Although a Christian prayer rally held the past Saturday in Washington, D.C., was billed as “A Million Women — An Esther Call on the Mall,” its primary organizer was a fundamentalist man.

Lou Engle, associated with the theocratic New Apostolic Reformation, first called for an “Esther Fast” to abolish Roe v. Wade in 2018, and organized last weekend’s event after Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, notoriously warning that “witches worldwide are cursing President Trump.”

That a woman’s prayer rally would be put together by a man is in keeping with the patriarchal story of the biblical Queen Esther exalted by the event, explains FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor.

“Queen Esther is more or less a Jewish Mata Hari installed by her uncle in King Ahaseurus’ palace, after the bible’s only feminist, Vashti, is dethroned for properly refusing to display herself before the king’s drunken companions,” Gaylor says. “Esther puts up with a cattle call for ‘fair young virgins’ in a humiliating beauty contest to replace Vashti, and even a year-long purification process. She ends up saving her people from a brutal slaughter — which is laudable — but then turns around and incites the king to kill more than 75,000 of the Jews’ supposed enemies, whose crimes are unnamed — which is not so laudable.”

Esther, in short, is not only a dutiful and subservient female, but also a retributive war-monger. Her exaltation by the Christian nationalist movement is disturbing.

The Esther event called not only for a prayer rally but three days of fasting, in homage to Esther, who is described as  fasting and praying for three days before asking the king to transfer the slaughter from Jews to their enemies. The instructions for the rally even mentioned there would be no food carts in the area in honor of the fast. The organizers also fixated the phrase in the Book of Esther in which Mordacai, Esther’s uncle, exhorts her to take action to save her people “for such a time as this,” with the current times described as dire.

NBC News reported that “tens of thousands,” but by no means millions, turned up, many wearing pink shirts reading “Don’t Mess With Our Kids,” which is a slogan of the anti-LGBTQ, book-banning group, Moms for Liberty. Others were wearing MAGA hats and waving Christian flags, including the “Appeal to Heaven” flag present at the 2021 Capitol attack (and more recently at Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s summer home). The prayer rally emphasized ending abortion, opposing LGBTQ-plus rights and showing support for Israel. The significance it placed on saving children fits in with QAnon conspiracy theories.

In an outlandish video promoting the prayer rally, Engle, bizarrely rocking back and forth, talked about having a dream of “women coming from everywhere … all coming to be taught from the book of Esther.” Engle’s narrative then digressed from the bible to “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Engle summarized a scene from the third movie in which the “Nazgul Witch-king,” who is destroying armies of men, proclaims “No man can kill me.” An armor-clad princess removes her helmet and stabs him as she declares “I am no man.” Engle said he woke up from this dream knowing evangelical women needed to convene in the nation’s capital.

“Immediately, I understood that there was a mass women’s movement of Esthers who would carry a mighty spirit of revival and wield spiritual authority to break and restrain the demonic powers of witchcraft in our nation,” Engle raved. He joined up in 2022 with Jenny Donnelly, a co-pastor with her husband. The Oct. 12 rally was timed for the Jewish Day of Atonement, and Engle promised that blood would be anointed on capital buildings.

To learn more about the threats posed by the New Apostolic Reformation that Engle is associated with, listen to Freethought Radio, which recently interviewed Matthew Taylor, author of the new book, “The Violent Take It by Force.” Taylor is an expert on the movement, which overtly plans to take over the United States and make it a theocracy.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with more than 40,000 members across the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church, and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.