All the President’s Prophets

POLITICS & POLICY
TEXAS MONTHLY
By Sandi Villarreal, April 28, 2025

Cindy Jacobs and other New Apostolic Reformation leaders have battle plans for “spiritual warfare”
during Donald Trump’s second term.

In front of a sea of swaying congregants, Cindy Jacobs ascended the expansive stage holding a microphone. A band of about ten musicians had just wrapped up a 45-minute set of praise and worship music that had primed the awaiting audience. The massive screens inside the sanctuary of Trinity Church in Cedar Hill displayed a celestial backdrop as Jacobs began to speak.

Less than 48 hours earlier, Donald Trump had been elected president, having sailed to victory, many of those gathered believed, on their intercessory prayers. But some of the event’s speakers had foretold well earlier that Trump would serve two terms. Jacobs gave them and others a shout-out—“The prophets are in the house!” she cheered, her commanding voice contrasting with her petite frame. The crowd whooped in celebration.

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Jacobs is the internationally beloved and respected “prophet to the nations” associated with the New Apostolic Reformation. The loosely defined network of far-right Christians believe they are called to rid the earth of evil and take control of key pillars of society for the kingdom of God. Through her vast network of influential prayer leaders and powerful friends, she crisscrosses the globe from Mar-a-Lago to Jerusalem to Cartagena, Colombia, meeting politicians and preaching the need for worldwide “readjustment” to Christian, biblical truths. The night she took the stage at Trinity, she had returned home to lead her annual gathering, the Global Prophetic Summit. There speakers preached to hundreds of attendees about politics, prophecy, and how to tap into supernatural gifts.

Across the sprawling narthex that wraps around the outside of the sanctuary, guests had thronged to peruse the tables where speakers sold self-published books, jewelry, and even, in one case, anointing lip balm. But as Jacobs spoke, adoring crowds packed the church’s stadium-style seats. With a second Trump presidency assured, the gathering felt part church revival, part pep rally. “More than a year ago, I was flying to Israel and the Lord said to me, ‘If we do not get a wartime president in 2024, we will have war in 2025,’ ” Jacobs told her crowd. “And I believe that God gave us that.”

As she paced the stage in her red flats—her signature shoe color—her pearls glinted in the spotlight. “Welcome to victory!” Jacobs said, launching into a general prophetic statement. “This is what God is saying to me: ‘It’s your escalation time. It’s your time where you go from zero to a thousand.’ Hallelujah!”

To kick off the three-day summit, Jacobs held up a three-ring binder full of prophecies—wars and rumors of wars—collected from her network for the year ahead. Notably, she never mentioned Trump by name, striking a conciliatory tone and saying to those who hadn’t voted for the president, “We love each other anyway.” (If any among those present were Harris-Walz voters, they chose to keep that fact to themselves.)

Several of the speakers were less circumspect. Mark Gonzales, founder and president of the Hispanic Action Network, a Dallas-based faith-advocacy group, laid out a vision for building a “civic interstate” of organized churches throughout the country to help elect Christian nationalists at the city council and school board levels. Chuck Pierce, a longtime collaborator with Jacobs and head of the Corinth, Texas–based group Glory of Zion International, recounted his 2008 prophecy in which God showed him how dire the situation in the U.S. had grown. He told the audience that he had asked, “Lord, how will America survive?” and that God had answered, “They will have to learn to play the Trump card.”

It was clear that the speakers believed they were engaged in a spiritual battle here on earth. For many Texans who grew up in Southern Baptist churches, like me, the vernacular Jacobs and her acolytes use isn’t totally unfamiliar. One memorable Wednesday night in the nineties, when I was around thirteen, my youth pastor shared audio of a teen who supposedly had been possessed by the devil. I thought the Exorcist-coded high-pitched voice was terrifying but also a little ridiculous. Our Christian patois did use the language of demons—don’t let the demon of lust or pride command your life—but we usually took it metaphorically.

