NAR Watch Episode 3: They Want to Hold Religious Tribunals

Brad Onishi: What’s up y’all, it is Brad here on Monday, and we're doing something a little different. We're gonna bring to you today our third episode of NAR Watch, my monthly sit-down with Matt Taylor about the New Apostolic Reformation.

Matt and I talk about a number of things. One of those is the very scary ways that New Apostolic Reformation leaders and apostles and prophets have started to use the idea of a tribunal as a kind of para-government force for meting out justice. It really has gained traction, not only within the NAR, but also in the militias aligned with it. And Matt explains the frightening aspects of this phenomenon.

We also talk about how the New Apostolic Reformation has really become a kind of accelerationist phenomenon on the American right, and what that means as we barrel toward the 2024 election. And finally, Matt uses the analogy of a kind of hurricane and the ways that forecasters map out the various possibilities of a hurricane touching down or going out to sea as a way to understand where we're headed with this election—a Trump victory, a Trump loss, and so on and so forth. He relates all of that to the NAR and the potential for violence and civil war across the country.

Tomorrow, we'll have another episode with Matt Taylor, and that will be an essay he's written called "The Colonized God," and it's really his understanding of how Christian nationalism is a perversion of Christianity. A version of this essay will be published in the magazine Sojourners later this week, and so we'll have that with you tomorrow.

If you’re not a subscriber, go ahead and think about doing that so you can have full access to this episode. Otherwise, thank you for being here y’all. 

Without further ado, here is my discussion with Matt.

Brad: Dr. Matthew Taylor, welcome back to Straight White American Jesus.

Matt Taylor: Glad to be back, Brad. Good to see you.

Brad: Good to see you in San Diego for the American Librarians Association Conference. And I tell you, friends, the Librarian Association Conference is everything you think—it's rowdy, it's wild. Sometimes, you know, it's hard to hang with the librarians, they just... it's a very rough crowd. [Laughs] No, it's the exact opposite of that. It's a lot of lovely people who love reading books and are amazing.

All right. We're gonna talk today—it's our third installment of NAR Watch of you helping us keep tabs on everything that's happening with the New Apostolic Reformation as we lead up to the 2024 election.

I'm gonna start today with something I think is truly terrifying, and that's a book by somebody who is closely aligned with Dutch Sheets, and has started talking not only about things we've discussed at length on this show with you—the Seven Mountain Mandate and other things—but also tribunals. So tell us about the book, tell us about the idea of tribunals, and we'll get into how it all fits into the entire ecosystem of the New Apostolic Reformation.

Matt: This idea of tribunals—as you said, there's a kind of B-level celebrity in the New Apostolic Reformation named Tom Schluter. He is a prayer coordinator for the city of Dallas, very close to Dutch Sheets. In fact, he was a part of that post-2020 election "contested state" tour that Dutch Sheets led. We talked about that in episode five of Charismatic Revival Fury. That was very much a force driving people towards January 6th.

So Tom Schluter has written this book called Tribunals, subtitled "The Authority of the Ekklesia to Legislate." It just came out, I think, in December. It really kind of broke onto my radar within the last couple of months here, but it's a very concerning evolution of NAR thought and NAR beliefs.

Maybe just to give a little bit of the background here, because he's riffing on a lot of other NAR pieces. Part of the NAR idea and program—they're constantly trying to find new ways to accumulate authority around the apostles and the prophets. So they become very fond, within the last 10-15 years, of finding ways to use governmental analogies to accrue this authority to the apostles and prophets.

Back in the 2000s, one of the members of Peter Wagner's inner circle, an apostle named Robert Henderson—who was the one who claimed that his prayers helped to kill Ruth Bader Ginsburg—he has this meme that he created called "the Courts of Heaven." The idea is that apostles and prophets have the authority to ascend into the Courts of Heaven, to bypass the earthly courts, and to be advocates in the Courts of Heaven. And then you'll find NAR leaders, and they'll write these elaborate legal cases that look like a Supreme Court briefing, but Dutch Sheets is the advocate. And then they'll have people recite these prayers that are framed as kind of Supreme Court briefings to appeal to the Courts of Heaven.

And then, of course, you have this idea of the Ekklesia that Dutch Sheets has been playing with more recently—this idea that the church is the real legislating government on the earth. They have a very strange... Dutch Sheets is taking this word—I mean, ekklesia in the New Testament just means "assembly," right? And often translated as "church." It's a synonym of the word synagoga in Greek—the synagogue, the place, the gathering place, the assembly place. And so the word that the early church chose to use to describe itself: "We are the assembly."

