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There are books that inform, and there are books that unsettle, and every so often a book manages to do both at once. Keri Ladner’s American Dominion: The Rise and Radicalization of a New Christendom is that kind of book. I do not say this lightly, and I do not say it as a matter of political fashion. I say it as someone who has spent a good many years sitting across from people whose faith was bent and used against them, and who has come to recognize how much of the damage traces back to the very theological currents Ladner is tracing here. This is a book I believe every Evangelical Christian in this country needs to read, even — perhaps especially — those who will find parts of it uncomfortable.

The great strength of American Dominion is its first half, where Ladner does the patient, unglamorous work of intellectual history. She does not begin with the New Apostolic Reformation itself but reaches back to the early years of the last century, to figures like Charles Fox Parham and William Seymour at the headwaters of American Pentecostalism, and then traces the thread forward through Aimee Semple McPherson, William Branham, and a good many others whose names have mostly faded from popular memory. I cannot in a brief review recapitulate all of that detail — it is worth reading the book to get it all — but the effect of laying out that long lineage is to show that the New Apostolic Reformation did not appear from nowhere. It is the fruit of a century of restorationist and revivalist impulses, each generation reaching for a more immediate encounter with the Spirit than the one before it.

Most Americans, including many Evangelicals, may have never heard of the Manifest Sons of God or the Latter Rain movement, and yet Ladner makes a persuasive case that you cannot understand the political Christianity dominating our headlines today without understanding these obscure mid-twentieth-century revivals. She traces how a fringe teaching about “manifest sons” — believers who would attain a kind of spiritual maturity before Christ’s return — fed into the Latter Rain’s emphasis on present-day apostles and prophets, restored offices mainstream Evangelicalism had long set aside as belonging to the apostolic age alone. It is genuinely illuminating to watch her show how a handful of independent, loosely accountable revivalists built, brick by brick, a theological architecture in which spiritual authority could bypass denominational structure and answer to no one but itself.

From there she moves into Joel’s Army, and this is where the book, for me, does its most valuable work. The martial imagery, the language of an end-times generation of overcomers destined to subdue the earth before Christ returns — Ladner shows how this rhetoric, once confined to charismatic fringe circles, supplied the emotional and theological vocabulary that would later get poured into explicitly political vessels. It is not hard, reading her account, to see how a generation raised on the language of spiritual armies would eventually start looking for earthly battlefields to match the rhetoric. She then carries the reader into the Seven Mountain Mandate, the idea that believers are called to take dominion over the seven “mountains” of cultural influence — government, media, education, business, arts and entertainment, family, and religion itself. Once you see this framework laid out historically, the way it did not spring up in 2016 or 2020 but had been building for decades, a great deal of what passes for confusing or sudden in contemporary Evangelical political behavior stops looking sudden at all.

Here Ladner also draws a distinction worth preserving: the Christian Reconstructionism of Rousas John Rushdoony and Gary North is a genuinely separate stream from the charismatic lineage running through Parham, Seymour, and the Latter Rain. Reconstructionism grew out of a Reformed, presuppositionalist theology with little use for present-day prophets, while the New Apostolic Reformation¹For more information on the New Apostolic Movement see, Counterfeit Kingdom: The Dangers of New Revelation, New Prophets, and New Age Practices in the Church by Holly Pivec and R. Douglas Geivett grew out of Pentecostal soil Reconstructionists traditionally regarded with suspicion. But Ladner traces how these two streams, distinct in origin, converged — in no small part through Lance Wallnau, who took the Seven Mountains framework and made it the connective tissue between Reconstructionist dominion theology and charismatic New Apostolic practice. Whatever their differences of pedigree, the resulting movement is thoroughly Dominionist, and Ladner is right to treat that convergence as one of the more consequential developments of recent decades.

What Ladner does especially well across this whole first section is resist the shortcut of simply naming heresies and moving on. She wants the reader to understand why these ideas were appealing — why a generation of charismatic believers, disillusioned with a Christianity that seemed to have gone soft or ineffectual, would find real comfort in a theology that promised present power, present authority, present victory. That empathy is what keeps the first half of the book from reading like a polemic; it reads instead like genuine history, the kind that helps you understand your own tradition rather than simply feel accused by it. Ladner is meticulous, she cites her sources, and she resists the temptation to flatten a complicated movement into caricature. By the time she brings the reader through the chapters that follow — the way these theologies fastened onto real grief and real cultural anxiety, the way “spiritual warfare” became a literal political posture rather than a metaphor — you understand not just what the New Apostolic Reformation believes, but why it has proven so durable and exportable. This is the part of the book I would put into the hands of any pastor, elder, or thoughtful layperson who wants to understand how we got from the Moral Majority to something considerably stranger.