For Jacobs, who did not make herself available for an interview, demonic spirits are a real and persistent threat. She preaches about their dangers to a social media following of hundreds of thousands and in regular appearances in Charisma Media and on the Christian Broadcasting Network, whose reach is even greater. Recounting her direct interactions with God, she leads her flock in “spiritual warfare” on his behalf—seeking, it seems, nothing less than a total theocratic takeover of the U.S. Now, with Trump back in office, she believes she’s won, through providence, a crucial battle in the fight between good and evil.

Cindy Jacobs didn’t always see herself as a prophet, but there were signs. She was born in 1951 to a Southern Baptist pastor in San Antonio. Supernatural gifts, such as casting out demons and faith healing, weren’t part of that theology; neither was elevating a woman to pastoral leadership. Still, Cindy felt some kind of calling. When she was four years old, as she recounts often in her writing and speaking events, she prophesied the birth of a younger sibling. “I told Momma, ‘I’m going to have a little sister.’ She said, ‘We’re not having any more kids.’ She was wrong. The Holy Spirit was right—she was pregnant.”

Five years later, Cindy attended a missionary church camp in Arizona. It was there, Jacobs writes in her 2019 book, Women, Rise Up!, that she felt God’s push into ministry. She was handed a commitment form with three boxes—for pastor, evangelist, and missionary—and filled it out. “I never dreamed I could be a pastor or evangelist, so I signed up with the Lord to go to the mission field. Little did I know that decision would lead me to worldwide ministry.”

While Jacobs marks her prophetic call at age nine, her understanding of what that meant developed gradually. It led her first to piano and to worship and praise. She thought maybe that was how God would use her, and she earned a bachelor’s in music at Pepperdine University, the school in Malibu, California, affiliated with the Churches of Christ.

At a friend’s encouragement, she started to explore the gifts of the Holy Spirit—first singing, then speaking, in tongues. She and her husband, Mike, were invited to a Black church in Los Angeles where they heard first-person testimonies of congregants being healed from disease and injury. “We could hardly sleep that night because of our excitement over what we had seen,” she recounts in one of her books. And then, during a Sunday service, came God’s prophecy. Jacobs heard someone speaking in tongues and felt the message was for her: “ ‘When the invitation comes, you are to join the church. Follow me and let the spiritually dead bury the dead.’ ”

Jacobs would spend the next decade—during which she and her husband moved back to Texas—raising children and developing her spiritual gifts. She recounts wrestling with God over a call to preach because, as a woman who had grown up in a Southern Baptist church, she thought her gender excluded her from the vocation. She experienced plenty of rejection during her rise in ministry, but she would come back to a memorable prophecy God had given her: “Daughter, I’m going to give you the hide of a of a rhinoceros and the heart of a dove.”

Jacobs began to make prophecies, at first mainly personal revelations: warning friends of dangers, praying for specific outcomes. Over time, she came to understand that her mission was to be a prophet not just to individuals but to the world, waging campaigns to convert entire nations. She began convening with other faith leaders such as Lance Wallnau, the far-right televangelist now most known for his “Seven Mountains Mandate.” “7M” is a New Apostolic Reformation rallying belief advocating for a Christian takeover of the seven areas of societal influence: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government. The underlying concept isn’t really new. In some ways, it’s an extreme version of the common Christian exhortation to be “salt and light,” seasoning the culture and illuminating society with the news of the Gospel.

In 1989, Jacobs met Fuller Seminary professor C. Peter Wagner, a scholar of church-growth models and the eventual architect of the NAR. Jacobs reportedly introduced Wagner to the concept of what he would later term “strategic-level spiritual warfare,” based on a belief that demonic forces can infiltrate not just beings but entire territories and seats of power. Casting out those demons requires on-site intervention from gatherings of “prayer warriors.” Wagner’s United States Strategic Prayer Network was extensive—each state had a designated warfare coordinator. Jacobs helped develop the tactics for battle, and she eventually served as a sort of commanding officer when she took over leadership of the network in 2008, about a decade before Wagner’s death.

That journey would lead Jacobs and her followers to the exterior of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, where they’d pray to halt the certification of the presidential-election results as a mob of Trump supporters stormed the building.

