'Arming' for Armageddon; Militant Joel's Army Followers Seek Theocracy (SPLC Report)

[Indigo Blue]

'Arming' for Armageddon
Militant Joel's Army Followers Seek Theocracy
By Casey Sanchez
Photography by Lowell Handler

Intelligence Report
Fall 2008


Canadian Todd Bentley, who preached for months on end this year in Florida, is a general in Joel's Army.


LAKELAND, Fla. — Todd Bentley has a long night ahead of him, resurrecting the dead, healing the blind, and exploding cancerous tumors. Since April 3, the 32-year-old, heavily tattooed, body-pierced, shaved-head Canadian preacher has been leading a continuous "supernatural healing revival" in central Florida. To contain the 10,000-plus crowds flocking from around the globe, Bentley has rented baseball stadiums, arenas and airport hangars at a cost of up to $15,000 a day. Many in attendance are church pastors themselves who believe Bentley to be a prophet and don't bat an eye when he tells them he's seen King David and spoken with the Apostle Paul in heaven. "He was looking very Jewish," Bentley notes.

Tattooed across his sternum are military dog tags that read "Joel's Army." They're evidence of Bentley's generalship in a rapidly growing apocalyptic movement that's gone largely unnoticed by watchdogs of the theocratic right. According to Bentley and a handful of other "hyper-charismatic" preachers advancing the same agenda, Joel's Army is prophesied to become an Armageddon-ready military force of young people with a divine mandate to physically impose Christian "dominion" on non-believers.

"An end-time army has one common purpose — to aggressively take ground for the kingdom of God under the authority of Jesus Christ, the Dread Champion," Bentley declares on the website for his ministry school in British Columbia, Canada. "The trumpet is sounding, calling on-fire, revolutionary believers to enlist in Joel's Army. … Many are now ready to be mobilized to establish and advance God's kingdom on earth."

Joel's Army followers, many of them teenagers and young adults who believe they're members of the final generation to come of age before the end of the world, are breaking away in droves from mainline Pentecostal churches. Numbering in the tens of thousands, they base their beliefs on an esoteric reading of the second chapter of the Old Testament Book of Joel, in which an avenging swarm of locusts attacks Israel. In their view, the locusts are a metaphor for Joel's Army.

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Those sounding the alarm about Joel's Army are not secular foes of the Christian Right, few of whom are even aware of the movement or how widespread it's become in the past decade. Instead, Joel's Army critics are mostly conservative Christians, either neo-Pentecostals who left the movement in disgust or evangelical Christians who fear that Joel's Army preachers are stealing their flocks, even sending spies to infiltrate their own congregations and sway their young people to heresy. And they say the movement is becoming frightening.

"The pitch and intensity of the military rhetoric of this branch of the global Dominionist movement has substantially increased since the beginning of 2008," writes The Discernment Research Group, a Christian watchdog group that tracks what they call heresies or cults within Christianity. "One can only wonder how long before this transforms into real warfare with actual warriors."

'Snorting Religion'
Joel's Army believers are hard-core Christian dominionists, meaning they believe that America, along with the rest of the world, should be governed by conservative Christians and a conservative Christian interpretation of biblical law. There is no room in their doctrine for democracy or pluralism.

Dominionism's original branch is Christian Reconstructionism, a grim, Calvinist call to theocracy that, as Reconstructionist writer Gary North describes, wants to "get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God."

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Warrior Nation
According to Joel's Army doctrine, the enforcers of the five-fold ministry will be members of the final generation, for whom the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade constituted a new Passover.

"Everyone born after abortion's legalization can consider their birth a personal invitation to take part in this great army," writes John Crowder, another prominent Joel's Army pastor, who bills his 2006 book, The New Mystics: How to Become Part of the Supernatural Generation, as a literal how-to guide for joining Joel's Army.Both Bentley and Crowder are enormously popular on Elijah's List, an online watering hole for a broad spectrum of Joel's Army enlistees, from lightweight believers who merely share an affection for military rhetoric and pastors who dress in army camouflage (several Joel's Army pastors are addressed by their congregants as "commandant" or "commander") to hardliners who believe the church is called to have an active military role in end-times that have already begun. Elijah's List currently has more than 125,000 subscribers on its electronic mailing list.

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So far, few members of the secular media have taken notice of Joel's Army, even as they report on Protestant dominionists like Pat Robertson or the more outrageous calls for the stoning of gays and lesbians emanating from Reconstructionist circles. There are exceptions, however. On the DailyKos, a well-read, politically liberal blog, a diarist has been blogging for two years about her experiences as a walkaway from a Joel's Army church. She writes under a pseudonym out of fear of physical reprisals.

She may have real cause for concern. As Wimber, the late founder of The Vineyard, put it in one of his most famous and fiery sermons, one that is still frequently cited by Joel's Army followers: "Those in this army will have His kind of power. … Anyone who wants to harm them must die."


You can read the entire report @ http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=964

Articles On the Rise of Dominionism in America: http://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/DirectoryRiseOfDominionismInAmerica.html


Edited to add this link: Christian Fundamentalism Permeates the Republican Party: Sarah Palin’s links to the Christian Right: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3997455

[lynnertic]

1. Meanwhile, in a Friday news dump, Pentagon announces it will send 1000 bunker-buster bombs

to Israel.

I hope they aren't nuclear-tipped.

[lapfog_1]

2. These idiots presume to change the word of God?

Not that I believe the stories or prophecies of the bible, but I think one of the main problems with people like this is that they really don't understand much about biblical times. "avenging swarm of locusts" doesn't mean anything to them so they think that it must be a metaphor.

Every year here in South Eastern Arizona (which, climate wise, is very similar to Israel), we put in a large garden, some years... like this one (the monsoon season has been long and unusually wet) we get locusts (grasshoppers), lots of them. This year one could call it a "plague". Every morning I walk across a grass pathway to my car and it's like watching one of those mousetrap / pingpong ball chain reaction experiments. Literally the ground explodes with jumping grasshoppers. The parts of the garden not enclosed by green house have been devastated. They ate even the chili peppers all the way down to the stems. They have consumed everything. If we didn't have the greenhouse and we depended on the garden for all of our vegatables... we would have starved this year. When the bible talks of "plagues of locusts" or "avenging swarm of locusts" I would take it at its word. Grasshoppers. not metaphors. Something that would kill thousands of farmers and their families. Wrath of god to the simple people of that time. Most years, few locusts... some years you can't walk without crunching a few dozen... and that means we must have done something to piss off God. So we will write it down as a story. And some other fool includes it in the bible.