Meet the Sarasota pastor rallying for a spiritual war against America’s ‘enemies’

At a recent Saturday evening service, Pastor Brian Gibbs issued a startling pronouncement to his Sarasota congregation: Nefarious entities had embedded themselves in America. 

“Warring angels,” he prayed, would assist the U.S. military in snuffing them out.

“I pray, Lord, that you would reveal to us exactly where enemies are, enemies that came in, weapons that have come in, that could potentially be used against us for terror and for death.”

This is standard talk for Gibbs, the lead pastor of Victory: A Church of His Presence in Sarasota and a political activist who casts the American church as a crusading light against shadowy forces of evil.

Though his congregation is modest — a service last month drew roughly 100 people — Gibbs has quietly expanded his reach. He currently holds services in another church’s space but has raised more than $670,000 to build a 500-seat sanctuary of his own in the Sarasota suburbs.

In the last decade, Gibbs has worked to advance his political vision in Sarasota and beyond — speaking at school board meetings against LGBTQ+ inclusion, traveling the country to challenge the 2020 election results and maintaining a friendship with Republican U.S. Rep. Greg Steube, whose congressional district includes Sarasota and extends down toward Fort Myers. 

His relationship with Steube has afforded Gibbs visible proximity to political power. In 2024, Steube and then-Sarasota County Commissioner Neil Rainford appeared with Gibbs at a Victory Church men’s prayer group. Months later, Steube joined Gibbs on his podcast to reflect on Trump’s victory and discuss the role of Christian faith in public office.

During his sermons and on his podcast, blog and public social media profiles, Gibbs uses harsh anti-LGBTQ+ language and decries his political opponents as demonic. Ahead of the 2024 election, he repeatedly suggested the country could be on the precipice of war and counseled his congregants to stock up on medical supplies and ammunitions. 

Suncoast Searchlight has found no evidence of Gibbs promoting physical violence.

But religious scholars and local clergy nonetheless say this kind of speech is more than provocative — it’s dangerous. In interviews with Suncoast Searchlight, they warned that his style of “spiritual warfare” rhetoric risks violence, especially in a hyper-polarized climate.

“I find it really, really concerning,” said Karrie Gaspard-Hogewood, a sociologist at Tulane University who studies religious and political violence and has warned about the rise of militant rhetoric among far-right Christian leaders.

“These religious leaders aren’t operating in a vacuum — they understand the political polarization we see all around us, and the fact that they would like to add fuel to that fire, instead of trying to be a voice of peace and unity, is frustrating and concerning.” 

A spokesperson for Steube did not return a request for comment about his friendship with Gibbs. 

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Gibbs, too, declined multiple requests for an interview except to say he does not condone violence. He also invited a reporter to attend a service. It was a passionate display of faith: Congregants sang and waved banners in praise, eyes closed and hands lifted toward the ceiling. The crowd — which skewed older, but included families and young people — gathered in the wood-paneled sanctuary to hear a pastor who cast their worship as a weapon in a spiritual war.

Far right finds fertile ground in Sarasota’s political landscape

Politically, Gibbs has found friendly territory in Sarasota, a place where many conservative activists, influencers and businesses have converged.

Right-wing companies, including the video streaming platform Rumble and Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of U.S. President Donald Trump’s social media site, Truth Social, are headquartered locally. In 2022, Trump’s former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, drew national attention for his efforts to insert himself in local politics. 

For years, fights over LGBTQ+ inclusion, COVID-19 masking policies and social-emotional learning dominated Sarasota County school board meetings, where conservatives earned a majority in 2022, with three of the board’s five then-members backed by Proud Boys activists. 

That coalition has since faltered. In 2024, two conservative school board candidates lost to liberals. The same year, a slate of write-in candidates affiliated with the far-right America First Southwest Florida group were trounced by more moderate Republican Party contenders in the race for seats on the Sarasota County Public Hospital board.

Though some of the far right’s political momentum locally has waned, Gibbs has sought to expand his influence as he prepares to move into a larger brick-and-mortar sanctuary.

“We need you to stand with us in faith and sow generously,” Gibbs said in a June fundraising video promising “revival and awakening.” 

