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 of 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 television studio, a publishing arm, and followers across the globe. Rick believes he receives prophetic messages from the Lord; recently he’s been told civil war is nigh. He condemns anyone who doesn’t fight for America’s so-called founding values. But every one of his five children is 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 challenges her father in public while her siblings and their mother Julie try to maintain a fragile peace. Amber pursues immigration law while Ben writes a screenplay about the family’s tensions. Flower farmer Aaryn, lives near Sam, a potter, in the mountains near Asheville—deemed climate-proof, until the storms come.

American Prophecy is a portrait of a complex family endemic of the crossroads the country now faces. Through weddings and Thanksgiving dinners, hurricanes and Election days, Sandler tells a story of what it means to weigh the political cost of loving each other across a political chasm.