Where I found myself pulling back a little was in the book’s later chapters, where Ladner turns from historian to diagnostician of the present moment. Her central claim — that dominionism has moved from the margins to the center of American Evangelical life — is one I take seriously, and I do not doubt the influence is real and, in its more developed forms, genuinely alarming. But she puts a number on it. She writes that some eighty percent of American Evangelicals are now dominionists, and she does not walk the reader through how she arrives at that figure. Eighty percent is an enormous claim, and it deserved a methodological footnote it never receives. Part of the trouble, I suspect, is a conflation buried in the number itself. Most American Evangelicals believe God gave humanity dominion over creation — that much is just Genesis 1, plainly read, and has been standard teaching for as long as there has been an Evangelical movement. But there is no real evidence that most Evangelicals support Dominionism as a political theology, the specific and much newer claim that believers are called to seize the seven mountains of cultural authority and govern society directly in Christ’s name. Genuine Dominionist movements remain a minority within Evangelicalism, however influential and well organized that minority has become. I finished the chapter persuaded that dominionism has real and growing reach, not that it defines the overwhelming majority of a movement still full of ordinary churchgoers who have never heard of the Seven Mountain Mandate.

A related concern surfaces in her treatment of Neo-Confederate ideas within the movement. Ladner is not wrong that there are real and troubling overlaps here, and she has done her homework tracing them. But the argument sometimes slides toward guilt by association: if you find yourself agreeing with a good idea espoused by some flawed historical figure, the implication is that the agreement itself is suspect. I do not think that follows, and it is often just a form of presentism — judging historical figures by today’s standards. Thomas Jefferson held slaves — a moral failure by any measure — and yet I can affirm what he wrote about the unalienable rights of man without that implicating me in the rest of his conduct. The same logic applies closer to home. Homeschooling is popular among dominionists, but it does not follow that every homeschooling family has signed on to dominion theology, and Ladner’s own caveats on this point get drowned out by the sweep of her larger argument. To her credit, she does qualify these claims here and there, but when the headline number is eighty percent, the qualifications feel like a formality rather than a governing principle. This is, I suspect, where the habits of the academy show through most plainly — a tendency, common in university religion departments, to read theological conservatism as evidence of illiberal politics, rather than treating the two as separable questions.

And yet I do not want that criticism to overshadow what she accomplishes in her conclusion. Here Ladner steps out from behind the historian’s remove and speaks in her own voice, and the effect is quietly moving. She writes about her own struggles with illness, and how they gave her an unwelcome but clarifying vantage point on the strains of Evangelicalism that treat sickness as a spiritual failure and healing as a transaction to be claimed by faith. She writes about her ministry alongside autistic children — her own version, I think, of ministering to the least of these — without sentimentality or self-congratulation. And she is plain about her own identity: she calls herself an Evangelical Christian, not an outside critic lobbing grenades over a wall. That reframes the entire book. This is not an exposé written by someone who wants Evangelicalism discredited; it is a warning written by someone who loves the tradition enough to want it saved from what she sees overtaking it.

I hope, perhaps more than I fully expect, that things have not deteriorated in American Evangelicalism quite as far as Ladner believes they have. But that hope is no reason to look away from what she has documented, and the imprecision of one statistic should not discredit the historical work that makes up the bulk and strength of this book. Even if Evangelicalism has not fallen as far as she fears, now is exactly the time for those of us who love the church to speak plainly about where these currents lead, before the drift becomes the destination. Ladner has given us the history we need to have that conversation honestly. For that alone, this book earns its place on the shelf of anyone who cares where American Christianity is headed.

Doug Duncan, MS, LPC, is a former member of a cultic, Bible-based group in Dallas, Texas. After he and his wife, Wendy, left that group, Doug returned to graduate school to earn a Master’s Degree in Counseling and became a Licensed Professional Counselor while Wendy wrote an excellent memoir of their experience in—and painful separation from—their cultic group, I Can’t Hear God Anymore: Life in a Dallas Cult. Since that time, they have co-facilitated a support group for former members of cultic and spiritually abusive groups, and have recently started a second support group for people looking to rebuild their relationship with God after experiencing spiritual abuse. Also, they each contributed chapters to Wounded Faith: Understanding and Healing from Spiritual Abuse, edited by Rev. Dr. Neil Damgaard. Doug also sees people recovering from abusive groups in his private counseling practice, and Wendy sees people for recovery coaching. Their website is www.dallascult.com, and you can email them at info@dallascult.com. These days they enjoy spending time with friends and family, and worshipping at their home church, St. Matthew’s Episcopal Cathedral in Dallas, TX

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