The Unholy Marriage of Michael Flynn and the Religious Right

The post-screening presentation and Q&A by, from left to right: Scott Wiper, Pastor Jackson Lahmeyer, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn (Ret.), and Ivan Raiklin. March 21, 2024, Sheridan Church, Tulsa Oklahoma. Photo by author.

Since January 6, 2021, there has been an increasing convergence of anti-constitutional military and paramilitary with a right-wing religious fundamentalist base that challenges the US secular constitutional system in the name of their interpretation of biblical principles. A key figure of this blending has been retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), who has been crisscrossing the US as part of his “ReAwaken America Tour,” stopping at major right-wing churches to rally former President Donald Trump’s fundamentalist base. 

Flynn was also a leader of the January 6, 2021 effort to organize a coup d’état against the constitutional process to certify Joe Biden’s electoral victory as president and reportedly attended a December 18, 2020 Oval Office meeting, “during which participants discussed seizing voting machines, declaring a national emergency, invoking certain national security emergency powers, and continuing to spread the false message that the November 2020 election had been tainted by widespread fraud.”  When questioned by Congress as to whether or not the violence on January 6, 2021, was justified and if he believed in the peaceful transition of power for the presidency, Flynn pleaded the Fifth.

Trump has promised to bring back Flynn into the government if he wins the election in November 2024. Flynn is an “election denier” who does not believe the fact that Biden won the election of November 2020. At the Defense Intelligence Agency, his “former subordinates … said Flynn was so prone to dubious pronouncements that senior aides coined a term—‘Flynn facts’—for assertions that seemed questionable or inaccurate.”

Flynn has been crisscrossing the United States along with right-wing businessman and cofounder with Flynn of the ReAwakening America Tour, Clay Clark, stopping at right-wing churches to rally Trump’s fundamentalist base for the upcoming November 2024 election. Separate from the ReAwakening America Tour is his own movie tour. His personal tour features a highly stylized propagandistic film about himself titled Flynn.  An October 18, 2022, PBS documentary titled Michael Flynn’s Holy War leads with his quote, “There is a spiritual war and there is a political war.”  Flynn’s movie tour that stops at primarily religious institutions brings these two wars together. This Christian nationalist base encompasses much of the armed, pro-militia movement that claims the Second Amendment guarantees them the right to possess weapons not only for hunting, but to defend and enforce their vision of what America should be.

The Sheridan Church. Photo by author.

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and the Sheridan Church rally, May 20

Lahmeyer is an adept mobilizer, and just prior to his coming to work at Sheridan Church, he served as state director of Christ for All Nations, the ministry of Reinhard Bonnke, son of Nazi Wehrmacht member and post-war pastor Hermann Bonnke. Bonnke’s Christ for All Nations was notorious for his gigantic rallies in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere. These rallies mobilized Africans into right-wing Christian church networks and away from progressive anticolonial movements. Evidently, his experience with Christ for All Nations has prepared him for the mobilization now for Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement.

The audience on May 20, 2024, while large, was predominantly elderly, with a few young adults generally accompanying older persons. On the audience’s right side of the room, a chart that covered the length of the wall illustrated Flynn’s narrative of political persecution by the so-called deep state. The man walking the audience through its details was Ivan Raiklin, a retired Green Beret, lawyer, and self-proclaimed “Deep State Marauder.” The son of Russian émigrés, Raiklin is a key figure in the Flynn universe and accompanied the retired general during his tour along with Boone Cutler, a far-right media personality who coauthored books with Flynn, and Scott Wiper, the film’s producer. 

Locations of Flynn’s movie tour.
Burgundy: religious
Orange: theater/auditorium
Blue: community center
Green: for-profit event space
Black: undefined or unknown
Yellow: shooting range
Mortarboard icon: educational institution

The audience response to the movie was overwhelmingly positive, as the screening was punctuated by sporadic cheers and boos underscoring the general mood during the film. Heckling targeted Republicans and Democrats equally, since both parties were framed as cut from the same deep-state cloth. Trump, conversely, was explicitly absolved of any wrongdoing, regardless of his role in firing Flynn. The narrative regarding the events surrounding his firing and subsequent legal issues was presented as an unfounded attack by a corrupt legal system against an honest soldier. Flynn frames himself as a harbinger of truth rallying the troops against the oppressive deep state, ultimately making the film more of a call to arms than a documentary.

