Mike Flynn learns how Satanic panic mongers eat their own

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Flynn’s trouble started on Sept. 17, when he led a congregation at Nebraska pastor Hank Kunneman’s Lord of Hosts Church in prayer. Flynn’s prayer included invocations to “sevenfold rays” and “legions,” two phrases that struck some of Flynn’s followers as strange.

“We are your instrument of those sevenfold rays and all your archangels, all of them,” Flynn said, later adding, “We will be the instrument of your will, whatever it is. In your name, and in the name of your legions, we are freeborn, and we shall remain freeborn, and we shall not be enslaved by any foe.”

As video of the prayer circulated in online conspiracy theorist groups, the references to “legions” and “rays” soon sparked speculation among Flynn’s right-wing supporters that their hero had been lured to the dark side. Always on the lookout for the Satanic influence they imagine lurks at the heart of the world, they claimed that Flynn had secretly been worshiping the devil. Worse, since the congregation was repeating the prayer after Flynn, the rumor went, he had duped hundreds of Christians into joining the ritual.

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Flynn’s prayer bears a striking resemblance to a prayer by Elizabeth Clare Prophet, the now-deceased leader of an anticommunist doomsday cult obsessed with nuclear war. Prophet’s group, the Church Universal and Triumphant, reached its peak in 1990, the year she predicted much of the world would be destroyed in a fiery nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States. Prophet’s followers flocked to her Montana ranch, building fallout shelters for an apocalypse that never arrived.

Flynn isn’t the first right-wing figure tied to QAnon to see its acolytes turn on him. Oklahoma Senate candidate Jackson Lahmeyer, whose challenge to Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) has been endorsed by Flynn, appeared at an April pro-QAnon conference with Flynn in Tulsa.

A few months later, however, Lahmeyer posted a seemingly innocent picture of his daughter wearing red shoes—apparently unaware that QAnon followers consider red shoes to be yet another sign of their imagined Satanic sex-trafficking cabal. Lahmeyer was soon caught up in a QAnon controversy of his own.

Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general who briefly served as Donald's Trump's national security adviser, made the remarks during the "ReAwaken America" conference in San Antonio, Texas, on Saturday.

"If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God and one religion under God," Flynn, who was recently forced to refute claims from believers of the QAnon conspiracy theory that he worships Satan, said.

Apparently a lot of QAnoners believe that any religion that isn't Christianity, Judaism, or Islam must be Satanism.

Most think Judaism and Islam are Satanist as well. Even a great deal of Christians are considered evil by these people.

As a Lutheran, I would most definitely be considered an apostate.

In all fairness, though, it isn't just Q-Anon. It's also the right's theocratic bent in general, be it "fetal heartbeat" abortion bans, abstinence-only sex education (as a firm adherent of the "three dates" rule, I definitely object to this one), labeling all LGBT people as potential pedophiles, the list goes on.

My pastor told me how a great many evangelicals consider even my conservative Lutheran Church Missouri Synod to be not really Christians.

Be glad you never met my late father. If you are a member of liturgical church (or even attended one), you were destined to hell, no matter how devout a Christian you are. Needless to say, he, his side of the family (he had 3 older sisters and 2 younger brothers, and his mother had between 18 and 22 brothers and sisters (I can never remember how many siblings she had), had already condemned me to hell. Of course, he was the black sheep of the family, since he married a Methodist girl, and her father was the town drunk, thereby making her the black sheep of both families.

Last bible study I attended at church, we were studying the ancient Creeds. I have been royally criticized for saying those creeds, and a further reason I was condemned to hell, since, to my dad’s church, as well as a good many “fundamentalist” groups around here, “The only true statement of faith is the Holy Bible.” Anything else, like the Creeds, the Augsburg Confession, and the Formula of Concord, or even the Westminster Confession (Orthodox Presbyterian Church) is non-biblical and is placing you on a path to hell.

Be glad you never met my late father. If you are a member of liturgical church (or even attended one), you were destined to hell, no matter how devout a Christian you are. Needless to say, he, his side of the family (he had 3 older sisters and 2 younger brothers, and his mother had between 18 and 22 brothers and sisters (I can never remember how many siblings she had), had already condemned me to hell. Of course, he was the black sheep of the family, since he married a Methodist girl, and her father was the town drunk, thereby making her the black sheep of both families.

Last bible study I attended at church, we were studying the ancient Creeds. I have been royally criticized for saying those creeds, and a further reason I was condemned to hell, since, to my dad’s church, as well as a good many “fundamentalist” groups around here, “The only true statement of faith is the Holy Bible.” Anything else, like the Creeds, the Augsburg Confession, and the Formula of Concord, or even the Westminster Confession (Orthodox Presbyterian Church) is non-biblical and is placing you on a path to hell.