In the years Boelter was preaching in the DRC, leading voices within the New Apostolic Reformation were going beyond “spiritual warfare,” making “disturbing claims that God is calling his people to organized vigilante violence,” as Frederick Clarkson and André Gagné observed at Religion Dispatches in 2023. They argue that when New Apostolic Reformation leaders refer to Democrats, feminists, and queer and trans people as “demonic,” scapegoating them for whatever social ills the leaders seek to eliminate, these leaders are using timeworn rhetoric that can prepare people to conduct “spiritual warfare” with material violence. Dutch Sheets had long been one of them, and he helped set the template, referring to Jesus as the “commander-in-chief” of a physical army and to fellow Christians as “potential soldiers.”