Who says Christian nationalism is a person’s sport? Jenny Donnelly — an “apostle” who claims God speaks to her prophetically in her goals — needs to marshal an “military of ladies” to this extremist trigger.
Donnelly is the founding father of the Her Voice Motion, which is dedicated to activating 1,000,000 girls to face for Christian dominion over American tradition and politics in 2024. Beneath the steering of prime leaders of the Trump-aligned Christian proper, Donnelly is organizing prayer rallies at each state Capitol subsequent April. And she or he is working to stage a million-woman Christian nationalist march on the Nationwide Mall subsequent October, close to Election Day.
Donnelly’s movement-building has an interesting gloss of ladies’s empowerment. She’s an skilled marketer — a former “Corridor of Fame” earner for a multi-level-marketing firm that acquired charged for working as a pyramid scheme. However Donnelly preaches a darkish message of Christian supremacy.
“I’m a very black-and-white particular person,” she mentioned in a video name with the Christian nationalist chief Lance Wallnau this summer time. “I simply consider what the Bible says,” she added. “We’re imagined to go onto the Earth; we’re imagined to dominate.” In a late November sermon, Donnelly addressed congregants on the divine mandate to “put God’s individuals in energy,” telling followers: “He’s given you a non secular place to reign and rule.”
The agenda for Donnelly, particularly, is to roll again the LGBTQ rights motion, which she insists is a Satanic slippery slope to pedophilia. “Know that sin doesn’t have a stopping level,” she informed a current spiritual gathering in Hollywood, warning that if the motion stays unchecked, “hastily it’s going to be OK for a 54-year-old to be married to a 4-year-old.”
Donnelly, 49, positions this anti-LGBTQ sentiment as if it’s defensive, with branding that features the web site: “Don’t Mess With Our Youngsters.” However she additionally fashions her motion on one of many bloodiest tales of the Previous Testomony — which ends with the heroes happening offense towards their enemies, one among whom finally ends up impaled on a spike.
For a preacher obsessive about energy, Donnelly shuns media consideration. She confided to the followers in LA that she needs her motion to seem bottom-up, insisting: “We need to make it so the press can’t discover out who’s the chief.” She didn’t comply with be interviewed by Rolling Stone.
Donnelly preaches close to Portland, Oregon, the place she lives together with her household. Presenting her life story to non secular audiences, she describes how she was born to “Jesus motion” hippies, who quickly divorced, and was raised in the home of her atheist, physician stepfather in Idaho. She rediscovered God, she says, throughout a second of despair in school.
Donnelly’s first profession was a wild trip close to the highest of an alleged pyramid scheme. She labored with AdvoCare, a Texas-based multilevel advertising agency that ostensibly bought dietary dietary supplements and power drinks. Donnelly and her husband had been featured as “Corridor of Fame” earners for the corporate. “I by no means got down to be a millionaire,” she mentioned in a single video, bragging of the couple’s seven-figure annual earnings.
Decrease-level entrepreneurs, nonetheless, felt duped by the corporate, claiming that AdvoCare wasn’t actually a diet enterprise, quite an costly lure that duped newcomers into shopping for stock that they had little prospect of promoting for a revenue. In 2019, the corporate reached an enormous settlement with the Federal Commerce Fee, agreeing to pay almost $150 million {dollars} to resolve prices that it operated as an unlawful pyramid scheme. (Donnelly was not named or accused of wrongdoing in that FTC motion.)
The collapse of AdvoCare occasioned a stark shift by Donnelly into a spiritual calling — pursued by way of a ministry she began together with her husband known as Tetelestai Ministries. The spiritual nonprofit’s income soared, in response to IRS data, from $121,000 in 2018 to $1.5 million in 2021, as Donnelly grew to become energetic within the far-right spiritual neighborhood’s struggle towards Covid restrictions.
In April 2023, Donnelly was commissioned as an “apostle” within the church of the Christian nationalist preacher Che Ahn — a number one determine within the New Apostolic Reformation. NAR is a department of Charismatic Christianity that’s obsessive about earthly energy, and a supposed mandate for Christians to exert “dominion” over “the nations” as a part of an Finish Instances campaign to hasten the return of Christ. Primarily based in Southern California, Ahn had traveled to Washington, D.C., to again Donald Trump on Jan. 6, 2021, and he decries the separation of church and state as a lie “from the pit of hell.”
Donnelly has since been on a meteoric rise in NAR circles, mentored by the likes of Wallnau, the Trump-allied promoter of a roadmap for Christian conquest known as the “Seven Mountains Mandate.” Donnelly has additionally solid a movement-building partnership with a fiery NAR preacher named Lou Engle — who has blended faith and politics for many years, together with ties to figures like Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback and Texas Gov. Rick Perry. (Engle didn’t reply to a Rolling Stone interview request.)
