Rabbi Jonathan Cahn, a New York Times bestselling author known for books including The Harbinger and The Return of the Gods, published a new book in September 2025 called The Avatar: The Return of the Ancients & the Future of America. Its central claim: ancient pagan deities have returned and are now working through human “avatars,” including, by the book’s own explicit description, specific recent American political leaders.
What follows describes what the book actually says, and what independent reviewers, including some within Cahn’s own religious tradition, have said about it.
What “Avatar” Means to Cahn
Cahn traces the word to Hinduism, where it describes a deity manifesting itself through physical incarnation. He extends the concept to the biblical term “shedim,” the spirits standing behind pagan deities in Hebrew scripture, arguing these entities have always sought human vessels to act through, whether or not the person hosting them is aware of it.
Who Cahn Actually Names
This deserves stating plainly rather than leaving vague, since the book itself is specific rather than general. According to its publisher description and multiple independent reviews, Cahn identifies particular American political figures as modern avatars for ancient pagan deities, most extensively Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris, with reviewers describing his treatment of Harris in particular as unusually pointed. The book treats Donald Trump differently within this same framework, according to reviewer summaries discussing “the meaning of Donald Trump” in more favorable terms tied to what Cahn presents as a providential role.
This is a specific, partisan claim from a named public figure, not a general or nonpartisan spiritual observation, and that distinction matters more than presenting it as an even-handed warning about unnamed “leaders, celebrities, and influencers” on all sides.
The India Account, and a Reviewer’s Skepticism
Cahn recounts a ministry trip to India, describing an encounter with Krishna worship, which he characterizes in the book as connected to “a god of destruction.” He says that after blowing a shofar during a sermon, thousands of attendees began to visibly manifest what he describes as spiritual distress before finding release, an experience he frames as demonstrating both the reality of these spiritual entities and the greater power of God. Cahn has told this story, or close variants of it, in multiple venues, including claiming similar mass responses, sometimes numbering in the millions, following shofar blasts in Nigeria and elsewhere.
For balance: Tim Challies, a widely read evangelical book reviewer writing from within the same conservative Christian tradition Cahn addresses, read the book directly and reached a skeptical conclusion, writing of the claimed millions of conversions in Nigeria, “that would be incredible if true, but I rather doubt it is,” and describing the book overall as reflecting “a woeful understanding of Scriptural events, biblical interpretation, and contemporary times alike.” This isn’t outside criticism from a different worldview. It’s a critical review from a reader who shares Cahn’s broader religious framework and evaluated his specific claims within it.
A Cultural Parallel, Loosely Applied
The comparison to Neil Gaiman’s American Gods deserves engaging with on its actual terms. The television series and novel do explore old gods losing influence as new gods of media and technology rise, a genuine, well-constructed piece of fiction, and it stays fiction, not evidence supporting a literal contemporary spiritual claim. The two works share a narrative structure, not a shared factual foundation.
A Genre With a Long History
Cahn’s work sits within a broader genre worth naming, since it isn’t a standalone phenomenon. Spiritual warfare theology, the belief that political and cultural events reflect an underlying battle between divine and demonic forces, has a documented history within American evangelicalism stretching back decades, through figures like C. Peter Wagner’s “dominionist” and “strategic-level spiritual warfare” writings in the 1990s. Scholars of American religion who study this tradition note it tends to intensify during periods of significant political and cultural change, offering adherents a framework that makes rapid social shifts feel spiritually legible rather than simply chaotic. Cahn’s own prior bestsellers, including The Harbinger, which connected the September 11 attacks to warnings in the biblical Book of Isaiah, follow this same pattern of reading contemporary American events through an ancient prophetic lens. Understanding that pattern doesn’t resolve whether any specific claim within it is accurate, but it does explain why a book making claims this specific about named living political figures reliably finds a large, receptive readership.
A Book With Specific Claims, No Settled Verdict
Cahn’s book exists, its claims about specific political figures are explicit rather than vague, and it has engaged readers on multiple sides, including believers who find it compelling and, as with Challies, believers within his own tradition who find its specific factual claims unconvincing. Whether framing current political and cultural conflict as literal spiritual warfare involving ancient pagan entities reflects reality is a theological and interpretive question, not one with an empirical answer any single source can settle. What can be stated plainly is what the book actually claims, who it actually names, and that its specific factual assertions, particularly the scale of the reported India and Nigeria events, have already drawn documented skepticism from reviewers who share Cahn’s own religious framework.
