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Ideas


THE WOMAN WHO BOUGHT A MOUNTAIN FOR GOD

The country’s fastest-growing Christian movement helped fuel Trump’s rise—and is
gearing up for spiritual battle.

By Stephanie McCrummen
Photographs by Olivia Crumm

June 20, 2023
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This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our
editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday.
Sign up for it here.

On the day she heard God tell her to buy a mountain, Tami Barthen already sensed
that her life was on a spiritual upswing. She’d recently divorced and remarried,
an improvement she attributed to following the voice of God. She’d quit
traditional church and enrolled in a course on supernatural ministry, learning
to attune herself to what she believed to be heavenly signs. During one worship
service, a pastor had even singled her out in a prophecy: “There’s a double door
opening for you,” he’d said.



But it was not until two years later, in June of 2017, that she began to
understand what that could mean, a moment that came as she and her husband were
trying to buy land for a retirement cabin in northwestern Pennsylvania. They’d
just learned that the small piece they wanted was part of a far larger parcel—a
former camp for delinquent boys comprising 350 acres of forest rising 2,000 feet
high and sloping all the way down to the Allegheny River. As Tami was
complaining to herself that she didn’t want a whole mountain, a thought came
into her head that seemed so alien, so grandiose, that she was certain it was
the voice of God.

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