The quest of the New Apostolic Reformation to conquer the “seven mountains” of influence isn’t about acquiring power for power’s sake. Within the mountain of government, even Trump is a means to an end—not a deity but, as Wallnau dubs him, a “Cyrus” figure, a reference to a biblical king who returned God’s people from exile, enabling them to rebuild their temple in Jerusalem. Broadly, that work is global revival, defeating the “enemy,” and ushering in the “second coming of Christ.” Specifically, it involves knocking down church-state separation and creating a Christian-dominated society.

The NAR and some of its figures may have risen to national prominence as key evangelical apologists for Trump, but many of them have been organizing in the Metroplex for much longer. While they claimed success after the first election of George W. Bush, their vision—overturning Roe v. Wade, promoting prayer in public schools—went unfulfilled. It wasn’t until Wallnau’s seven-mountains concept was fully integrated as a tenet of their theology, in the mid-2000s, that they actively looked for ways to take the mountain of government.

In 2011 the movement’s leaders found their guy, someone who would give them a seat at the table and pursue their antiabortion, anti–gay rights agenda: Texas Governor Rick Perry. That August, Jacobs, Wagner, and others within the NAR fold endorsed the soon-to-be presidential candidate’s gathering at Reliant Stadium, in Houston. “The Response,” dubbed “Prayerpalooza” by critics, had all the markings of a large-scale revival: a crowd of 30,000-plus, plied with introductory praise and worship music, some lying on the ground, others speaking in tongues.

When Perry lost in the GOP primaries and Barack Obama eventually won a second term in the White House, NAR apostles and prophets activated their prayer networks and prepared for battle. According to religious scholar Matthew D. Taylor, the Supreme Court’s landmark 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which guaranteed the right to same-sex marriage, was a defining moment. “The summer of 2015 felt like the absolute bottom point in their efforts because they had spent decades cultivating a Supreme Court that would go their way on abortion, that would go their way on LGBTQ rights, that would be the bulwark against this kind of cultural change,” Taylor told me. “They just felt like they were boxed out of everything. . . . They were primed to look for a bully.”

Ten days before the Obergefell ruling, Donald Trump had launched his 2016 presidential campaign. Many evangelical voices at the top broke for Texas Senator Ted Cruz in the GOP primary. But the flocks in the pews wanted Trump. NAR leaders did too, and they rallied their followers. When the field of candidates was still too large for one debate stage, some already believed that God had anointed Trump for president.

Denominational evangelical leaders, overwhelmingly men, had seen their influence, and their flocks, dwindle for decades. Meanwhile, independent charismatic voices like Jacobs could quickly call up their massive prayer networks to engage in “strategic-level spiritual warfare.” The two camps found common cause in electing their “bully.” At a meeting between Trump and Christian leaders billed as “A Conversation About America’s Future” held in the summer of 2016, after Cruz’s exit from the primaries, Jacobs’s name was listed among the conveners, alongside that of Ronnie Floyd, the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention. The message to evangelicals: Get on board.

They did. And NAR leaders stuck by Trump in 2020, most refusing to acknowledge that Biden had won the election. Had they accepted the loss, it could have seemed to others that the prophecy had failed. Trump was supposed to be a two-term president, after all.

In the months following the 2020 election, those leaders gathered their networks of prayer warriors for at least eighteen “Global Prayer for Election Integrity” Zoom meetings, as Taylor details in his book The Violent Take It by Force. According to other reporting, on one call Jacobs prayed that the group’s efforts would be like a “nuclear bomb against the powers of darkness.”

About a month after that call, on January 5, 2021, she spent nearly three hours in the White House (at whose invitation remains unclear), touring the East Wing and engaging in spiritual warfare on behalf of the president. The following day, Jacobs, in her red boots, stepped onto a small stage outside the U.S. Capitol and started interceding.

“Lord, we pray that the message will go into the Senate and the House that there are citizens outside saying that they want an audit,” she said. “We declare that we will have this audit in the name of Jesus.”

The NAR leaders eventually lost that battle. Jacobs, for her part, offered a sort of repentance on social media in the following days:
“Was my heart centered on Jesus or politics? . . . Confession! My heart was more centered on politics. So sorry, Lord!”

