…to obey is better than sacrifice… (1 Samuel 15:22).

Michele Bachmann has accomplished much as a mother, lawyer, politician, and now Dean of the Robertson School of Government at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

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Find out when your state prays.

It all started with a commitment of obedience to the Lord.

She was saved in high school when she went to what she thought was a Halloween party at a Lutheran church. Although it turns out there was no party, the door was open. She and her friends walked in and saw the eternal flame lit on the altar. Michele said, “The four of us joking, laughing, mocking scoffers walked down that aisle. When we reached the altar, all four of us involuntarily fell to our knees. And so we just started talking to God. I’d never done that before. There was no pastor there. So as we were talking, all of a sudden, we started just saying, ‘God, I’m so sorry. I haven’t lived up to what I should be, and God, would you take me? I give myself to You.’”^[1] Shortly after that, she attended Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts, which she describes as a primer on how to live the Christian life. One of the most impactful lessons for her was about obeying the Lord: “I asked by the power of His Spirit to help me to be obedient and just say no to my flesh and say yes to Him.”^[2]

Bachmann sensed the Lord calling her to Israel. In obedience, the day after she graduated from high school in 1974, she flew to Israel to live and work at Kibbutz Be’eri for the summer. There, she grew to love the Jewish people and Israel.

After earning her bachelor’s in political science and English from Winona State University, she married Marcus Bachmann four years later. The couple has raised five biological children and has consistently fostered four others. In total, they have supported twenty-three children through foster care.

She was a member of the charter class of the Regent University School of Law and also completed a master of laws degree in taxation at the College of William & Mary. She worked for five years as a federal tax litigation attorney for the Office of Chief Counsel in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The Bachmanns worked on Jimmy Carter’s election campaign in 1975. She grew disillusioned with Carter’s policies and decisions, especially his support for legalized abortion. By 1980, she’d switched parties, and she went to work for Ronald Reagan’s campaign.

Bachmann decided at the last minute to attend the Republican convention for Minnesota State Senate District 56 on April 1, 2000: “It was April Fools’ Day, but it was no joke.”^[3] She went there with other concerned constituents to “send a message to those entrenched insiders, reminding them that we didn’t like what they were doing in the capital, St. Paul—that we didn’t like what they were doing to us and our children.”^[4] A new education curriculum concerned her. She believed the convention would probably support the incumbent senator, who has served for twenty-eight years, in his bid for another term. Although he previously took a pro-life stance, he introduced a bill to erect a Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun bust in the state capital. Blackmun is well-known in Minnesota for writing the Roe v. Wade decision. The senator had fallen in step with “the hard-edged leftism emanating from the Twin Cities,”^[5] said Bachmann, adding, “On all the big issues that my friends and I cared about, the senator was 100 percent wrong.”^[6]

As Bachmann and her friends talked that morning about sending the senator a strong message that he needed to represent his constituents better, one of them pointed out that there was only one sure way to get his attention: to run against him. At that point, Bachmann’s friends turned to her: “Michele, will you do it?”^[7] She was initially reluctant, and this was all last-minute, but she told herself: “Michele, sometimes you have to risk it. After all, others have taken far bigger risks for what they believed in. Now your turn has come.”^[8]

She agreed to throw her hat into the ring. The chairman seemed upset by the challenge but decided that Bachmann had the right to be considered as the GOP candidate by the convention. He subsequently requested that she deliver a speech. Although she felt daunted due to the limited preparation time, she prayed to God for readiness. She connected with the convention attendees during her allotted five-minute speech: “They were happy to hear someone speak clear words, words that expressed their own faith and beliefs.”^[9]

Then the convention vote came: Bachmann or the incumbent. When the chairman asked for members of the campaigns to oversee the counting of the hand-written ballots, Bachmann turned to the woman to her right. It was Barbara Harper who agreed to the assignment. Harper could tell there was some funny business going on in the back room, and Bachmann wrote, “When one politico ‘discovered’ an envelope full of ‘ballots,’ Barbara challenged them on the spot.”^[10] The suspect ballots were thrown out, and the convention elected Bachmann as their GOP nominee with a sixty percent supermajority. She went on to win that seat in the state senate, where she served from 2001 to 2007.

The National Stage

In 2006, Bachmann became the first Republican woman from Minnesota elected to the House of Representatives. She most wanted to serve on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, but some tried to tell her it wouldn’t be possible.

