Editor’s note: This profile is part of a GPAHE series examining the people shaping American Christian nationalism in post–Project 2025 America. Christian nationalism is distinct from Christianity itself; mainstream churches have publicly rejected the movement as a distortion of the Christian faith. The figures profiled here are the architects of a theocratic, political project working to fuse American national identity with conservative Christian supremacist rule and dismantle democratic institutions.
Lance Wallnau gave the Christian right its plan to seize the ‘seven mountains’ of American life, and recast a thrice-married casino magnate and reality star as a modern King Cyrus, anointed by God. In 2024, Wallnau ran a revival tour through the swing states that recruited poll workers, funded by a secret club of Christian multimillionaires.
Key Takeaways
- Wallnau popularized the Seven Mountain Mandate, the dominionist doctrine that orders Christian nationalists to conquer the “mountains” of society, from government and media to business and the family.
- His 2016 book, God’s Chaos Candidate, turned a vote for Trump into an act of faith.
- Wallnau is the spiritual visionary behind Ziklag, a covert club of multimillionaire Christian donors that spent nearly $12 million on the 2024 election.
- He spent November and December 2020 telling his audience the vote was stolen; one rioter charged over January 6 cited his show as the reason he came to Washington.
Vice-presidential candidate JD Vance appeared at the Courage Tour in late September 2024 and answered a pastor’s questions about his faith. The tour was Lance Wallnau’s, a revival roadshow he was running through the swing states. Wallnau told his audiences that Kamala Harris is demonically possessed and that Donald Trump is a king God chose to save America.
Wallnau, 70, is a Texas preacher who calls himself a prophet and a practitioner of “strategic-level spiritual warfare.” He handed the Christian right the strategy it now uses to justify taking power in God’s name, and the theology that made Donald Trump, to millions of believers, God’s instrument. Matthew Taylor, a visiting scholar at the Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown University, whose book The Violent Take It by Force traces the network behind January 6, calls him “the most important evangelical political theologian of the twenty-first century so far.”
A Blueprint for Takeover
Wallnau did not invent the doctrine. In 1975, Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ and Loren Cunningham of Youth With a Mission compared lists of the cultural “mountains” they believed God wanted Christians to capture. The count settled at seven: government, media, education, family, religion, business, and the arts.
Wallnau sharpened the idea into a political program. In his 2013 book Invading Babylon, co-written with Bethel Church pastor Bill Johnson, he recast the seven mountains as a plan to take over the institutions that run the country. He hangs the whole program on two words from Genesis — “have dominion” — and reads them as a literal order to govern. Frederick Clarkson, who has spent four decades documenting the religious right’s drive for political power at Political Research Associates, calls it a theocratic bid for “dominion over every aspect of society.” Taylor says “Christian nationalism” is too soft a word for it and names it “Christian supremacy.”
“Yes, I am a Christian nationalist,” Wallnau said on a 2021 livestream, when most of his peers still treated the phrase as an insult. Since then he has tried to soften it, recasting the Christian nationalist as a harmless “Christian patriot.” He claims, falsely, that the label once belonged to Lincoln and the Roosevelts. He broadcasts daily from Dallas and keeps a standing seat on the far-right prophecy show FlashPoint.
The Apostle’s Protégé
Wallnau came up inside the New Apostolic Reformation, the movement the church-growth professor C. Peter Wagner named and organized in the 1990s. Wagner taught that God was restoring the lost offices of apostle and prophet, with living apostles — himself among them — holding authority over a single global church; he called it “the most radical change in the way of doing church since the Protestant Reformation,” and he took Wallnau on as a protégé. Wallnau would turn the movement toward elections.
The movement came with a battle plan. Its apostles practice what they call spiritual warfare. They name the demonic “principality” they believe rules a city or a nation, then they hold a mass prayer on site to drive it out. Wallnau read the whole country that way, as occupied ground he was sent to reclaim.
Anointing a Casino King
In 2015, with the evangelical establishment holding its nose at Trump’s casinos, bankruptcies, and divorces, Wallnau found a way around the problem. He reached back to King Cyrus, the pagan Persian whom God uses in the Book of Isaiah to rescue his people, and cast Trump in the same role — a sinner God had chosen anyway. His 2016 book, God’s Chaos Candidate, told wary evangelicals that Trump was the wrecking ball God would swing at a corrupt order. They listened.
Within weeks of the 2017 inauguration, Wallnau went on the show of Jim Bakker, the disgraced PTL televangelist who served prison time for fraud and now sells buckets of end-times survival food, and explained that Trump had knocked a “spirit of witchcraft” out of the Oval Office and turned it loose in the streets — which was why, he said, millions of women had marched against the new president the day after he was sworn in.
