The Militant Gospel: How “Spiritual Warfare” Became Political Violence

A Tragedy in Zimbabwe

On Thanksgiving Day in 1987, a group of American missionaries was massacred on a humanitarian farm in Zimbabwe. One man who heard the news—a close friend of slain missionary David Emerson—was set on a path of militant Christianity that would culminate 38 years later in the political assassinations of Minnesota State Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark.

The assassin frequently referenced Emerson and even named his only son after him. His death marked one of many turning points toward political violence.

The missionaries were part of the Community of Reconciliation, an outreach from the church then known as Kansas City Fellowship. You may know that church by another name. Founded by Mike Bickle in the early 1980s, it became the center of a group known as the Kansas City Prophets.

Yes, that Mike Bickle—the founder of the International House of Prayer—who spent decades using his spiritual authority as clergy to sexually groom teenage girls and young women. He was already abusing girls, including one as young as 14, by the time Emerson was slaughtered in Zimbabwe. This willingness to trample others and violate their dignity as people created in the image of God is never far from the story of spiritual warfare.

The Birth of Joel’s Army

In Bickle’s case, that story centered on Joel’s Army, a force of supernaturally empowered Christians who would arise during the End Times to enact vengeance on God’s enemies. Bickle didn’t invent Joel’s Army, but he may have done more than anyone to popularize it.

The Community of Reconciliation was led by Bickle’s brother-in-law and co-pastor, Bob Scott. Bickle had no direct connection to the group of missionaries, and their deaths remain a profound tragedy. Scott later broke with Bickle and denounced the movement he had helped build in his 2024 exposé Some Said They Blundered (a refutation of the 1991 book Some Said It Thundered).

Still, those connected to the Kansas City Prophets swam in the same stream—a literal, flesh-and-blood approach to spiritual warfare.

Did the Minnesota shooter learn about Joel’s Army from Bickle? Or possibly from Emerson? As of this writing, we don’t know. What we do know is that he attended Christ for the Nations Institute, a training school for Christian nationalists founded in 1970 by a charismatic revivalist who may have been part of the first iteration of Joel’s Army.

British Israelism and the Latter Rain

Gordon Lindsay (1906–1973) was a British Israelist with sympathies toward the Ku Klux Klan. He was also a charismatic minister with an extraordinary gift for organization—one he used to promote a fellow British Israelist with similar sympathies, William Branham.

Branham, a faith-healing revivalist, built his doctrine on a heretical concept called the Manifest Sons of God—an elite group of Christians who could perform even greater works than Christ (John 14:12) as they destroyed God’s enemies. When the Latter Rain revival broke out in 1948 after one of Branham’s crusades, another minister, George Warnock, adapted the idea and renamed it Joel’s Army.

Joel’s Army was based on a militant interpretation of Joel 2, describing an army of locusts devouring everything in their path. Warnock saw those locusts as an army of God waging scorched-earth warfare during the Day of the Lord.

“In the second chapter [of Joel], we see the description of the [End Times] army of the Lord, which will be released just before the end of the ages,”
— John Wimber (1934–1997), addressing a London audience in 1990

Wimber, leader of the moderately charismatic Vineyard movement that bridged Pentecostalism and mainstream evangelicalism, had no ties to British Israelism or the Klan. A one-time keyboardist for the band that became the Righteous Brothers, he was later saved by grace.

Around the time of Emerson’s murder, Wimber began working with Bickle and the Kansas City Prophets. Unaware that they were preying on teenage girls and young women, he saw them as supernaturally gifted believers who were “doing the stuff” of the Bible. Could he have known that, by spreading Bickle’s rhetoric about Joel’s Army, he was popularizing an approach to spiritual warfare that would one day lead to political assassinations?

I do not know whether Emerson saw himself as part of Joel’s Army when he traveled to Zimbabwe to work on New Adam’s Farm. Nor do I know if he taught his mentee in Minnesota about Joel’s Army or if the assassin learned that violent theology elsewhere. But his own writings reveal that from Thanksgiving 1987 until June 14, 2025, he was consumed with three things: David Emerson, the radical Christianity he embraced, and the need to die a martyr’s death as his mentor had done.

When Spiritual Warfare Turns Flesh-and-Blood

Spiritual warfare does not have to be violent. For many Christians, it means the daily struggle to choose good, to rein in negative thoughts, to respond with kindness, and to help those in need.