“‘You’ll never get on it,’” she remembers them saying. “It’s the most difficult committee to get on because it’s the smallest committee, and it takes an appointment from the Speaker of the House of Representatives. They said, ‘Just forget it. You’re not an insider.’ The Lord supernaturally, sovereignly, put me on that committee! I learned quickly from the types of information I was getting [that] the reason why I was on that committee was to serve as a prayer warrior on behalf of my nation. I felt that the most important work that I did in Congress was to serve on that committee. I would find myself, even during committee hearings, praying—and then, of course, praying after and being observant between times and reading more in different directions to make sure that I knew what was going on. I rearranged my entire life in Congress so that I could spend about forty hours a week on that committee. A member of Congress doesn’t generally have forty hours to spend on a committee, but I believed that this was my calling: to focus on this committee more than any other, primarily for the purpose of prayer for our nation, for the world, for Israel.”^[11]

I am so grateful we had an intercessor on the Intelligence Committee from 2007 to 2015. Bachmann served with indomitable courage on several fronts. She was also a member of the Financial Services Committee. Banks were collapsing then, and U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson asked Congress to do something that had never been done before: approve an $800 billion bank bailout. Recounts Bachmann: “That’s when $800 billion was real money. I’m flabbergasted at the debasement of our currency, but at that time, $800 billion was the moon and the stars.”^[12] She and others were unwilling to fall in line with the Republican leadership, which was pushing them to vote for the bill.

When Barack Obama was president, Republican congressional leaders often pushed members to support him with their votes to avoid appearing “racist.” Bachmann remembers one particular closed-door meeting: “I looked around the room at all my Republican colleagues, and I said, ‘Are you a racist? I’m not a racist. This isn’t about the color of anybody’s skin. This is about issues.’”^[13]

When President Obama announced that he wasn’t going to uphold the definition of marriage as being solely between a man and a woman because he didn’t think that was constitutional, Bachmann addressed the House Republican Conference:

“I said to them, the President of the United States just months ago raised his right hand, put his other hand on a Bible, and said, ‘I swear to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.’ His oath of office is contained in the Constitution, and it says, ‘I will faithfully execute the laws of the land,’ and he just told us in public, on camera, that he will not faithfully execute the laws of the land. He will not uphold the definition of marriage. And I thought, ‘Are we going to take it? And that’s what I saw the Republican leadership do. They slid off the cliff in terms of upholding the law and holding Obama to account, and it was because they didn’t want to appear racist against him.”^[14]

At that moment, Bachmann (and some thirty other members of Congress) made a decision: “‘I’m going to listen to the people I serve, rather than just the Republican leadership, and as I see our freedoms being challenged by President Obama, I’ve got to stand up against it. I’m going to stand up for the Constitution, for the Bill of Rights, and for our Declaration of Independence.’ That’s literally what the Tea Party was.”^[15]

Facing a Goliath

In 2012, Bachmann was deeply concerned about Obamacare. “Any nation that has adopted socialized medicine has never recovered from what that meant for the country,” she says. “It’s stifled growth in all of its facets. I knew that the United States would be no exception. At its foundation, Obamacare was socialized medicine, and I knew it would destroy the greatest health system on earth.”^[16]

Just as Bachmann and her friends learned at the state level in 2000, in 2012, she realized that running against national leaders would be a powerful way to address the nation’s problems publicly. Bachmann, therefore, began urging certain members of Congress to run for president. However, she continued to feel a personal burden “like an elephant on my chest.”^[17] The Bachmanns set aside three days to pray, fast, and seek God’s direction. “By the afternoon of day two,” she says, “both my husband and I knew that I should do it.”^[18] She launched her presidential campaign. Bachmann says that the essential issue was the willingness to obey the Lord.

“It wasn’t because I harbored any illusions that I thought I was actually going to win,” she says. “But there hadn’t been any debate over Obamacare—no real national debate. If you recall the words of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, she famously said: ‘We have to pass the bill to know what’s in it.’ They would never allow the contents of the actual bill to be divulged because if anybody knew what was in it, they would oppose it. The American people deserved to know this was the biggest bill ever passed in the history of our country. They deserved to know how America was going to change and how their lives were going to be changed because when the government controls health care and health care decisions, they hold life and death over each one of us.”^[19]

Bachmann’s campaign prayer was that she might highlight the need to repeal Obamacare. That prayer was answered when she became the first Republican woman to appear in a televised presidential debate. She appeared in fifteen of them. To date, she is also the only Republican woman ever to win a presidential primary contest, having won the Iowa straw poll. However, though she pulled out of the election five months later, she knows she did the right thing by choosing to run. “I felt victorious because I had been obedient.”^[20]

That act of obedience bore fruit because repealing Obamacare then became a goal of the Republican Party. Though neither Mitch McConnell nor Paul Ryan brought it to a vote, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to remove the individual mandate. “That was the worst part of Obamacare,” Bachmann says. “It forced every American to buy a costly product they didn’t want. President Trump removed that, and that saved the country, and it saved our economy.”^[21]

Out of the Limelight, Into the Fire

Bachmann served one more term in Congress before she sensed the Lord calling her out of politics. Since then, she has stayed on top of what’s happening in the world and brings that intelligence to believers for prayer.

