Tracing the roots of Christian Nationalism and the New Apostolic Reformation is no longer a fringe concern. It has become one of the most urgent forces reshaping American political life, and most people still do not understand where it came from, how it operates, or what it ultimately wants. Keri Ladner, PhD, does. A scholar of fundamentalist politics, she has spent years tracing the theological roots of movements like the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and documenting how they moved from the margins of American religious life into the centers of government and policy. Her new book, American Dominion: The Rise and Radicalization of a New Christendom (Bloomsbury Academic, official release April 16, 2026), offers one of the most carefully researched accounts yet of how we arrived at this moment.

Keri has been a guest on this podcast before. In our first conversation, we explored her 2024 book End-Time Politics: From the Moral Majority to QAnon, tracing the ideological line from Jerry Falwell through the movements that helped bring Donald Trump to power. I encourage you to listen to that episode. In this second conversation, we went deeper: into the theological architecture behind the New Apostolic Reformation, the manipulation of faith healing, the alleged sexual abuse inside NAR-affiliated churches, and what the so-called Seven Mountain Mandate has to do with your children's school curriculum.

Why “Christendom” and Not “Christianity”

One of the first things Keri established was her word choice in the title of American Dominion. She did not write “Christianity.” She wrote “Christendom,” and the distinction matters.

“When we're talking about Christendom, we're really talking about power structures,” she told me. “The term has historically been used to describe the Church-State relations in Europe, particularly medieval Europe. What I'm trying to show is that we are looking at an age of very heightened Church-State relations, to the point that the church is pursuing a level of power that we have not seen really since the Middle Ages.”

This is not a story about religion. It is a story about control.

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