satan directly into the Congressional and Executive branches of the United States.
A Spiritual Power Trip That Threatens The RepublicTo some extent, how an individual chooses to heal after addiction and abuse is none of our business, unless…unless the cure is worse than the original problem. Unless the cure creates an individual who has simply traded one set of anti-social behaviors for another set. Unless the ideology that heals undermines the spirit of a democratic Republic.
And what I believe has happened, sadly, is that the ‘cure’ unleashed in these middle-class charismatic churches has birthed a true social evil - a childishly simplistic cosmology of war between Satan and Christ that all too easily becomes politicized by wealthier believers capable of funding political ambition.
To understand why it concerns me, we need to delve deeper into this worldview, even though it might drive us nuts to do so. I’ll never forget something that the amiable, ex-alcoholic and convicted drug-dealing pastor of New Life Church told me in his office during my research:
“If God wants to speak to us through a donkey’s butt, we’ll sit quietly around the donkey’s butt and listen.”
This is not just a post-modern evangelical joke; it is a hugely dangerous political stance that has been brewing quietly for decades in hundreds of charismatic and Pentecostal churches.
How do I make this leap?
Well, it comes back to the foundational set of charismatic Christian assumptions about the world since the advent of Pentecostalism at least.
We live in a fallen world where Satan has the upper hand
Satan is actively manipulating individuals around us and close to us (i.e., drugs, abuse, mental illness)
We must beg God to defend us from the rising tide of evil (i.e., otherwise Satan easily wins)
God may utilize evil and broken people to accomplish his larger goal of preparing for the Second Coming (i.e,. the God who plays both sides)
For churches full of ex-cons and former addicts, this is a convenient belief system and definitely an attractive one.
And it explains why so many of these folks support Donald Trump as a political figure who has no real religious beliefs at all (and never has to anyone who has followed his life before 2016). If God can speak through the corrupted, immoral person, then believers may need to be open to voting for an immoral candidate (something classic evangelicals do not favor).
Mike Johnson’s spiritual journey, viewed from a distance, parallels the rise of charismatic Christian beliefs in spiritual warfare. His hometown of Shreveport, LA, is a southern Baptist stronghold, the dominant segment of Christians by far, according to the Association of Religion Data Archives. As of 2020, there were 151 Southern Baptist churches in the Shreveport metro area. But the second largest group of local churches is 102 nondenominational ones. Many Southern Baptists do not advertise their cross-attendance, much like many Democrats do not advertise their gun ownership. The proximity of both streams of religious ritual, however, indicates how Mike Johnson and others in Shreveport have had easy access to charismatic or Renewalist ideologies and beliefs, even if they no longer show up at nondenominational services for reasons of ‘image maintenance.’ (To be fair, I looked hard and could not find any evidence that Mike Johnson has attended nondenominational services or been slain in the Spirit. I’d have to ask him directly).
Yet, he does have close friendships and alliances with charismatic leaders:
The tone, message, and involvement of certain evangelical leaders put into public view Johnson's connections with figures that Taylor considers to be Christian extremists. Johnson is a Southern Baptist, but it's his ties with a particular network of non-denominational, charismatic Christians that's drawing scrutiny. The network is known as the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR. The movement is small but growing quickly, and so is its political influence. Its followers believe there is a theological imperative to bring America under, quote, "biblical governance." They have a plan. It's known as the Seven Mountains Mandate, or dominion theology.8
The cosmology of spiritual warfare places the individual in a wartime situation of great urgency, one in which the laws and rules of government become subordinated easily.
God’s Law supercedes ‘Man’s Law.’9
This is the Machiavellian right-wing logic of the Heritage Foundation, Mike Johnson, and others in Congress. The charismatic cosmology (i.e. spiritual warfare) of Renewalism explains why otherwise conventional-seeming evangelicals will work with an “ass” to get what they want - access to the power to destroy secular regulations that weaken “God’s army.”
When I was doing fieldwork in the charismatic Christian community in 1995, I can’t say there was a ton of ideological discipline or consistency from person to person. The healing function is what brought them there, and I suspect most drifted away once healed. Only a minority of true loyalists held to the cosmology of war between Christ and Satan. They became hooked on the healing juice.
For those whose lives have been nearly destroyed by a loss of self-control, submitting yourself to a cosmic war is a thrilling, enticing, and empowering act. It distracts them from their various addictions by feeding a basal narcissistic orientation with a new set of objectives for personal aggrandization. But, in a way, this is also the evangelical version of post-1960s anti-institutionalism. It is an extremist right-wing critique of social change that empowers certain believers to see themselves as above the Law for a just cause.
https://www.thearda.com/us-religion/h...
2https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Gh...
3https://www.christianitytoday.com/202....
4Pew Religious Landscape Study using 2023-2024 data.
5Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Apo... https://www.npr.org/2023/11/15/121153...
6https://wava.com/articles/headlines/m....
7This is based on a sample of n=586 adults who go to Christian services at least a few times a year within a large study performed by https://prri.org/spotlight/the-future....
8https://www.npr.org/2023/12/05/121745...
9The Renewalist movement quietly uses the revolutionary era flag “An Appeal to Heaven” as its core symbol. Although American revolutionaries in 1775 used it to challenge the divine right of Kings, charismatic Christians use it to symbolize that God, not the courts, are the ultimate arbiter of good and just government. And, of course, Renewalists claim openly to speak for God to the rest of us, the fallen sinners.
