JD Vance Just Spoke At A Radical Christian Nationalist 'Revival'—And Now We See Why

Christian nationalists are trying to close the ground game gap

The term “sane-washing,” according to the Urban Dictionary, is defined as

Attempting to downplay a person’s or idea’s radicality to make it more palatable to the general public

Sound familiar?

During Tuesday night’s debate, JD Vance was on a mission to do just that for Donald Trump. When Vance said, for example, that Trump governed on “common sense wisdom” as president, or when he suggested Trump somehow saved Obamacare “in a bipartisan way,” or when he claimed that Trump “peacefully gave over power” in 2021, Vance was gaslighting the American people on behalf of his running mate, all with a straight face. It was quite a performance.

But Trump wasn’t the only one Vance was sane-washing Tuesday night.

Through his slick debate club demeanor, his nods toward moderation and civility, and his bizarre portrayal of himself as seemingly almost pro-choice, Vance was communicating to voters that he’s really not that weird. Forget all that stuff you heard about him, he’s actually Team Normal. 

But nothing could be further from the truth. And Vance isn’t even trying to hide it.

Over this past weekend, JD Vance attended a Christian revival event—essentially a politically-driven religious road show—dubbed “The Courage Tour.” It’s run by Lance Wallnau, whom Religion News describes as “a self-described prophet who predicted Trump’s 2016 win and has supported the former president since.” 

Wallnau is associated with an influential network of charismatic Christian leaders known as the New Apostolic Reformation and is thought to have coined the phrase “Seven Mountains Mandate,” to describe a movement to put Christians in control of seven spheres of society: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business and government.

According to Matthew Taylor, author and religious scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies, the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) is at the far end of the Christian nationalist extremism spectrum.

And Taylor called Vance’s appearance at the event the “endorsement of one of the worst, most conspiratorial, Christian supremacist spectacles in the country.”

Wallnau is, after all, the same man who said after Kamala Harris’s dominant debate performance last month:

“That’s the seduction of what I would say is witchcraft. That’s the manipulation of imagery that creates an impression contrary to the truth, but it seduces you into seeing it. So that spirit, that occult spirit, I believe is operating on her and through her.”

So why would Vance appear at an event teeming with the sort of radicalism he and Trump are trying to distance themselves from this close to Election Day?

In today’s piece, I’ll dig into what Wallnau is trying to accomplish with his Courage Tour and why Vance decided to hitch his wagon to it. And I’ll look at how it exposes the true radicalism of the Trump-Vance ticket, one that no amount of sane-washing can erase.

The Christian Nationalism Of Trumpism

As I wrote back in February, this New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) movement led by Wallnau is central to the Christian nationalism that is metastasizing among the right wing in our country. 

According to The New Republic, “a central tenet of NAR’s belief system is that it is God’s will for Christians to take control of all aspects of U.S. society…to create a religious nation.”

And for NAR leaders like Wallnau, the path toward that Christian nation has been to lift up Donald Trump into the halls of power.

According to Religion News:

For a decade, Wallnau, 68, has played a vital role in building the myth of Trump as a strongman anointed by God, the message of a loose but influential network of Christian leaders who call themselves the New Apostolic Reformation. The group is held together by its charismatic faith that God, in the Spirit, still speaks through modern-day apostles and prophets.

God works through Trump, the NAR leaders say, because the former president is powerful enough to rebuild his kingdom in America and in the world.

Early in his political career, Trump surrounded himself with NAR spiritual advisors such as televangelist Paula White-Cain, who is a prominent Seven Mountains (7M) apostle, as well as Jim Garlow and Mario Bramnick, who, as Matthew Taylor writes in The Bulwark, after Trump lost in 2020, “were instrumental in sparking the Christian rage that fueled the conflagration of January 6th.”

It is no accident that in 2023, the Republican House Conference elevated Mike Johnson to the position of Speaker, third in line to the presidency. Johnson has said that the Bible “is [his] worldview” and that God “lifts up” leaders into power, including himself. Speaker Johnson’s ties to the NAR movement have been well documented. He hasn’t hidden his Christian nationalism, having proudly flown the Appeal To Heaven flag right outside his office, the same flag hung by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito at his beach house this summer. 

This flag has taken on a very specific meaning in the last several years, as The AP put it:

The “Appeal to Heaven” flag was among several banners carried by the Jan. 6 rioters, who also favored religious banners symbolizing the white Christian nationalist movement.

Johnson himself, of course, was central to Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement, having authored the Supreme Court brief opposing the certification of the 2020 election results. 

For these far-right Christian nationalist leaders, Trump’s “Stop the Steal” and the January 6th riots were all in the service of their ultimate project of returning Trump to the White House in order to get them closer to a Christian nation.

Having failed in 2020, as Popular Information’s Judd Legum notes, Wallnau began plotting how to return Trump to the White House back in 2021:

As he said in a Facebook video:

“The Lord’s saying that there’s a train coming, and the Trump train is going to be part of it. It’s really gonna be the movement of the Spirit of God in a kind of a revival. And listen to me, I got a plan, and you guys are gonna be with me. We’re gonna hit these rallies, we’re gonna go to these states—but hear me, hear me, hear me—80 million people voted for Donald Trump. Half of them were Christians; the other half, they believe in God, they love the flag, and they’re worried about America, they want to keep it great. There’s our harvest.”

Wallnau continued:

“If we can get the gospel to the rallies, in the name of Jesus, I’m praying that Donald Trump will entertain this idea. I want the rallies to become partners with the revival that America needs. We need the rallies to become connected to the revivals.”

And since February of this year, that’s precisely what he’s done with The Courage Tour. While he may not have gotten Trump, Vance is the next best thing.

The Christian Nationalist 2024 Playbook

On Saturday, September 28, Vance attended Wallnau’s Courage Tour stop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, just 16 miles from where Trump was shot at a rally over the summer. Vance was there for a town hall with local Pastor Jason Howard. 

During the event, Vance reportedly made the Christian case for expelling immigrants and advocated for defunding public schools. Jason Selvig of The Good Liars described the event as “a little bit of election conspiracy mixed in with a little bit of fanatical religion.”

But this is just the latest in a string of swing state stops for the event. According to Religion News, the Courage Tour:

…has been visiting 19 “bellwether counties” in nine states, aiming to break “demonic strongholds,” Wallnau has said. With many stops in swing states, those counties are thought to be crucial to an electoral victory for Trump.

And they are well organized. Wallnau is working with the MAGA-adjacent America First Policy Institute as well as Charlie Kirk’s youth-oriented group Turning Point USA, which has reportedly already recruited 2,500 churches “to stand with the America First agenda” in the turnout effort.

As Rolling Stone put it:

Christian Nationalists Team Up on Illicit Push to Get Churches to Campaign for Trump

In a must-read X thread,

Judd Legum

broke down some of the crazier panels of the event, such as:

And…

But they are also doing some real organizing of Christians for Trump, including recruiting election workers.

As Frederick Clarkson wrote on X, “The Wallnau wing is employing the rhetoric and vision of religious war to rally followers to participate in mundane election mechanics.”

The real issue with this event, and the reason Vance made the calculation that attending was worth any possible downside, is the mobilization it represents, urging swing state suburban voters to support Trump and Vance.

Matthew Taylor raised the alarm about the ultimate goals of the Courage Tour in a chilling X thread:

[T]he Courage Tour is a 2020-election-denying, Christian nationalist, conspiracy propagation machine masquerading as a Pentecostal-style Christian revival. 

At the helm is Donald Trump's most servile theologian & spiritual propagandist, Lance Wallnau, about whom I have a whole ch. in my new book.

Wallnau was a key player in galvanizing & mobilizing Christians be in DC for #January6th & was there himself. 

Even more ominous, Wallnau's Courage Tour is operating hand-in-glove as a functional Trump campaign tour under the guise of a Christian ministry.

Trumpist think tank America First Policy Institute is feeding Wallnau county-by-county voter data…

If we pay attn to the ramp-up of rhetoric & protests that led to January 6th, the Courage Tour very much fits the pattern of partisan-spiritual-warfare, conspiratorial prophesying, & demonization of opponents that fed directly into the Capitol Riot.

Journalists & editors: The Amer people need to understand what kinds of far-right Christian extremists Vance is cozying up to (Trump is already their snuggle bear).

This signals the further integration of Christian supremacy & anti-democratic mobilization into the Repub core.

Karrie Gaspard-Hogewood, a Ph.D. student at Tulane University who studies Christian nationalism, attended a Courage Tour event in Georgia earlier this year and described it as

“...an election mobilization effort, to mobilize churches and people in the community that would vote the way they want them to vote. But it’s positioned within this larger eternal narrative, which is that this is a battle that’s been going on between good and evil for some time.” 

Kamala Harris may have the money advantage, the enthusiasm advantage, and more field offices open than Trump, but even as Republicans have publicly fretted about an inferior Trump ground game, Wallnau’s Courage Tour has been chugging along under the radar.

To counter it, we need to surge our own activism for the Harris-Walz ticket, and as Matthew Taylor rightly points out, to educate ourselves about this dangerous movement and raise the alarm by spreading the word.

Taylor’s list of additional primary source articles about this insidious movement include:

• Religion Dispatches: WHERE’S WALLNAU? A NAR APOSTLE TAKES AIM AT SWING COUNTIES IN ‘THE BATTLE FOR THE MOUNTAIN OF GOVERNMENT’

• The Washington Spectator: God and QR Codes for Trump; The Courage Tour Goes to Michigan

• Baptist News Global: How concerned should we be about conspiracy theorists counting our votes?

With just 33 days left until the election, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz will need all hands on deck to achieve a two-fer this November: keeping Donald Trump out of the White House and preventing the far right Christian nationalist movement from turning this nation into an anti-democratic theocracy.