She demurred when Pat Robertson, founder and chairman of Christian Broadcasting Network and founder and chancellor of Regent University, asked Bachmann to serve as dean of Regent’s Robertson School of Government. Nevertheless, she again went to prayer, and the Lord confirmed that this was indeed her next step of obedience.

At Regent, Bachmann established an annual 40 Days of Prayer & Fasting event. “We as Christians are tasked to pray and without ceasing. Through our conversations with God, we can release His power to transform hearts, change lives, and experience a love that is like no other.”^[22] In the fall of 2023, she also launched a new Ph.D. program in government at Regent. “My goal is to graduate 100 PhDs who know the truth of America’s founding and go into teaching academia, work in the Pentagon, work in the government, and work as headmasters of schools, but they understand the truth of America. We don’t curse the darkness; we light a candle.”^[23]

Bachmann says of our walk of obedience to God: “In this life, it’s the harder walk. But because of the life to come, it is the best walk.”^[24]

Perhaps as you are reading this, you feel you are not a person of influence. Maybe you think you are not like Michele Bachmann. That does not mean God has not placed you in the kingdom for this time. Your acts of obedience are putting you where God needs you and equipping you to pray and intercede for your community, state, and nation in ways no one else can do.

Over time, an acorn will produce one oak tree, which will begin the process of starting a forest. So it is with the seeds of influence you sow daily. Did you realize that when you influence a person, you not only change that person, you change their entire household—which ultimately can change a whole generation? There are no small seeds in God’s eyes. If you are a praying person, you are impacting lives, impacting nations, impacting generations, and possessing the gates of the enemy. Do not doubt it.

Before birth, God knew you and had a destiny for you. Whether you walk in that destiny or not is entirely up to you. Remember, influence means the capacity to affect the character, development, or behavior of someone or something or the effect itself. You influence others daily. How you influence them is up to you. You, too, have come into the kingdom of God for such a time as this—make your influence count.

Bachmann requested prayer guidance: “As long as I can hear the still small voice of the Lord I know what my job is to do, and that’s to say, ‘Yes.’” Post your prayers for her and the students she prepares in the comments below.

(Photo Credit: Michele Bachmann)

^[1] From Rich Swingle’s interview with Michele Bachmann, March 11, 2024

^[2] From Rich Swingle’s interview with Michele Bachmann, March 11, 2024

^[3] Michele Bachmann, Core of Conviction: My Story, (Sentinel, 2011), Location 65 in Kindle edition.

^[4] Bachmann, Core of Conviction, Location 73 in Kindle edition.

^[5] Bachmann, Core of Conviction, Location 100 in Kindle edition.

^[6] Bachmann, Core of Conviction, Location 112 in Kindle edition.

^[7] Bachmann, Core of Conviction, Location 124 in Kindle edition.

^[8] Bachmann, Core of Conviction, Location 129 in Kindle edition.

^[9] Bachmann, Core of Conviction, Location 162 in Kindle edition.

^[10] Bachmann, Core of Conviction, Location 187 in Kindle edition.

^[11] From Rich Swingle’s interview with Michele Bachmann, March 11, 2024

^[12] From Rich Swingle’s interview with Michele Bachmann, March 11, 2024

^[13] From Rich Swingle’s interview with Michele Bachmann, March 11, 2024

^[14] From Rich Swingle’s interview with Michele Bachmann, March 11, 2024

^[15] From Rich Swingle’s interview with Michele Bachmann, March 11, 2024

^[16] From Rich Swingle’s interview with Michele Bachmann, March 11, 2024

^[17] From Rich Swingle’s interview with Michele Bachmann, March 11, 2024

^[18] From Rich Swingle’s interview with Michele Bachmann, March 11, 2024

^[19] From Rich Swingle’s interview with Michele Bachmann, March 11, 2024

^[20] From Rich Swingle’s interview with Michele Bachmann, March 11, 2024

^[21] From Rich Swingle’s interview with Michele Bachmann, March 11, 2024

^[22] “Regent University to Begin its 40 Days of Prayer & Fasting for 2023,” Regent University, accessed January 31, 2025, https://www.regent.edu/news/regent-university-to-begin-its-40-days-of-prayer-fasting-for-2023/.

^[23] From Rich Swingle’s interview with Michele Bachmann, March 11, 2024

^[24] From Rich Swingle’s interview with Michele Bachmann, March 11, 2024