It’s October 2019, and in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, then president Donald Trump stands at his desk in a blue suit, his eyes closed. Around him are 25 people, also smartly dressed, and with their eyes shut too. With a few exceptions, they’re mostly middle-aged white men, and those of them nearest to Trump lay their hands on him while the room falls silent in prayer.

Among the usual suspects – right-wing evangelicals like American Values president Gary Bauer, First Baptist Dallas senior pastor Robert Jeffress, and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins – are a female televangelist named Paula White-Cain, and the president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, Samuel Rodriguez.

These last two are leaders in a movement that is playing an increasingly significant role in American politics, constructing a religious network determined to see Trump re-elected in November so that he can continue their mission: to turn America into a theocracy. This is the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR).

The NAR was founded in the mid-1990s by a New York minister and theological professor called C Peter Wagner. Its adherents believe that the idea of apostles and prophets didn’t end in Jesus’s time and that the organisation’s leaders are living prophets and apostles today.

It is distinguished by an adherence to Dominionism – the belief that God wants his followers to rise to power through civil systems so Christians can control society. At its heart is what’s known as the Seven Mountains mandate, which offers a blueprint of how the NAR can reclaim America for Christ, by imposing its influence over politics, education, family, the arts, the media, business, and religion.

Web magazine Religion Dispatches calls the NAR “one of the most important Christian religious and political movements of our time” and points to the role of NAR leaders in the electoral campaigns of Trump “and Trump-aligned figures, from school boards to statewide elected offices”.

On his website, Lance Wallnau, an American preacher who popularised the Seven Mountains strategy, calls it an “unstoppable movement”.

Some media coverage conflates the NAR with Christian Nationalism, but they’re actually very different. Christian nationalism contends that America has always been a Christian nation. But it’s more about identity than religion, bound up in nativism and white supremacy – reimagining the country’s history and values.

NAR, on the other hand, is very much rooted in religion. It’s also multi-racial, and at its root is the restoration of modern-day apostles and prophets – including women like White-Cain. NAR’s vision is to remove the “demonic forces” from positions of power and replace them with Christians intent on bringing about the Kingdom of God.

Talk to Action, a platform dedicated to analysis of the religious right, says NAR demonises minority groups such as Muslim-Americans and LGBT+ citizens, and promotes “a Tea Party style of radical libertarian economics categorically opposed to government involvement in healthcare, and advocates the burning or destruction of objects and scripture associated with a wide range of faiths”.

Anthea Butler, chair of the department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on evangelicalism, says that of the politicians courted by the NAR, some are actually involved in the movement, but others, like Trump, see it as an opportunity.

“Trump doesn’t understand it in the religious sense, but he definitely understands that he can use it to put himself forward,” she says. “He understands instinctively that these are people who understand power and want it, and that they will help him get it so that they can get it.”

Butler said the attempt on Trump’s life at his campaign rally in Pennsylvania in July is now being seen in theological terms. “This assassination attempt is perfect for him because they will twist scripture to show that he is really God’s man and that God rescued him to be president. This is why they are so triumphant and believe that they’re going to win in November.”

If you thought the US constitution ensured separation of church and state, for the most part, presidents before the 1970s largely kept their faith close to their chests. But that disappeared when Democrat Jimmy Carter came to power.

As author Richard Hutcheson wrote in his book, God in the White House, Carter’s “bubbling Baptist evangelicalism was all-too painfully public … He talked openly about being born again, thereby establishing a born-again test for future presidential aspirants for the evangelical vote.”

After Carter, the religious right were in the ascendance, and evangelicals aligned themselves more with Republicanism. During Ronald Reagan’s presidency, social issues such as opposition to abortion emerged as pivotal to his political agenda.

James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, a prominent American evangelical organisation, described America as being embroiled in a new “civil war”, distinguished by a clash between two irreconcilable worldviews. Dobson was among those church leaders praying over Trump in the Roosevelt Room back in 2019.

