The Biggest Religious Movement You Never Heard of: Nine Things You Need to Know About Rick Perry's Prayer Event

When Texas Gov. Rick Perry decided to stage a Texas-size prayer event — dubbed “The Response” — on Aug. 6, it no doubt seemed like the right thing to do at the time. It received little critical scrutiny when he announced it back in early June, except on websites that track these sorts of things. But after Rachel Maddow, drawing on these sites, did a segment highlighting some of the more bizarre statements made by Perry's high-profile religious endorsers, things cooled considerably — even though the real story is still not remotely well-understood.

“Perry’s endorsers are not just a random group of radical evangelists making outrageous statements,” researcher Rachel Tabachnick subsequently wrote at Alternet.org. “These are the apostles and prophets of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), the biggest international religious movement you never heard of.” Almost simultaneously, investigative reporter Forrest Wilder of the Texas Observer published an extensive article on Perry's prayer event and his endorsers, “Rick Perry's Army of God.”

The NAR's intellectual godfather, C. Peter Wagner, one of Perry's early endorsers, brags that it's the most significant change in how Christianity is practiced since the Protestant Reformation. Like him or not, in a sense he's right: With tens, even hundreds of millions of followers worldwide, the NAR's stress on Godlike prophetic and apostolic powers, its revisions of end-time prophecies, its methodology of “spiritual warfare,” and its agenda of theocratic dominion over all aspects of society are not just threatening to modern secular democracy and the religious pluralism it protects, they have been sharply criticized by other conservative Christians as unbiblical, deviant teachings, even a form of the very demonic practices they obsessively declare war against. Indeed, the Assemblies of God — the largest Pentecostal denomination in America — condemned some of the NAR's teachings and practices as “deviant” in 2000, though Tabachnick told me that many within the denomination have since embraced the movement.

Wilder told me they were going to “tone it down a little bit to make it less overt in terms of the particular set of beliefs and practices that most of the people behind the event hold.” So, probably no talk about taking over government, sex with demons or Oprah Winfrey as a harbinger of the Antichrist — the sort of more alarming tidbits Maddow highlighted.

But if America's mainstream media reporters think this turns Perry's prayer meeting into a nonevent, they couldn't be more mistaken. There might not be any “gotcha!” moments to be had — although anything is possible — but with 15 long months of campaigning ahead and multiple other candidates courting the same, poorly understood religious constituency, there is a wealth of potential insights to be gathered that could prove invaluable down the road. What's more, the failure to explore and understand the multiple intersections of religion and politics has repeatedly exacted a terrible toll over the past 30 years of media consolidation, which has seen more and more talking heads, as frontline reporting has withered on the vine. Failure to understand the politico-religious dynamics of far-off Afghanistan in the 1980s resulted in all sorts of mayhem there — and eventually in the 9/11 attacks.

So what are some of the stories the media ought to be looking at, coming out of The Response, regardless of whether there are any instant YouTube classics or not? Without trying to dictate what others should write, one can glean some helpful tips from those who've ventured in early. Here are nine underreported stories worth considering: