PENNSYLVANIA — LifeGate Church is nestled in a wooded area of Elizabethtown, 6 miles from the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant that partially melted down in 1979, almost rendering this pretty patch of central Pennsylvania along the Susquehanna River a radioactive wasteland. The church was formed in 2010, and now a half-acre of trees behind the building lay on their sides, cut down to make room for an expansion that will include a new youth center.
On an overcast Sunday morning last month, about 80 congregants pulled into the parking lot underneath brilliant orange and yellow foliage and filed in through the church’s red front doors, sharing warm greetings and smiles. I also pulled into the parking lot, glancing in the rearview mirror to see a car pulling in behind me with a sticker on its front windshield declaring, “CRT MARXISM SUCKS.”
I was welcomed by Pastor Don Lamb, a tall, gray-mustachioed man who had recently recovered from a heart attack. (He’d collapsed in a nearby diner and technically died, he told me. But people rushed to his aid and performed a “miracle,” resuscitating him.) Lamb had made it clear before I arrived at LifeGate that he was wary of journalists like me, but that the church would stand by its promise to welcome anybody for Sunday service. I took my place in the rows of adjoined chairs as a full band — keyboardist, guitar player, bass player, drummer — started to play worship songs. The congregants rose to their feet, some with palms facing upward and eyes closed, singing.
“I was instructed years and years ago to make a sword and to put on it specific words,” Greiner said. He recited the sword’s inscription. “Anointed and appointed. Worship. Warfare. Prayer. Intercession by the direction of the Lord Jesus Christ,” he said. “The other side says, The sword of the Lord — my name’s not on here — it’s The sword of the Lord. The sword of the Spirit.”
Greiner explained how God recently told him to retrieve the sword from Mastriano’s office in Harrisburg, take it to Philadelphia, where a pastor at a church blessed it, and then to the nation’s capital. “God said, ‘After Philly, this must go to D.C. This must go to my Capitol in D.C. from Harrisburg,’” Greiner recalled, his voice breaking.
“Oh Lord and heavenly father, we thank you and pray to you that you gave us this sword to bind the powers of Satan and cast it out!” one of the men said. “As this sword moves to Washington, I pray by the powers of the Holy Spirit you will send your angels in and around that building, Lord. And you will touch the mighty Angel of God and find the power of Satan in Washington and run him out of town, Lord!”
“We welcome you all to LifeGate, the church in the country that’s trying to affect the country,” he said. “We truly believe that God has called the church to be more than a house of offerings, a house of sermons, a house of hymnals. This will be a house of activating people to be engaged in the world we will live in.”
The event’s organizer, Francine Fosdick, then gave him what she called “the Sword of David.” She explained that she was giving him the sword because of the “warfare” Mastriano would have to wage on the campaign trail. “You’ve been fighting for our country, and you’re fighting for our religious rights in Christ Jesus,” Fosdick told him.
Mastriano has run an insular campaign for governor, often outright refusing to engage questions from a mainstream media eager to press him about his apocalyptic Christian worldview. He has preferred instead to remain in a conservative media bubble, almost solely granting interviews to far-right figures like Steve Bannon.
To better understand Mastriano, I traveled to central Pennsylvania to see the Christian nationalist extremists in his orbit up close. His supporters, some of whom are self-anointed “prophets,” see Mastriano as ordained by God to be governor of the Keystone State at a crucial moment in American history. Along the way, I joined a traveling far-right roadshow and neo-Charismatic Christian revival called the Great ReAwakening, hosted by former Trump national security adviser Gen. Michael Flynn and Oklahoma businessman Clay Clark.
It’s a festival of MAGA and QAnon conspiracy theories — about the 2020 election, vaccines, the COVID pandemic, 5G, critical race theory and a globalist cabal of Democratic Satan-worshiping pedophiles — so outlandish that it’d be easy to dismiss as fringe if it weren’t regularly attracting thousands of people. It’s also routinely endorsed by some of the most powerful Republican figures in the country, including Mastriano.