The Prophets and the Mob
Biden’s win against Trump in 2020 did not move Wallnau off his prophecy. Night after night through November and December 2020, he broadcast that the election had been stolen and that keeping Trump in office was God’s own work. Taylor ranks him among “the key Christian mobilizers for January 6th.” One man charged in the riot cited Wallnau’s show as the reason he came to Washington, sure that he was joining a permitted rally.
He was not alone. Cindy Jacobs, from the same apostolic circle, set up a stage within yards of the Capitol and prayed as the mob went in. Wallnau was in Washington too, headed for a microphone at a pro-Trump rally when the crowd breached the building; he turned back to his hotel and streamed the day instead. Months later, touring the swing states for the next election, he called the riot “an election fraud intervention.”
Demons on the Ballot
Wallnau’s Courage Tour pulled into Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in late July 2024. Onstage, Joshua Standifer, who runs Lion of Judah — a poll-worker recruiting group that calls itself the “Christian version of the NRA” — urged the crowd to register and slip inside the election system as a “Trojan Horse.” Wallnau had said from the start what the tour was for — breaking the “demonic strongholds” that kept Republicans from winning.
He did not run it alone. Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA put its muscle behind the tour, and the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute pitched in. It rolled through the battleground counties that Wallnau said God had marked, and at each stop a voter-registration table sat beside the altar.
When a gunman grazed Trump’s ear in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024, Wallnau got the push alert on his phone and, before he turned on any news, he went to the life-size cardboard effigy of Donald Trump he keeps at home. He cupped its cardboard ears in both hands, and as he told his followers, only afterward learned that was where the bullet had caught Trump. The timing, he said in a 32-minute retelling, was “nothing but divine intervention.”
He saved his harshest language for Harris. He called her a Jezebel more dangerous than Hillary Clinton, citing her race and her youth, and wrote on Facebook that Satan had sent her to take Trump out. He had said much the same about Clinton in 2016.
The Vance town hall may have crossed a legal line. Putting a vice-presidential nominee on a revival stage six weeks before the election ran up against the ban on tax-exempt groups campaigning, Baptist News reported; the donor fund Ziklag had underwritten the tour with a $700,000 grant. Wallnau had run the play before, stumping in 2022 for Doug Mastriano, the election-denying candidate for Pennsylvania governor who lost by nearly 15 points.
The Billionaires’ Crusade
Ziklag is an invitation-only network of Christian families, each worth at least $25 million — the Uihleins of Uline, the Greens behind Hobby Lobby, the Wallers who own Jockey. ProPublica and Documented obtained thousands of its internal files in 2024, which list Wallnau as the group’s “visionary and advisor.”
The fund’s money flowed to the Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal group that helped end Roe v. Wade and exports its anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ+ model abroad, and to Turning Point USA.
Wallnau kept one piece for himself, an operation he called Watchtower, built to work transgender rights as a “wedge” — the “target on the forehead of Goliath” he believed could pull tired voters back to Trump.
The Statesman Evangelists
Days after Trump won in 2024, Wallnau told his online crowd that “the government and the church” could finally move together to claim the government mountain worldwide. He described a coming “Pax Romana” in which Trump would send “statesman evangelists,” himself included, to press foreign rulers to Christianize their countries on the American model. Their own governments would host and bankroll the revivals, he said, because “Christianity will bless your nation.” CBS canceled Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. The White House squeezed Harvard. Wallnau, in an August 2025 broadcast, cast both as the ‘high places’ of culture falling to the right kind of Christians.
Two cardboard effigies now share the library where Wallnau says he can feel angels — one of Donald Trump, the other of Elon Musk, mailed in by a follower. In May 2026, Wallnau laid hands on the cardboard president and asked God to harden him against Iran, then turned to the Musk cutout and prayed that the richest man alive might have a quiet “encounter with the resurrected Christ.”
For years, Wallnau worked the revival circuit and told his crowds the country was theirs to take. The billionaire donors behind him are still writing checks, and his poll-worker activists have worked their way into the election system, county by county. Trump has opened a White House faith office and a Justice Department task force to hunt “anti-Christian bias.”
In His Own Words
“I heard the Lord say, ‘Isaiah 45 will be the 45th president.’ I go check it out; Isaiah 45 is Cyrus.”
— His founding claim that Trump was Cyrus, to CBN News, 2017.
“There was a deliverance of the nation from the spirit of witchcraft in the Oval Office.”
— On The Jim Bakker Show, February 7, 2017.
“You see the Left is loaded with demons.”
— On FlashPoint, 2024.
“She is the devil’s choice.”
— His verdict on Kamala Harris, July 2024.
“Jesus told me that Trump was going to be put back in office for the sake of the nations.”
— Laying out his plan to remake the world under Trump, on the Encounter Today podcast, March 2025.
“Take all the domains we can while we have the wind to our back.”
— Describing his “Nehemiah Project” to fuse government, church, and business, March 2025.
