‘The Seven Mountains Mandate’ author stops by the ‘A Matter of Faith’ podcast

LOUISVILLE — Author and scholar Matthew Boedy, whose “The Seven Mountains Mandate: Exposing the Dangerous Plan to Christianize America and Destroy Democracy” was published Tuesday by Westminster John Knox Press, was the most recent guest on “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast.” Listen to Boedy’s hour-long conversation with hosts the Rev. Lee Catoe and Simon Doong here.

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The book touches frequently on the influence of Turning Point USA and its founder Charlie Kirk, who was killed on Sept. 10 while speaking at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. At the outset of the conversation with Boedy, who teaches rhetoric and composition at the University of North Georgia, Catoe noted that Kirk’s death by gun violence occurred well ahead of when the podcast was taped. “A Matter of Faith” condemns “any kind of violence,” Catoe said, including gun violence, and also condemns homophobia, transphobia, racism, white supremacy and Christian nationalism. “We can hold all those things up at the same time,” Catoe told listeners.

Doong asked Boedy to explain the Seven Mountains Mandate movement.

Boedy called it “a movement within Christian nationalism dedicated to Christianizing the seven cultural institutions or arenas or spheres in the United States” — education, family, business, government/military, religion, media, and arts and entertainment.

The idea is to have Christians in leadership within each sphere, Boedy said, or “what might be described as a Christian consensus within those areas … so these areas should not only be run by Christians, but have a Christian culture attached to them.”

The movement began in the charismatic branch of white evangelicalism in the 1970s, according to Boedy. “What they’re attempting to do is take their idea of Christianity and force it on other people and other parts of the nation,” he said. The movement wants to take back each of the mountains, which it suggests “is controlled by a secular force or a demonic force.”

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He said the heir to the Seven Mountains Movement is Turning Point USA, which started out as a political organization and is now a religious organization as well. Progressive Christians and churches and their leaders can respond to this movement by further promoting their ideas on religious pluralism as well as democracy.

“I think the response needs to be not just a religious response, although that is important,” he said. “We need to make a larger network of people who will promote democracy against those who won’t.”

Many members of churches in mainline denominations aren’t well-versed about this movement, Catoe said. “We talk about Christian nationalism in broad terms, but we don’t know exactly what’s happening,” he said. “Sometimes we don’t take things that are considered Satanic or demonic as being real in progressive circles.”

Boedy noted that “the kind of spiritual warfare the Seven Mountains Movement people operate with is not an individual one.” In his letter to the church in Ephesus, he noted that Paul urges individuals to “put on the whole armor of God.”

“It was about individually blocking Satan’s attacks on your mind,” Boedy said of Paul’s letter. Movement supporters “want to take those individual verses and extrapolate it to institutional areas.”

One example is the prayer walks that were common in cities about 20 years ago. “They would point out areas where demons would be,” including places with significant drug use and homelessness.

“Some people included higher education in this,” Boedy said. “They wanted to repel the demons from those areas and from those institutions, and they would walk and pray.” While movement supporters used to pray over their cities, they now pray over the entire nation, he said.

Among Mountain of Education strategies, movement supporters turn to the use of vouchers to take public money and use it to attend private schools. Many also work to populate their local school board with those who support such aims.

“They’re talking about battling Satan not just as individuals, but as a church and, more broadly, as a nation,” Boedy said.

With the Mountain of Religion, the belief is either that certain denominations have been overtaken by Satan “or they’re not preaching the real gospel or getting good discipleship,” Boedy said. “What the Seven Mountains Mandate has in mind is they want to push the church to purify itself and get better discipleship. That may sound good, but they also suggest you should leave the churches that are never going to be good enough. … It’s a movement to take the battle to Satan. They are taking the spiritual battle fight to the enemy.”

“They want very much to Christianize the public school system,” he said, including placing the Ten Commandments in classrooms, banning some books and implementing President Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission “to bring Christianity as the consensus to public schools,” as Boedy put it. “You can see they want to bring back a very specific Christianized version of American history so they can change what we’re taught in the future.”

“That’s very important for the Mountain of Education,” he said. “Once you start educating people differently in grades K-12, that affects their lives from here on out.”

Movement proponents stress that the nation’s form of government is a republic and not a democracy, Boedy said. “When they say republic, they mean leadership by a minority. Also, a republic to them has a certain culture — American culture, Western culture, often a stand-in for white culture.” Some discuss taking voting rights “away from individuals who don’t meet their moral standard,” he said. “They don’t like blue states, and they don’t like people moving from blue states to red states, changing and influencing the red states.” To proponents, “anything that comes from California is bad for the rest of the nation.”

“I don’t know if they would be for a king, like in the Old Testament,” Boedy said. “But they do like President Trump because he gets their agenda done. They want Christian leaders to rule.” Some have ideas like starting new cities or taking over local government and school boards “so it becomes a Christian city by fiat,” he said.

“They might use democracy to get there,” Boedy said. “But in the end they are antidemocratic because they don’t want to have the rest of the citizens participating in government.”

The strategy for the Mountain of Business “is all about free-market capitalism” and people being free to create businesses “without having the government on their backs,” he said. There’s also the idea of the prosperity gospel within the Seven Mountains Movement, “that God can bless you with wealth if you follow God’s commands.” A nation can be blessed similarly, he said.

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While the Seven Mountains Mandate approach sounds well-coordinated, Doong said he doesn’t see that level of coordination in progressive church spaces, where “there’s a lot of in-fighting. We may agree on where we’re going,” Doong said, “but we disagree about how to get there.”

“The white evangelical movement is now working at institutional levels that the progressive movement is not,” Boedy said. “They aren’t working at the state level or the community level.” Progressive Christians “want to include non-Christians in their pluralistic ideas. The Seven Mountains people are not interested in negotiations.”

“They know what they’re trying to do and they’re in it for the long game,” said Catoe, who then asked Boedy what he sees as the outcome when it comes to faith.

“That question is tied to what America looks like in the post-Trump era,” Boedy said. “Every time we see the Christian nationalist movement pop up, they raise the stakes of what they want. They didn’t get what they wanted, and so they did an insurrection. What could be higher than that? What could be more damaging to the nation?”

As a professor of rhetoric, Boedy stresses for his students the importance of “using the available means of persuasion.”

“You have to decide what could work and what’s a non-starter,” he said. “We’re all trying to find language to coalesce around. I’ve been using the word ‘democracy.’ President Biden tried to do that and it failed; he was not re-elected. I don’t have the magic words or the magic wand here.”

But there’s still Scripture “to talk about individual hope and individual joy and community-level joy, which is the idea of Christianity to begin with,” Boedy said. “We talk about the church being persecuted and being a minority movement and having to defend itself, and that might be where we’re going.”

“We may have to go through some very bad times … to restore some sort of spirit of cooperation and faith in our society,” he said. “It may take the coalescing of odd groups to restore our faith in government.”

“I think that change can come from religious leaders,” he said, “the people who know how to build unity and build faith, whether in God or in government.”