Brian Gibbs and the rise of the New Apostolic Reformation

Although Gibbs targets contemporary conservative foes — like changing gender norms, abortion rights and high-profile Democrats — his political theology traces back to a movement born in the 1990s known as the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR.

Early leaders in the NAR promoted a radical idea: The globe, they believed, was entering an awakening, replete with modern-day prophets and apostles. They sought to build God’s kingdom on earth by fighting demonic entities for control of social and political institutions. 

A handful of figures in this movement developed large congregations and adherents in person and online, drawing believers enthralled by their spirit-filled gifts of healing and prophecy. The New Apostolic Reformation apostle Dutch Sheets, who wrote the forward for one of Gibbs’ books and whom Gibbs described in a Facebook post as a close spiritual mentor, exemplifies the trend, commanding hundreds of thousands of followers of his own. 

Gibbs is also a member of Bethel Leaders Network, a group organized by Bethel Church, a prominent conservative, charismatic megachurch in Redding, California, that boasts some 11,000 congregants. 

Dan Minor, a non-denominational Sarasota pastor who developed his theology under the guidance of such leaders — including ministers from Bethel Church — said ultraconservative politics were not always, in his perspective, a driving force in the movement.

“They’re the ones that taught me that people’s differences are supposed to be celebrated by God,” said Minor. “They’re the ones that taught me love and compassion.”

But when Minor’s church, Harvest Sarasota, began to openly embrace LGBTQ+ congregants in its mission, he said, he was effectively banished from Sarasota’s evangelical community.”

Brian himself actually sat me with two other pastors from the community … to quote, unquote, straighten me out, after we had hired an openly gay man as our administrator back in 2016,” Minor said.

When Bethel Church leaders, and a host of other NAR-aligned pastors backed Trump the same year, the split was cemented.

“When I saw them embrace somebody that seemed to represent the exact opposite, I was like ‘wait, what?’” Minor said. “Now, they think I’m woke.”

Religious scholars say NAR leaders’ early embrace of Trump — whom conservative Christians initially resisted during the 2016 GOP primary — helped cement his lasting power.

“Trump has become convinced that far-right Christians, especially evangelical charismatic Christians, are at the dead center of his base,” said Matthew Taylor, a senior Christian scholar with the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies, whose work has focused on the rise of independent charismatic Christianity in the United States.

Taylor described the White House Faith Office — led by the Orlando-based, charismatic pastor Paula White — as a key avenue for the administration to gauge “what that Christian far-right base is wanting.”

From Sarasota to D.C.: Gibbs joins post-election spiritual fight

In Sarasota, Gibbs has become an ambassador for a small but fervent segment of that local right-wing Christian base — and a case study in how the movement’s more fringe ideas have entered the political mainstream.

When the 2020 election ended in a narrow win for Biden, Gibbs, who had confidently predicted a Trump victory, denounced the outcome as a coup and prayed fervently for it to be overturned. 

“We bind the demonic forces that are operating in this effort,” he wrote in a Facebook post decrying Biden’s victory. “We ask for Your angels to aid us in this battle.” 

By early December, Gibbs was on the road with the New Apostolic Reformation apostle Sheets, rallying believers for what they saw as a fierce spiritual battle against Biden’s victory — stopping in Georgia and Pennsylvania “to pray and intercede for the shifting of the great keystone state.”

Other NAR leaders organized “Jericho marches” that December in Washington D.C., reenacting the Bible story of the Israelites who circled the city of Jericho, shouting and praying until its walls miraculously fell — allowing their soldiers to storm the city and destroy it.

When swing state audits and recounts confirmed Trump’s loss, Gibbs joined Sheets’ team in the capital to elevate their prayers for victory. 

“A profound & significant assignment here today at The White House,” Gibbs wrote on the last Tuesday of the year in a cryptic social media post accompanied by photos of himself and Sheets smiling on the White House grounds.

A week later, during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, protesters brandished Appeal to Heaven flags, Revolutionary War relics repopularized by Sheets as a call for Christian dominion over government. They blew shofars, Jewish ceremonial instruments fashioned from rams’ horns that some charismatic Christians have adopted as a weapon of spiritual warfare. And they prayed.

Gibbs told Suncoast Searchlight he was not in D.C. during the capitol riot. 

