"Muthee exclaimed, "We come against the spirit of witchcraft! We come against the python spirits!" Then, a local pastor took the mic from Muthee and added, "We stomp on the heads of the enemy!" - Journalist Max Blumenthal, describing Palin-anointer Thomas Muthee's appearance at the Wasilla Assembly of God, September 20, 2008
Despite concerted efforts, disturbing evidence pointing towards the likely nature of Sarah Palin's religious beliefs continues to emerge. Yesterday "scrubbed" footage, from a 2005 "anointing" of then-Alaska gubernatorial contender Sarah Palin, resurfaced on the website of the net-based alternative news service The Irregular Times. The footage showed Kenyan minister Thomas Muthee not only praying over and blessing Sarah Palin, to advance her bid for the Alaska governorship and protect Palin from a "spirit of witchcraft", but, prior to the blessing, Muthee gave a seven to eight minute speech in which he called on believing Christians to "infiltrate" a number of key areas of secular society including Banking and finance, schools and education, media, politics and government.
Thomas Muthee claims to be able to dramatically cut crime by expelling "territorial" demons, but Muthee is no isolated crank. Rather, he is an influential figure in an increasingly powerful but little studied, emergent strain of world Christian fundamentalism bent on achieving political power and cleansing the world of "evil'.
Terminology Thomas Muthee used in his 2005 "anointing" speech, his reference to the "Seven Kingdoms" which Christians should "infiltrate", can be traced to an ambitious and militant recent movement within Christianity that at least several of Palin's churches appear to be in, known as the New Apostolic Reformation or (more broadly) The Third Wave. A recent series of articles and short video documentaries [complete list here] at the website Talk To Action, which analyzes the intersection of religion and politics, has focused on connections of Palin's churches to that movement and begun to map out the barely-noticed yet rapidly growing, international move among fundamentalist Christianity, away from Christian denominationalism and towards a type of hyper-fundamentalism bent on achieving worldly power.
more on Third Wave / New Apostolic Reformation
Palin's Churches and the Third Wave: The Lions In the Pews
'The leadership of the New Apostolic Reformation is not waiting around for the Rapture. They are actively planning to advance the kingdom on earth by conquering the "Seven Mountains." 'Buzzflash interview with author, re Third Wave & New Apostolic Reformation
Palin, Muthee, and the Witch - Journalists Miss the Major Story
Up until early September 2008 on the website of the Wasilla Assembly of God, the Alaska church Sarah Palin was baptized at and attended for two and 1/2 decades (most of her adult life) viewers could watch streams of Wasilla Assembly of God sermons events going back into 2004. But as scrutiny of Palin's possible religious beliefs grew through September 2008, that video content became suddenly unavailable and a statement church website declared that heavy traffic had overwhelmed the church web-server which hosts the Wasilla Assembly of God's website. Then, in mid-September, some of those sermons again became available for public viewing - but sermons older then September 2006 were no longer available.
According to Wasilla Assembly of God head pastor ed Kalnins, since officially leaving his church in 2002 Sarah Palin has maintained an ongoing "friendship" with the church and attends Wasilla Assembly of God seminars and special events. On June 7, 2008, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin used Alaska state travel funds to fly from Juneau to the Wasilla area and on June 8 Palin attended two Wasilla church events, one at the Wasilla Assembly of God and another at a periodic gathering of Wasilla area churches known as "One Lord Sunday", an event celebrated in other areas of Alaska as well.
At the June 8, 2008 "One Lord Sunday" gathering held at the Wasilla sports arena, pastor Ed Kalnins publicly blessed ( or "anointed" ) Sarah Palin with the laying on of hands. Earlier that day Palin had spoken at a ceremony, held at her former church - the Wasilla Assembly of God, for graduates of the church's three-year post-high school "Master's Commission" program, an $8,000 program which teaches students such subjects as deference to authority, Biblical memorization and "prophesy". Ed Kalnins was the first graduate of the Masters Commission program, started in the 1980's at the Phoenix, Arizona based Phoenix First Assembly of God megachurch of pastor Tommy Barnett. The Masters Commission has subsequently grown into an international program, based in dozens of countries worldwide, and has graduated tens of thousands of students.
After Palin's speech at the Masters Commission graduation ceremony, Ed Kalnins prompted the Alaska Governor to mention her May 2005 blessing, or anointing, by Muthee - who now presides over a growing network of hundreds of Kenyan churches and has taken the title of "Bishop".
