Chuck Darwin<p>“I personally feel like if you would like to stay with us, <br>then I would ask if we could lay hands on you and pray,” a woman said.</p><p>“We won’t hurt you,” another woman said.</p><p>“We just take everything to God,” <br>a woman sitting next to me said. <br>“Don’t take it personally.”</p><p>The praying began, and I waited for the judgment.</p><p>How all of this came to be is a story with many starting points, <br>the most immediate of which is Trump himself. </p><p>In the lead-up to the 2016 election, establishment leaders on the Christian right were backing candidates with more pious pedigrees than Trump’s. </p><p>He needed a way to rally evangelicals, <br>so he turned to some of the most influential apostles and prophets of the NAR, <br>a wilder world where he was cast as <br>God’s “wrecking ball” <br>and embraced by a fresh pool of so-called prophecy voters, <br>people long regarded as the embarrassing riffraff of evangelical Christianity. </p><p>But the DNA of that moment goes back further, <br>to the Cold War, Latin America, and an iconoclastic seminary professor named <br><a href="https://c.im/tags/C" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>C</span></a>. <a href="https://c.im/tags/Peter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Peter</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Wagner" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Wagner</span></a>.</p><p>He grew up in New York City during the Great Depression, <br>and embraced a conservative version of evangelical Christianity when he was courting his future wife. </p><p>They became missionaries in Bolivia in the 1950s and ’60s, <br>when a wave of Pentecostalism was sweeping South America, <br>filling churches with people who claimed that they were being healed, <br>and seeing signs and wonders that Wagner initially dismissed as heresy. </p><p>Much of this fervor was being channeled into social-justice movements taking hold across Latin America. </p><p>Che Guevara was organizing in Bolivia. </p><p>The civil-rights movement was under way in the United States. </p><p>Ecumenical organizations such as the World Council of Churches were embracing the theology of liberation, <br>emphasizing ideas such as the social sin of inequality <br>and the need for justice not in heaven but here and now.</p><p>In the great postwar competition for hearts and minds, conservative American evangelicals<br>—and the CIA, which they sometimes collaborated with<br>—needed an answer to ideas they saw as dangerously socialist. </p><p>Wagner, <br>by then the general director of the Andes Evangelical Mission, <br>rose to the occasion. </p><p>In 1969, he took part in a conference in Bogotá, Colombia, <br>sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association <br>that aimed to counter these trends. </p><p>He wrote a book<br>—"Latin American Theology: Radical or Evangelical?"<br>—which was handed out to all participants, <br>and which argued that concern with social issues <br>“may easily lead to serving mammon rather than serving God.” </p><p>Liberation theology was a slippery slope to hell.</p><p>After that, Wagner became a professor at "Fuller Theological Seminary", <br>teaching in the relatively experimental field of church growth. </p><p>He began revisiting his experience in Bolivia, <br>deciding that the overflowing churches he’d seen were a sign that the Holy Spirit was working in the world. </p><p>He was also living in the California of the 1970s, <br>when new religions and cults and a more freewheeling, independent, charismatic Christianity were proliferating, <br>a kind of counter-counterculture. </p><p>Droves of former hippies were being baptized in the Pacific <br>in what became known as the "Jesus People" movement. </p><p>Preachers such as John Wimber, <br>a singer in the band that turned into the Righteous Brothers, <br>were casting out demons before huge crowds. </p><p>In the ’80s, a group of men in Missouri known as the "Kansas City Prophets" believed they were restoring the gift of prophecy, <br>understanding this to be God’s natural way of talking to people.</p>