GOP lawmakers and extremist pastors joined together to repent over LGBTQ+ freedoms, abortion, and non-believers.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and two dozen members of Congress assembled at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., last week for the second-annual National Gathering of Prayer and Repentance. The event was chock-a-block with Christian nationalist pastors and featured a clarion call for spiritual warfare, with members of Congress beseeching fellow Christians to “tie the hands of Satan” and to “bind the demonic forces” that are supposedly possessing America.

The National Gathering for Prayer and Repentance is the brainchild of Johnson, a religious zealot who is third in line for the presidency and who, as Rolling Stone has reported, is convinced that America is “dark and depraved” and deserves God’s wrath. The gathering is staged as a far-right counterweight to the National Prayer Breakfast, a longstanding ecumenical religious event, which was also held in Washington last week. That gathering was attended by President Joe Biden, who offered a bland prayer that America should remember its character of “honesty, decency, dignity, and respect,” and find strength in togetherness.

The NGPR, by contrast, featured extremist calls for Christians to stand in opposition to sinful American culture — in particular the rise of LGBTQ+ freedoms, the environmental movement, and the practice of abortion. The kind of repentance sought by the speakers was often less for personal failings, than for the failure of Christians to exert power and control over those who don’t obey their theology.

Pastor Ché Ahn, for example, is a far-right Christian nationalist, who spoke at the “Stop the Steal” protest seeking to keep 2020 election loser Donald Trump in office, a day before the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Ahn is a leader of the New Apostolic Reformation, an ascendant, power-obsessed religious movement that calls on Christians to take dominion over the nations of the world in order to hasten the return of Jesus. In his call for repentance, Ahn lamented: “We have abdicated our responsibility to occupy until You come.”

Other NAR leaders who took the stage included the “apostle” Dutch Sheets, who preaches that Christians “have been given legal power and authority from Heaven,” and Lou Engle, who prayed at NGPR for 100,000 LGBTQ+ Americans “to be saved and transformed by the power of God.” Matthew Taylor, a religion scholar who has written about the rise of Christian nationalism for Rolling Stone, argues that the NGPR event showcased “the creeping influence of anti-democratic theologies and practices among our elected officials.”

While extremist preachers inveighed against demons and false gods, Johnson played it relatively straight — praying for Solomonic wisdom to execute God’s will. The NGPR ceremony was emceed by its co-founders Jim Garlow, also considered an “apostle” in the NAR movement, and Tony Perkins, who leads the Focus on the Family, a stalwart organization of the old-school religious right. Both men are longtime mentors of Johnson, who became speaker in October.

As a faith leader, Garlow comes out of Charismatic Christianity, which believes in “gifts of the spirit” like faith healing and speaking in tongues. The NAR movement takes this embrace of the supernatural even further, insisting that prophesy and divine revelation are not biblical bygones, but alive in our present world — as is a constant struggle between angels and demons, which humans can influence through prayer or so-called “spiritual warfare.”

Perkins comes out of an extremely conservative, but more traditional, Southern Baptist religious practice. Yet at NGPR, the usually stiff-starched Perkins was speaking the expansive language of the Charismatics.

“We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age,” he told the crowd.