Since the 2020 election and its turbulent aftermath, Gibbs has continued to rally his followers around cultural and political flashpoints, framing each battle as a front in a larger spiritual war.

“I am boldly declaring today that we will never become a stronghold for the LGBTQ community — this sexual filth and perversion will not become our new normal,” he said during a Sarasota County School Board meeting in October 2021, speaking against the recognition of LGBTQ+ history in schools. 

Gibbs invoked his faith and accused local officials of “bowing down to a destructive and wicked agenda.” 

He has echoed this rhetoric in his sermons, claiming transgender identity to be a product of “Satan himself,” accusing LGBTQ+ -affirming churches of enabling pedophiles and, on at least one occasion, using a homophobic slur to describe gay people. 

Minor, the Harvest Sarasota pastor, said he worried about Gibbs’ escalating rhetoric. 

“You might think to yourself, ‘well, that doesn’t affect me because I’m not gay,’” Minor said. “But now you see … that it’s everybody who doesn’t think like him, vote like him and believe like him. And I think the danger is we can’t let people not be checked — publicly checked and rebutted — when they make such harmful statements towards especially marginalized groups.”

Again, during the 2024 election season, Gibbs’ intensity flared. Kamala Harris, he claimed, was “full of critters,” controlled by a demonic entity. He warned his congregants to prepare for the worst, counseling them to buy water, medical equipment and ammo. 

“We’ve been wise,” said Gibbs on Nov. 2, three days before Florida voters cast their ballots in the general election. “It’s been very wise of us to prepare our water, our food, our ammunition, our medical supplies.”

Scholars warn that spiritual rhetoric could fuel real-world violence

Researchers who focus on the New Apostolic Reformation have repeatedly warned that ramped-up calls for spiritual warfare, in the context of a hyperpolarized America, could give rise to real-world violence.

Gaspard-Hogewood, the Tulane University scholar, described Gibbs’ rhetoric as “disturbing.” 

“It’s the very fluid boundary,” she said, “between spiritual and physical war that is very concerning.”

In an interview with Suncoast Searchlight, Dale Coulter, an ordained minister in the Church of God and a professor of historical theology at Pentecostal Theological Seminary in Tennessee warned more broadly of such groups’ propensity to “create an atmosphere that can lend itself to conspiracism,” and in turn, the dehumanization of perceived enemies. 

“When people embrace conspiracism,” he said, “physical violence is easier to justify.” 

In Sarasota and throughout the Suncoast, some local clergy have pushed back against what they see as exclusionary and intolerant policies, penning op-eds in support of LGBTQ+ rights and organizing a town hall on Christian nationalism.

“We’ve become a little less siloed in our work,” said The Rev. Wes Bixby, the senior minister of First Congregational United Church of Christ in Sarasota. “We’ve been meeting together since January on a monthly basis, trying to figure out what are the best ways for us to publicly gather folks and connect people.”

JT Priar, a young adult minister at Sarasota’s Church of the Trinity MCC, also has championed a more inclusive vision of Christianity. He has spoken at school board meetings in support of LGBTQ+ students, introducing himself as a “queer Christian minister” — an identification that he said has “ruffled feathers.” 

“They come up to me sometimes and say ‘do you know what the Bible says about homosexuality?’” Priar said. “To me, that’s a pretty small God, if your God can only fit within parameters laid out by a bunch of men thousands of years ago.” 

Meanwhile, Gibbs has shown no sign of taming his militant rhetoric — nor has it apparently cost him politically. 

His vision — once on the fringes of American religious life — has increasingly found space in public institutions, amplified by allies in office and echoed from pulpits to policymaking circles. During Trump’s inaugural festivities in January, Gibbs travelled to D.C. to celebrate at the Christian Inaugural Gala, where Sheets delivered the keynote address. 

That same month, on an episode of Gibbs’ podcast, the pastor sat down with Steube over glasses of orange juice at Florida House in Washington D.C. The conversation turned to faith and power and how one shapes the other.

“It’s the word of God first,” Steube told Gibbs. “And then if it doesn’t address it in the word of God, it’s our Constitution.”

This story was produced by Suncoast Searchlight, a nonprofit newsroom of the Community News Collaborative serving Sarasota, Manatee, and DeSoto counties. Learn more at suncoastsearchlight.org.

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