After the screening, Flynn, Wiper, and Raiklin participated in the Q&A session for which, surprisingly, many in the audience did not stick around. The questions ranged from the ‘truth’ behind Flynn’s phone calls with former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, to the production of the film itself. However, it was a question regarding the fate of January 6 prisoners that resulted in the most memorable response. Raiklin, when addressing the alleged suicides of several incarcerated January 6 rioters, became so enraged that he tensed up and had to pause for a couple of seconds before confronting the crowd about the situation in which their movement found itself. He called them to act against the system that oppressed them, though he was light on the details as to how. On this matter of January 6-related suicides, it is clear that at least one person has died by suicide, but there is no evidence to support a widespread phenomenon. Action was the underlying theme of the night, with the staff and Flynn pushing their audience to not only share their experience of the movie with their friends and family, but to become politically active. This push for political mobilization applied to churches as well, with Flynn criticizing the state of the Catholic Church (his own denomination), while praising Lahmeyer for his good job.

Political-Religious Context

Oklahoma is a state with a conservative political culture where Democrats have struggled to perform well. In 2020, Donald Trump carried all 77 counties, including the highly-urbanized Oklahoma and Tulsa counties. Oklahoma also ranks as one of the most religious states in the US, with 71% of Oklahomans reporting they believe in God with absolute certainty, as compared to 63% of Americans who responded the same way at the national level. While religion or religiosity does not necessarily cause conservative political beliefs, it does make sense that in Oklahoma politics are practiced with guiding impulses from the relatively high degree to which Oklahomans are religious.

When it comes to Tulsa, in particular, Jackson Lahmeyer stands out as a leading figure as the head of the Sheridan Church, beyond the fact that he is also influential in the political sphere as the founder of Pastors for Trump, a coalition of religious leaders who gather to pray for the success of Trump in the 2024 election, and encourage  their flock to vote for him, either by example or by directive. Additionally, the group exists to lobby Trump for their policy interests regarding “marriage, freedom of speech and personal responsibility”. In what might be considered a violation of the laws regarding political activity of tax-exempt nonprofit organizations, Lahmeyer has turned his church into a site of political organizing by setting up Pastors for Trump, hosting political events, and selling political literature in the Sheridan Church store. The address for Pastors for Trump on its website is 7901 E. 41st Street, Tulsa—the same as the address for Sheridan Church. Pastors for Trump offers little on its website, and other than Mark Burns and Craig Hagin, it is unclear if there are other board members. According to the organization’s website, however, Pastors for Trump boasts a membership that includes religious leaders from all fifty states. Hagin is notable because of his connection to the Sheridan Church through his grandfather Kenneth Hagin, one of the former leaders within the Sheridan Church and founder of the Rhema Bible Center in Tulsa.

Pastors for Trump

More than just an advocacy or interest group, Pastors for Trump is connected to Trump himself and clearly part of the larger network of Trump’s 2024 campaign for the presidency. Demonstrating the closeness with which Pastors for Trump works with their beneficiary, Pastors for Trump participated in an event alongside Flynn’s ReAwaken America Tour at Trump’s National Doral golf course in Miami. Trump himself called in to the ReAwaken proceedings to laud Flynn and give his well-wishes to the throngs of his admirers at Doral.

Tim Dickinson, “Evil Mermaids, Demons, and Donald: This Pro-Trump Conference Got Real Weird“

Pastors for Trump has enlisted the help of leading January 6 insurrectionists Michael Flynn and Roger Stone. Lahmeyer, Flynn, and Stone all appeared on a prayer call in March 2023 for and including former President Trump.

With Lahmeyer and Flynn working together, the importance of religion in Oklahoma and across the United States cannot be ignored as a primary organizing node around which political ideology is formed and voting behavior executed. At a movement level, for Pastors for Trump, both Flynn’s (whose religious background is central to his political worldview) and Stone’s involvement creates a powerful mix of religion and politics designed to take over the government and craft policy from a reactionary perspective that would see the rollback of gender and sexual rights that have been hard fought over the last 50 years.  

