The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin (25 page)

The following Sunday, October 16, she attended services at the Wasilla Assembly of God. During her campaign for lieutenant governor, Sarah had switched her allegiance to the Wasilla Bible Church, which was marginally less extreme in its views and had a significantly larger congregation.

But now she went back to her roots, having arranged for a special blessing from a guest preacher, Reverend Thomas Muthee, of Kiambu, Kenya. Muthee had given nine sermons at the Assembly of God church during the previous five days. He’d first gained fame in Pentecostal circles in the late 1980s by claiming to have used prayer
to drive a witch called Mama Jane out of the city of Kiambu, just as Sarah’s longtime spiritual mentor Mary Glazier had driven a witch out of Alaska.

The tale Muthee told to Pentecostal congregations around the world was that Mama Jane had been amusing herself by arranging fatal traffic accidents in front of her house. He proclaimed, “Mama Jane either gets saved and serves the Lord, or she leaves town. There is no longer room in Kiambu for both of us!” Her response was to cause a triple fatality.

Muthee’s followers swarmed all over her house, wanting to stone her. In the ensuing melee, police encountered her pet python. One of the officers, recognizing that the snake was a “demon,” shot and killed it. With the snake’s death, according to Muthee, “the demonic influence was broken,” Mama Jane left town, and the streets of Kiambu were again safe for driving.

Muthee’s claim to have recaptured Kiambu for Christ by breaking Mama Jane’s demonic hold on the city coincided with the 1989 publication of a book called
Taking Our Cities for God
, by a Pentecostal preacher from Los Angeles named John Dawson. The book resonated throughout the Pentecostal universe as a spiritual call to arms. Dawson believed that “satanic forces manifest themselves in the culture of the city,” and that only “strategic-level spiritual warfare” (SLSW) could defeat them.

The following year, George Otis, Jr., who later founded and became CEO and president of The Sentinel Group, a Seattle-based “Christian research and information agency,” coined the term
spiritual mapping
. He wrote that Satan had sent powerful demonic forces to particular countries, regions, and cities in order to thwart Christian teaching. These “territorial spirits” destroyed the moral fabric of the societies in which they operated. He wrote that “spiritual darkness is palpable and geographically concentrated.”

In his 1991 book,
The Last of the Giants: Lifting the Veil on Islam
and the End Time
, he posited the notion that “territorial demonic strongholds” literally existed in various locations, and that SLSW, if concentrated in the proper areas, could free whole societies from demonic control.

This notion gained traction among Pentecostals throughout the 1990s, aided considerably by the 1997 publication of
Breaking Strongholds in Your City: How to Use Spiritual Mapping to Make Your Prayers More Strategic, Effective, and Targeted
by C. Peter Wagner, cofounder (with the later disgraced Ted Haggard) of the World Prayer Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Described in
Charisma
magazine as “a spiritual version of the Pentagon,” the World Prayer Center is the command post for Wagner’s worldwide campaign against demons.

Writing in The Plumbline, Orrel Steinkamp describes the role of spiritual mapping in strategic-level spiritual warfare: “Spiritual mapping is the process of gathering information regarding a region or a people in order to determine the identity and function of the territorial ruler … ‘Team Orange’ are a specially trained cadre of spiritual mappers. They gather information regarding any area to which they are sent … They call spiritual mapping ‘Night Vision Goggles’ which enable them to see, purportedly, into the darkness of a city.”

Wagner believed that the “Third Wave of the Holy Spirit” broke upon the beaches of America in the 1980s and that it represented the last chance for Christians to position themselves before the end-times, which would lead to the Rapture, but only for those who’d earlier dedicated their lives to fulfilling the wishes of Jesus Christ.

He literally believed that Satan sent “senior demons from the hierarchy of evil spirits” to control everything from individual neighborhoods to whole countries. But all was not lost. Spiritual mapping, a sort of divine GPS, could identify their whereabouts, and strategic-level spiritual warfare could destroy them.

In 1998 the World Prayer Center created a “spiritual mapping repository.” Otis said, “Spiritual mapping is especially needed now
because Satan will increase his resistance to the church as it moves toward fulfillment of the Great Commission.”

In 1999, Otis not only published a book called
Informed Intercession
, a guide to how to “transform” a city or region, but also produced a video called
Transformations
, which purported to show how spiritual mapping and spiritual warfare had improved the quality of life in four different cities, including Hemet, California, and Kiambu, Kenya.

In Hemet, Otis said, “The Transcendental Meditation center was literally burned out. Shortly after the intercessors prayed for its removal, a brush fire started on the mountain on the west side of the valley. It burned only the Transcendental Meditation facility and didn’t touch any of the buildings on either side.”

In 2000, Wagner wrote a new book called
Praying Through the 100 Gateway Cities of the 10/40 Window
, the premise of which was that locations between ten and forty degrees north latitude (i.e., “the 10/40 window”) should be the primary targets of spiritual warfare.

At sixty-one degrees north, Wasilla was not in the danger zone. Nonetheless, as mayor, Sarah had taken the precaution of having it declared a City of Character, trusting that the designation would strengthen its defenses against demonic onslaught. Now she was concerned with Satanic control of a larger realm: the state of Alaska.

