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Educating Floridians on the New Apostolic Reformation
The Miami Herald published a new exposé about Mario Bramnick, the pastor of a small church in Broward County, Florida, who has outsized influence in the Christian nationalist movement.
“Over the past several years, Bramnick has had the ear of powerful politicians including former president Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana,” Lauren Constantino reports. “In Florida, he’s on the Faith and Community Advisory Council, a board of 25 members appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis. He was among evangelical delegations that met in Jerusalem in March and Washington in July with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and has boasted about his access to the important leaders.”
Constantino turned to Interfaith Alliance for analysis of Bramnick’s association with the New Apostolic Reformation, “a movement that aims to shape every pillar of American society to reflect far-right religious beliefs and echoes the goals of Christian nationalists. While many conservative politicians embrace evangelical support, most tend to diplomatically distance themselves from extreme positions that some religious scholars consider a danger to democracy as well as more mainstream Christian groups.”
“ The main goal of the New Apostolic Reformation is to enhance their own political power and impose their extreme, dangerous and often bizarre beliefs on all Americans,” said Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, president and CEO of advocacy group Interfaith Alliance, in a statement to the Miami Herald. “... they aim to radically transform society in a way that would marginalize and oppress all those who don’t share their beliefs — including Jews, Muslims, and the overwhelming majority of Christians.”
I spoke with Constantino for close to an hour to go deep into this ideology. I’m quoted in the article commenting on how the New Apostolic Reformation has “contributed to democratic backsliding in the United States and people not wanting to associate with religion.”
“ There’s this anti-democratic element, that is, no matter how the people vote, they’re calling for God to intervene on their side,” I shared. “So it goes beyond faith based advocacy and talking about values, and really gets into something that is theocratic.”
[Click here to read the full article, which was front-page news in Miami.] (https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/broward/article292806034.html)
Transcript
What’s Happening in Texas is a Moral Outrage
In Tom Stoppard’s play Jumpers, he penned the line: “It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.” In our democratic republic, the way in which votes are counted decides who represents us, whose votes matter. President Trump is currently working with allies in state legislatures across the country to change where votes in their states are counted, in an undemocratic attempt to maintain control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2026 midterm elections by building on years of attacks on decades-old voter protection laws. For decades, elected officials have attempted to gerrymander districts in their respective states in order to maintain their party’s political power, but never has a president publicly strategized on how to use ad-hoc redistricting in order to maintain his political power.
Texas Faith Communities Fight Against Mandated Ten Commandment Displays
Texans of all faiths are uniting in filing a lawsuit against Senate Bill No. 10 (S.B. 10), which requires Texas public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments. The bill specifically mandates the display must be at least sixteen by twenty inches, hung in a "conspicuous space,” and follow a specific phrasing most commonly aligned with Protestant beliefs.
Faith leaders have an important role in fighting hate speech
Recently, the Sure Foundation Baptist Church (SFBC) in Indianapolis held a sermon in which the preacher called for the government to institute the death penalty for the LGBTQ+ community. Despite heavy criticism from the Indianapolis community for its hateful remark, the church has refused to back down, instead celebrating the exposure that the incident has brought.