The presidential candidate and longtime Charisma reader opens up about her charismatic roots

Charisma: We’ve been told you’re a Charisma reader—we’re honored. How did you first hear about the magazine?

Bachmann: Maybe from church. My husband, Marcus, and I had gone to a small, Spirit-filled church—maybe 50 to 60 members. We were about 19. In ’75, things were really heating up spiritually across the country. What we appreciated about Charisma more than anything is you had a synopsis of current events from a biblical point of view. We all had Charisma subscriptions. It was just a basic for all of us.

 Charisma: How did you first come to know the Lord?

Bachmann: I was born into a family of Lutherans and our parents took us to church every week. They were faithful. I’m sure the gospel was preached from our pulpit, but I didn’t get it. All I saw was the tradition. I didn’t understand that whole part about faith. In high school I joined a prayer meeting, and my friends there knew I didn’t know the Lord, personally. I was a good girl, but it didn’t matter; I still didn’t know the Lord. I still had a wicked heart and I needed Him. So on Nov. 1, 1972, I bowed my knee with three friends. The Holy Spirit led us, and we confessed our sins before the Lord and turned and went a new direction—that was it. I went home that night and I said to the Lord, “I don’t know what happened, but I’m a completely different person. Whatever I become, I will radically abandon myself and my life to You and it’s Your plan now.”

They make an odd couple—Christian conservatives and secular media. Yet they’ve locked arms in charging that the New Apostolic Reformation is a shadowy cult seeking to control the outcome of the 2012 U.S. presidential elections. Here’s my answer to their claim.

The New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) has recently become a topic of discussion in the political media. I noticed some mention of it in connection with Sarah Palin’s run for vice president, but I considered it relatively insignificant. Then more talk of NAR surfaced around Michele Bachmann, but it soared to a new level when Texas Gov. Rick Perry entered the race for the Republican nomination for president in August.

On Aug. 24, NPR aired a story (and published it elsewhere) titled “The Evangelicals Engaged in Spiritual Warfare,” naming me as NAR’s architect and tying Perry and other politicians to NAR in a negative light. Since then, I’ve been observing how the media has sought to taint Christian political candidates with false notions about the movement.

The best I can discern, NAR has become a tool in the hands of certain liberal opponents of the conservative candidates designed to discredit them on the

basis of their friendship with Christian leaders supposedly affiliated with NAR. To bolster this attempt, they accuse NAR of teaching false doctrine and paste on it the label of “cult.”

How Pentecostalism is gradually changing the dynamics of American politics

A phenomenon is emerging in politics today, one off the radar of most political observers. This movement hasn’t come crashing on the scene all at once, but instead has been steadily forming like a tsunami, untraced by most and even ignored by those aware of its potential yet who dismiss it out of personal bias. As this wave surges, its rising water line can lift political candidates to new heights of influence almost overnight. 

The tsunami I speak of is the new wave of proactive involvement among Pentecostal/charismatic Christians in the American political system, and it is becoming an increasingly powerful force with enough potential to change a nation. Donald Miller, professor of religion at the University of Southern California, has said that “Pentecostalism is reshaping the face of Christianity.” I would argue it is also reshaping the face of American politics and represents a significant part of a larger movement to return America to its Judeo-Christian values.

According to the World Christian Database, there are almost 80 million “renewalists” in the U.S., which would include Pentecostals, charismatics and neo-charismatics (often referred to as the “Third Wavers”). Yet to understand just how influential the Pentecostal political movement is becoming, we must first understand how far charismatics (a term that, for the sake of brevity, I’m using interchangeably with Pentecostals) have come regarding politics.

Answering the Anti-PentecostaI Bias

When Sarah Palin became the Republican nominee for vice president in 2008, reports quickly surfaced saying she had long been a member of a Pentecostal church. With that news, any grand American tradition of religious tolerance for her vanished. More than simply being disrespected for her Pentecostal beliefs, Palin was derided for them with smears that were close to bizarre in their misuse of the facts. 

She was a heretic, bloggers claimed, and under the hypnotic sway of modern Elmer Gantrys. She was robotically devoted to the cult of a witch hunter. She attended a church in which people ranted in tongues, raised Nazi salutes and trained their children to be Christian versions of suicide bombers.

The truth was, Palin was a member of one of the fastest-growing movements in Christian history, one that must be considered mainstream today by any standard. From a handful of adherents when modern Pentecostalism began in the early 1900s, Pentecostals now number more than 580 million worldwide. They are growing by more than 19 million a year, some 54,000 per day, and researchers predict by 2025 there will be more than 1 billion Pentecostals and charismatics in the world, most located in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

When my brother—a fifth-generation preacher’s son—came out of the closet, I encountered one of the church’s biggest dilemmas of our time: How should we respond to those who struggle with homosexuality?

The day was supposed to be the greatest of my life. I was 29, getting married and had arrived at a local eatery to meet my brother, Eddie, and ask him to be my best man. I couldn’t wait to see his reaction when I invited him to be the most important person in my wedding other than my incredible bride-to-be.

His reply changed my life forever. Thankfully he didn’t decline with a “No.” But neither was his answer a hearty, “Oh, yeah! Congratulations, bro!” Instead, my only brother’s reply was a tearful, “Richie ... I’m gay.”

What? That definitely wasn’t the response I expected. My thoughts raced: That’s simply not possible! No way! How could a family like ours, so deeply rooted in church, have a member who isn’t following suit, who isn’t living the same lifestyle we’ve always lived?

Jack Hayford explains what holiness is really about and why it matters so much to God

As often as the word holy is used by Christians, you’d think that we could all agree on a uniform understanding of its meaning. We read our “Holy” Bibles. We receive “Holy” Communion. We sing the hymn “Holy, Holy, Holy” and acknowledge the “Holy” Spirit, the third person of the Godhead. We understand the word generally to mean “divine” or “of God.”

But when Christians start to discuss holiness, they discover that the                             implications of the word vary widely. It seems that holiness can mean anything from a name for the pope to teetotalism and not wearing makeup.

What do you think it means? What does the word holy (or the closely related words sanctify or sanctification) suggest to you? The word in some form—holy, holiness, holiest, hallow, hallowed—occurs nearly 700 times in the English Bible. Certainly, it’s an important word. The average believer seems to feel threatened by the idea of holiness. He tends to see it as something unapproachable, a demanding standard of life that seems to be well beyond him. Believers tend to define it by “feel” more than by fact, and the feeling seems to be, “Boy, that’s way beyond me (although I sure want to try my best!).”

How to recognize and get rid of religious spirits in your life

A family once brought a woman to our church on Steele Street and Blue Avenue in Jacksonville, Fla., who needed deliverance. We did not have deliverance teams in the church at that time; only my husband, Ardell, and I did the ministry.

This woman had come from a mental hospital in South Florida. As God is my witness, when I pulled up to the church, she was sitting in a car—and it literally was rocking. As she   stepped out, the demons spoke through her. 

“Kim cannot cast me out!” they shouted. “Benny Hinn cannot even cast me out! You have never met this demon!”