But prophecies can shift; revelations can make the picture clearer. Trump would still be a two-term president—the timing was just off.

Four years later, on the night Trump was declared the victor of the 2024 presidential election, Jacobs was preparing for her organization’s largest event of the year. She posted a celebratory video: “Thank you to the hundreds of thousands of intercessors. . . . This was a global election, and God gave us the win!”

Apostles and prophets within the NAR believe that each of them is tasked with an assignment to help take over a mountain of influence for the kingdom of God. With the government in hand, they’ve turned their sights to what may be the largest uphill climb: conquering the media. When the participants at the November gathering were asked to stand if they felt called to tackle the “media mountain,” more than half of the audience rose.

An invasion by the NAR would look like not only the death of legacy news media—the Trump administration is helping with that one too—but also an infusion of Christian-based programming. “We want Hollywood to see that Jesus is alive—we’re boldly going for Hollywood,” Jacobs told a congregation at Trinity Church in early January.

Boldness looks more muted in Hollywood than on the steps of the Capitol. Jacobs’s new YouTube show, When Heaven Hears, is airy—much of it is filmed on a brightly lit, Magnolia-style set. In each episode, Jacobs speaks one-on-one with guests she hasn’t previously met and offers visions for their futures. Many of them are already Christian; they can quote the Bible or reference spiritual encounters.

In the second episode, filmed years ago and shelved when COVID-19 hit, Jacobs sat down at a table with Cindy Luna, an actress originally from Miami whose credits include roles in NBC’s The InBetween and TNT’s The Last Ship. Jacobs posed a question. “Have you ever had a private sit-down with a prophet before?”

Luna said she had not. What happened next felt familiar to me—I’d witnessed plenty of psychic readings. “I see that God is rearranging you and your life right now. He’s rearranging you for his purposes,” Jacobs told Luna. “You’re a storyteller. . . . I don’t know if you do anything in Hollywood, because I know nothing about you, but I see you directing and producing.” (This was not a stretch: Most of the show’s guests are L.A. industry types.) Jacobs went on to tell Luna, after confirming that her guest was single, that “there is someone that is being prepared for you.”

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The conversation might seem like a departure from Jacobs’s nation-shaking prophecies with worldwide geopolitical implications. She didn’t talk about strategic-level spiritual warfare or have much to say about demons. The goal of the show, Jacobs has said, is to demonstrate to the lost that prophecy is real, that God still speaks today. If you’re going to conquer the culture, you have to legitimize your movement.

Throughout the conversation, Luna nodded along, smiling politely. Then Jacobs cited a specific verse, and it was clear she had gotten through—Luna said she had been meditating on that exact verse, Jeremiah 29:11, and posting it on social media.

That kind of breakthrough may prove more difficult with a secular audience, the kind Jacobs is after. As of this writing, the episode with Luna has only around 16,000 views. But the other wins of the movement can serve as proof to others that the cause is righteous and victory possible. After all, summiting the government mountain and electing Trump once seemed fantastical.

Jacobs says the concept of doing a show for “the secular people” was prophesied to her years ago by her friend and Florida-based preacher Jane Hamon. After the pandemic shut down production, the project foundered—she worried it might never happen. The show finally premiered on Christmas Day of 2024. One prophecy fulfilled.

PCDCC Comms Content Editor Note:  For in-depth, deep dive into the historical origins of the Israeli-U.S.A. “special relationship” based on shared notions of “exceptionalism” and “anti-Colonialism” vs “Colonialism” founding and historical feature of conquest, take a peek at the link from the book “Our American Israel, the Story of an Entangled Alliance”.

The following quote best illuminates the takeaway from this book about the American Israel Alliance transformation into a “Christian-Zionist alliance” that permeates republican politics:

“The providential narrative has made the special relationship seem inevitable, as though it primed
Christian Americans to embrace Israel long before the founding of either nation-state. In reality,
it took many changes in twentieth-century America—the emergence of the idea of the Judeo-Christian
tradition, post-Holocaust theology, and the politicization of evangelical Christians—to generate new
stories and forge modern bonds between American Christianity and the Jewish state.”