American Prophecy

A feat of narrative reporting that grapples with familial understanding and conflict, and a parable for understanding the country’s current division, and how we got here—a gripping and powerfully relevant story for our moment.

Meet the Joyners: a Southern family that reflects the schism at the heart of the United States itself. The Joyners founded one of the most political Evangelical ministries in the country. Now their kids have grown up to resist everything their parents’ church represents. This intimate family drama is the story of clashing ideologies that threaten to tear them, and the nation, apart.

A former Trump adviser, patriarch Rick Joyner is the CEO and pastor of Morningstar Ministries, an influential church with a homegrown television network, a publishing arm, and followers across the globe. Rick is a self-described prophet who believes God has told him civil war is nigh, and who condemns anyone who doesn’t fight for America’s “founding values”—including each of his five children, every one of them on the opposing side.

Eldest daughter Anna Jane, a high-profile climate change advocate, has inherited Rick’s calling to be a leader in an apocalyptic fight, and now fights her father in public while the rest of the family—mother Julie, most of all—tries to maintain a fragile interpersonal peace. Her sister Amber leaves behind a music career in Charleston, South Carolina, to pursue immigration and environmental law. Their brother Ben, a filmmaker in Los Angeles, is developing a narrative feature about the politics of his divided family. And sister Aaryn, a flower farmer and occasional organizer, lives near brother Sam, a potter, in the mountains near Asheville, North Carolina, which Anna Jane believes is climate-proof—until the storms come.

American Prophecy is a portrait of a complex family endemic of the crossroads the country now faces, told through weddings and Thanksgiving dinners, hurricanes and Election Days. Lauren Sandler captures a family that must weigh the political cost of loving each other and what it means to survive as a unit across a political chasm.