If polls, not prophecies, are to be believed, Mastriano will be clobbered by his Democratic opponent, Josh Shapiro, in Tuesday’s election. But his likely defeat shouldn’t distract from what Mastriano represents: The of the Republican Party into a sect that sees its victory as inevitable and predestined from above, and which paints its opponents as the literal incarnations of the Devil in need of vanquishing. In this view, democracy is merely a roadblock in a divine quest for domination.
Early on a Friday morning last month in Manheim, a small town in the fertile farmland of Lancaster County, a few thousand people — almost all white, most middle-aged — entered the sprawling Spooky Nook Sports complex, laying their coats down on white folding chairs as a band on stage broke into song.
“Way maker, miracle worker, promise keeper, light in the darkness. My God that is who you are,” the band sang as the crowd joined in. They wore T-shirts emblazoned with slogans like “Jesus is my Savior, Trump is my President,” and “FAUCI LIED.”
Pastor Dave Scarlett took the stage, flanked by half a dozen people holding shofars — rams-horn trumpets traditionally used by Jews in religious ceremonies. In recent years the far-right has appropriated the instrument for its battle cry, a way of commencing “spiritual warfare.” Shofars were seen frequently during the violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
So began the 17th stop of the Great ReAwakening tour. Attendees were told by speaker after speaker that they — the true, real Americans — are under attack on all fronts, and their salvation lies in seizing political and cultural institutions to pave the way for the Second Coming of Christ.
Polny spoke at the Great ReAwakening show on Oct. 21. After a hard-to-follow explanation about the Biblical significance of the number “24,” Polny told the crowd that something big was going to happen soon, on Nov. 24 — perhaps the crash of the American dollar. “The system is a fraud, people!” Polny said. “It’s a fraud. Haggai 2:8 states that ‘the silver and the gold are mine, saith the Lord.’ Not the U.S. dollar!”
The “” is at the core of the New Apostolic Reformation. This relatively new evangelical movement believes in miracles, the supernatural, and the existence of modern-day apostles and prophets. It’s a movement characterized by Christian dominionism, the belief that Christians must gain control of the “seven mountains” of societal influence to form a perfect world. Only then, the prophecy goes, can Christ return to Earth.
This theocratic philosophy makes no room for equal governance in a pluralistic society like that of the United States. Yet the GOP candidate for governor of the country’s fifth largest state is a devotee. Though Mastriano has attempted to distance himself from New Apostolic Reformation, he has repeatedly on the campaign trail with its apostles and prophets, allowing them to lay hands on him in prayer.
Mastriano was scheduled to speak at this Great ReAwakening in Manheim — organizer Clay Clark said Mastriano’s campaign asked to include him on the speaker list — but he wouldn’t appear until the end of the second day of the conference, after 16-plus hours of songs, baptisms, healing ceremonies and the casting out of demons.
A graphic appeared on the screen behind him showing photos of Hilary Clinton, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, President Joe Biden, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), billionaire George Soros, former First Lady Michelle Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and others.
“Says God, ‘you can’t stop my son, who is the rightful president, and his name is President Donald Trump…” she said, as the crowd broke into hysterical cheers. “He is on his way back, and how he takes his position back on center stage, you will never see that coming because you won’t see me coming. And I am with him.’”
I had been watching the failed U.S. Senate candidate Kathy Barnette speak on stage when Boland sat next to me. She had seen my tweets about the conference. She whispered in my ear that they were “trash” and “full of lies,” pointing her finger toward my chest. She said she would pray for me to have a “radical encounter with God” so that the “demons inside me” causing me to lie would leave.
Other vendors sold $100 metal crosses, handbags shaped like guns, and “Trump is still my president, but Christ is King” sweatshirts. There were various questionable health supplements for sale, vitamins and anointing oils, and a blanket that purportedly protects you from 5G’s radioactive waves.
Mastriano’s campaign had a booth amidst all this snake oil where supporters could sign up to volunteer. A nervous campaign worker moved aside as I took photos of the booth, stacked with literature about Mastriano’s pledge to restore “voting integrity,” “end mask and vaccine mandates,” and “put parents in charge of education.” I asked the campaign worker if Mastriano would still speak at the conference, and she said probably not. He was too busy. Clark, the conference organizer, kept telling me that Mastriano was still on the schedule.