Another important actor bridging religion and politics is Sean Feucht, who once prayed over President Trump in the Oval Office. While it is unknown if Feucht is a member of Pastors for Trump, he does have a close relationship with Lahmeyer, having spoken at the Sheridan Church. Feucht is a telling artifact within the larger movement of the marriage of MAGA politics with right-wing evangelical Christianity. It reveals the truly reactionary nature of the connections that allows organizing between these two poles. This is exactly what allows Flynn (and the rest of his activists) entry into the religious world. A Christian nationalist, Feucht’s visit to the Sheridan Church in Tulsa was marked by his comments that revealed his politics along an explicitly millenarian orientation, where, in his belief, the return of Jesus Christ is imminent. He stated: “That’s why we get called ‘Christian nationalists.’ ”

Before the 2024 election cycle ramped up, Feucht also organized several demonstrations in 2020 that flew in the face of both public health protection measures and the racial justice movements that surrounded the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police in the summer of that same year. Feucht also unsuccessfully ran for Congress, as another example of clergy whose reactionary tendencies lead them to seek office to better effectuate theocratic public policy. For members of Pastors for Trump and their fellow travelers, the public health measures intended to keep communities safe during a once-in-a-century pandemic smacked of the kind of perceived oppression that many on the evangelical right view as justification for their specific underdog theology. Moreover, it illustrates the desire for members of the reactionary Christian right to place the administration of the state in God’s hands, as Feucht demonstrated when he said that the goal was for “God to be in control.” 

Prayer Call with Lahmeyer, Stone, Flynn, and Trump

On March 20, 2023, Pastors for Trump, with its founder Jackson Lahmeyer acting as master of ceremonies, hosted an online prayer call. In this format, speakers are able to call in and offer their prayers; viewers listen to speeches and prayers providing unity. Lahmeyer started his broadcast by listing some of the star guests slated for the call-in, including Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and of course Donald Trump himself, the beneficiary of the prayers that evening. Lahmeyer then remarked that this would be “one of the most important prayer calls in American history,” and that “[this call] was a defining moment in the nation’s livelihood,” signaling the profound importance that Lahmeyer and the rest of Pastors for Trump place on the value of prayer. In a sense they are right, the intervention of a higher power is an easy political win, because it isn’t falsifiable. Moreover, on a human level, the act of coming together to pray serves as a valuable organizing tactic for politicians as it builds a strong sense of community that is linked through faith.

Roger Stone was the first speaker on the call. He spoke about how his survival of what he paints as a Soros-funded plot against him was only through the “blood of the cross” and, of course, Donald Trump’s intervention. In this neat picture, the antisemitic trope of George Soros as an arch-puppeteer is positioned against a more powerful and more benevolent God, who interceded on Stone’s behalf. For believers, this could be taken as proof that God is on their side. As he continued, Stone drew parallels between his alleged persecution and that of Donald Trump’s, with references to Trump’s mishandling of documents and his involvement in stoking the flames of insurrection on January 6. Stone said, “President Trump has done nothing whatsoever wrong.”

The conversation then moved to Flynn, who was brought on after Stone called him a “great American patriot.” Flynn thanked Lahmeyer for organizing the event, saying that it was “bringing God back into this country.” He went on to say that the people they were facing were “Godless people,” with which Lahmeyer agreed. Flynn then stated that, “during my own persecution that prayer was the most powerful weapon.” He then praised Lahmeyer for showing how the Constitution was connected to the Bible. Flynn made a point that there were many Americans on “both sides of the aisle” who wanted prayer to be returned to America. This is a crucial point, because it positions the movement exemplified by Pastors for Trump as neither left nor right, but rather Godly.

Before Trump joined the call, Lahmeyer introduced Clay Clark as having been a key organizer who helped bring the entire call together. Clark, a 41-year-old Oklahoman who launched the ReAwaken America Tour as a veritable far-right dog and pony show featuring Michael Flynn, who is officially listed as the cofounder of the tour; Mike Lindell, the MAGA CEO of MyPillow; conspiracy theorist Alex Jones; and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. According to Rolling Stone, after January 6, the tour and Clark’s organization became a key strategic structure for the MAGA movement to plan their eventual return to power. Clark thus positioned himself as a crucial voice and strategist within the MAGA movement, once that movement had been dislodged from government. Clark’s presence, on the Pastors for Trump call is significant because it signals the strategic organizing power that is available to the Pastors. The ephemeral spiritual warfare of Lahmeyer et al. is then given a real political bite through Clark’s organizing power. Clark also has connections to the Black Robe Regiment, a militant religious organization that invited him to Washington, DC to speak to their members on January 5, 2021.