In 2001, Otis released a sequel video called
Transformations II
, which exponentially increased the reach and strength of the message he and Wagner were trying to bring to the world. Among those caught up in this Third Wave, or New Apostolic Reformation, was Ed Kalnins, pastor of Wasilla’s Assembly of God church.

Although the general council of the Assemblies of God had again denounced the New Apostolic Reformation as heretical the year before, Kalnins retained his allegiance to it. Thus the church in which Sarah had been baptized and to which she’d belonged for more than twenty-five years, until she abandoned it in an election year for one with a larger congregation, was so extremist that even the radically
right-wing Pentecostal Assemblies of God had declared it beyond their pale.

In 2005, Muthee, the star of the
Transformations
videos, had been on a lucrative worldwide lecture tour for five years. Kalnins had booked him for a week’s worth of sermons in Wasilla in October. Having borrowed the first
Transformations
video from a previous Assembly of God pastor in 2000, Sarah knew well who Muthee was and considered the chance to receive his personal blessing as a sign from God that she was on the right path, both spiritually and politically.

And so it was to her original church that she returned on Sunday, October 16, 2005, to hear Thomas Muthee preach the last of the ten sermons Kalnins had hired him to deliver. She knew she’d play a starring role.

The video of Muthee’s sermon, including the laying of hands on Sarah as he prayed to Jesus to make her governor, became an Internet sensation during the 2008 campaign. In it, Muthee says:

At this point, Sarah steps to the altar, turns, bows her head, and extends her arms in front of her, palms upraised. Muthee lays a hand on her head as Kalnins and Phil Markwardt of Wasilla’s Crossroads Community Church lay hands on her shoulders. Muthee accelerates into exhortation mode:

Members of Wagner’s Third Wave/New Apostolic Reformation are convinced that their prayers can literally destroy individuals whom they’ve identified as demonic. Among those for whose deaths they claim credit are Mother Teresa and Princess Diana.

Wagner taught his followers that a female mega-demon whom he called the Queen of Heaven (aka “the Great Harlot of Mystery Babylon”) lurked near the summit of Mount Everest, “in a huge castle made of ice.” He also taught that “each of the surrounding mountain peaks housed high-ranking demonic spirits.”

It was imperative, in Wagner’s view, that the Queen of Heaven be toppled before the millennium. He did not underestimate the difficulty of the task. “This is not Spiritual Warfare 101,” he wrote. “The notion of confronting the Queen of Heaven is not fun and games. It is an advanced, high-risk assault …”

One of Wagner’s leading apostles in Mexico was a woman named Ana Mendez, a former witch in a Haitian voodoo cult. She established a 10/40 window prayer tower in Mexico City, which, Wagner wrote, was “continually occupied by fervent intercessors.” While Mendez herself was praying there one day, God told her it was high time to launch an assault on the Queen of Heaven in her Himalayan stronghold. In September 1997 she did, leading a team of twenty-six “intercessors” to Mount Everest in an assault she called Operation Ice Castle.

Some of the group chose to provide long-range support from the Everest View Hotel at an altitude of thirteen thousand feet. Others pushed on to a base camp at eighteen thousand feet. Mendez and a small cadre “scaled the ice cliffs and crossed bottomless crevasses,” Wagner wrote, eventually climbing to twenty thousand feet.

There, Mendez later said, God revealed to her “a large, brown stone formation, completely surrounded by walls of ice resembling a castle, and shaped exactly like an idol of the Queen of Heaven.”

Either that, or cerebral edema was causing her to hallucinate.

She and her elite force launched highly targeted intercessory prayers directly at the Queen inside her palace. Apparently the prayers found their mark, killing the Harlot Queen. Wagner wrote, “It had been a successful venture and … had deeply affected the invisible world. If not the strongest, it would be seen as one of the strongest assaults on the Queen of Heaven ever undertaken.”

The effects, according to Mendez, were almost immediate. “Within two weeks,” she wrote, “there was a huge fire in Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation; an earthquake destroyed the basilica of Assisi, a hurricane destroyed the infamous temple ‘Baal-Christ’ in Acapulco;
Princess Diana died, a representative of the British throne, to which Sir Edmund Hillary dedicated Mount Everest, and Mother Teresa died in India, one of the most famous advocates of Mary as Co-Redeemer.”

This was the kind of power with which Muthee and Kalnins sought to equip Sarah as she prepared for her next step up the political ladder. “The more violent you become,” Muthee says, “the quicker you will see things happen.”

Sarah retained enough contact with the real world to understand that the depth of her commitment to Third Wave ideology could prove awkward politically. Therefore, while continuing to proclaim herself a born-again Christian, she carefully shielded the extreme nature of her beliefs from public view.

But the very day after Muthee blessed her and sent her forth to do battle, she announced she was running not for lieutenant governor, but for governor, and not as an independent, but as a Republican.

God took it from there, keeping both Thomas Muthee and Sarah’s original spiritual mentor, Mary Glazier, well hidden.

I
SPEND A QUIET Fourth of July with the grebes and the birds and my squirrel. Retired judge Beverly Cutler sends me a column written in November 2008 by a sixteen-year-old Palmer High School student named Waverli Rainey and published in the
Frontiersman
. Its description of Valley mores is dismaying, especially when read on this, the day set aside to celebrate the birth of our nation.