The militarization of prayer in America: White and Native American spiritual warfare

Elizabeth McAlister - Journal of Religious and Political Practice

This essay extends the literature on the militarization of everyday life to argue that contemporary military metaphors and practices have become a generative force animating the sphere of Christian prayer. The wars of the twentieth century and the corresponding process of militarization have affected almost every aspect of social life all around the globe, and prayer is no exception. In the United States, “the capillaries of militarization have fed and molded social institutions seemingly little connected to battle” (Lutz 2002 Lutz, Catherine. 2002. “Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis.” American Anthropologist, 104(3): 72335.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®][Google Scholar]: 724). Of course the Bible is full of violent battles and scenes of war, and religious actors have drawn on these images in countless periods throughout history (Niditch 1995 Niditch, Susan. 1995. War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence. New York: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]: 4). Today’s Christian militarization is simply the latest iteration in a long partnership between Christian missions and military expeditions, tropes, values, and logics. Yet in the twentieth century the militarization of daily life in the United States reached new heights and has expanded into new sectors, including research, technology, border patrol, immigration, humanitarianism, education, leisure, aesthetics, and fashion. It is time to examine how militarism has come to be part of the prayer practices of millions of Christians, especially in the charismatic networks that are on the rise across the globe.

This means examining side by side two spheres that are rarely considered together. In popular opinion, prayer is considered personal, holy, moral, beneficent, submissive, and even sacrificial. Militarism, on the other hand, is about dominating through force, and it is collective, violent, and combative, a top-down affair of highly disciplined and aggressive troops and their weaponry, funded and controlled by nation-states. Yet my research shows that prayer has become increasingly militarized during the last several decades.

To understand this process, I focus here on the articulation (Hall 1986) between militarism and aggressive forms of prayer in the case of evangelical warfare prayer developed by white and Native North Americans.11. I use the term articulation in a particular fashion, after Stuart Hall 1986 who theorized that elements of culture, while usually tied to class, can recombine in various ways into new patterns with novel meanings or connotations. This is useful in understanding how cultural spheres as seemingly far apart as militarism and prayer can be linked together both in theory, theology, and practice, and come to create new meanings, rituals, and identities, which in turn influence politics and diplomacy, missionary projects, and even humanitarianism.View all notes I use the term aggressive forms of prayer here as a conceptual, second-order category that encompasses both spoken addresses to the Christian God (or other deities and spirits), and ritual action, conceived to be part of the work of prayer, that aim to harm, debilitate, remove, or weaken another party or to impose the speaker’s will onto another party, an institution, or series of events. It is not the case that aggressive forms of prayer are merely a “reflection” of politics or of the broader culture. One of my assumptions is that through prayer, in both written/formal and oral/improvised forms, people actively produce meanings that in turn shape the world – individual identities, congregations, networks, political actors – in a dialectical way (see also McAlister 2001: 5). This lets us see clearly that secular and religious spheres are entangled and produce one another.

In what follows, I discuss an evangelical network that practices a militarized form of prayer its members call “spiritual warfare”.22. This network is known variously as the Spiritual Mapping Movement, the Transformation or Revival Movement, the New Apostolic Reformation, and the Third Wave Evangelical Movement.View all notes Spiritual warfare is a precise term in evangelical and charismatic networks, and it is a theological orientation that runs through churches as well as para-church organizations. People who subscribe to this idea understand the whole of human history as a consequence of the cosmic battle of Satan against God. They offer a legalistic account beginning with the idea that God gave earthly dominion to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28. When Satan’s temptation of Eve in Genesis 3 leads to the Fall of Man, “legal” spiritual authority extends to Satan and explains why life on Earth is fraught with suffering. According to God’s law, Satan gains the legal right to be “prince of this world” (John 12:31), and he commands an army of demons who maintain “strongholds” – geographic and spiritual bases of demonic power. After Christ was crucified in payment for the sins of all of humankind, Satan was dispossessed of his dominion on Earth. However, Satan’s strongholds did not melt away. Instead, Satan and his demonic army hold on to what power they have cultivated through social vice and sin: violence, idol worship, sexual iniquity, poverty, addiction, abortion, and more. People’s sin functions as an “invitation” for Satan’s demons to enter and begin legal operations.

Most scholarship on this movement focuses on the personal forms of spiritual warfare that individuals wage against personal demons – such as lust, envy, alcoholism, and even mental illness. But less attention has been given to the ways spiritual warriors understand national and global politics. The battle against demonic strongholds is waged against specific evil entities in both local and national spaces. Wrote theologian C. Peter Wagner, “I have come to believe that Satan does indeed assign a demon or corps of demons to every geopolitical unit in the world, and they are among the principalities and powers with whom we wrestle” (Wagner 1989 Wagner, C. Peter. 1989. “Territorial Spirits: Identifying Demonic Spirits Over Geographical Domains.” Ministry Digest, 1(5): 4245. [Google Scholar]: 47). Spiritual warfare evangelicals have elaborated a complex theology and prayer practice with a highly militarized discourse and set of rituals for doing “spiritual battle” and conducting “prayer strikes” on the “prayer battlefield”. Warfare prayer can take place in church, at large revivals, at semi-public conferences in hotels, or in private spaces such as homes. Spiritual warriors are aggressive prayer intercessors who can pray openly in “prayer walks” through public spaces, often in urban neighborhoods where poverty and crime are rife. Advanced warriors can also do “covert actions” in public spaces when they are “on assignment” from the Holy Spirit, in which case they might pray in small groups at key “demonic strongholds”, such as massacre sites, masonic temples, or abortion clinics. The goal is generally not to cause harm but to impose change onto another party or group (such as Muslim mosques, or abortion clinics) by causing them to go bankrupt, leave a territory, or, ideally, convert to Christianity. The aggressive intent of the prayer, its imagery of violence and war, and its premise of a cosmically violent stage on which Christians must act, supports the case for “a special affinity between Pentecostal prayer and violence” (Obadare 2015). The movement is political in that its intercessors imagine they are part of an elite group of God’s agents, participating in a massive social transformation of the world into the Kingdom of God.33. As focused as they are on bringing revival and transformation in a kind of “end times” sensibility, spiritual warfare theologians avoid delving into doctrinal debates about premillennialism, the rapture, and other features of apocalyptic thought that might cause disagreement and factions. The focus of their energies is on the present moment, when their prayers can bring humanity to the verge of a “breakthrough” of Christian revival led by the Holy Spirit.View all notes

