“I believe you will hear from heaven, and that voice is more important than mine or ANYONE else’s,” wrote US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee in a text message to President Donald Trump. “No President in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Truman in 1945,” said Huckabee, signalling a divine call to drop a nuclear bomb over Tehran.

But Huckabee’s message offers more than a signal. As one among many Evangelical Christian Zionists that have crowded into the Trump administration, Huckabee is a canary in the coal mine of a rising Reactionary International — and the role of religion in it.

Armed with theology, zealots like Huckabee claim to be serving no party nor nation, but rather to be waging a holy war on a global scale, in which power is divine right, opponents are demonic saboteurs, and elections are cosmic battles that may sometimes require religious intervention.

In the United States, this new religious alliance has been responsible for bestowing divine authority on Donald Trump, positing him as a "modern-day Cyrus": a pagan king biblically ordained to fulfil God’s purposes — moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, or cleansing its territory of Palestinian residents.

Behind such ordinances stand powerful Charismatic Christian leaders, whose theological authority and institutional influence lend legitimacy to the far-right agenda. After Trump’s first impeachment, Paula White Cain — a Charismatic leader and advisor to Trump — posted on X: “Tonight we lift up our President, @realDonaldTrump in prayer against all wickedness & demonic schemes against him and his purpose in the name of Jesus.”

Today, the Progressive International releases its latest investigation on the role of Charismatic Christianity as the ‘Spiritual Backbone’ for the rising far-right. In it, we reveal how the new church wages spiritual warfare to distort our democracies: treating demons as real agents and opponents as true “enemies of God” to be purged and persecuted.

[[READ THE CASE NOW]](https://reactionary.international/cases/charismatic-christianity-the-spiritual-backbone-of-the-reactionary-international/en/)

This movement has provided the theological justification for rising extremism across the world,  emanating out of the United States and into political arenas from Asia and Africa all the way to the Pacific Islands. Indeed, in Latin America — where evangelism has soared in scale and influence  — we can detect the influence of the Charismatic movement in virtually every authoritarian intervention: a coup in Honduras, sabotage of Colombia’s peace process, another coup in Bolivia, and another in Brazil.

There, the rise of Jair Bolsonaro must be understood through his close alliance with the Charismatics. Bishop Edir Macedo publicly endorsed Bolsonaro, and pressured the anchors on his television channel to direct their coverage to provide support to his candidacy and his plans for a coup against the government of President Lula da Silva.

In South Korea, meanwhile, former President Yoon Suk-yeol's coup attempt found its strongest backing in the evangelical community, who laundered conspiracy theories about communist election fraud to justify his efforts to reclaim the executive by force.

But the investigation that we publish today goes further — showing how Charismatic Christianity not only intervenes at critical junctures in the electoral process, but in many cases has also embedded itself into the infrastructure of the state and the fabric of society.

Argentina’s President Javier Milei, for example, awarded $9 million to the Alliance of Evangelical Churches of Argentina (ACIERA) to manage food distribution as he took a chainsaw to the state’s own welfare policies. The failure was predictable. Hunger lines were soon forming outside the office of the newly appointed “Human Capital Minister” Sandra Pettovello.

Taken together, the research suggests that the Reactionary International relies critically on the institutions, ideas, and influence of this new strain of Christianity to survive, and thrive. Yet far too little coverage of the far-right has so far drawn attention to its ‘spiritual backbone.’

Our task, then, is to continue digging — not only to share this investigation far and wide, but to deepen it, uncovering the flows of finance and traffic of favours that undergirds the religious elements of the Reactionary International.

We invite you to read the case study, to forward this briefing across your networks, to sign up to the consortium, and — of course — to consider making a contribution to our efforts to reveal the illicit activities of this growing network of reactionary actors.

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