In a September 30, 2013 broadcast, as reported by Raw Story and Religious Right Watch, Morningstar Ministries head Rick Joyner -- a leading prophet and apostle in the theocratic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation who has ties to former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin [see: 1, 2] and other leading Tea Party-aligned Republicans -- publicly issued a call for a coup - a "military takeover" of the United States government and the imposition of martial law.

In an interview with former Reagan Administration lawyer Michael "Mikey" Weinstein -- who formed the civil rights watchdog organization the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) after discovering a pattern of coercive evangelizing at his former alma mater, the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs -- Weinstein told me his organization estimated that between 28% and 34% of officers and NCOs in the United States military were adherents to a supremacist form, of Christianity known as dominionism who might back or at least be sympathetic to evangelist Joyner's call for a coup.

"It is a terrible mistake to dismiss Joyner as merely fringe. The opposite is true", explained Weinstein, who emphasized that there are dozens of dominionist evangelical para-church organizations engaging in what MRFF views as predatory evangelizing in the military. "Complacency is complicity," warned Weinstein, who called Rick Joyner's call for a military takeover a "red line" and also a "wretched" form of "sedition".

"We are most concerned about a fusion between dominionist Christianity and the military's weapons of mass destruction", warned Weinstein, who says his client base, members of the military who turn to MRFF for protection against coercive evangelizing, is approaching 35,000. Most of those MRFF clients, according to Weinstein, are Christians who are targeted for holding the wrong doctrine and theology.

Morningstar Ministries founder Joyner, who over the last decade has partially rebuilt the crashed real estate and media empire of disgraced TV evangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, who were caught up in a 1980s scandal which led to a flurry of media claims that the religious right was spent as a political force, has promoted the claim that President Obama's health care reform legislation includes a provision to create a left-wing paramilitary force akin to Hitler's Nazi "brownshirts".

Despite his promotion of fringe right-wing conspiracy theory, Joyner - accorded the status of "prophet" within his movement - boasts ties to Republicans such as former Senator Jim DeMint, now head of the mammoth Heritage Foundation and to evangelists in the upper echelon of Christianity Today such as the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, and some surprising international connections as well - Joyner has frequented an internationalist conference co-hosted by a close confident of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

[video, below: Morningstar Ministries head Rick Joyner calls for a "military takeover"]

In his call for a "military takeover" and "martial law", because the nation has been so allegedly "undermined", Rick Joyner omitted several relevant aspects:

First, Morningstar Ministries head Joyner is a significant leader in one of the most militant streams of the religious right (the New Apostolic Reformation) which, in turn, has for three decades have been engaged in a slow-motion takeover of the Republican Party.

The religious right takeover of the GOP helped power the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress and by 2000, according to a survey released in 2002 by Campaigns & Elections magazine, the Christian right had "strong" or "moderate" influence in the majority of state Republican Party structures.

In its new guise, as the "Tea Party", the religious right also drove the 2010 Republican takeover of the House of Representatives and of numerous state legislators and governor's seats across the nation.

From those positions of power, after both the 1994 and 2010 takeovers, religious right affiliated Republicans have pursued an insurrectionary agenda, blocking significant national legislation and shutting down the federal government - in short, Rick Joyner's own movement can be accused of working to undermine the Republic and American democracy.

Second, Joyner's movement itself claims to have infiltrated the U.S. government and the United States military with its "apostles". So Joyner's appeal to the "Lord" to effect a military takeover can be taken at face value or, alternately, as a coded appeal to those apostles to carry out Joyner's vision for divine national redemption via a coup.

While such a possibility may seem unlikely, over the last three decades the dominionist religious right has waged an aggressive, ongoing campaign to promote its supremacist political ideology within the United States military - often in violation of regulations concerning improper and coercive evangelizing in the military according to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which fights such predatory evangelism.    

In the forefront of the campaign to impose a narrowly sectarian form of Christian dominionist ideology on the military has been the enormous 1/2-billion dollar a year international ministry Campus Crusade For Christ - whose Military Ministries division has advertised a goal [also see 1] of turning United States military personnel into "government paid missionaries" and of "transforming the nations of the world through the militaries of the world".

In December 2006, Campus Crusade's Washington D.C.-based Christian Embassy ministry came under fire after a MRFF Washington press