There are other meanings of that word in Greek, sure, and you can talk about the state legislature as the state assembly. That is a meaning of that word, but Dutch Sheets has determined, through prophecy or whatever his way of reading the Bible, that that is the real meaning of Ekklesia—that the church is actually God's government on the earth, meant to legislate.

This tribunal idea is an evolution of that. And you can hear that Tom Schluter is even including that word Ekklesia in the title. But the idea is, again, that apostles and prophets in particular, but all charismatic Christians, can participate in these kind of ad hoc courts—governing forces, spaces where the church can operate in the supernatural realm that affects the natural realm. And they're organizing these, and it started to kind of roll out. So the book came out this past December, and you see more and more NAR leaders, especially in that Dutch Sheets wing of the NAR, are using this language of tribunals.

If you think about what a tribunal is, though—a tribunal can mean just a court, but it can also mean an ad hoc judgment, right? We talk about military tribunals, where this kind of ad hoc court has all of this authority.

My worry—and we can talk about some of the ways that this is dovetailing with other things that are going on in far-right politics right now—my worry is that it's more and more destabilizing to how people conceive of our government, to how people trust the system that we have. And it's again creating pathways outside of the US government, outside of our democratic systems, to say "this is the reality," right? And the more that people immerse themselves and get radicalized within that alternative reality, when they try to come back and function within our society, they don't respect the systems that we have, because they say, "Well, the church is the real legislature, the church is the real court, we are the true authority. Why would we even listen to elected officials? Why would we trust democracy?"

Brad: I want to read a little bit from the book and just give folks an idea of what he means. So he says: "The Tribunal is a helpful notion, because it represents the idea of a court, a congress or a council getting together to determine what the Lord would look like to have determined and then decreed on Earth. It becomes a place where we can legislate out of His kingdom principles." And that last part really stuck out to me—that we're going to, as you just said, convene a meeting where we will legislate. Okay, so you're going to legislate on earth. And he, in other parts of the book, says we're going to legislate justice.

So this is one of those moments where you hear the word "tribunal"—and sure, this could be something that is just a word that is descriptive of a kind of trial. It could be, you know, you were talking about words and their various meanings. "Tribunal" could be "trial." It could be something we imagine happening in a setting that is not para-government, that is not necessarily associated with disgusting, tragic evils in human history.

Nonetheless, tribunals are also things that resonate for many people as having a historic meaning associated with a military leader saying, "Well, let's have an ad hoc trial right now to determine if you're guilty," and it's often not really a trial by a jury of your peers and so on. "Tribunal" is a word that carries a lot of weight in terms of negative historical connotation.

I'll just add one more thing and then turn it back over to you to connect this to other places. There was so much talk in the 2000s and 2010s about "creeping Sharia," and Sharia as a law that would creep in and take the place of American law. I know your first book puts you in place as an expert on these fears and some of these comparisons. I don't always—I'm not somebody on this show who does these comparisons of saying that conservative Christians in America are like al-Qaeda and the Taliban. People do that fast and free. We've never done that on this show, and I'm not gonna do it now.

What I am trying to say is all those fears of creeping Sharia, etc.—this feels like you're saying we should have God's law on Earth decreed through these church-led tribunals, rather than the American Constitution and the laws of a state, a county, a city, or the federal government. And so that's what resonates with me as I hear you talking and as I read some of Schluter's book.

Matt: And I am very leery of people who talk about "this is Christian Sharia." Go and study Sharia. Sharia is a developed legal system that has evolved over centuries. It's complex, it's multitudinous. It's this massive body of legal discourse that parallels, in some ways, like the entirety of American law. To say that you're against Sharia is like saying you're against law. Sharia contains everything. It's very systematic and thought out.

This is not that. This is something that Dutch Sheets and Tom Schluter and Robert Henderson made up in the last 20 years, and they're just kind of pulling out of nowhere. On its surface, this stuff sounds silly. It sounds goofy that Dutch Sheets and his cohort think that they are the real government in some ethereal heavenly court—they get to make decrees and those affect reality.

Go and look at what happens on January 6th. That is what people are talking about. What the people who are there on January 6th, what their supporters are talking about—they're talking about these ideas that they are there as the Ekklesia. The people who show up that day are "decreeing and declaring" as the Ekklesia. These ideas have radicalized many, many people to distrust the legitimacy of our system, and that ties into the rest of the far right.