When Trump joined the call, he thanked both Lahmeyer and Clark for their efforts in rallying supporters to the cause and organizing the call, and said to them that it was an “honor to be with you.” He also took a moment to acknowledge Flynn and Stone, stating that he had just heard “our great General Flynn and my friend Roger Stone,” and that “I was very honored to give them full pardons, because they were treated horribly by Government [sic].” Trump then took the opportunity to remark that the current moment was a “horrible period for the United States of America.” The rest of Trump’s time was devoted to similar complaints about the Biden Administration and assertions that under his administration the United States was in a stronger position in all conceivable ways. It was a strange mix of policy and religion that indicated the strong connection between the two areas of public life and ones that the religious right would like to make more explicit, if not foundational to public life in the United States. At the end of the call, Lahmeyer led a prayer over Trump. He thanked “God the Father for Trump” and said that through God, Trump’s best days were still “right in front of him.”

Catholicism, Michael Flynn, and the Catholics for Catholics organization

Michael Flynn was raised in a right-wing religious milieu. His mother took the family to various anti-abortion movements and marches as a child, and the family’s Catholic identity was a vital aspect of the family’s structure, according to Flynn’s brother recounting the family’s upbringing in the PBS Frontline documentary. Flynn carried his religious warfare mindset forward into his military service and into the battles in Afghanistan and Iraq. The mix of religion and politics—specifically politics informed by religion—has continued to affect Flynn’s approach to political organizing, which was especially obvious in his comments during the movie event in Tulsa.

To further pursue this end, Flynn has emerged as a senior advisor to Catholics for Catholics, a group which organized a gala dinner hosted at Trump’s estate and social club, Mar-a-Lago, on March 19, 2024, in celebration of Saint Joseph’s Day. The dinner featured, among others, disinformationist and right-wing provocateur Jack Posobiec, Roger Stone, national director of Priests for Life  Frank Pavone, and Michael Flynn.

Promising to only “take a minute,” Flynn spoke of the perils facing the country, stating that “this country is in the middle of Psalm 23,” in reference to the valley of the shadow of death. It is exactly this generalized pessimism regarding political, social, and cultural developments in the United States that gives the religious right its purpose. Thus, religious reactionaries use this fear, often suffused with the fear of Communism as in the 20th century, to claim a kind of moral superiority through which they act to install God’s law on Earth. Their ultimate end, then, is a kind of anti-democratic theocracy, and Flynn with his fundamentalist bent and his activities organizing paramilitary organizations offers moral cover for violent fundamentalism that threatens democracy in the United States.

Alongside Flynn at the Catholics for Catholics event was Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, the onetime Catholic priest who was defrocked in 2022 for placing an aborted fetus on the altar of his church. Determined to outlaw abortion in the United States, Pavone was a cochair of Trump’s “pro-life coalition” for the 2020 election.

Catholics for Catholics is a political organization and registered as a 501(c)(4) advocacy organization. Steve Bannon, Trump’s 2016 campaign strategist and right-wing journalist, has called Catholics for Catholics a “vital” organization. Founder John Yep, who has been active in the reactionary and controversial Legionaries of Christ for over 14 years, appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast on June 16, 2023, when Catholics for Catholics led a homophobic protest that they called a “prayerful procession” to Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, California, where the Dodgers were celebrating drag culture as part of their Pride Month celebrations.

History of the Sheridan Church

Glenn Millard (1904–1987) founded the Sheridan Christian Center in 1951. Millard hailed from a family of preachers, according to the book Like a Prairie Fire: A History of the Assemblies of God in Oklahoma, by Bob Burke.  According to Burke, Millard’s sister Roberta and his daughter Geneva went on tour  in the spring of 1948 with well know traveling preacher and later televangelist Oral Roberts. While it is unclear what relationship Millard may have had with Roberts, the two were certainly operating in the same space, and it is possible that either could have lent spiritual or material assistance to the other at one time or another.