A researcher in religious studies, I have attended numerous conferences, seminars, and prayer groups on spiritual warfare and revival, and have followed the movement as it extended from the US into the Caribbean (McAlister 2012 McAlister, Elizabeth. 2012. “From Slave Revolt to a Blood Pact with Satan: The Evangelical Rewriting of Haitian History.” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, 41(2): 187215.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®][Google Scholar], 2013 McAlister, Elizabeth. 2013. “Humanitarian Adhocracy, Transnational New Apostolic Missions, and Evangelical Anti-Dependency in a Haitian Refugee Camp.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 16(4), pp 11-34.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®][Google Scholar], 2013 McAlister, Elizabeth. 2014. “Possessing the Land for Jesus” In Paul C. Johnson (ed), Spirited Things: the Work of “Possession” in Afro-Atlantic Religions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pages 177205. [Google Scholar]). I wondered how it was that evangelicals came to understand themselves as prayer warriors, and in particular, how they trained for the most grueling, “territorial-level” assignments. At one prayer conference I met a Native American apostle who led a spiritual warfare boot camp in Oklahoma dedicated to training Native American recruits in the theology and practical protocols of spiritual warfare. The leaders of this boot camp were Native Vietnam veterans, who brought their experience of military training and discipline to bear on prayer. The Christians who engage in this high-level warfare are on a mission to transform territories, institutions, nations, and the land itself. Native Christians involved in the movement focus also the vexed issues involving massacres, land theft, broken treaties, and ongoing social injustices that include poverty and addiction on reservations. The apostle accepted my application to participate in this training, geared for tribal members but open to other ethnic groups, with the understanding that I am a social scientist researching and writing about the movement. This article would serve as a case study on the Native American strand of spiritual warfare. They had received the message that it was part of God’s plan that I attend, and write, in an effort to understand their mission better. Excited and nervous, the same day I was accepted I bought a plane ticket to Oklahoma.

Spiritual warfare boot camp

It was before sunrise and we fifteen recruits were assembled in five rows in an open field in the Oklahoma countryside. The dew was wet under our feet on this dark and chilly October morning in 2013. We had moved quickly from our bunk beds to predawn prayer and into our assigned formation before the drill sergeant could blow his whistle, because we already knew that any lateness, any infraction, any deviation from the proper pose “at attention” – head up, chest back, eyes forward, hands at the sides – would attract the embarrassing attention of one of the three caustic drill sergeants. All Vietnam veterans, they were giving us a crash course in military discipline. We wore matching uniforms of a boot camp T-shirt, black cadet’s beret, and ID lanyard. One by one we were inspected, looked up and down, and given either a correction – “eyes forward” – or a barked question – “What is General Order number four?” The correct answers were all from the Bible: “I will report accurately, by the spirit of truth, all enemy formations. John 16:13, SIR”. Eleven General Orders had been assigned for exact memorization, and we were being tested. Again a drill sergeant barked the loud question: “What is General Order number five?” “I will stand at my post until we all come into the unity of the faith. Ephesians 4:13, SIR”. Soon we were joined by the three prayer warriors who had been chosen to walk the perimeter of the camp, looking for signs of enemy activity.

After we were tested on our General Orders, it was time for marching drills. “AttenTION. Forward MARCH!” Around and around the large field we marched, halted, about faced, and marched again, until the sun was rising and it was time to go to the dining hall for a home-cooked and nutritious breakfast. We lined up single file there, this time first by rank and then by age. We recruits were last, after platoon sergeants, staff sergeants, first sergeant, and then, at the highest rank on base, the generals, who are also apostles of the Lord. Virtually all of the higher-ranking officers were Native, and more than half the recruits were Native as well, including some from reservations in the West and Canada. Among our group were Cheyenne, Chickasaw, Apache, Cherokee, Navaho, Oneida, Tlingit, and two descendants of famous Lakota warriors who had fought at the Battle of Little Big Horn, and whose families had converted to Christianity.

After prayer and breakfast, it was time to take our seats in the church sanctuary, which doubled as a schoolroom for the week-long training. We sat at tables in rows and listened to a well-organized series of talks from about eight speakers in the area who were recognized as “carrying the anointing” for conducting and teaching spiritual warfare. Throughout the week a corps of staff sergeants supervised us within a set of strict disciplinary guidelines. When a ranking officer entered the room we were instantly to stand at attention and wait for his or her “at ease” command. We were to take careful notes, pray together, perform work jobs, and obey the rules of the base. We also attended morning and evening flag-raising ceremonies. I was honored to be chosen to be one of four recruits to perform this solemn ritual, which was carried out to a strikingly poignant recording of a Sioux battle chant. And somehow, between rising at 5 a.m. and going to bed at midnight and doing all of this, we were expected to find the time to memorize our General Orders.

