Before I get started, I hope you and yours had a great 4th of July celebration weekend!
The History of the Fourth of July - On the fourth of July each year, also known as Independence Day, Americans celebrate this historic event.
Moving on...
Barry Goldwater saw it coming. He said so plainly. Nobody listened.
In November 1994, the man who had spent his life as the intellectual cornerstone of American conservatism picked up the phone and told John Dean exactly what he thought about the direction the Republican Party was headed. "Mark my word," he said, "if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them."
He had names in mind. Pat Robertson. The Christian Coalition. The Moral Majority orbit that had been methodically colonizing the Republican Party since Jerry Falwell decided God needed a lobbyist. Goldwater had been fighting these people inside his own party for years, and losing. He died in 1998. He didn't live to see how thoroughly he lost.
What Goldwater was describing wasn't Christianity. It wasn't even a coherent political philosophy. It was something more dangerous and more specific: the fusion of evangelical fervor with raw institutional ambition, wrapped in scriptural language to inoculate it against criticism. You can't argue with someone who believes they're doing God's work. That was his point. That was always his point.
Thirty years later, the movement he warned about has a name most Americans still haven't heard. They should learn it.
The Seven Mountain Mandate
The Seven Mountain Mandate, or 7MM, is a dominionist theological framework that holds that Christians are called not merely to evangelize but to seize control of the seven key institutions of society: family, religion, education, government, media, arts and entertainment, and business. The goal isn't conversion through persuasion. The goal is dominion through occupation. Believers are instructed to place themselves in leadership positions across all seven spheres, reorient those institutions toward biblical principles as the movement defines them, and in doing so hasten the Second Coming of Christ.
The framework traces back to a 1975 meeting between evangelical leaders Loren Cunningham and Bill Bright, who sketched out the "seven spheres" concept as a strategy for Christian societal impact. It was popularized more recently by figures like Lance Wallnau and Bill Johnson in their 2013 book "Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate." The title is not subtle. Neither is the theology.
The movement is tightly linked with the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, a charismatic network that has revived the concept of living apostles and prophets who receive direct divine direction for how the faithful should move through these seven mountains. It is organized, it is networked, and it has been quietly seeding itself into American political life for decades while most observers were looking elsewhere.
A 2024 poll found that 41 percent of American Christians have been influenced by or believe in 7MM concepts. That is not a fringe. That is a movement.
The Prosperity Gospel Connection
To understand why Goldwater's label of "capitalist Christianity" is more than rhetorical, you have to understand what prosperity theology actually teaches.
The prosperity gospel holds that God rewards the faithful with material wealth, and conversely that material wealth is evidence of divine favor. Poverty is a spiritual failing. Financial success is a sign of righteousness. The private jet is not hypocrisy. The private jet is testimony.
This is not a marginal position in the 7MM ecosystem. It is central to it. Business is literally one of the seven mountains. Market dominance becomes a spiritual mandate. The accumulation of wealth isn't just permitted -- it's commanded. Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn, Paula White-Cain: these are not outliers in this world. They are its architects and its celebrities.
Paula White-Cain, of course, served as Donald Trump's personal spiritual advisor and held a formal position in the White House Office of Faith and Opportunity Initiatives. When she stood in the East Room and declared that "all demonic networks" were broken over opposition to Trump's presidency, she was not performing for the cameras. She was doing exactly what the Seven Mountain Mandate instructs. She was exercising dominion from inside the mountain of government, on behalf of a man she had declared anointed.
That moment deserved far more scrutiny than it received. It got very little.
What This Isn't
It is worth being precise about what Goldwater was not saying, and what critics of 7MM are not saying. This is not an argument against Christianity, or against Christians in public life, or against religious conviction informing political values. People of faith have always participated in American democracy. The abolition movement was drenched in Christian theology. So was the civil rights movement. So is much of the Catholic social justice tradition.
The distinction matters enormously. Christianity as a moral foundation for civic engagement looks like: caring for the poor, opposing injustice, advocating for the vulnerable, accepting the dignity of people who differ from you. These are positions that require engagement with a pluralistic democracy. They require compromise, coalition, and persuasion.
The Seven Mountain Mandate looks like: seizing the institutions so you don't have to persuade anyone. It looks like: placing believers in positions of authority specifically to reorient those institutions away from pluralism. It looks like: describing secular culture as "demonic" and your opponents as agents of Satan. Speaker Mike Johnson is the most visible current example of a politician whose stated worldview is saturated with 7MM and NAR theology. He is second in line to the presidency.
Jesus of Nazareth had quite a lot to say about wealth and power in the Gospels. Very little of it resembled what Kenneth Copeland preaches from his $6.3 million parsonage. The people Goldwater was warning about have constructed a theology that would be unrecognizable to the tradition they claim to represent.
The Party Goldwater Built
There is a bitter irony running through all of this. Barry Goldwater spent his career building an American conservatism based on individual liberty, limited government, fiscal restraint, and the absolute separation of religious authority from state power. He was not a gentle or easy man politically. He voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on constitutional grounds he would later reconsider. He held views that were genuinely hard-edged.
But he also supported gay rights. He supported abortion rights. He believed with ferocity that what happened in your bedroom, in your church, and in your conscience was none of the government's business, and certainly none of Pat Robertson's business. He told the Senate in 1981 that he was "frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, C, and D. Just who do they think they are?"
The movement he spent his last years fighting didn't just take over the party he built. It gutted it, hollowed it out, and replaced its principles with a dominionist theology that treats democratic pluralism as an obstacle rather than a value. The MaGA movement is its current political expression, and the overlap between MaGA, NAR, and 7MM is not incidental. It is structural.
Goldwater was a conservative's conservative who understood that the republic runs on compromise and that anyone who won't compromise because God told them not to is not a political actor. They are something else entirely.
He tried to deal with them. He said so himself.
The rest of us are still figuring out how.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.
He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.
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