It was Millard’s intention that the Sheridan Christian Center would serve as the genesis for similar churches, and from its beginnings with only a handful of members meeting in the Millard garage, the church would produce some of the leading theological talents of mid-twentieth-century Oklahoma. In 1974, presumably after moving from the Millard garage, Kenneth Hagin (1917–2003) founded the Rhema Bible Center. Hagin began his theological career in the same milieu of old-time revivals that also featured Millard and Roberts. In 1973, one year before he founded the Rhema Bible Center, Hagin led a so-called camp meeting hosted by the Sheridan Christian Center. These meetings were attended by many elites of the charismatic movement of Oklahoma, such as Roberts.

The Sheridan Christian Center celebrated its 40th anniversary in style. According to the Tulsa World newspaper, celebrations were marked by a month of activities including a picnic and meetings with many of the former church leaders who established organizations as alumni of Sheridan. Sheridan Pastor Vep Ellis recalled Millard’s encouragement of starting new churches that originated from within Sheridan. This included the Victory Christian Center, which at that time in 1991 boasted 8,000 members, making it one of Tulsa’s largest churches.

Along with rebranding itself as “Sheridan.Church,” the church has moved about a mile from its former location. Pastor Jackson Lahmeyer boasted at one point during his sermon that the space had formerly been a nightclub and honky-tonk.

Pentecost Sunday at Sheridan

At the Sunday service before Flynn’s movie event on Monday, May 20, 2024, Lahmeyer mounted the stage to say that everyone had better sing the song “Our God Is an Awesome God,” before he would begin the service. Once satisfied, Lahmeyer started with an introduction announcing that it was Pentecost Sunday—marking the day that the Holy Spirit was revealed to the faithful.

Lahmeyer began the service by remarking that it was indeed Pentecost Sunday, and then asked how many of the congregation considered themselves Pentecostal. Some hands went up, and then Lahmeyer proceeded to define Pentecostal. He also offered a story from his childhood and joked about growing up in a “Pen’ecostal” church. In a “Pen’ecostal” church, if at someone’s baptism they did not come out of the water speaking in tongues, then they were regarded as not being true believers. Lahmeyer was quick to say that Sheridan was not so extreme, but that the church did believe in gifts of the Holy Spirit as an ongoing reality in Christian life.  

Lahmeyer then offered a lesson in what it meant to be a Pentecostal and the importance of Pentecost. To support this, he offered readings from Acts chapter 2, Zephaniah chapter 3, and Genesis chapter 11. The larger message from the service had to do with the unity of the Christian church in its most capacious terms. When commenting on Genesis chapter 11, he spoke about how the unity of the nations was destroyed at the Tower of Babel because of humanity’s capacity to achieve anything it wanted as a collective. Lahmeyer used this as a call to arms that Christianity needs to unite to make the world a holier place. Of course, this cannot be divorced from the Flynn event that followed the next night, and the concept of spiritual warfare that is prevalent among charismatic churches. According to Canadian professor Ruth Marshall, the posture of spiritual warfare is combative and makes use of bellicose language during prayers and lessons.

Conclusion

As Americans prepare to elect a president in November 2024, the religious right is an increasingly important phenomenon in the American political landscape. Flynn’s interaction with this constituency, represented by Evangelicals and Catholics alike, offers a window into the bloc’s vision for a potential second term for Donald Trump. The strong religious undertones of Flynn’s movie and the fact that his tour made generous use of religious spaces to hold the movie screenings themselves are a clear indication of the alliance being built between paramilitary organizations, religious right, and a possible future Trump administration.

Trump, for his part, has participated in the events of the religious right with great enthusiasm. In accepting the support of organizations like Pastors for Trump he agrees, at the very least temporarily, to make their concerns his and to make their policy preferences key elements of his political program. He does this through explicit participation as well as through the participation of people he keeps close such as Michael Flynn and his associates, both of whom could be White House fixtures in the near future. And with each of them, they bring their own agendas and those agendas of the religious right whose support they needed, sought, and will eagerly implement. 

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Image made by John Chrobak using “berkeley_8_27_17-6556” by Roger Jones licensed under CC BY 2.0; “01 (99)” by Becker1999 licensed under CC BY 2.0; “Michael Flynn” by Gage Skidmore licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.