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:
In a moment, I’ll be asking you that we pray for Sarah, and I’ll tell you the reason why … God wants to take the political dimension of our societies. That’s why I was so glad to see Sarah here. We should pray for her, we should back her up. And, you know, come the day of voting, we should be there, not just praying, we should be there …
We need God taking over our education system. If we have God in our schools, we will not have kids being taught, you know, how to worship Buddha, how to worship Mohammed, we will not have in the curriculum witchcraft and sorcery …
We need God taking over the media in our lands … and government … We need believers there. We need people that are born again, spirit filled, people who know God, and people who are serious with God. So I’ll ask Sarah, would you mind to come, please? Would you mind? Come, please. Let’s all stand up and let’s hold hands all over this house. Come, Pastor, come.
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:
Thank you, Jesus. Let’s all pray. Let’s pray for Sarah. Hallelujah! Come on, hold your hands up and raise them. Hold them and raise them up here! Come on, talk to God about this woman! Come on, talk to God about this woman we declare favor from today. We say favor, favor, favor! We say praise my God! We say grace to be rained upon her in the name of Jesus. My God, you make your judgment, you make room. You make ways in the desert, and I’m asking you today, we are asking you as the body of Christ in this valley, make a way for Sarah … Make her way, my God. Bring finances her way, even in the campaign, in the name of Jesus, and above all give her the personnel, give her men and women that will back her up in the name of Jesus …
Our Father, use her to turn this nation the other way around … so that the curse that has been there long can be broken … In the name of Jesus, in the name of Jesus! Every form of witchcraft, it will be rebuked in the name of Jesus. Father, make her way now! In Jesus’ name. Amen.
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 su
rrounding 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.
FIFTEEN
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.
On Nov. 4, 2008, Sen. Barack Obama was elected the first African-American president of the United States of America. I went to the Wasilla Sports Complex for what was called a community event. We were told it was non-partisan … However, once inside, it seemed as if it was a Republican-only event … I felt joy as I saw Sen. Barack Obama’s electoral points grow and grow …
I anxiously awaited what Present-elect Obama would say. Between speeches, a live band played music. However, when President-elect Obama began to speak, those running the event had to be asked to have the band stop so we could hear him speak. Eventually, they stopped playing, but we missed the beginning of the speech. Then half way through this historic speech, former Mayor Keller turned down the audio of President-elect Obama and put on a call from Governor Palin …
No one paid respect to President-elect Obama’s historic moment. So the next day I borrowed my mother’s Obama shirt and walked into school … I expected complaints and qualms about the new president, but I was not prepared for the flat-out racist remarks said openly in the halls and classrooms. I was appalled. While I sat at my desk trying to do my work I could hear my fellow classmates:
“I think we should kill Obama,” one said.
“I hope someone comes up and shoots him in the head,” another would say.
“I hate Obama … he’s black.”
On went the racist words for the full 80 minutes of that class. I began to think of the ignorance of the students I was surrounded by. I wondered where they learned to be so hateful, and I wondered why the teacher never stepped in—why no adult … had the guts to cut in and say it was not OK.
Sarah’s Fourth of July message “www.troopathon.org or call 866-866-6372 to support greatest military in the world; show our troops we care, we’ve got their back, bless them” comes via Twitter.
Back at Soap Opera Central, People reports that Levi Johnston has apologized to Sarah and Todd. When last I read about him he was spilling his guts to Vanity Fair for money, telling tales out of school about what went on behind the Palins’ closed doors. It wasn’t pretty. Now that he’s realized that his own “career” can go nowhere without Bristol, he’s busy patching things up.
“Last year, after Bristol and I broke up, I was unhappy and a little angry,” his prepared statement says. “Unfortunately, against my better judgment, I publicly said things about the Palins that were not completely true … I owe it to the Palins to publicly apologize.”
Bristol’s PR people add a statement of their own, in her name. It says, “Part of co-parenting is creating healthy and honest relationships between the parents. Tripp one day needs to know the truth and needs to know that even if a mistake is made the honorable thing to do is to own up to it.”
So all is well again. For the moment.
I MEET WITH Sherry and Mercede Johnston again, this time—because Sherry has been granted a rare afternoon out—at the Kaladi Brothers coffee shop in the Carrs mall, probably second only to the Mat-Su Family Restaurant as a gathering place for Wasillans, and even more of a magnet for Wasilla youth during the day.
Sherry is pleased because she’s just seen Levi, not a common occurrence. “He came up for a haircut,” Sherry tells me. “He said he had a big photo shoot coming up. He wouldn’t tell me with whom and he wouldn’t tell me what it was about. It was strange: I felt like there was something important he wanted to say.”
Levi went to his mother’s bathroom, looking for Percocet. “He said Bristol had just had another plastic surgery and she was hurting.” He wouldn’t speak to Mercede because he’s been on the outs with Mercede since getting back with Bristol because Bristol is on the outs with Mercede because Mercede posted a blog that Bristol didn’t like and Bristol told Levi to tell Sherry to tell Mercede that if she didn’t take the blog down she’d never see Levi or Tripp again.
Instead of removing the offensive post, Mercede blogged anew: “Why would he let this happen all over again? … I wish Levi could be the man I know he is and have a mind of his own and finally stand his ground, but I guess he is blinded by love. How is it fair that I can’t speak my mind on a blog without Levi threatening to never speak to me again, but Bristol can go on Facebook daily and call me nasty names with no repercussions at all?”
At Kaladi Brothers, she’s unrepentant. She tells me she was recently subpoenaed for a deposition in Bristol’s custody fight with Levi, a fracas that may be paused for a while as the couple struggles to reunite. “Bristol’s lawyer, Van Flein, he just sneered at me. He also told me I wasn’t allow
ed to talk to you. I said, ‘Who are you to tell me who I can talk to?’ He said, ‘That’s if you ever want to see your nephew again.’ Bristol was sitting there smirking.”
The next day, US Weekly has Bristol and Levi on the cover holding Tripp. “We’re Getting Married! The reunited couple reveals their sudden, secret engagement—and why they hid it from Sarah. ‘I Hope My Mom Will Accept Us.’” They were reportedly paid a hundred thousand dollars for the exclusive.
This was the photo shoot for which Levi wanted his mother to cut his hair. This was the “something important” he seemed to want to tell her but did not.
Rumors immediately run rampant that Bristol is pregnant again—and not by Levi, because she was living with Ben Barber at what would have been the time of conception. Barber, who was offered an electrician’s job in Delta Junction, 450 miles to the northeast, as an inducement to leave without making a fuss, speaks to The Daily Beast.
“I helped her out with Tripp more than Levi ever did,” he says. “What does Levi have going for him? Nothing. I don’t understand how Bristol can go and spend her life with someone who can’t get his GED.” He says Bristol never had a good relationship with either of her parents and that both Todd and Track are incensed at the news of the engagement.
Truly, the Palins are a circus of many rings.
THE FUSS OVER my moving in here has finally wound up where it belonged all along: in a comic strip. I’m in Doonesbury this week.
(illustration credit 15.1)
I TOLD TODD back in May that not only was I not going to be paying attention to anything that happened on his side of the fence, but that even if I inadvertently saw or heard any activity I would refrain from writing about it. I keep my promises—most of them, anyway. In any event, I’m keeping this one. Thus, Roland Hedley would have had a fruitless trip.