The Man Who Calls Evangelicalism a Cult: Steven Hassan and the Machinery Behind the Attack on the New Apostolic Reformation

The BITE model is deceptively simple. Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotional control. Any group that exercises control over these four domains can be classified as a cult. That’s it. That’s the whole test.

The problem is the test has no floor. Hassan himself says it: “Destructive mind control can be determined when the overall effect of these four components promotes dependency and obedience to some leader or cause; it is not necessary for every single item on the list to be present.” Not every item. Not even most items. A “few major behaviors under each of the four components” is enough. The evaluator — Hassan — decides which behaviors count and how many are sufficient. The framework doesn’t diagnose; it labels.

And the categories are broad enough to catch anything. Behavior control includes regulating what you eat, what you wear, how much money you give, and how you spend your time. Information control includes limiting outside sources and discouraging critical inquiry. Thought control includes asking members to accept doctrine as truth. Emotional control includes teaching about sin, guilt, fear, and consequences. Any religion with a behavioral code, a membership covenant, a set of teachings, and a concept of divine judgment fits the model. The framework doesn’t distinguish between a cult and a church. It defines church as cult.

Hassan’s attack on the evangelical right is not a passing reference. It is a sustained, multi-year campaign that touches every aspect of charismatic evangelical belief and practice.

In his own book, he names NAR ministries as cults: “Many of the ministries and groups of the NAR — including the International House of Prayer, Bethel Church, and Morningstar Church — fulfill criteria of the BITE model, such as deceptive recruitment, restricting access to critical information and people, and instilling phobias in members.” He describes the NAR’s growth as a cult expansion: “Through robust networking, savvy use of computers, aggressive grassroots tactics, and a mastery of influence techniques right out of the cult playbook, the NAR has grown into a movement with tens of millions of followers in America and a reported 300 million internationally, many of whom have been highly indoctrinated — rendered highly dependent and obedient to their leadership.”

Hassan characterizes the NAR’s theological emphasis on spiritual warfare as evidence of authoritarian thought reform: “They are especially common in some Bible and shepherding cults, and in particular in the ministries belonging to the Christian right movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), which believes in demon possession and puts a heavy emphasis on Satan.” And he frames evangelical political engagement as cult behavior: “Political cults may use religion as a cloak, as do….some Christian right groups.”

He goes after the NAR’s worship and prayer practices, framing “declarative prayer” — the charismatic practice of speaking God’s promises aloud — as a cult technique that “resonates with the ‘prosperity gospel,’ which teaches that people will get rich if they pray and donate money to their church.”

And he goes after “The Family” — the Fellowship Foundation, the secretive evangelical network behind the National Prayer Breakfast — calling it an organization that “operates numerous front groups that keep its activities hidden,” and quoting Sharlet’s account of its daily regimen: “no swearing, no drinking, no sex, no self.”

The pattern is complete. There is no aspect of charismatic evangelical life — from worship practices to leadership structure to political engagement to theological emphasis on spiritual warfare — that Hassan has not characterized as evidence of cult control.

Since 2019, Hassan has published a sustained series of articles on his Freedom of Mind platform framing evangelicals and the NAR as a cult threat — and devoted numerous episodes of his “Cults, Culture & Coercion” podcast to the same target.

The centerpiece is Jonathon Sawyer, a former member of an NAR-affiliated school. Hassan put him on his Influence Continuum series to narrate his years inside an NAR school — then gave him a bigger stage, inviting him to present “LGBTQ Students and Undue Influence in Schools” at the Program in Psychiatry and the Law (PIPATL), a Harvard Medical School-affiliated forensic think tank (June 5, 2024). A former member’s grievances, elevated into Harvard-affiliated academic programming.

His other interviews follow the same pattern: Adam James, a former NAR worship leader and church planter, on white nationalism and the NAR; John Collins on William Branham’s “Message” movement — the NAR’s theological lineage. A string of academics who study the NAR critically get their own episodes attacking it: André Gagné, a former evangelical pastor turned scholar of dominionism; Warren Throckmorton, an evangelical psychology professor who critiques dominionism from inside evangelicalism; Keri Ladner, author of “American Dominion,” on the NAR’s Manifest Sons of God theology. In March 2026, Hassan handed a full episode to Holly Pivec and Doug Geivett — two academics whose specialty is attacking the NAR from within Christian scholarship — to frame Bethel Church’s “declarative prayer” as a cult technique.

Hassan does not interview current NAR leaders or present the movement’s perspective.

Hassan does not operate alone. The attack on the NAR and evangelical Christianity runs through an ecosystem of watchdog organizations, scholars, and clinicians that shares his framework, cites his sources, and platforms his guests.