Donnelly’s Her Voice Motion, searching for to mobilize Christian nationalist girls, had a popping out celebration in July — taking up the Portland conference heart for 3 days of worship and speeches from figures like Wallnau, Ahn, and Engle. Donnelly and Engle have continued this street present, internet hosting a touring “Freedom Tour.”
Framing her political activism biblically, Donnelly leans on the Previous Testomony Guide of Esther. In that bloody story, Esther, a younger Jew, is made queen by a fearsome Persian king. The king is later satisfied by a depraved adviser, Haman, to subject a decree calling for the extermination of the Jewish individuals. Upon the recommendation of her uncle Mordecai — who satisfied Esther that God had positioned her in her royal put up for “such a time as this” — the queen dared angering the king (and maybe being put to dying by him) to hunt a reprieve for the Jews. The king took her counsel, and issued a brand new decree — authorizing Jews to take vengeance towards their tormentors, which they did with violent zeal. Haman ended up on a spike.
Within the motion’s metaphor, Donnelly and her feminine followers stand as Esthers. Engle and the boys who raise up their Christian nationalist wives and feminine relations are Mordecais. In his sermon on the Portland conference heart, the place he rocked forwards and backwards as he spoke, Engle railed towards the “transgender demonic spirit.” Insisting America confronted a “do or die second,” he took on the mantle of Mordecai, shouting: “Tonight, I name forth Esther. For such a time as this.”
Don’t mistake Donnelly’s message of feminine empowerment as feminist. As Donnelly described her view, in a June dialog with Wallnau about “the sort of lady Devil fears most,” Christian girls nonetheless want males to entry their energy. “We want the endorsement of a male voice,” Donnelly mentioned. “We want your permission to be courageous.” Within the battle for the nation she mentioned: “I consider that the ladies are the arrows, and the boys are the bows. The Holy Spirit is the archer.”
As a preacher, Donnelly outlines a stark message of Christian dominance. She insists Christians are God’s chosen individuals and believes they’re commanded to take management, primarily based on the instruction in Genesis to “subdue” the earth. In a current speech, Donnelly mentioned: “I seemed that [word] up in Hebrew; that phrase really means ‘to take it beneath bondage.’” Donnelly continued that the precise message from God was: “I commanded you to take a look at the Earth, and when it acts up, carry it beneath the bondage of the dominion of God.” Donnelly insists that when Christians don’t occupy their rightful place of energy, it creates “a giant vacuum for unrighteousness to take over.”
In her motion constructing, and her audacious objective to carry 1 million girls to Washington subsequent fall, Donnelly seems to be leaning on her multilevel advertising experience. In her Hollywood speech, she informed the assembled girls to take cost of spreading the message inside their very own networks: “The those that belief you, belief you,” she mentioned. “We don’t have time for them to realize belief of me or Lou.” Donnelly can also be elevating money by way of a fundraising web site known as the “Esther Community,” which presents recurring donation ranges of as much as $39.99 a month.
Step one in Donnelly’s hoped-for nationwide mobilization comes this April, in gatherings at every state Capitol. Organizing supplies posted on a Donnelly web site insist that every gathering is supposed to be “peaceable prayer meeting” and never a “violent protest.”
However the rhetoric utilized by each Donnelly and Engle is suggestive of one thing far darker. Addressing the Portland conference corridor, Donnelly mentioned: “That is one thing that we’re laying our lives down for.” Talking in regards to the March on Washington in a filmed handle to the Hollywood viewers, Engle exhorted the ladies to, “Warfare for our kids,” including: “We’re going to consider that God goes to unfastened the sound of Psalm 68.” (Psalm 68 reads partially: “Could God come up, could his enemies be scattered; could his foes flee earlier than him. Could you blow them away like smoke — as wax melts earlier than the hearth, could the depraved perish earlier than God.”)
In her current November sermon, Donnelly additionally elaborated on her hair-raising takeaway from the Esther story — and the connection between bloodshed and authority and perception. Donnelly claimed of the Jews who took vengeance on their enemies: “They slaughtered so many individuals that everyone feared the Jews, and determined to hitch them — which means they determined to worship the God of Abraham … as a result of they got here into such authority and such energy.”
Donnelly mentioned she expects comparable mass conversions when Christians step into their full authority: “I consider we’re going to see … a billion soul harvest.” Donnelly insisted that God needs to see the church arrive at its “most interesting hour” and step “into its season of energy” — in order that “an entire lotta individuals say, ‘I need to grasp with you guys.’”
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