Muthee is a heavily connected African minister, popular as a speaker at certain Christian conferences, who has become famous worldwide among members of the rapidly expanding form of Christian fundamentalism that is the Third Wave or the New Apostolic Reformation - due to a video documentary that showed, as one of six "case studies", a purported incident in which Muthee and his supporters drove a "spirit of witchcraft", as well as a woman Muthee accused of causing that spirit, out of the Nairobi suburb of Kiambu after which, according to Muthee and the author of that "Transformations" video, documentarist George Otis, Jr., crime in Kiambu "virtually disappeared", most of the bars in town closed and almost all of the residents of Kiambu joined churches. That description of the current state of Kiambu clashes sharply with mainstream media and non-governmental accounts, which detail primary school children living in fear of being raped or killed on their way to school and gruesome crimes including the decapitation of a man, whose severed head was deposited at a Kiambu bus station.
In the resurfaced footage from the May 2005 blessing or "anointing" of Sarah Palin, at the Wasilla Assembly of God, three pastors surround Sarah Palin and bless her with the laying-on of hands. One of the pastors was Thomas Muthee. Another was Phil Markwardt of the Wasilla area Crossroads Community Church. The third was Wasilla Assembly of God head pastor Ed Kalnins. Kalnins and Markwardt traveled with Muthee, in 2005, to Africa to visit Muthee's Kenya-based. Kalnins has stated he has made two other trips to Africa, presumably to Muthee's church. Kalnins' and Markwardt's churches are among a Wasilla area church consortium helping to finance Muthee's Kenyan church expansion program.
During the trip to Africa with Markwardt, Muthee and Kalnins distributed boxes of books by Rick Joyner, Francis Frangipane and John Bevere - all authors promoted by the Wasilla Assembly of God. Curricula by Bevere and Frangipane are taught in the Wasilla Assembly of God "Masters Commission" program and Frangipane is closely associated with the Morningstar Ministries of Rick Joyner, which has recently purchased and begun to restore Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's former palatial "Praise The Lord" PTL building complex near Charleston, South Carolina.
In April 2008, a "spiritual breakout", with numerous and ongoing reports of strange and miraculous manifestations and experiences commenced at the Morningstar Ministries Heritage Estate complex and Morningstar Ministries media personnel were on hand to document the "breakout" from its April 23 inception. Morningstar makes video shorts of the "breakout" available for download on its website and a "week 17 / August 7-13 2008" video short shows Steve Thompson up on stage before a roiling crowd at Heritage, shouting:
"See, Jesus is waiting - seated at the right hand of the Father, having all authority on Heaven and on Earth, having commissioned and empowered and deployed his disciples to go out to enforce the victory and the judgment that he won over the enemy and waiting until his people rise up and demonstrate their glory and those enemies are put under the feet of the body of Christ."
In October the Executive Vice President and Head of Prophecy at Morningstar, Steve Thompson, will lead a prophecy conference at the Wasilla Assembly of God. The relationship between Morningstar Ministries and the Wasilla Assembly of God is extremely close, and pastor Ed Kalnins both has traveled to Morningstar for a recent pastor's conference and also taken Wasilla Assembly of of Masters Commission students to a February 2008 Prophecy Conference at Morningstar's new, former PTL-owned, Heritage Ministries estate complex. Morningstar head and founder Rick Joyner, whose books are distributed internationally, has written, on a June 19, 2007 newsletter of the Elijah List, entitled "THE TRUE SOLDIERS OF THE CROSS ARE MOBILIZING", that the Christian theocratic regime Joyner advocates "may seem like totalitarianism".
In a March 14, 2004 sermon he gave at the United kingdom based Kingsgate Community Church, Thomas Muthee brandished a spiritualized counterpart to Joyner's and Thompson's menacing and militant rhetoric, telling Kingsgate church members that he had miraculously healed his baby daughter, born without joints in her legs, through prayer and by spiritually grappling with the devil. Muthee then exhorted his audience to what was properly, in context, a form of "spiritual violence" or "spiritual warfare" :
"The Bible says that since the days of John The Baptist the Kingdom suffers violence. The violent take it by force. People that have spiritual backbone are the ones that will move forward. I thank God for what I see happening in this place. I thank God for the vision, the passion that I can see here.
And my word is this: The more violent you become, the more committed you become, the quicker you will see things happen in this region."
Muthee's rhetoric has, if anything, grown more extreme since that 2004 sermon, as attested to in a recent post from journalist Max Blumenthal who traveled to Alaska to attend Bishop Thomas Muthee's September 20-21 appearance at the Wasilla Assembly of God. As Blumenthal describes:
On the first night of services, Muthee implored his audience to wage "spiritual warfare" against "the enemy." As I filmed, a nervous church staffer approached from behind and told me to put my camera away. I acceded to his demand, but as Muthee urged the church to crush "the python spirit" of the unbeliever enemies by stomping on their necks, I pulled out a smaller camera and filmed from a more discreet position. Now, church members were in deep prayer, speaking in tongues and raising their hands. Muthee exclaimed, "We come against the spirit of witchcraft! We come against the python spirits!" Then, a local pastor took the mic from Muthee and added, "We stomp on the heads of the enemy!"