Because there's this new burgeoning trend—it's especially taking hold within the QAnon community, but it's really throughout these far-right militia and conspiracy theory groups. And it's this idea that the phrase that is attached to it is called "Tactical Civics." It’s an elusive phrase. The idea of tactical civics—and Michael Flynn, the arch conspiracist in our country today, Michael Flynn has promoted this idea. He might be one of the people that is behind this whole effort to promote it. The idea of tactical civis is that in every county, you can create alternative structures to the government of that county. In a time of crisis or in a time of war, in a time of rebellion, in a time of sedition, they can convene an alternative government that will create tribunals, that will create courts and be able to judge people and even try people for treason.

This is an evolution, if you're familiar with the idea of the sovereign citizen movement—a very far-right fringy idea that is becoming more and more mainstream—that people are not beholden to the US government. People are not beholden to the national government. They are sovereign citizens of themselves. They don't have to abide by the laws.

Part of the program of far-right destabilizing organizing militia movement is you undermine the current system. You find ways to make the current system look bad or to decrease people's trust in the current system so that you can institute an alternative system. And my worry is that these two things are starting to dovetail. The tactical civics is going on on the left hand, and the tribunals of the Ekklesia is going on the right hand. And you can see the way that these things are dovetailing—that Tom Schluter and Dutch Sheets are creating the theology to vindicate this sovereign citizens kind of alternative government concept.

Who knows, long term, where this goes, but it's not good when you have people as militant as Dutch Sheets and Tom Schluter are, and their followers are—people as radicalized in their spirituality and in their theology—now believing that they are the ones who hold true authority in society, and that they are not accountable to the system that exists, that we've built democratically to govern ourselves. They're saying they're appointed by Heaven. So why would they trust...

And again, I am very leery of analogies that try to make Muslims look inherently bad. But if you look at what the Taliban did in Afghanistan before the US withdrawal, the Taliban basically created ad hoc systems and courts in all kinds of localities, and had taken over most of the country through that before the US withdrew. It was really like Kabul—the capital city with a little outpost where the US-backed government held power—and the Taliban had created all these alternative structures and undermined that government authority to the point where the functional government was simply contained to that little capital region.

So I'm not saying that's a perfect analogy, but this is how systems break down. This is how democratic systems falter—when citizens stop trusting those institutions, stop trusting those systems, and start creating alternative systems, or groups that have a will to power create these alternative systems that then they are not accountable to any other authority other than their own conception of themselves.

Brad: All right, so let's remind people of some things I think that you've tried to teach us over Charismatic Revival Fury, and in these conversations we've had about the New Apostolic Reformation over the last couple of months. One of the things I really want to remind people is the portability of New Apostolic Reformation memes and ideas.

So I think one thing that you've done a wonderful job at helping people understand is that something like the Seven Mountains Mandate or the Appeal to Heaven flag symbol—these don't stay within the confines of the New Apostolic Reformation. So the Appeal to Heaven flag, we've been over it. It may start with Dutch Sheets and his whole interpretation of it. It ends up outside Leonard Leo's house. Leonard Leo is a traditional Catholic. It ends up on the summer home of the Alitos. We've talked about it.

The Seven Mountains Mandate and the Seven Mountains idea is now something used by someone like Charlie Kirk, who's not really a New Apostolic Reformation person, but is certainly being influenced by some of these ideas and some of these theologies.

What I fear, Matt, is that the tribunal idea will become something, once again, that can be borrowed—that you can get a logic, you can get a "theologic." That's what theology is. You can get a theologic that is very portable, that says, "Well, God's the ultimate King and judge. God's Kingdom is how things should be, and we're God's delegates and ambassadors and representatives on Earth. So we should be the ones who legislate justice by way of Kingdom tribunals that decide what is actually right and wrong."

And that can stay in the Tom Schluter kind of universe. And if you read the Tom Schluter book, it's easy to laugh him off because he sounds like a hokey pastor. I'm not gonna lie—he's talking about getting ice cream with his wife. You just can imagine a guy that's kind of a hokey pastor type. He talks about prayer and doing his devotions in the morning.

But you know what I can also imagine, Matt, is somebody you mentioned last month—the tribunal idea gets in the hands of Matt Shea, a militant with violent rhetoric, a radical who is associated with militias in a part of the country, Eastern Washington, where there's a lot of folks who might be very into this tribunal idea in rural parts of Idaho, rural parts of eastern Washington. That's what's going through my mind—you're giving people a meme and a structure to run with, even if you, Tom Schluter, are out here getting ice cream with your wife. I think Matt Shea and those types and other militia types are like, "Oh, yeah. This is great. This is a nice plug-and-play apparatus for us to use when we justify whatever things we want to justify in terms of violence and radicalization and extremism."

