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| The son of a Holocaust refugee, Mr. Cahn was raised in a Jewish family in the New York suburbs - he draws upon his Jewish background, using the title of rabbi or wrapping himself in a prayer shawl emblazoned with the Beth Israel logo. |
#MAGA Church: The Doomsday Prophet Who Says the Bible Predicted Trump
“Trump is offering us a window for revival, a window to return to God,” Mr. Cahn said. “What happened in the election was not about Trump but about something much higher, the purposes of God.”
A
charismatic pastor in New Jersey (who also calls himself a rabbi) leads
a church fixated on end times. Before the apocalypse, however, he’s
fitting in a trip to Mar-a-Lago.
On
a Sunday morning at Beth Israel Worship Center in Wayne, N.J., a
bearded pastor named Jonathan Cahn stood on an elevated platform, gazing
over a full house. Stage lights shifted from blue to white as the
backing band played a drifting melody. Two men hoisted curled rams’
horns and let out long blasts.
“Some
of you have been saying you want to live in biblical times,” Mr. Cahn
said, pacing behind a lectern. Then he spread his hands wide. “Well, you
are.”
Sitting at the end of a sleepy
drive an hour from Manhattan, Beth Israel may look like any common
suburban church. But the center has a highly unusual draw. Every
weekend, some 1,000 congregants gather for the idiosyncratic teachings
of the church’s celebrity pastor, an entrepreneurial doomsday prophet
who claims that President Trump’s rise to power was foretold in the
Bible.
Mr. Cahn is tapping into a belief more popular than may appear.
A recent Fox News poll found one in four Americans believe “God wanted Donald Trump to become president.” Celebrities like the televangelist Paula White and Franklin Graham have boosted the idea. The president’s own press secretary suggested as much
in a January interview. And on the opening day of the Conservative
Political Action Conference this month, the millionaire businessman
Michael Lindell took to the stage and declared President Trump “chosen by God.”....
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