Author and scholar Matthew Boedy, whose “The Seven Mountains Mandate: Exposing the Dangerous Plan to Christianize America and Destroy Democracy” was recently published by Westminster John Knox Press, was a recent guest on “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast.” Listen to Boedy’s conversation with hosts the Rev. Lee Catoe and Simon Doong here.
Boedy called the Seven Mountains Mandate movement “a movement within Christian nationalism dedicated to Christianizing the seven cultural institutions or arenas or spheres in the United States” — education, family, business, government/military, religion, media, and arts and entertainment.
The idea is to have Christians in leadership within each sphere, Boedy said, or “what might be described as a Christian consensus within those areas … so these areas should not only be run by Christians, but have a Christian culture attached to them.”
The movement began in the charismatic branch of white evangelicalism in the 1970s, Boedy said. “What they’re attempting to do is take their idea of Christianity and force it on other people and other parts of the nation,” he said. The movement wants to take back each of the mountains, which it suggests “is controlled by a secular force or a demonic force.”
He said the heir to the Seven Mountains Movement is Turning Point USA, which started out as a political organization and is now a religious organization as well. Progressive Christians and churches and their leaders can respond to this movement by further promoting their ideas on religious pluralism as well as democracy.
“I think the response needs to be not just a religious response, although that is important,” he said. “We need to make a larger network of people who will promote democracy against those who won’t.”
Many members of churches in mainline denominations aren’t well-versed about this movement, Catoe said. “We talk about Christian nationalism in broad terms, but we don’t know exactly what’s happening,” he said. “Sometimes we don’t take things that are considered Satanic or demonic as being real in progressive circles.”
Boedy noted that “the kind of spiritual warfare the Seven Mountains Movement people operate with is not an individual one.” In his letter to the church in Ephesus, he noted that Paul urges individuals to “put on the whole armor of God.”
“It was about individually blocking Satan’s attacks on your mind,” Boedy said of Paul’s letter. Movement supporters “want to take those individual verses and extrapolate it to institutional areas.”
Among Mountain of Education strategies, movement supporters turn to the use of vouchers to take public money and use it to attend private schools. Many also work to populate their local school board with those who support such aims.
With the Mountain of Religion, the belief is either that certain denominations have been overtaken by Satan “or they’re not preaching the real gospel or getting good discipleship,” Boedy said. “What the Seven Mountains Mandate has in mind is they want to push the church to purify itself and get better discipleship. That may sound good, but they also suggest you should leave the churches that are never going to be good enough. … It’s a movement to take the battle to Satan. They are taking the spiritual battle fight to the enemy.”
“They want very much to Christianize the public school system,” he said, including placing the Ten Commandments in classrooms, banning some books and implementing President Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission “to bring Christianity as the consensus to public schools,” as Boedy put it. “You can see they want to bring back a very specific Christianized version of American history so they can change what we’re taught in the future.”
“That’s very important for the Mountain of Education,” he said. “Once you start educating people differently in grades K-12, that affects their lives from here on out.”
“We may have to go through some very bad times … to restore some sort of spirit of cooperation and faith in our society,” Boedy said. “It may take the coalescing of odd groups to restore our faith in government.”
“I think that change can come from religious leaders,” he said, “the people who know how to build unity and build faith, whether in God or in government.”
Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)
Let us join in prayer for:
Kendra Bright, Operations and Accounting Associate, Presbyterian Publishing Corporation
McKenna Britton, Communications Associate, Interim Unified Agency
Let us pray:
God of truth and peace, strengthen your people to bear witness to love, justice and compassion, so that faith may be a force for healing rather than harm. Amen.
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