But Butler says the NAR is different to conventional evangelicalism. “It’s more like Pentecostalism and neo-charismatic Christianity,” she says – Christian movements that emphasise spiritual gifts like speaking in tongues or prophesy. “Prophesy,” Butler adds, “is what’s inherent in all of this.

“It doesn’t matter that [Trump has] been married to three women and slept with a porn star and did all this stuff. You have to understand that for them, he was a sinner, but that God has redeemed him and used him.”

For evangelicals and the NAR, Trump’s opposition to abortion and his judicial appointments, particularly to the Supreme Court, as well as his stance on issues like Israel, are of paramount importance. “It isn’t so much they’re doing this so Jesus can come back,” Butler says. “It’s that there’s evil on Earth right now. The evil happens to be Democrats and liberals and trans people. And God has given [them] time to fight it.”

A little over a decade ago, I attended a New Apostolic Reformation church service in the suburbs of Austin, Texas. Back then, I was writing a story about how the NAR was supporting the then Texas governor Rick Perry in his (failed) bid for the Republican presidential nomination. “We’re part of his army,” the minister, Art Serna, told the congregation that night. “And every one of you has a role to play.”

A man behind me wearing a baggy baseball T-shirt began talking in tongues before lying prostrate on the floor between the chairs, mumbling. Serna walked over to an older man standing at the front of the room and lay his hands on his chest. The man began shaking before throwing his head back and closing his eyes.

After the service, I met Bob Long, a jovial, grey-haired man who led the church and who was considered an apostle by his followers. He told me the NAR was “looking for the most conservative candidate who holds both a conservative fiscal and social world view” – which Long explained meant a “Biblical worldview”. On Long’s church website, it describes its aim as to raise up a “company equipped to invade every arena of culture, commerce and civil government”.

When I raised the criticism that the NAR should stay out of politics – that it was, after all, Thomas Jefferson who described a “wall of separation” between church and state – Long told me that civil government itself was invented by God. But, he added: “That doesn’t mean a theocracy in the 21st century. Nobody wants that except Islam and some other world religions.”

Back then, more than 10 years ago, in addition to telling me abortion and gay marriage would be illegal, Long said America needed to repent for the sins of the nation. One of those sins, he said, was “allowing the innocent blood of 55 million unborn babies that has been shed in our land since 1973 Roe v Wade.”

But in the summer of 2022, thanks to Trump appointments during his term in office, a conservative-leaning Supreme Court repealed Roe, ending the constitutional right to abortion in America.

Project 2025 is a proposed plan published by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation which aims to promote right-wing policies that it hopes will reshape the United States government should Trump win the election in November.

Butler told me so much of Project 2025 is about religious issues, “whether we’re talking about education or sexuality or banning gays and trans people. It fits into that in the sense that they’re making God’s government; that they are creating a theocracy. [These people] are not interested in democracy. They’re interested in freedom for themselves, not for anybody else. They like authoritarianism, which is why they like Trump. And everything revolves around him right now.”

At the end of July, a travelling tent revival – a hallmark of US evangelicalism since the 1800s – came to Eau Claire, a small city in Wisconsin. Among the speakers was controversial US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, but it also featured a lineup of preachers and “prophets” of the New Apostolic Reformation.

Headlining the event was Wallnau, who along with his fellow revivalists, had a message: Vote in November. And help elect Donald Trump. “America’s Awakening Begins Here,” the website for The Courage Tour announces. “Embrace transformation and reformation.” More locations, it notes, will be announced in the run-up to November’s election.

In Britain, it’s hard to imagine a mainstream politician embracing religion in such a massive way in order to gain support. Mixing politics and religion can get you in hot water. But in the US, in today’s Republican party, the opposite is true. Trump’s imperfections or crimes are irrelevant. God has saved him. And he’s now been chosen to lead their battle for the soul of America.