Others take it more literally, seeing it as a struggle against demonic forces, guided by Ephesians 6:12:

“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places” (NASB).

For them, these “spiritual forces of wickedness” are literal demons threatening our health, our children, and even our politics.

Some forget the first part of that verse and imagine our struggle is against flesh and blood—against Congress members, aides, and police officers protecting democracy; against Democratic lawmakers gunned down in their homes while the country sleeps. To the most devoted foot soldiers of Joel’s Army, these are literal “Demon-crats” who deserve to die. Spiritual warfare becomes political violence against those who refuse to read Christian nationalism into the U.S. Constitution.

The Gospel of the Warrior

Donald Trump says of such people—those who reject Christian nationalism—that they hate America. Not those who wage war against it; they are “fine people on both sides.” The enemies, he insists, are those who believe he lost the 2020 election, who reject him as king, who oppose deporting lawful residents to foreign megaprisons.

I, for one, do not relish being the target of someone else’s spiritual warfare.

“There are many professional soldiers who may take their jobs very seriously,” wrote Rick Joyner at the start of a prophetic bulletin he called Warrior Nation, “but when you meet a warrior, you know the difference.”

Joyner is part of an elite group of self-proclaimed apostles in the apocalyptic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR).

“Likewise,” he continued, “the church leadership is about to be transferred from the hands of professionals to the true warriors which soldiers of the cross will all soon become.”

Joyner’s language is not metaphorical. For decades, he has called for civil war within the church and urged a militant response to Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.

There is a new breed of Christians that are going to emerge who are more militant than the world has seen since the first century… The first wave will create shock waves of both fear and wonder… awakening the rest of Christianity to its true nature and destiny.

The first of those shock waves may have appeared on January 6, 2021, when NAR-informed Christians gathered outside the U.S. Capitol to pray, worship, and blow shofars as acts of spiritual warfare. Any idea that such warfare did not involve people we disagree with died that day—and was buried when an assassin, armed with a NAR-inspired theology, murdered Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, on June 14, 2025.

False Worship, True Justice

There are few direct analogies between religions, but an imperfect one occurred on September 11, 2001. My uncle was an American Airlines captain based in New York, and when my 13-year-old self saw the television as I shelved books in the school library, my thoughts leapt to him. I didn’t know if he was involved or even still alive.

“They were like lambs for the slaughter,” he said years later of the flight crew and AA staff he’d known who died aboard the plane that struck the Pentagon.

Jihad and spiritual warfare are not the same. But when we demonize those unlike us—when we wage what we think is a holy war against enemies of our own making—the result looks frighteningly similar. We imagine ourselves defending God’s honor, but in truth, we become terrorists who mistake violence against God’s children for worship.

“What are your many sacrifices to Me?” says Isaiah 1:11 (NASB).
“When you come before Me, who requires of you this trampling of My courtyards?” (v. 12).
God had commanded sacrifices, yet despised the people’s hollow obedience.
True worship, Isaiah insists, is this:
“Learn to do good; seek justice, rebuke the oppressor, obtain justice for the orphan, plead the widow’s case” (v. 17).

The Hope of Civil Nationalism

Come together as a community and help one another flourish in what Hebrew calls shalom. This is the essence of what has been sidelined amid the fury of Christian nationalism and its opposition: civil nationalism.

Civil nationalism embodies democratic values—equal protection under the law, respect for difference, and the impulse to do good for others. It happens when we volunteer at food banks, when my neighbor—who likely votes differently—mows everyone’s lawn, when my Sunday school welcomes queer Christians who embody God’s love for the marginalized. I have so much to learn from these people.

This is the benign form of spiritual warfare: confronting the evil within ourselves, not in those we label enemies. Civil nationalism stands as the opposite of Christian nationalism and the violent theology threatening our democracy.

Maybe the best answer to the claim that critics “hate America” is for those of us who reject Christian nationalism but love our country to wave the flag proudly—celebrating the democratic, civil principles that make it worth loving.

A Better Kind of Warfare

Let’s engage in a better spiritual warfare—one that compels us to love our neighbors and even our enemies, as Jesus taught. And let’s embrace a better nationalism—one that holds America to its highest ideals rather than succumbing to the violence consuming it.

A nationalism that builds a bigger table with room for all, because we are all sinners in need of grace and image-bearers of a God who loves us deeply.