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Nov 05, 2024

At the RNC Prayer Breakfast, Speakers Said the Quiet Part Out Loud – Mother Jones

Jentezen Franklin (right) at the 2024 Republican National ConventionMother Jones illustration; Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty; Kiera Butler/Mother Jones On the final day of the Republican National

Jentezen Franklin (right) at the 2024 Republican National ConventionMother Jones illustration; Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty; Kiera Butler/Mother Jones

On the final day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, I arrived at the Pfister Hotel ballroom 10 minutes before the God and Country Prayer Breakfast was supposed to start. I arrived a bit early just in case I encountered any trouble, since a few hours before the Faith and Freedom Coalition, the influential Christian political group that was hosting the breakfast, had denied my request for a press credential. While I didn’t have any trouble walking into the event, once I arrived, an organizer informed me that the hundreds of seats in the cavernous main breakfast room were already taken. She ushered me and a handful of others into an extremely air-conditioned overflow room, where, over chilly bacon and scrambled eggs, we watched a live stream of the proceedings on a big screen. My tablemate was an older gentleman who boasted that he had once hosted a Trump fundraiser at his “car club” and raised $2 million. We commiserated about being relegated to this outpost.

In the end, the surroundings hardly mattered as everyone could listen to stories of personal miracles that God had performed in the lives of one speaker after another. Trump’s vice presidential pick, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, had asked Jesus to help him with a bout of insomnia the night before his prime-time RNC speech—and it worked! House Speaker Mike Johnson’s sons had been saved from a near-drowning experience by a passing paraglider who had been sent by God. Trump’s former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Dr. Ben Carson once performed a complex and risky surgery and was sure he had lost the patient—but the next morning, that patient was sitting up in bed and telling jokes.

But the speeches weren’t all personal testimony. Many were peppered with the language of Christian nationalism and the shadowy charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation. In personal testimonies chock full of miracles and Bible verses, speakers assured the crowd that God was guiding their presidential candidate, and would help them accomplish their political goals—especially a complete end to abortion.

The first speaker of the morning was Paula White, who served as a spiritual adviser during Trump’s first term. White, who warned followers in 2020 that “Christians that don’t support President Trump will have to answer to God,” is closely associated with the New Apostolic Reformation, a charismatic evangelical Christian movement led by a loose network of self-appointed prophets and apostles. Many claim that God speaks directly to them, often in dreams, and believe that Christians are called to wage a spiritual battle for control of the United States. Though their beliefs in the more mystical and supernatural realms of Christianity are unconventional, adherents have made recent inroads into conservative politics, including, as I reported recently, the Supreme Court. In Saturday’s assassination attempt, White said, “We witnessed a miracle.” Her speech included a prayer that God’s “supernatural power” would protect Trump in the months and years to come.

White wasn’t the only speaker at the breakfast associated with the New Apostolic Reformation. There was also another former Trump spiritual adviser Jentezen Franklin, head pastor of the Free Church in Gainesville, Georgia, who has written a popular book about diet and spirituality, Fasting: Opening the door to a deeper, more intimate, more powerful relationship with God. At the breakfast, Franklin told a story from the Old Testament, in which Moses took blood from a ram and put some on Aaron’s right ear, right thumb, and right big toe. In doing so, Aaron would be able to listen, act, and walk in faith.

God had done exactly the same thing with Trump, Franklin said, at the assassination attempt last Saturday. After taking a bullet in the ear, Trump reached up with his hand and got blood on his thumb. Then, before he was ushered to safety, he asked for his shoes—an echo, in Franklin’s mind, of the bloody toe in the Bible. God, Franklin said, had told Trump, “‘I’m going to step into your shoes. I’m going to get in and work with your hands.'” He added, “I really believe that God has given Trump new ears.” He led the audience in a prayer asking. “Can we pray for the president to have new ears? I want him to have spiritual Mickey Mouse ears.” Then he could hear “if God would move him in the right direction to defend this nation.”

What exactly was that right direction? Some of the speakers hinted that it might have to do with a particularly important goal for many conservative Christians: ending abortion. As my colleague Abby Vesoulis wrote, the topic of reproductive rights has been a third rail so far at the Republican National Convention—and that’s because the cause of ending abortion, while it’s important to many of the party’s Christian conservatives, is also deeply unpopular among voters and with Trump himself. Which is the likely reason abortion language isn’t part of the official party platform. Abortion is also an issue on which former President Trump and his running mate disagree: While Trump has said that he supports a woman’s right to choose, Vance doesn’t believe abortion should be performed under any circumstances.

Unsurprisingly, Vance didn’t mention any disagreement with Trump on this subject during his convention speech on Wednesday evening, nor did he say the word “abortion” at the prayer breakfast. But after telling the story of how he rejected the “arrogance” of atheism and returned to Christianity in 2019, he pivoted to subtly assuring the crowd that he was working on abortion. “There have been a lot of rumblings in the past few weeks that the Republican Party is not going to be open to social conservatives,” he said. “And really from the bottom of my heart, I will say that social conservatives have a seat at this table, and they always will.” He added, “We have to advance the ball one yard before we advance the ball 10 yards before we advance the ball 50 yards.”

“From the bottom of my heart, I will say that social conservatives have a seat at this table, and they always will.”

Michael Whatley, the co–chair of the Republican National Committee, was not so subtle. “I am proud to be the most pro-life chair in the history of the Republican party,” he said. “I am here to tell you today that as long as I am the chair of the Republican National Committee, this party is going to be a pro-life, pro-family, pro-faith party.”

Toward the end of the program, Kari Lake, the frontrunner in Arizona’s Republican primary for the US Senate, described a moment during the pandemic that changed her life. She was reading the Bible and realized that “the news I was reading was a lie.” Lake, who had been working as a TV news anchor, began to question her whole career. Seeking guidance on whether to quit her job, she opened her Bible and without looking, put her finger down on a passage that read, “If you bring nothing into this world, it is for certain that you take nothing out.” For Lake, God was speaking directly to her, saying, “‘Don’t worry about that big paycheck, I’ve got you covered. I’ve got a bigger plan for you.’”

“Just because culture pushed him out, he’s not a smaller God, he’s still the Almighty God that saved the president,” she continued. “I’m looking forward to being Christian soldiers with you as we go into this next four years.”

After breakfast, outside the hotel, some of those Christian soldiers used words like “wonderful” and “humbling” to describe the morning’s program. Christina, an attendee who traveled from Dallas to the convention after having been invited by one of her state’s delegates, said she found Vance’s speech at the breakfast especially meaningful. “It brings me back to my own life,” she said. “It’s a comforting feeling.” I asked her what role she thought faith should play in government. “I think it should come back,” she said.

The speakers at the convention appeared to be committed to doing just that—even if they weren’t talking about it during the main convention program. Whatley, the Republican National Committee co-chair, said that during a meeting about the official platform that took place the previous week, “We put together a very strong pro-life platform that we moved on to the convention.” Then, he said, “I kicked all the staff out, and I kicked all the guests out, and I closed the doors. And I told everybody we are going to have an absolutely amazing convention.”