(Doug Ladner) There are books that inform, and there are books that unsettle, and every so often a book manages to do both at once. Keri Ladner’s American Dominion: The Rise and Radicali)zation of a New Christendom is that kind of book. I do not say this lightly, and I do not say it as a matter of political fashion. I say it as someone who has spent a good many years sitting across from people whose faith was bent and used against them, and who has come to recognize how much of the damage traces back to the very theological currents Ladner is tracing here. This is a book I believe every Evangelical Christian in this country needs to read, even — perhaps especially — those who will find parts of it uncomfortable.
The great strength of American Dominion is its first half, where Ladner does the patient, unglamorous work of intellectual history. She does not begin with the New Apostolic Reformation itself but reaches back to the early years of the last century, to figures like Charles Fox Parham and William Seymour at the headwaters of American Pentecostalism, and then traces the thread forward through Aimee Semple McPherson, William Branham, and a good many others whose names have mostly faded from popular memory….
I cannot in a brief review recapitulate all of that detail — it is worth reading the book to get it all — but the effect of laying out that long lineage is to show that the New Apostolic Reformation did not appear from nowhere. It is the fruit of a century of restorationist and revivalist impulses, each generation reaching for a more immediate encounter with the Spirit than the one before it.
Most Americans, including many Evangelicals, may have never heard of the Manifest Sons of God or the Latter Rain movement, and yet Ladner makes a persuasive case that you cannot understand the political Christianity dominating our headlines today without understanding these obscure mid-twentieth-century revivals. She traces how a fringe teaching about “manifest sons” — believers who would attain a kind of spiritual maturity before Christ’s return — fed into the Latter Rain’s emphasis on present-day apostles and prophets, restored offices mainstream Evangelicalism had long set aside as belonging to the apostolic age alone. It is genuinely illuminating to watch her show how a handful of independent, loosely accountable revivalists built, brick by brick, a theological architecture in which spiritual authority could bypass denominational structure and answer to no one but itself.
Research: New Apostolic Reformation
CRN has compiled a list of false teachers and several other professing Christians we’ve warned you about over the years. The list also contains those we must keep an eye on plus movements, organizations and “frauds, phonies and money-grubbing religious quacks” to mark and avoid as per Romans 16:17-18
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