Perched on a cream-colored armchair, Johnny Enlow, a 61-year-old, California-based Pentecostal pastor with short-cropped gray hair, a trim beard and Tom Selleck-style mustache, looked into the camera and prophesied that Donald Trump would become president again. Not in 2024. In 2021.
“The January 20 inauguration date doesn’t really mean anything,” Enlow said in the January 29 video, which has gotten north of 100,000 views on YouTube. According to Enlow, more than 100 other “credible” Christian prophets around the world had likewise declared that Trump, somehow, would be restored to power soon.
Indeed, Enlow was not alone out on that limb. Greg Locke, a Nashville pastor with a massive social media following, said after Trump’s loss that he would “100 percent remain president of the United States for another term.” Kat Kerr, a pink-haired preacher from Jacksonville, Florida, declared repeatedly last month that Trump had won the election “by a landslide” and that God had told her he would serve for eight years.
Enlow, Locke and Kerr are among dozens of Christian prophets in America—religious leaders with followings among Pentecostal and charismatic Christians who claim the ability to predict the future based on dreams, visions and other supernatural phenomena. Some prophets are church leaders, while others operate independently. There are no official requirements for prophet status, though followers generally expect prophets to get at least a few prophecies right.
But, lately, that standard has come under duress—particularly when it comes to Donald Trump.
In 2015, spurred by the lengthy prophecy of a 27-year-old wunderkind named Jeremiah Johnson, many Pentecostals and charismatics embraced the idea that God had chosen Trump to restore America’s Christian moorings. Trump’s surprise win in 2016 offered a dramatic validation, and in 2020 dozens of prophets declared that he would win election again. This time, they were wrong. Yet, in the wake of Joe Biden’s victory, instead of apologizing or backtracking, a number of prophets continue to assert that it is God’s will for Trump to be in the White House and that a miraculous reversal is nigh.
[M]any observers worry that these prophets are sowing more confusion, blurring the line between misinformation and religious proclamation. They are spreading their message to wide audiences—some preachers who amplify these prophecies have followings in the millions—that increasingly exist in an echo chamber of like-minded religious YouTube channels, Instagram feeds and websites such as ElijahList, host of the YouTube channel ElijahStreams, where Enlow’s video aired.
It’s well known that Trump received strong support from white evangelicals in the 2020 election; estimates hover around 80 percent. But the role that prophecy plays in that support might be underexplored. In a survey conducted last year, two political scientists found that nearly half of America’s church-attending white Protestants believed Trump was anointed by God to be president—a portion of the population that other scholars have dubbed “prophecy voters.” The share is likely higher among charismatic Christians . . .
Not all prophets have doubled down on their Trump prophecies since the election, however. And as some have backed away from Trump, a schism has emerged.
In a December 15 article, Michael Brown, a longtime charismatic revivalist and scholar in Charlotte, North Carolina, had sharp words, warning co-religionists: “There is no reality in which Trump actually did win but in fact didn’t win. … To entertain possibilities like this is to mock the integrity of prophecy and to make us charismatics look like total fools.” After apologizing on January 7 for his own prophecy that Trump would be reelected, Jeremiah Johnson called parts of the prophetic movement “deeply sick.”
The emerging rift mirrors the one in the GOP, with one faction trying to move on from Trump in the name of democratic principles, and the other redoubling their commitment to him, spurred by the grassroots and in defiance of facts. Johnson and other prophets in his camp have received fervent pushback from their followers. . . . “This has opened the door to outright delusion,” Brown said in an interview. “As a full-blooded charismatic, I’ll say we’ve earned the world’s mockery for our foolishness.”
In a 2020 book, James Beverley, a research professor at Tyndale University in Toronto, tracked more than 500 prophecies about Trump by more than 100 prophets over a 15-year period, and found a low batting average for accuracy. “My research,” Beverley told me, “shows that the prophecies are usually vague, sometimes totally wrong, and, with rare exception, have failed to be properly critical of Trump.”
Nonetheless, Trump rewarded his Pentecostal supporters with photo ops in the Oval Office and visits to their churches, including one this past October in Las Vegas, where leaders prophesied, to a cheering crowd, that Trump would win a second term.
“How did so many of us end up with an almost a cultlike devotion to a leader, compromise our ethics for a seat at the table and drape the Gospel in an American flag?”
I continue to believe that evangelicals and Christofascists will be the death of Christianity. Their lies, hypocrisy, delusions and outright cruelty towards others are steadily killing the Christian brand. No wonder 40% of the under 30 years of age generations want nothing to do with religion.
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