The NAR helped popularize the concept that Christians should conquer the seven spheres of society: family, religion, government, arts and entertainment, business, education and media. The idea took off in the 2010s when Lance Wallnau, a pastor considered an NAR prophet, repackaged the concept as the Seven Mountain Mandate. Wallnau wrote he learned about the concept when Loren Cunningham, an evangelical leader, told him that God had separately given Cunningham and Bright the same seven arenas in a message decades before. It was an evolution of Reconstructionists’ dominion theology.

Wallnau has popularized the mandate into a powerful framework for conservative evangelicals to influence all aspects of society by taking “territory” and, as he told an audience in September, “penetrating the systems and the culture and the organizational environment of what’s around you in a community.” The mandate has guided some Christians as they built media empires, Christian schools and businesses, and as they sought elected office.