All of this military discipline, taken straight from the leaders’ experiences as soldiers in Vietnam, was to teach us the principles of honor and authority, which would become the foundation for our lives as victorious prayer warriors. As the week went by, I realized that the tough military discipline the officers were subjecting us to was a veneer covering a deep sense of Christian love and affectionate caring. Formal commands gave way to moments of emotional bonding in prayer on several occasions. The leaders explained that they were disciplining us as a loving gift, so that we would be strong enough to follow the protocols, focus, and lines of command that spiritual warfare required. Submission to spiritual authority was central to both the political project of the training, and to its methods of enactment.

For the next week we were taught – with the aid of a pre-prepared workbook and PowerPoint presentations – the principles and protocols of effective prayer warfare. The speakers related the underlying narrative of Satan’s war against God in its particular relevance to both the United States and to Native tribal groups in fascinating ways, which will be elaborated below.

“Everyone who comes into the Kingdom of God comes into spiritual warfare, whether they like it or not”, said the leading apostle on the first night of the boot camp. It turned out that for our apostles, “Warrior means ‘one who keeps peace’”. Our battles would largely be staged in what they called the “spiritual” or “supernatural” realm. Many of them would be self-sacrificial and involve fasting and prayer, and there would be no training in arms handling or physical combat. “We are here to crucify the flesh”, they said. As for me, I was working to understand the relationship between the Christian mission these spiritual warriors felt they have been assigned to carry out and the military practices they were deploying to enact their mission. As we circled the field over and over, learning military marching, proper salute forms, and other commands, I found myself wondering how it had come to pass that this ethnically mixed group of charismatic evangelicals had taken literally the idea of being an “army of God”, and performed this long-standing biblical metaphor in uniform, with actual drills and practices of the US military.

The militarization of prayer in America

The history of any nation can be told as a military history, and crucial for the case at hand, the United States was first colonized through warfare against Native peoples. War consolidated the nation through a revolution against Britain. With its Protestant majority, the nation’s military activity during each conflict was expressed using biblical scripture and rhetoric that became increasingly inflected with evangelical tropes and cues. The twentieth century saw the rise of both US military power and evangelicalism, both of which reached an apex in the speeches of George W. Bush. (In his 2003 State of the Union Address preparing the country for war, Bush said the nation must “confound the designs of evil men” because “our calling, as a blessed country, is to make the world better”.) Major moments of increased militarization included the world wars against fascism in Europe and the establishment of the national security act in 1947. After the Cold War, the United States emerged as the first global superpower, and American military spending, even before the massive increases after the September 11 attacks, was as much as that of the next twelve largest national militaries combined (Lutz 2002 Lutz, Catherine. 2002. “Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis.” American Anthropologist, 104(3): 72335.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®][Google Scholar]: 729).

Concurrently, militaristic imagery grew more pronounced in evangelical communities. In 1951, Bill Bright found an institutional means through which to harness military values to evangelical outreach when he founded Campus Crusades for Christ, which remains today a strong presence in many universities and high schools. The organization’s mandate was to instruct young evangelical “warriors” on codes of moral discipline that were articulated in military imagery: members were encouraged to enlist, rally, advance, campaign, and blitz (Martin 1996 Martin, William. 1996. With God On Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America. New York: Broadway Books. [Google Scholar], cited in Johnson 2010 Johnson, Jessica. 2010. “The Citizen-Soldier: Masculinity, War, and Sacrifice at an Emerging Church in Seattle, Washington.” PoLAR. Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 33(2): 32651.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®][Google Scholar]: 344). In the 1970s, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, evangelicals began to export a militarized vision into a project of aggressive missionary expansion abroad. The US draft ended in 1973, and the armed forces became all-volunteer at the same time that the Reagan administration set in motion a program of neoliberal economic reform and market deregulation, together with an increase in support for the military through spending, and a campaign for volunteer enlisters to “answer the call” of duty. Evangelical discourse in books, conferences, and sermons articulated a new paradigm of free choice, strategy, efficiency, technology, statistics, and goal setting that came to flow across the fields of business, sports, and the military.

In this neoliberal evangelical vision, biblical, organizational, and military language formed an energetic new view of how American Christians could best convert others across the world (Rynkiewich 2007 Rynkiewich, M.A. 2007. “Corporate Metaphors and Strategic Thinking: The 10/40 Window in the American Evangelical Worldview.” Missiology, 25(2): 21741. [Google Scholar]: 232). Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, already a powerful evangelical institution, in the 1970s grew into an influential center of academic mission study where professors drew on sociological research to bolster a militarized sensibility. Missiology courses identified “target populations” that could be better reached with the assistance of sociological information during “strategic missions”. The resulting Church Growth Movement which began at Fuller would gain momentum among global evangelicals at the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland. There, missionaries consolidated statistics concerning population, GDP, and degree of “reachedness” in what some derided as an exercise in “statistical Christianity” (Han 2010 Han, Ju Hui Judy. 2010. “Reaching the Unreached in the 10/40 Window: the Missionary Geoscience of Race, Difference and Distance”, in T. Sturm (ed), Mapping the End Times: American Evangelical Geopolitics and Apocalyptic Visions. Burlington, VT. Ashgate Publishing. 183207. [Google Scholar]: 188). The appropriation of technology, social science, and military thought was a powerful mix for these evangelicals, and the advent of affordable air travel had made it possible to meet face to face with fellow missionaries from many different countries. Fuller professor Ralph Winter went on to found the US Center for World Missions in 1976, referring to it as the headquarters for missionary research and “a Pentagon for mission agencies around the world” (Han 2010 Han, Ju Hui Judy. 2010. “Reaching the Unreached in the 10/40 Window: the Missionary Geoscience of Race, Difference and Distance”, in T. Sturm (ed), Mapping the End Times: American Evangelical Geopolitics and Apocalyptic Visions. Burlington, VT. Ashgate Publishing. 183207. [Google Scholar]: 190).

This overarching ethos of purposeful mission, volunteerism, and strategic goal setting was part and parcel of the militarization of everyday life of American civil society, Protestant churches, and missionary thought, and moral education became articulated with warfare in explicit ways. In the 1980s, the military began to support evangelical proselytizing and worship among troops. Conservative evangelical leaders like Paul Weyrich (who co-founded both the Moral Majority and the Heritage Foundation) “advocated for an increased military presence in inner city school districts to provide discipline and moral instruction so as to ‘save’ the poor and, ostensibly, the nation” (Cowen 2006 Cowen, Deborah E. 2006. “Fighting for ‘Freedom’: The End of Conscription in the United States and the Neoliberal Project of Citizenship.” Citizenship Studies 10(2): 16783.[Taylor & Francis Online][Google Scholar], cited in Johnson 2010 Johnson, Jessica. 2010. “The Citizen-Soldier: Masculinity, War, and Sacrifice at an Emerging Church in Seattle, Washington.” PoLAR. Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 33(2): 32651.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®][Google Scholar]: 345).

Evangelicals met again in 1989 at the Lausanne II conference, where they explicitly connected militarism to the sphere of prayer. They ratified spiritual warfare as a legitimate activity in world evangelizing: aggressive prayer was needed to fight evil directly in the invisible realm. They took up the view that there are levels of evil and corresponding tactics of warfare necessary to combat evil, since Satan is essentially a commander-in-chief from whom legions of lower-ranking demons take orders. “Ground-level” spiritual warfare prayer can take the form of casting out evil through deliverance prayer, in which the Christian exorcizes demons from another person under the authority of Jesus (as depicted in Matthew 10:1). These can include the demons of addiction, depression, perversion, and the like. “Occult-level” warfare operates against “mid-level formations” such as shamanism, astrology, or Freemasonry. More ambitiously, Christian prayer warriors can engage in “strategic-level” or “territorial-level” warfare. Territorial-level warfare means to “pray down” powerful demons with broader military jurisdiction – those who have taken over entire areas of geographical territory such as a city or a whole nation. Victory over these “strongholds” will result in the revival and flourishing of Christianity in a given area or place (Wagner 1991 Wagner, C. Peter. 1991. Engaging the Enemy: How to Fight and Defeat Territorial Spirits. Ventura, CA: Regal Books. [Google Scholar]).

The concept of spiritual warfare has a particular genealogy in the Third Wave Movement headed by American Peter Wagner, who taught at Fuller Seminary from 1971 to 2001. (He also founded Global Harvest Ministries in Colorado Springs, where I attended a seminar on spiritual warfare.) Wagner embraces a fivefold ministry view that sees the legitimate offices of the church to be those listed in Ephesians 4:13, that is, apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. (In contrast, the ranks of apostle and prophet are seen by traditional Protestant denominations as having been dispensed with after the earliest period of Christianity.) Wagner teaches that humanity has entered a new age in which God is calling prophets and apostles to become intercessors and usher in the return of Jesus and the Kingdom of God through warfare prayer. While there is no orthodoxy in this loose international network, generally speaking, divinely “anointed prayer warriors” understand themselves to be called to do battle in the spiritual realm with Satan’s high-ranking demons.

These Christians take their understanding of this war from Ephesians 6:12: “We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places”. Christian intercessors stress to one another that they are praying against the spiritual evil of Satan himself, not against people. Physical violence against people or property is anathema to the teaching and the practice of spiritual warfare, and practitioners are not connected to terrorism or armed militias, for example, in any way (although some take credit for God having caused the downfall of another as the result of their aggressive prayer). The violence of spiritual warfare is discursive and yet is part of a cultural and ideological politics supporting evangelical Christians in becoming more invested and more influential in all sectors of society.

In order to make missionary outreach more successful, evangelicals at Lausanne II appropriated geoscience technology and began to generate datasets with the help of GIS specialists like Global Mapping International. They produced maps of ethnic/racial “people groups” and coded the globe according to degrees of reachedness in an attempt to make precise the goals and strategies of missionary activity. They noted “gaps” or territories that are ruled by “spiritual wickedness”. They coined terms like “missionmetrics” and “evangelistics” and spoke of the “deployment” of missionaries in “teams” for “strategic missions” (Han 2010 Han, Ju Hui Judy. 2010. “Reaching the Unreached in the 10/40 Window: the Missionary Geoscience of Race, Difference and Distance”, in T. Sturm (ed), Mapping the End Times: American Evangelical Geopolitics and Apocalyptic Visions. Burlington, VT. Ashgate Publishing. 183207. [Google Scholar]: 196). It was at Lausanne II that Argentinian-born pastor Luis Bush developed the image of the “resistance belt”, an area of the globe presenting a challenge to spreading the gospel. He concluded that “successful church planting in the Pacific, Africa and Latin America has largely reduced the world’s prime evangelistic real estate to a swathe of territory from 10 degrees to 40 degrees north latitude, running through Northern Africa and Asia, known as the 10/40 Window”. Bush noted that the parameters of the 10/40 Window include the Middle East and encompass “the core of the Islamic region” (Bush n.d.), and Peter Wagner pointed out that the area is also the center of other “demonic” religions such as Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Taoism (Wagner 1992 Wagner, C. Peter. 1992. Warfare Prayer: What the Bible Says About Spiritual Warfare. Ventura, CA: Regal Books. [Google Scholar]: 143).

In the 1990s, Peter Wagner and others “promoted explicitly geographical and geopolitical analysis with a renewed emphasis on strategy and expertise”. During the First Gulf War, spiritual warfare missionaries emphasized “Iraq and the Garden of Eden as the seat of Satan on Earth” (Holvast 2009 Holvast, René. 2009. Spiritual Mapping in the United States and Argentina 1989–2005. Leiden: Brill. [Google Scholar]: 229). In 2003, some months after the US military withdrawal from Somalia, Lieutenant-General William Boykin was filmed lecturing in churches wearing his military uniform, showing a slide of a Black Hawk helicopter in Mogadishu. Pointing to a black mark in the sky, Boykin opined, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your enemy. It is the principalities of darkness. It is a demonic presence in that city that God revealed to me as the enemy”. In another talk, Boykin said that terrorism “is our spiritual enemy that will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus” (“A Tale of Two Faces” 2003). Clearly, Boykin was invested in the spiritual warfare world view and its understanding of cosmic reality. This view, developed by theologians at Fuller Theological Seminary, informed his military service. In turn, he brought that theology back in testimony to churches at home – a stark example of the ways that evangelicalism and militarism were constituting one another.

Spiritual warfare and Christian tribal sovereignty

Spiritual warfare theologians and pastors were not only mapping international geopolitical spaces, they also concerned themselves with American domestic space. The spiritual warfare movement shares with other branches of Christian conservatism a sense that America is a chosen nation with a righteous, Christian identity (an identity that is under attack by evil forces in the form of immorality, liberalism, and secularism). So as I prepared to attend the spiritual warfare boot camp I was curious to see how Natives would find ways to reconcile this narrative with the US government’s extreme violence against tribal groups. What I found was a radical revision of evangelical Americanism and an insistence on tribal nation sovereignty.

Indeed, the teachers at the boot camp told a straightforward story of government mistreatment of Natives. One evening the lecture recounted the history of the “ratification of 371 treaties with the Indian Tribes of America”. They explained that “the United States government has broken all 371 treaties”, which resulted in the outright theft of millions of acres of land. As if this were not bad enough on its own, our teachers considered this history cosmically significant as well, amounting to a profound original or “root” national sin. They cited four scriptural passages in which God instructs people not to move property boundary lines or break covenants, including Deut. 27:17: “Cursed be he that removeth his neighbor’s landmark”. This disobeying of God’s commandment has resulted in opening the land and its inhabitants to the effects of God’s curse. The American government broke its own land treaties, and so white American “immigrants” and their nation are living out God’s punishment. The message was that God abandoned his chosen American “New Israel” because of its government’s sins against tribal peoples.

But in the speakers’ view, the Native Americans had also committed a deep and enduring sin of their own, and this is partly why the US government was able to steal so much Indian land. The Old Testament is full of legal agreements, covenants with God, and people breaking the covenants. Our teachers applied a logic of diplomatic protocol to the biblical story, in which Christians hold authority over demons, land, and all of Earth’s creation, through their salvation and brotherhood with Jesus. The only catch is the obligation of full obedience to the living spirit of God. Biblical scholar Regina Schwartz (1997 Schwartz, Regina M. 1997. The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]: 54) writes of how, in the Old Testament, property rights are contingent upon obedience: “A self-enclosed circular system is thereby instituted: to be ‘a people’ is to be God’s people is to inherit his land, and if they are not the people of God, they will not be a people, and they will lose the land”. Idolatry is the biblical sin most often responsible for the Israelites losing their land or failing to repossess it. It is also the sin by which Native Americans, in their relationships with ancestral spirits and spirits of the land, created the spiritual conditions for losing the battle with white settlers. This theology casts the ancestral spirits of indigenous people as demonic and demands they be rejected – itself a form of symbolic cultural violence that traditionalists and others vigorously denounce. This situation means that Native people have to get to work confessing and repenting. Said one of our teachers, “My father and my forefathers, Lord, we screwed up the land before the white man came. You see, I’m included in that”. This puts in Indian hands the responsibility but also the possibility for improving things. Because of these deep iniquities of both Natives and immigrants, all Americans continue to experience problems and social ills in society, and God’s Kingdom is not yet a reality.

In the spiritual warfare view developed by Native leaders, tribal peoples (and all others) have an indigenous identity that connects them through their ancestors to the geographical land of some nation or nations on the Earth. It is part of God’s plan for people to exercise effective dominion in some spot of land in the Earth (Chosa 2004: 92). Incorporating new research on the human genome, the teachers laid out the view that genetic factors, written in the DNA of our physical cells, “become a historical and spiritual record of what our blood lineage experienced over the generations”. Spiritual DNA can carry a curse from generation to generation through a family’s bloodlines, such as that from having a murderer among one’s forebears. But spiritual DNA also carries authority over territory – the people who have lived on any given land the longest have rightful spiritual authority over that land. And this is a spiritual authority that is still legally in effect for Natives according to biblical law, since immigrants who broke their own treaties stole the land from them. One teacher explained how Indians had a special duty to be stewards, both of the spiritual ownership of the land and of God’s mysteries. In effect, Native peoples were meant to function as “heavenly minded hosts”. It is this principle that should put indigenous people at the center of the Christian project anywhere in the world, and especially in the US. “We need to awaken to this simple principle of spiritual protocol for the righteous execution of indigenous authority. The church must work towards a true relationship with Native believers and honor them as the host people of this continent. Extending forgiveness without extending the right hand of fellowship yields only a short-term work of reconciliation and produces no lasting effect in the spiritual landscape” (Chosa 2004 : 105). To be sure, no whites have turned over land to tribal groups as a result of Christian fellowship. Whites and other groups do attend to Native land issues when they prepare spiritual warfare missions, and search the historical record for massacres or broken treaties as possible sins leading to demonic activity and requiring repentance.

Indigeneity thus works as a strength in spiritual warfare. As a result, both mission work and spiritual warfare are most effective among those who share ethnic and spiritual DNA. Said one teacher, “As we mature in our heavenly and earthly identity as a warrior son of God, we can progressively exercise indigenous authority in the Spirit to launch frontal attacks upon the net and web power-grids of darkness and their tether points in our indigenous territory”. This means that Cherokee people will work best against evil in both Oklahoma and, say, North Carolina, while an Anglo and Scots-Irish person such as myself will be most effective on prayer missions in New England or in the British Isles.

As for the US as a nation, God has given Natives sovereignty over tribal lands and withdrawn his favor towards the United States because of government violence against Natives. “The Native believers are the only ones who can permanently deal with any and all ancient issues of iniquity affecting the spiritual and natural landscape”, explained our teacher. In their fine tuning of spiritual warfare theology, Native Americans are central to the work of God’s Kingdom.

The spiritual battle to defend the land

It turns out that to participate in spiritual warfare prayer is to assume a role in an elaborate, cosmic drama. And to be an actor in this drama is to understand one’s place in history, and see how one’s spiritual DNA creates weaknesses (through generational iniquities) that must be cleansed through confession and repentance and seeking healing from God. Spiritual warriors also understand that their spiritual DNA affords them strengths, such as the ability to minister to certain ethnic groups or to address “root issues” of historical significance. (For example, someone whose family owned slaves might be called to repent for the sins of slavery and anti-black racism.) Even more crucially, being a prayer warrior means understanding that one must be led by the Holy Spirit. Prayer warriors should live in holiness (which is to say, live in accordance with biblical principles, and in constant prayer). And prayer warriors, or intercessors, stay alert to the ways God is talking to them, having developed what Tanya Luhrman calls “attentional learning”, which allows people to “school their minds and senses so that they are able to experience the supernatural in ways that give them more confidence that what their sacred books say is really true” (Luhrman 2012 Luhrman, T.M. 2012. When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. New York: Vintage Books. [Google Scholar]: xxii; see also 254–66).

In reading scripture, praying constantly, and paying attention to the world around them, intercessors might come to the understanding that the Holy Spirit is calling them to an “assignment”. They bring this feeling to the spiritual authority who provides them “covering”, and discuss the validity of the sentiment. The other members of their prayer group will pray about and discuss the assignment together, and remain alert for signs that might confirm the calling. While I have participated in spiritual warfare prayer in churches, in trainings, and on behalf of individual people in domestic settings, I have not been given the opportunity to join many covert mission strikes myself. What follows is a description of such a mission by one of my teachers. I chose to describe this mission, despite my own absence, because it is a particularly interesting example of how aggressive prayer is articulated with militarism, geopolitics, and ethnicity. It is also perhaps a bit unexpected: it is a case of thwarting a demonic invasion by none other than His Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet.

My teacher read in the newspaper that the Dalai Lama intended to go to Toronto in 2004 and perform his “Kalachakra for World Peace”, an eleven-day program of Tibetan Buddhist rituals during which monks created a large multi-colored sand mandala. At issue was that according to the Buddhists themselves, the mandala contained the Kalachakra deity and 721 surrounding deities, drawn into the sand. As we might suspect, some evangelicals considered the deities to be demonic, and the drawings to be the demons materialized. The prayer warriors researched the ritual and learned that at the end of the proceedings, the monks would sweep up the sand and pour it out into a nearby body of natural water. In this case, the Dalai Lama would deposit the sand into the waters of Lake Ontario. According to the Canadian Tibetan Association, this would be “an act of blessing the surrounding” and would “serve as a universal prayer for the development of the ethics of peace and harmony within one’s self and humanity”(Harrington 2012 Harrington, Laura. 2012. “Exorcising the Mandala: Kalacakra and the Neo-Pentecostal Response.” Journal of Global Buddhism, 13: 14771. [Google Scholar]: 147). But according to my teacher, the sand drawings were demons, and the Dalai Lama was going to try to “dump the sand mandala that is now inoculated with the virus of these 722 spirits, into the lakes, and then it opens up the lakes to these 722 spirits”.

Historian of Buddhism Laura Harrington writes that despite the view of much current research within university walls that embraces Buddhist modernism as a worthy partner in rationality and ecumenisms, evangelicals view the religion as “a belief in spirits and demons, secret sexual practices, [and] occultism” ruled by a “God-King”. What is more, spiritual warriors discern the Dalai Lama as a “spiritual master with geographical roots in the 10/40 Window, and a powerful adept with dominion over a wide range of Tibetan spirits” (Harrington 2012 Harrington, Laura. 2012. “Exorcising the Mandala: Kalacakra and the Neo-Pentecostal Response.” Journal of Global Buddhism, 13: 14771. [Google Scholar]: 159–60). Especially galling to evangelicals are the constant appearances, prizes, and favorable publicity he receives as the rightful head of state of an occupied Tibet and a proponent of universal human rights and world peace. While the rest of America remains ignorant, Tibetan Buddhists are competing for global religious domination. While evangelicals and their public prayer are pushed out of the public sphere by hypocritical liberals, the Dalai Lama parades around doing elaborate public religious ceremonies, even in 2011 in Washington, DC, to the outrage of spiritual warfare communities. The Dalai Lama was working to gain a legal-spiritual foothold in North America and advance his position toward transforming the world into a “universal Buddhocracy”, the Kingdom of Shambhala. The Kalachakra mandala would amount to “a Trojan Horse introducing into American territory the very demons the Spiritual Mappers seek to destroy” (Harrington 2012 Harrington, Laura. 2012. “Exorcising the Mandala: Kalacakra and the Neo-Pentecostal Response.” Journal of Global Buddhism, 13: 14771. [Google Scholar]: 160–61).

To respond to this threat, the apostle told me, “we collected a team together; we trained them first for three days. And the Holy Spirit gave us specific instruction”. He recounted how his team went up to the shores of several of the Great Lakes and prayed in certain ways that were asked of him by the Holy Spirit while the mandala was being drawn. And here is where my teacher’s knowledge of spiritual protocol, combined with his spiritual DNA as an Ojibwe whose ancestors lived in the Great Lakes region, became a powerful part of his spiritual warfare tactic. According to spiritual protocol, he told me, “if the mouth of the indigenous spirits of the lake cannot invite them [the Tantric deities], they cannot enter”. Just as a person may only legally enter another’s house upon invitation, so too must forces in the spiritual realm operate according to the rules.

My teacher continued: “So we just shut their mouths. With the authority and dominion by God as an Ojibwe I commanded the spirits of the lake to shut their mouths in the name of the Holy Spirit. So the spirits of the lake could not invite the Tibetan spirits into the lake, so they could not enter. Native people understand this. It’s protocol”. He went on to explain that when the Dalai Lama dumped the sand into the water, he knew the deities did not enter. The Dalai Lama has his own “spiritual eyesight”, and he knew he had to take his spirits home. The mission was successful, and the Native prayer warriors, in a small elite team on a specific mission strike, had honorably defended American water and American land through a covert aggressive prayer strike.

Firsting, hosting, and the warrior tradition

There are many paradoxes in militarized Christian prayer, and opening them up for analysis goes a long way to understanding why this world view might appeal in particular to Native people. For charismatics, the Holy Spirit can send new revelations to individual prophets and this means that popular theology is always subject to new understandings. Ethnic and racialized communities’ revisions can serve them for their own purposes. In general this theology both reproduced and resignified negative images about tribal peoples. The complicated historical interpretation that our Native teachers laid out for us at the Oklahoma boot camp revisited negative mainstream tropes about Native people and simultaneously reworked the tropes into new shapes.

For example, nineteenth-century literature and mass media perpetrated a myth that Indians cursed the nation, leading to America’s social, political, and economic ills, and later to the loss of their own land (Caterine 2014 Caterine, Darryl V. 2014. “Heirs through Fear: Indian Curses, Accursed Indian Lands, and White Christian Sovereignty in America.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, 18(1): 3757.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®][Google Scholar]: 38). However, the version of this story told by my teachers – that God abandoned America because of settlers’ sins of violence towards Natives – reinstated both primacy and agency to the Natives in a Christian register.

Spiritual warfare theology also renarrates settler colonialist tropes of the prehistoric Indian who “vanished” during the Anglo takeover. At the same time, this theology allows for Native people to occupy a central role in American history and the American future. They in effect reclaim the process of “firsting” that Jean O’Brien (2010 O’Brien, Jean M. 2010. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.[Crossref][Google Scholar]: xii–xv) writes is the settler account that “asserts that non-Indians were the first people to erect the proper institutions of a social order worthy of notice”. The “vanishing Indian” faded away just as Europeans built settlements and towns. Local histories wrote these “firstings and lastings” narrating the modern European founders and the “last” non-modern Indians in a region. By placing themselves as “heavenly minded hosts”, Natives present a new account of “firsting” whereby they are divinely situated to belong to their ancestral lands and to the US as a whole in the spiritual, ultimately most real, realm. Now, it is arguable that by refirsting themselves, these Natives appeal to problematic logics of origins and ties to land and the natural world that essentialize indigenous identity. Yet by insisting on their spiritual authority over the stewardship of the land and on other Christians approaching them first in any diplomatic missions, they take up the central problem of the “recognition” of Indians that, in its most basic sense of the word, local and federal actors have long denied them.

There is another paradoxical historical dimension of the militarization of prayer for Native Americans, particularly those who fought in Vietnam or other US wars. Although it has been romanticized by outsiders, there does exist a warrior tradition in many tribal groups, where warrior societies protected the community and acted as the keepers of the tribes’ spiritual power in warfare. Moreover, Europeans developed a policy of conscripting Native Americans, such that the older warrior tradition melted into a later tradition of service in European armies (Holm 1996: 69). Native American historian Tom Holm (1996: 21) in interviews with Native veterans found that “while they sometimes talk of serving their country, they more often associate being in the armed forces with a much older tradition – that of being a warrior in the tribal sense, with all the responsibilities, relationships, and ritual that go along with that status”. At the time of the Vietnam War, American Indians made up less than one percent of the US population, and yet they comprised more than two percent of the troops.

In traditionalist communities, warfare has been a way for men to gain status and honor and maintain their spiritual powers (Holm 1996: 40). Evangelical Natives, learning from those who served in Vietnam, bring the same gravitas to spiritual warfare that their traditionalist ancestors once did to physical warfare. Like the warrior societies, they emphasize spiritual preparation and coming into the proper relationship with the supernatural world. Like traditionalists, evangelicals pray, fast, and practice abstinence, seeking vision and revelation – only they seek it from the Holy Spirit rather than ancestral spirits. This particular reinscription of the Native warrior tradition into evangelical spiritual warfare may partly account for the literal and material expressions of spiritual warfare taking shape as a militarized boot camp.

The figure of the Native Christian warrior is an ironic one, since Native intellectuals have argued that the twin forces of Christianity and militarism were the primary causes of ruination for tribal groups (Deloria 1973 Deloria, Vine. 1973. God is Red. New York: The Putnam Publishing Group. [Google Scholar]). It is true that Christian Americans viewed Native communities as being rife with witchcraft and needing salvation from whites. Yet spiritual warfare is paradoxically invested in a native politics of sovereignty. More recently Native Christians have argued that taking on the project of missionizing to their own communities can be a strategy to stop Anglos from missionary activities, often inflected with racism, and to take up Native leadership themselves (Smith 2008 Smith, Andrea. 2008. Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.[Crossref][Google Scholar]: 98).

This essay has argued that the late twentieth century intensification of the militarization of everyday life has extended to the prayer practices of some charismatic Christians, has described the case of a Native Evangelical Spiritual Warfare boot camp, and has offered analysis of the paradoxical appeal spiritual warfare has for tribal group members. A Native spiritual warfare counter-narrative to American chosenness is emerging in which God has abandoned and punished the US because of its violence against tribal groups; Native nations insist on God-given political sovereignty that must be federally respected; and indigenous peoples are at the center of the Christian project. Yet the fact that tribal groups join white evangelicals in recasting ancestral spirits as demonic, only to take up leadership in that project and to struggle for primacy and recognition, is also a symptom of profound dispossession.

And yet, the majority of spiritual warriors in the US are white. And while the warfare in question takes place in the invisible realm, the agenda of the movement is undeniably political for all ethnic groups (see Marshall 2009). Unlike, for example, the Salvation Army, which is also organized through militaristic images but is focused on social gospel projects and on saving souls (Winston 2000 Winston, Diane. 2000. Red-Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]), the Spiritual Warfare movement is part of a teleology of transformation where a vanguard of spiritual elites help usher in a collective radical rebirth behind the scenes. This Christian revival will result in a final era where the Holy Spirit transforms the imperfect and fallen world into the Kingdom of God. Not a system of nation-states or democratic republics, the Kingdom is figured as a restoration of an eternal original Eden where a heavenly court maintains perfect justice. In this masculinist vision, men have dominion over women and humans over animals just as in the Genesis story. Spiritual warriors will be honored soldiers in God’s army even and especially in the Kingdom. However, the details of the eternal Kingdom are rarely elaborated by warfare thinkers and teachers. Much more important is the present political condition of warfare with unseen spiritual evil, and the mapping of spheres of demonic activity – personal, cultural, and geopolitical. In this politics, people live out individual and collective lives in the tension between obedience to both divine and human authority and the aggression of their vision, intention, and language in spoken prayer.

Acknowledgements

This project was part of the New Directions in the Study of Prayer initiative, funded by the Templeton Foundation through the Social Science Research Council. My profound thanks for helpful critique go to Debby Applegate, Ava Chamberlain, Matthew Engelke, David Frankfurter, Peter Geschiere, Pamela Haag, Laura Harrington, Stewart M. Hoover, J Kehaulani Kauanui, Em Kianka, Christina Klein, Laura Levitt, Ruth Marshall, Mark Minch, Deborah Dash Moore, Kathleen Newman, Ebenezer Obadare, Leonard Primiano, Peter van der Veer, and Diane Winston.

Notes

1. I use the term articulation in a particular fashion, after Stuart Hall 1986 who theorized that elements of culture, while usually tied to class, can recombine in various ways into new patterns with novel meanings or connotations. This is useful in understanding how cultural spheres as seemingly far apart as militarism and prayer can be linked together both in theory, theology, and practice, and come to create new meanings, rituals, and identities, which in turn influence politics and diplomacy, missionary projects, and even humanitarianism.

2. This network is known variously as the Spiritual Mapping Movement, the Transformation or Revival Movement, the New Apostolic Reformation, and the Third Wave Evangelical Movement.

3. As focused as they are on bringing revival and transformation in a kind of “end times” sensibility, spiritual warfare theologians avoid delving into doctrinal debates about premillennialism, the rapture, and other features of apocalyptic thought that might cause disagreement and factions. The focus of their energies is on the present moment, when their prayers can bring humanity to the verge of a “breakthrough” of Christian revival led by the Holy Spirit.

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    Source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20566093.2016.1085239

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