“I identify as a man today — is it OK to be in here?” a man in the men’s bathroom loudly joked as he used a urinal, with three other grown men next to him guffawing. (Nearly every speaker at the conference had gone after transgender people, some calling gender dysphoria the work of the devil.)
I showed Zimmerman a photo of the “angel of death” prophecy that had been projected on stage, making sure it was close enough so he could read the text above the faces of the 24 people prophesied to die in the next couple of months: “Angel of Death coming for them by year-end. ’TREASON will be written on them for ETERNITY.”
“I don’t know what was said. But there’s no question there’s, you know, there’s good things, and there’s bad things happening in our country, and some individuals promote good things, and some individuals promote bad things.”
Lisa, from Elizabethtown, lit a second cigarette after agreeing to explain her “Save The Children” T-shirt to me. The Illuminati, she said, are harvesting adrenochrome from the blood of sex-trafficked kids in underground tunnels. She’d seen video evidence of these rituals via DuckDuckGo — a Pennsylvania-based search engine. She turned around so I could see the back of her shirt, replete with a map of “THE TUNNEL SYSTEM OF THE UNITED STATES.”
I called Thomas LeCaque, an associate professor of history at Grand View University who studies apocalyptic religion and political violence, to ask him whether this was because QAnon’s brand, with all of its wild prophecies and numerologies, and its association with the Jan. 6 insurrection, had simply become too toxic. “I think it’s much worse than that,” he said. “I think QAnon became so normalized in the far right that you don’t need the specific banners of Q to announce it’s already there.”
“The ideology that your enemies are literal monsters and that something needs to be done about them — that part has unfortunately become far too mainstream,” LeCaque said. “I think that’s the part that should worry us a lot more. Like it’s really easy to make fun of QAnon in its purest state, but QAnon’s actual core is that you need mass murder to save America, and that part hasn’t died.”
Then Eric Trump thanked Clark, the conference’s organizer, who had joined him on stage. “I love you guys,” he told Clark, “the job you’ve done…” The crowd started to cheer loudly for Clark. I was close enough to the stage to see the tears welling up in Clark’s eyes.
He this prophecy as a call from God to launch the Great ReAwakening, holding the show’s first iteration in Tulsa last April. He has used the tour to push the unhinged conspiracy theory that the COVID vaccine is a trick by billionaire Bill Gates to alter our DNA, making the number of genes a variant of the devil’s number — 666, also known as the “Mark of the Beast.”
After Eric’s speech, many in the crowd started to filter out of the Spooky Nook complex, walking back to their cars as the sun set. A middle-aged white couple named Carl and Lori were driving a red, white and blue pickup truck covered in decals spelling out, “Doug Mastriano For Governor.”
This was her fourth time at a Great ReAwakening event. She was here with Randy Ireland, who the New York chapter of the Proud Boys, a violent neo-fascist gang that played a major role in the insurrection. She and Ireland had joined forces to raise awareness about the mistreatment of Jan. 6 prisoners, who they said were being “robbed” of their due rights under the Constitution.
Every month they host a candlelight vigil outside the prison in D.C. where a few dozen alleged insurrectionists are being detained. “We pray,” Witthoeft said. “We sing hymns. We have call-ins from the prisoners that we put out over livestream through a microphone and the telephone, and then at nine o’clock, we all sing the National Anthem.”
“I think there’s a lot of different people here with a lot of different messages, but one consistent message is we need God in this country. We need God in our lives. We need God to move us forward in our paths, individually and collectively. And so I believe, you know, it’s a feel-good moment for a lot of people that are here.”
Nearby people lined up to be healed by prophets, to have their demons cast out. Over on the main stage, a murderer’s row of bigots, grifters, COVID-deniers, and QAnon influencers gave speeches. It became clear that Mastriano wasn’t going to show. He was speaking at a rally up in Scranton and likely wouldn’t have time to get here. Not that he was going to sway any voters here, anyway. He had their votes. His campaign workers packed up their booth and walked out of Spooky Nook.
“These are the things that we come against in the name of Jesus, that we wage war with, and these are the things that we will declare victory over today!” Ogilvie declared. On the wall behind him, a projector displayed a long list of the church’s enemies:
