Pastor Jeremiah Johnson had three prophetic visions on October 20, 2020 (The Altar Global 2021a). The first was of the Los Angeles Dodgers winning the World Series that began on that day. The second was of Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. The third was of Donald Trump winning reelection. When the first two visions came true, Johnson enthusiastically told his social media followers that God had foretold Trump’s victory.
Statistically speaking, the pastor’s predictions were unimpressive. The Dodgers had at least a 50 percent chance of winning the World Series, and Barrett’s confirmation was almost certain. Theologically, there was no reason to believe that God concerned himself with baseball games. But preachers in America’s burgeoning prophetic charismatic movement aren’t rated by their batting averages; their fans celebrate their successes and usually overlook their failures (Duin 2021).
At only twenty-seven, Jeremiah Johnson had built a large following among evangelical Christians eager to anoint Donald Trump as God’s man in the White House. In 2015, Johnson had prophesied that “Donald Trump is going to be used by God as a trumpet in America to expose darkness and perversion.” He acknowledged Trump’s personal faults but opined, “could God not use the wicked and ungodly to bring about His plans?” After all, that’s what God had done when he chose Cyrus to end the Babylonian captivity in 539 BCE; perhaps Trump was to be the Cyrus of our time. Johnson urged his followers:
Listen to the trumpet [Trump] very closely for he will sound the alarm and many will be blessed because of his compassion and mercy. Though many see the outward pride and arrogance, I have given him the tender heart of a father that wants to lend a helping hand to the poor and needy, to the foreigner and the stranger. (Johnson 2015)
God’s spiritual heart transplant didn’t noticeably improve Trump’s attitude toward the poor, foreigners, and strangers. But that didn’t shake pastor Johnson’s faith. His confidence in his gifts was unshaken until the 2020 election forecast went wrong. He said, “To my knowledge this is the first wrong prophecy I’ve given on this kind of level ever in my life” (The Altar Global 2021b).
Admitting that he was wrong took courage; others in the charismatic prophetic movement resorted to denialism. Johnny Enlow, a prominent prophetic preacher, argued:
President Trump is the president that has been ordained [and] nominated by the Lord. He won over 70 percent of the vote and 49 of the 50 states. So he won. He is sanctioned in heaven, on earth, and he’s here, but we have somebody else [in the White House]. (Ben Lim Global 2021)
Gerald Flurry, the founder and editor of Philadelphia Trumpet, a magazine that promises more than a million readers accurate forecasts of where world events are leading, argued that “we can be sure God is going to return Donald Trump to power sooner or later” and that “perhaps He looks on Mr. Trump as still being president of the United States!” (Flurry 2021).
Flurry was defending his prediction that “Donald Trump Is Going to Win this Election,” a prediction that was audacious because it was published on November 9 when he knew that “the media have already crowned Joe Biden.” But he was confident that “they are going to be shocked and disgraced” (Flurry 2020). Flurry’s prediction wasn’t based on a dream but instead on his interpretation of biblical texts that he believes are infallible.
The belief that ancient texts predict current events is the central theme of Flurry’s magazine. He believes that Donald Trump is “an end-time antitype of King Jeroboam ii of Israel” whose reign was from 931 to 910 BCE (Flurry 2021). This is not just an analogy; there is no time limit on biblical prophecy, and believers think many prophecies from thousands of years ago are still pending. Flurry notes that “first-century apostles thought Jesus Christ would return in their day—so they were 2,000 years off in their thinking!” And counting.
Scholars of biblical prophecy realize that many predictions seem to have failed, but they argue that it is wrong to submit biblical prophecy to this kind of test. Some say that biblical prophecies apply only to the eschaton, the end of time, an event that many believe is imminent … so they are still waiting. Others say that the point of biblical prophecy is not to predict an inevitable future but to warn people of imminent disasters or turning points. If the people heed a prophetic warning, God may call off the prophecy. God can change his mind at any time, and whatever happens must have been his will (Chisholm 2010).
The prophetic tradition has many excuses for the apparent failure of a prophecy, but Jeremiah Johnson didn’t rely on any of them. On January 7, the day after the invasion of the U.S. Capitol, he posted a letter acknowledging quite forthrightly that he had been wrong. He fully expected to be denounced as a false prophet, a very serious matter for a man whose career is based on channeling the word of the Almighty. He said the financial risk to him and his employees was substantial, but he was a man of God, not a businessman, so he prayed on it and God’s answer was: “I want you to admit that you missed it.”
Johnson received thousands of angry messages from believers—not because his prophecy was wrong but because he admitted it. He reported that many “actually began to persecute me; they actually began to threaten my life because I repented.” Many insisted that Donald Trump had actually won the election but that it had been stolen from him. Others insisted that the prophecy would still come true because Trump would somehow reverse the outcome.
Michael Brown, a prominent radio host and sage of the AskDrBrown Facebook page, is a respected elder in the prophetic movement. Responding to the failed prophecy controversy on December 11, he took a firm position: “If Donald Trump is not inaugurated and Joe Biden is, the prophets are wrong. Period” (AskDrBrown 2020). He rejected the common excuse that people didn’t believe enough or didn’t pray enough: “It’s not as if we don’t have enough faith. No, it has to come true. We have had plenty of people pray.” He also rejected the political excuses: “I don’t think the courts are corrupt, the Supreme Court. If there is fraud, I believe it will come out. If Donald Trump does not serve a second consecutive term, the prophets were wrong.”
Brown also pointed out that none of the prophets had forecast COVID-19 before it happened, and none had forecast the racial protests following George Floyd’s killing. Christians could have used a warning about those things. But the failure to prophesize wasn’t the prophet’s fault, he believed; it was because God didn’t choose to send a warning. Brown said he was “deeply concerned over the attachment the church has to Donald Trump.” He thought they were idolizing him and were better known as Trump supporters than as followers of Jesus. He stated: “The Republican Party is not the Kingdom of God, and not every Democrat is a demon. … It could well be that a Biden presidency is just what the Church needs.”
Jeremiah Johnson agreed, stating that “we must humble ourselves and recognize that if God wanted Donald Trump in office in 2020—he would be!” In a frank self-criticism, Johnson said it was prideful of him to predict an election based on his dream. It was also theologically wrong, in his view. Old Testament prophets often received messages directly from God, but New Testament Christianity is beyond that. It relies on the word of Jesus, not dreams and visions. He sought the counsel of experienced elders and started a new ministry based on preparing believers for the return of Jesus—an event for which he did not give a date.
The prophetic movement relies mostly on prophecies that are vague enough to resist testing. Gerald Flurry claims that “God prophecies in the Bible, and His prophecies are sure! (2 Peter 1:19). However, He usually does not show the whole picture in detail or all at once. He often speaks in a coded way, and only later reveals that code” (Flurry 2021). In this respect, biblical prophecies are much like the hints dropped by Q, the mysterious prophet of the QAnon movement. Believers are challenged to interpret the texts and sometimes their dreams may give them ideas. Flurry doesn’t speculate about why God chooses to communicate in this way.
Believers are generally unconcerned about the lack of objective statistical evidence that prophecy works. James Beverley told interviewer Julia Duin that “my research shows that the prophecies are usually vague, sometimes totally wrong, and, with rare exception, have failed to be properly critical of Trump” (Duin 2021). But Beverley’s published anthology of biblical prophecies does not even raise the issue of their accuracy (Beverley 2020).
Scholars have many interests, but preachers and magazine writers promote prophecies as foretelling the future. Wishful followers may be satisfied with predictions vague enough to be reconciled with any outcome, but this doesn’t work with elections. As Michael Brown observed: “There is no middle ground. There is no third option. There is no reality in which Trump actually did win but in fact didn’t win. Or in which he’s the president in God’s sight but not in man’s sight. Not a chance. To entertain possibilities like this is to mock the integrity of prophecy and to make us charismatics look like total fools” (Brown 2020).
Jeremiah Johnson and Michael Brown will likely refrain from predicting future elections, but Gerald Flurry has doubled down: “One thing is certain: God is going to bring Mr. Trump back. We know he’s coming back—it’s in the prophecy! It’s just a matter of when. It will happen at most in four years—yet I can’t conceive of it being anywhere near that length of time. It could be much quicker—we will see” (Flurry 2021).
Indeed we will.
References
The Altar Global. 2021a. I was wrong: A new series on Donald Trump and the prophetic controversy (February 3). Available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYzKrbWQ-2I.
———. 2021b. I was wrong, part I (February 8). Available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYCOAR2zuZ0&t=1318s.
AskDrBrown. 2020. Facebook post (December 13). Available online at https://www.facebook.com/ASKDrBrown/videos/249987029862324.
Ben Lim Global. 2021. Interview with Johnny Enlow, the breaker series, ep.4 “Breakthrough in reformation” (March 9). Available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf_-q0g3YPw.
Beverley, James. 2020. God’s Man in the White House: Donald Trump in Modern Christian Prophecy. Pickering, ON, Canada: Castle Quay Books.
Brown, Michael. 2020. To my prophetic friends: You were either right or you were wrong about the election. Tri-State Voice (December 15). Available online at https://tristatevoice.com/2020/12/15/to-my-prophetic-friends-you-were-either-right-or-you-were-wrong-about-the-election/.
Chisholm, Robert. 2010. When prophecy appears to fail, check your hermeneutic. Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 53(3): 561–567.
Duin, Julia. 2021. The Christian prophets who say Trump is coming again. Politico.com (February 18). Available online at https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/02/18/how-christian-prophets-give-credence-to-trumps-election-fantasies-469598.
Flurry, Gerald. 2020. Donald Trump is going to win this election. Philadelphia Trumpet (November 9). Available online at https://www.thetrumpet.com/23137-donald-trump-is-going-to-win-this-election.
———. 2021. Why I still believe Donald Trump is coming back. Philadelphia Trumpet (March). Available online at https://www.thetrumpet.com/23490-why-i-still-believe-donald-trump-is-coming-back.
Johnson, Jeremiah. 2015. Prophecy about Donald Trump as a Cyrus figure. Charisma (July 28). Reprinted in Beverley 2020.