In God We Vote
Reveal
The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX
4.7 • 8K Ratings
🗓️ 12 October 2024
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A small church in a small town in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, has been flexing its political muscle and building an outsized reputation for blurring the line between church and state. Pastor Don Lamb wants his congregants to be engaged in spiritual warfare and not be “head-in-the-sand, Jesus-loves-you kind of Christians,” especially when it comes to the local school board.
To Lamb, this is not a Christian takeover. Yet his church is influenced by an elusive, hard-to-pin-down movement whose followers believe that Christians are called to control the government and that former President Donald Trump was chosen by God. It’s called the New Apostolic Reformation, and it’s nothing like the culture war–fueled Moral Majority of yesteryear. There are prophets and apostles, and a spiritual war is underway, not just in Pennsylvania. To win, the church has to do more than just preach the gospel; it has to get political.
This week, Reveal’s Najib Aminy and Mother Jones reporter Kiera Butler explain what the New Apostolic Reformation is and what happens when it seeps into small-town churches like Lamb’s.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is reveal. |
| 0:06.0 | I'm Al Letton. |
| 0:08.0 | Two faded red doors serve as the main entrance to Don Lamb's barn style church. |
| 0:14.3 | Okay, so this is our main floor over here. |
| 0:17.2 | We are in the middle of the building project, so we are, we are building out this way. |
| 0:25.0 | Don is a pastor of Lifegate, a small church in a small town, |
| 0:31.0 | in the very big and politically relevant swing state of Pennsylvania. |
| 0:36.0 | So this is a very small crying case and eventually we will build 30 feet this way and move that whole stage out of here and double the size of this sanctuary. |
| 0:44.6 | So we sit about 150 in here and it'll be about 300 maybe. |
| 0:48.6 | From the back of the chapel you'll see dark gray office chairs instead of wooden pews. They're facing a |
| 0:54.9 | stage with a purple velvet backdrop and right in front of the stage at the center is a |
| 1:00.8 | wooden stand. Yep, this is where we preach right here. |
| 1:04.0 | We put it in the middle and we got our clock so we know we can't go over time. |
| 1:09.0 | While all this might look like a quiet and small church. It's at this pulpit where Don has |
| 1:15.2 | given some pretty fiery sermons that go beyond the gospel. If America said last |
| 1:20.6 | November we want abortion, we want transgenderism November we want abortion we want transgenderism we want open borders we |
| 1:25.8 | want to die on our sword kill us we deserve to die but guess what America |
| 1:32.1 | rejected that last November 3rd. |
| 1:35.0 | To put it mildly, Don had some issues with the 2020 election. |
| 1:40.0 | Your nation as a whole did not vote for the Antichrist. It was stolen and allowed. |
| 1:46.0 | God can take things sideways in your life. Then what do you do? |
| 1:50.0 | Do you go back and cry, suck thumb you have to fight through. |
... |
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