Who Runs Pastors for Trump? Tulsa Preacher Jackson Lahmeyer Profile – Rolling Stone

Even by the standards of the MAGA fever-swamps, pastor Jackson Lahmeyer’s social media posts are extreme. A sampling of his outré takes:

“Alex Jones did nothing wrong”

“Fauci is a mass-murdering Luciferian”

“Speaker Pelosi is a DEMON!”

“Jan 6 = FBI Inside Job”

“Bring out the tanks. Immigration Moratorium”

Yet far from making him politically radioactive, the Oklahoma church leader’s trollier-than-thou persona helps explain his rapid ascent in the orbit of Donald Trump. 

Lahmeyer leads the newly created Pastors For Trump, a 50-state organization that aims to revive evangelical support for the disgraced, insurrectionist former president as Trump makes his bid for the 2024 GOP nomination. 

Lahmeyer announced the formation of Pastors for Trump on “The Stone Zone” podcast in early December. The group is ostensibly independent of the presidential campaign, but Trump blessed Pastors for Trump — sending Lahmeyer a “THANK YOU!” note in black Sharpie, and promoting the group on Truth Social. “Our registration numbers just spiked,” Lahmeyer tells Rolling Stone, “the moment he Truthed it out.”

Pastors for Trump is the brainchild of an extremist in both religion and politics — and a man who celebrates the union of the two realms: “I will embrace Christian Nationalism,” Lahmeyer declared this fall on a stop of the ReAwaken America tour, “because… we are at war in this country; it is a spiritual war between good and evil.” 

The emergence of a figure like Lahmeyer at the very beginning of the 2024 election cycle underscores two key trends. First: Overt Christian Nationalism — the ideology that America was founded on, and should be governed to enforce, conservative Christian morality — is becoming central to the GOP nominating process. And second: Trump, and his brain trust, are moving to lock in evangelical voters as a tier-one priority, before they’re tempted to decamp for candidates with more authentic spiritual convictions, like former Vice President Mike Pence, or Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

For some men, politics and proselytizing are two sides of the same coin. Lahmeyer (pronounced Law-meyer) is 31; he sports close-cropped brown hair, and speaks in a staccato honed over years in the pulpit. He has been living a mix of religion and politics since the 2020 election. A hardcore election denier who also encouraged defiance of Covid health mandates, Lahmeyer leveraged both issues to challenge Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford in the 2022 Republican primary — a far-right campaign guided by Trump-pardoned felons Gen. Michael Flynn and Roger Stone. 

That bid launched Lahmeyer as a rising star in MAGAworld, a status he’s seeking to burnish with his backing of Trump 2024. Lahmeyer tells Rolling Stone he launched the new organization hoping to fill a vacuum of evangelical support for the former president. “The Washington Post wrote a story about the silence of evangelical leaders that were previously very strong supporters of President Trump,” he says. “That prompted Pastors for Trump; I began laying the infrastructure, behind the scenes, getting pastors in all 50 states.”

Organized as a 501(c)(4) — a “dark money” nonprofit — Pastors For Trump allows a high level of secrecy from donors and participants alike. Lahmeyer says the Trump-backing pastors will only be made public at their discretion, though the group’s state and regional directors will soon be named.

By law, churches risk their nonprofit status by engaging directly in politics. But Lahmeyer insists that Pastors for Trump is a licit forum for religious leaders — as individuals — to exercise their political rights, apart from their churches. Yet when asked if the aim is to get MAGA-minded preachers to lead their flocks to back Trump, Lahmeayer is not coy. He replies: “Absolutely.”

Many evangelicals Christians see Trump as a politician who served his purpose: God had a plan for the sinner in the White House — but Trump’s moment has passed. By contrast, Lahmeyer sees Trump as a kindred spirit, with more to deliver, regardless of the former president’s personal shortcomings. 

“Here’s what I know: President Trump’s actions bear the fruit,” Lahmeyer says. “He’s been the best pro-Christian president we’ve had in my lifetime.” The pastor ticks off, among the 45th president’s hits, the relocation of the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, the Abraham Accords, and the Supreme Court justices who abolished Roe. “In Oklahoma, we are now an abortion-free state — and that is thanks to President Donald Trump.” 

Laymeyer and Trump share a conspiratorial worldview — on issues from election fraud to quack Covid treatments to lies about the 44th president. (“Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim,” Lahmeyer has tweeted.) But the pastor also relates to Trump’s failings. As a high schooler, Lahmeyer fathered a child, and married the mother, in a teen union that didn’t last. He argues that a person’s history shouldn’t “determine their present and their future,” adding: “I had a tremendous past in high school. If we were gonna base it upon that, I wouldn’t be qualified to be a pastor.”

Lahmeyer grew up in Oklahoma, and attended Oral Roberts University where he received both a BA and a masters. He began his career as “crusade director” for Christ For All Nations, and then served as state coordinator for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Lahmeyer says his job, in essence, was to pack arenas for Pentecostal pastor Reinhard Bonnke and Franklin Graham, respectively. “Mobilization is my background,” he says.

Lahmeyer is now lead pastor at Sheridan Church in Tulsa, a “nondenominational charismatic church” with a history of giving rise to mega-pastors: “Kenneth Copeland began his ministry at Sheridan,” Lahmeyer says. 

The belief system promoted at Lahmeyer’s church is both fundamentalist (“the Bible is the inspired, infallible, incorruptible and authoritative Word of God”) and End-Times (“We believe in the imminent and personal return of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”)

Charismatic Christians like Lahmemer also hold that the realm of angels and demons is literal and — as the pastor puts it — “overlaps with our modern political world.” In Lahmeyer’s depiction, “The spiritual realm is just as real as the physical realm that we see and feel and touch and hear.” Lahmeyer insists that when “Lucifer was cast out of heaven, he took a third of the angels with him” and that they’re “still here today.” 

The pastor and his co-religionists believe that demons and angels remain locked in “spiritual warfare” — and that the outcomes of that holy conflict make themselves manifest in U.S. politics. “This is a battle between good and evil, and we have to engage in that fight,” Lahmeyer insists. 

In the pastor’s with-us-or-against-us worldview the political left is infested with “Luciferians.” As evidence, Lahmeyer points to Democratic support of abortion (which he calls “murdering babies inside their mother’s womb”); same-sex marriage; and the mainstream acceptance of trans identity. “The gender confusion that they’re pumping upon children,” Lahmeyer claims, “that is Luciferian.”

Speaking to Rolling Stone, Lahmeyer hastens to clarify, that he is “not advocating for physical violence” and that, “When I say ‘war’ and ‘fight,’ our weapons are spiritual.” As recently as August, however, he suggested that a spiritual battle with the left could escalate into an “actual Civil War.”

Through his fundamentalist lens, Lahmeyer sees top Democrats as in league with the Devil, including the outgoing Speaker of the House, an observant Catholic. “You’re either a friend of God or an enemy of God,” Lahmeyer says of Nancy Pelosi. “If she feared God, there is no way she would push things that are so anti-God.”

Christian nationalism — which he’s contrasted with the “godless globalism” of the left — is increasingly central to Lahmeyer’s identity. Lahmeyer has declared that, “The purpose of America was to form a Christian nation.”  And, on election day this November, he implored those heading to the polls to “Vote for Christian Nationalism today.”

Speaking to Rolling Stone, Lahmeyer softens this view, a bit. “I’m going to push for Christian leaders, because we do need Christian leaders in the realm,” he says. “But to say that every position would be occupied by a Christian? That’s impossible; this is a…