Matt: Absolutely. And people often talk about the NAR as though it's this giant mass of people that are operating in coordination. And this is where you start getting into conspiracy theories about the NAR. The NAR is a leadership network built by Peter Wagner, built by Dutch Sheets, built by Cindy Jacobs and Ché Ahn and Chuck Pierce. But the power of the NAR is that they have a massive megaphone to millions of charismatic believers, and they are thought leaders in that world. Not that all those people adhere to everything about the NAR—it's that they follow this constellation of celebrities.

And so when a new idea, when a new meme like this, hits the bloodstream, it gets spread throughout that entire body and through the entire body of charismatic media, charismatic belief, charismatic practice. And then, and now, what we're seeing is these militia groups are beginning to adopt charismatic beliefs and charismatic practices. In part, I think, because it gives them legal cover—because they can say we're religious groups—but also because it synchronizes nicely with their worldview, particularly in this moment where these, especially these independent, charismatic folks, have gone extremely right-wing and extremely Trumpy.

You're seeing this cross-fertilization between militia groups and militia ideas and NAR groups and NAR ideas. And yeah, my worry is that you can see how a seed like this idea could truly become something that is gravely dangerous to American civic life in localities, but even systematically across the board, the more the system becomes—more people distrust their county government, the more they distrust their state government, the more they distrust the national government—the more willing they are to seek an alternative system or topple the current system.

Brad: Well, this comes out—sorry, but I want to connect us to two things that are happening this week. It's the same week that we get this report from Raw Story, and then other outlets picked it up, about a guy named Ivan Raiklin, who is somebody who hangs around the Trump orbit a lot—MAGA orbit, if you want a connection here.

Friends, back in November, when Matt and I wrote a story about the Appeal to Heaven flag being outside of Mike Johnson's office, one of the pictures that is floating around the internet from that era is of Ivan Raiklin with Ashley Babbitt's mom outside of Mike Johnson's office, with the Appeal to Heaven flag in the background.

And so we got the news this week that he sees himself as the agent of retribution for the Trump kind of universe, and that if Trump's reelected, he will be the guy, and he has these dreams of linking up with constitutional sheriffs to carry out raids and basically picking up political enemies and others who are seen as dissident. And it really sounds straight out of an authoritarian regime from whatever terrible context you want to imagine from the 20th century and so on.

That's not all. Here's the point I'm trying to make. That vision that Raiklin has about retribution and SWAT raids and constitutional sheriffs is not that different from the tribunal. Now, the more you dig into the Raiklin story, you're like, it doesn't seem like he has any traction here. Some of the constitutional sheriffs are like, "Yeah, don't know this guy. He's crazy." Nonetheless, the desire seems to be the same, Matt. We want to mete out justice on those who disagree with us. These are people who prayed for Ruth Bader Ginsburg to die. So that scares me.

It's also the week of NatCon 2024 when people like Al Mohler are out here saying everyone in the United States should acknowledge the Christian structure of civilization, even if they're not Christians. Al Mohler and Doug Wilson were asked, "Will Hindus and Muslims and Jews be welcomed into this Christian nationalist state that you're imagining?" And they're like, "Well, Jews, of course. Can't really comment on the Hindus and the Muslims."

So y'all can think of the tribunal idea as just Tom Schluter trying to make a name for himself in the NAR Leadership Network. I don't take it that way. I take this as linking up with a lot of the desires of many Christian nationalists across the country.

Matt: Yeah, and this is my worry. Who knows how this election plays out, but Trump has already talked about invoking the Insurrection Act, calling up militias to help him put down rebellions or put down protests. These were ideas that were in the ether around January 6th as well. These folks could become the brownshirts of a second Trump administration. And if Trump is not elected, they could become the seditious secessionist county movement, county-by-county movement, to say, "Well, we don't recognize the authority of the federal government, and we're gonna push." And that could be civil war. That could be insurgency. I mean, there are all kinds of outcomes of this, none of which are pretty.

Brad: Well, let's take a break and come back and talk about—let's just stay on that topic. So we'll be right back.

