AMERICAN PROPHECY: ONE FAMILY, TWO NATIONS AND A WORLD ON FIRE is a nonfiction story about the complex relationships between Southern right-wing pastor Rick Joyner and his five left-wing children, a family in the midst of navigating the widening, and increasingly militant, political and cultural chasms in the United States. It asks, and answers, how we’ve arrived at this terrifying moment in the American experiment, through immersive reporting and deep historical research.
Rick Joyner was deep into psychedelics – both taking and dealing them – until he was born again as an end-times prophet after his Naval discharge in the early 1970s. Now he believes the United States is in the midst of what he calls “the Second American Revolution/Civil War.” Demons, he preaches, are coming over the southern border. God told him this in a vision. He has many such visions. He’s written dozens of books describing them, in addition to his multiple online news shows in which he talks about politics from the standpoint of his own, and his pulpit at MorningStar Ministries. MorningStar is headquartered on the site of the Christian theme park, Heritage USA, famously built by Jim and Tammy Faye Baker before their fall, now resurrected for a faith that leaders like Rick have reoriented from love to war.
Joyner calls upon followers to stockpile guns to fight an enemy that includes, by definition, all five of his children, who were raised in his churches and school — especially oldest daughter, Anna Jane, a prominent climate change activist who publicly rails against her dad and his politics. She, too, sees the end times, in the form of rising seas and wildfires. Despite the family’s deep, and sometimes public, philosophical divides, they still gather for every holiday. The Joyners’ story is an opportunity explore the factors that have led them, and us, to this contemporary conflict. Every location is a historical roadmap to this moment in time, a door cracked open to the question of how we ended up in this fragile and threatening era.
This is the story of a family, but it’s not a book about a family. It’s a book about America’s past and present. It’s the story about the conflict between Rick and his kids, and the long and brutal history they share, but it’s a book about where we’ve found ourselves, as our democracy hangs in in the balance, as an autocracy cloaked in false theocracy attempts to claim its place. The Joyner family represents our sudden anocracy – the liminal space between the flawed American experiment, founded on racist patriarchy, and the rise of something far darker – and how we navigate our uncertain and seismic era. It is the story of how our rapidly widening chasm is lived. A story two-hundred and fifty years in the making, since the first slave ships landing on our shores, and developing right now, as we fight for our radically diverging self-evident truths.
AMERICAN PROPHECY will be published by Random House in September, 2026.