Direct attackers. The Southern Poverty Law Center — the country’s most prominent designation machine for extremist movements — calls the NAR “the greatest threat to US democracy that you have never heard of.” Frederick Clarkson, a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, has spent decades building the case against what he calls “dominionism”; he describes the NAR as “the transformation of an entire society with this certain kind of Christo-centric worldview,” and warns that its methods “can be deeply subversive.” And the pipeline from activism to litigation is already visible: a website run by former members and their families, literally named “G.O.D. is a Cult,” brands G.O.D. International — the Nashville evangelical ministry now facing a federal TVPA suit — “a Nashville-based cult.”

Academic legitimizers. Matthew D. Taylor, the Protestant scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, devotes an entire book to the premise: “The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy” (2024), alongside his audio-documentary series “Charismatic Revival Fury: The New Apostolic Reformation.” André Gagné — the same Concordia University professor Hassan features on his podcast — published “American Evangelicals for Trump: Dominion, Spiritual Warfare, and the End Times” (Routledge, 2024), framing evangelical spiritual warfare as a “politics of conquest.” Andrew Whitehead, a sociology professor at Indiana University Indianapolis, supplies the quantitative layer: “Taking America Back for God” (Oxford, 2020, with Samuel Perry) turns ordinary evangelical political conviction into a measurable pathology called “Christian nationalism.”

Institutional actors. Robin Boyle-Laisure, a professor of legal writing at St. John’s University School of Law and a board member of the International Cultic Studies Association, has published extensively on the TVPA’s forced-labor statute and its application to non-physical coercion. In a 2016 article in the Oregon Review of International Law, she laid out the case for using federal trafficking statutes to capture the leaders of “destructive cults” — coercive control without physical force. She does not cite Hassan by name, but her framework is functionally identical. Boyle-Laisure is the bridge between academic theory and legal application — she publishes the scholarship that converts the cult framework into TVPA doctrine.

Hassan built the theory. These actors are applying it independently. The evangelical movement is not facing one man’s campaign — it is facing an ecosystem that has adopted his framework and is using it against evangelical organizations in court, in academic publications, and in media platforms.

This is not theoretical. The infrastructure Hassan has built is already producing results in court, and the legal theory behind it is expanding.

Kingdom of God Global Church — formerly Joshua Media Ministries International, an NAR-affiliated megachurch — was indicted in August 2025 on federal forced labor conspiracy, human trafficking, and money laundering charges; a third church leader has since been charged in the multi-state conspiracy. The Department of Justice’s own press release describes leaders who “used physical and psychological abuse to coerce victims to solicit tens of millions in donations.” Those allegations are grave and, if proven, criminal. The church has filed a petition seeking return of $4.2 million in seized assets, arguing the seizure infringes its First Amendment-protected religious functions. The allegations are serious and, if true, criminal. The concern here is not which defendants deserved prosecution; it is the breadth of the theory prosecutors are increasingly using — the same coercive-control theory Hassan has been promoting for decades.

G.O.D. International (Global Outreach Developments International, Nashville) faces a federal TVPA civil suit (M.D. Tenn., filed February 27, 2026) alleging sex trafficking and forced labor — including allegations that its founder sexually abused and assaulted multiple women over several years, using his spiritual leadership position to “effectively brainwash” them. Those allegations are grave and, if proven, criminal; they deserve to be tested on evidence, not on a theory of what a cult looks like. The case’s structure shows the framework at work: institutional religious authority, communal living, volunteer labor, and social consequences for leaving, pleaded as trafficking under federal statutes. The concern here is not which defendants deserved prosecution; it is the breadth of the theory prosecutors and plaintiff attorneys are increasingly using.

Lieff Cabraser — one of the largest plaintiff class action firms in the country — opened an abuse investigation of Hillsong US in March 2025. Hillsong is a Pentecostal megachurch network whose theology overlaps significantly with NAR, and its public scandals have been substantially about misconduct, not doctrine. When a top-tier plaintiff firm starts investigating a major evangelical network on abuse claims, the framework’s vocabulary is close behind — and the line between prosecuting abuse (which the law should do vigorously) and prosecuting theology (which it should not) is the line this doctrine erases.

The statutory framework is permanent. Federal courts have held that consent is no defense to forced labor charges: a defendant can be convicted even if the victim initially consented, on the theory that coercion can vitiate prior consent. Approximately $140 million per year in federal anti-trafficking funding supports training judges, prosecutors, and law enforcement in this framework — roughly $1.1–1.2 billion in cumulative spending since FY2010.

The NAR is not facing a random assortment of plaintiffs’ attorneys. It is facing a legal theory that has already produced a federal indictment of an NAR megachurch, a TVPA civil suit against an evangelical missions organization, and an active investigation by one of the country’s largest class action firms into a Pentecostal network. The framework Hassan built is not just an attack on evangelicalism. It is a threat to every religious organization in America.