Brad: All right, so you know, Matt, you've mentioned kind of trying to forecast the future. I think both of us get asked all the time, "All right, what's going to happen?" I mean, the amount of journalists who have asked me over the last four years, "Are we going to have another civil war?" And I'm talking journalists from Italy, journalists from Sweden, journalists from France, journalists from New Zealand. "Is the United States going to have another civil war?" Not to mention everybody in this country. So you just sort of hinted at this, but I think you have a new model, or new analogy, for thinking about the 2024 election. So take it away. How are you thinking about possibilities for November?

Matt: I am not a prophet. I don't predict the future. I don't view that as my job, but I think we need to pay attention to the times that we're living in, pay attention to the broader trends within our society. And as I think about this election, I kind of have two hard and fast assumptions. And if these assumptions are wrong, I would be thrilled, but these are my hard and fast assumptions.

If Donald Trump wins this election, long term, that is the dissolution of American democracy. I don't think that pluralistic liberal democracy in the United States, in our current system, can survive a second Trump term. Again, I hope to be wrong about that, but that to me, that is the way that they are gearing up for a second Trump administration, that it is outright authoritarian. Doesn't mean that we'll lose everything. It doesn't mean we'll be Nazi Germany at the end of four years. It just means that the systems that we have will be replaced by more and more authoritarian, less and less rule of law, less and less respect for individual rights and individual liberty.

The second assumption, hard and fast assumption, that I have, is that if Donald Trump loses, he will not accept that. I don't think he, within his personality, is capable of accepting that. And so the question is, if those two things are true, what happens? How do we imagine how this plays out?

And I was inspired this week by, actually, by news reports about Hurricane Beryl. And the way that when, if you follow weather news, you can sometimes, what they'll do is they'll take a storm, a tropical storm or a hurricane, and they'll plug it into all these different models, because there's a physics to a storm. There's currents in the ocean, there's the heat of the water, there's how the storm has gathered. And they'll plug all that data into different models, and they'll give you this—they call it a spaghetti graph—with all the lines, paths that this hurricane could follow, and you get like 30 of these, because they've got all these different models. And you can see, oh, well, one path is it goes back out to sea. One path is it makes landfall. One path is it hits a major city. But none of this is saying, "Oh, one of these is absolutely going to happen." It's merely saying, "Probability-wise, here's the different directions this thing could go. And we should be prepared if you're on one of those paths. You should be paying attention to the storm. You should be watching this."

Donald Trump is a hurricane bearing down on the United States. And I would even expand it to say the MAGA movement is a hurricane bearing down on the US mainland. And even if Trump were to die tomorrow, we would still be in a very dangerous situation in terms of the way that the right wing in our country is thinking and operating today.

So I don't know. There's so many different factors in terms of how does the Supreme Court respond to these different scenarios? How does Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House respond to these different scenarios? How does the Biden administration, while it's still in office, respond to these different scenarios? There's far too many X factors to say "here's what's going to happen." But there aren't very many paths through the next six to eight months that don't lead to widespread violence.

And I think part of what I'm trying to get across to folks is we need to be prepared, because there's a physics to this election. There's certain things that are pieces that are already in place on the board, and we need to be ready for the very real problems that are going to emerge in the coming months. And some of those problems will probably come up before the election. In fact, many of them are coming out right now, but some of them are gonna emerge after this election.

And if Trump wins, I think that you could very well see Democratic lawmakers, I think, rightly, constitutionally, trying to block Donald Trump from assuming office, based on the 14th Amendment Section 3, that says that an insurrectionist cannot hold office. But the date at which the Congress gets to weigh in on a presidential election is January 6, 2025—the counting of the electoral votes. So if Donald Trump won, we could literally see the inverse of January 6, where Democrats, I think entirely constitutionally, are trying to block him from taking office. But just imagine how the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and Tactical Civics and Michael Flynn and the NAR would react in that kind of scenario. And I think you're beginning to then get your head around and your heart around just what a perilous moment and perilous season we're headed into.

Brad: Thanks for listening today, y'all. I have about 20 more minutes with Matt Taylor for Premium subscribers. If you're not yet a premium SWAJ supporter, check it out in the show notes. You'll get access to the full episode for today, bonus content every Monday, a bonus episode every month, access to our 600-episode archive and ad-free listening, not to mention an invite to our Discord server.

If you were wondering, this was recorded before the attempted assassination on Donald Trump's life, and so none of the events or analysis mentioned here are referencing what happened over the weekend. We'll be back tomorrow with an episode once again with Matt Taylor on how he understands Christian nationalists have perverted Christianity. Wednesday, we'll have "It's in the Code," and Friday, the weekly roundup. Thanks for being here. We'll catch you next time.