In 1975, two founders of evangelical youth organizations had a fateful meeting. Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, visited Boulder, Colorado. He carried with him a burning message he felt he needed to deliver to Loren Cunningham, the founder of the international missionary organization Youth With a Mission—who was also in Colorado. Bright had received a revelation from God, he thought, about the mission writ large of Christians in the United States. This mission involved Christians influencing, or conquering, seven areas of power: education, family, religion, government, business, media, and entertainment. As the story goes, Bright shared his list of institutions over which he thought Christians should reign victorious, and Cunningham had separately drawn up a similar list, too. For the Christian nationalists who follow the seven mountains mandate, Bright and Cunningham’s similarity of visions demonstrated divine synchronicity.
A journey through the book of Revelation may unveil the oppressions of ancient and contemporary days of systemic violence, economic injustice, abuse of imperial power, along with a stirring invitation to divine intimacy. But as I study this vibrant, disturbing biblical book, there are many others who have taken different and catastrophically harmful lessons away from their apocalyptic fascination. They read the book illiterately, by which I mean without attention to genre or context, and apply it to their pre-existing ideologies—many of which include violence in support of their cause, conspiracy theorizing about how Christians are under threat in the United States, and secret certainties that seemingly decode the mysteries of domestic and global politics. A book by scholar Matthew Boedy entitled The Seven Mountains Mandate: Exposing the Dangerous Plan to Christianize America and Destroy Democracy details the plans underway by those on the Christian right who see in the book of Revelation a battle plan to take over public institutions, including sidelining pluralistic democracy itself. It’s harrowing stuff, it’s happening in our time—and the plans have been underway since at least the 70s.
In particular, Christian nationalists are using a passage from Revelation 17 to justify their coup. It’s a bizarre and counter-intuitive interpretation, and requires some sifting.
Here’s the context: John of Patmos, the vision-chronicler of Revelation, has an anti-imperial and misogynistic vision of the “whore of Babylon,” whom I’ve written about here and here. John sees this mythic woman riding a seven-headed beast that an angel explains represents “seven hills” (17:9). Rome is frequently referred to in ancient sources as a city of seven hills, and the Greek word horos used can mean hill or mountain. (From Ovid’s Tristia: “Rome, that sees the world from her seven hills, Rome, the place of Empire and the gods.”) So, John’s vision sees the woman called Babylon—a not-so-veiled reference to the Roman Empire itself—riding a mythical beast (which also happens to be a reference to Rome). Revelation chapters 17–18 are John’s vision of Rome’s destruction and economic collapse, all told through his damaging image of the “whore of Babylon.”
But here’s how Christian nationalists read this passage: in their literature, they have begun to climb the “seven mountains” that the Babylon woman is riding. And instead of a tale of an empire’s fall, they read it as a summons to take power back from Babylon and instead build an empire for Christ. The interpretation of “seven mountains” of influence for Christians to conquer has long influenced Christian nationalist circles, especially right-wing Pentecostal-charismatic circles. They view their anti-democratic fight for power as a holy one commissioned by God.
I skimmed a couple of Christian nationalist texts, and here’s what I learned. One influential leader, a charismatic (white Pentecostal) megachurch pastor named Bill Johnson, points to Bill Bright and Loren Cunningham’s fateful meeting and says: “There are seven realms of society that must come under the influence of the King and his Kingdom. For that to happen, we, as citizens of the Kingdom, must invade.” (Invading Babylon: The Seven Mountain Mandate). For Johnson, Christians need to become aggressive attackers of powerful realms, taking back what supposedly belongs to Christ.
Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash
Johnson’s passion could be written off as a fanciful flight of imagination, except that such networks have collected sizable political power and influence, such as Turning Point USA, which ferociously unfurls the “seven mountains” mandate as political policy. Seven Mountains mandaters seek changes in public policy, such as defunding public schools, funneling federal funds through school vouchers to private conservative Christian schools. Using similar arguments from the 19th-century slaveholding states, they seek to vastly limit the federal government’s power in favor of states’ rights, all to bolster Christian governmental authority and an erasure of separation between church and state. Boedy goes into much more detail about this religious extremism spreading across the United States.
Here’s another charismatic author-influencer named Johnny Enslow, founder of “Restore7” (i.e., restore the seven mountains or spheres of influence), who writes:
Revelation 17 describes a ‘harlot’ who sits on a ‘beast with seven heads’ that are ‘seven mountains.’ This demonic entity, described as a woman, must be displaced from the mountains, or seats of power. This is our mission that we were co-commissioned to do. (Seven Mountain Prophecy)
The perspective of spiritual warfare supports the mandate for “invasion” that these Christians believe they have.
Bill Johnson picks up on another obscure Revelation detail: There are seven mountains and seven kings who rule the mountains. In addition to Revelation 17 mentioning seven hills-mountains, John of Patmos also points to seven kings as another meaning for the seven-headed monster: “The seven heads [of the beast the whore of Babylon is riding] are seven heads; they are where the woman sits. They are also seven kings” (Revelation 17:9). This verse is a non-logical, visionary, stream-of-consciousness association of images, but that doesn’t stop people from applying it to contemporary times.
Here’s what Johnson says about the kings who rule the mountains. Compassion and justice are out and autocratic power is in:
Every 7M (seven mountain) king has a position in a high place and influences their own sphere directly and other spheres indirectly. Kings do not have to be virtuous, but they do have to be competent or they won’t last long because all kings know other kings who would like to take their thrones. This is not the culture of sheep; it is a culture conducive to wolves. (Invading Babylon)
Instead of identifying with the murdered-by-empire lamb of Revelation, who is Christ, such interpreters look instead to the metaphors of Babylon-empire to justify their plans for taking over areas of influence for Christ. Huh? It’s a staggering inversion. The nonviolence of Jesus, the sheep of sheep, has given way to the violence of Empire, to wolves and beasts, and the violence of Empire is called the necessary means for Christ.
Revelation can be abused for anti-democratic, authoritarian means, or it can be a text that frees our spiritual imaginations to grapple with injustice, the abuse of power, and systemic evil. Does our reading of the Bible make us more like Jesus, or more like the empire he resisted?
If our reading of dangerous texts like Revelation doesn’t lead to more Christ-likeness—more compassion, greater mercy, deeper solidarity with suffering, and more authentic love, even for enemies—than it is likely leading to more imperial-likeness instead.
Note: If you signed up for “holy ordinary” posts about prayer and contemplation but the daily news is all the apocalypse you can handle, I get it. You can manage your newsletter preferences by clicking “unsubscribe” at the bottom of this email, which leads you to a page where you can elect not to receive “Revelations” emails but still receive everything else.
Thanks for reading. My Substack covers the ongoing rise of TPUSA
This is the clearest explanation of why all the 7 mountain thinking leaves such a yuck in the gut. It’s using the tools of empire to replace one unjust, unloving system with another that will be just like it. Thank you!