Skip to main content
The Latest

Rick Joyner Tells Christians to Arm Themselves in Preparation for Civil War

Right-wing pastor Rick Joyner appeared on “The Jim Bakker Show” Monday(link is external), where he once(link is external) again(link is external) urged conservative Christians to begin forming militias in preparation for a coming civil war.

Joyner, who has been warning(link is external) for years(link is external) that the United States(link is external) is heading(link is external) for civil war(link is external) and martial law(link is external), told Christians that there was no point in praying to prevent a civil war because the conflict is inevitable, and they should instead focus on acquiring weapons in preparation for the coming violence.

"I tell you we have to be ready to defend our families, our communities, our neighbors, our churches, everything because it is coming home," Joyner said(link is external). "I don't believe there's going to be a neighborhood exempt from what's coming."

"We're telling our people, 'You really need to be able to protect your own family, and you need to be able to gather together with others who are going to join together to protect their neighborhoods,'" he continued. "I saw militias popping up like mushrooms all over the country. These weren't racist militias. They weren't evil. All they want to do was protect their communities. And the Lord showed me in this dream that he had seeded our whole country with a provision to defeat this onslaught, and the seeds that he has sown throughout our country to defeat it were the veterans of the Afghan and Iraqi wars who knew how to fight urban warfare and everything else."

"Even Jesus said at one point, 'I didn't come to bring peace, I came to bring a sword,'" Joyner added. "We're in that time right now. You can go on praying for unity and for the parties to come together and all that, but it's not the time for that. That's not going to happen right now."

"The war that is unfolding, it's going right down to, I think, every neighborhood in every community, every city, and it will be a civil war," Joyner declared. "It's going to be, I think, increasingly worse with the increasing time it takes for Americans to stand up and push back against this evil that has been taking over our land. There's a time for peace and a time for war, it says in Ecclesiastes. Well, we're not headed towards peace right now, we're headed towards conflict and war, and we need to prepare for it. We need to put out the word. People need to be prepared."