He was supposed to campaign with a MAGA celebrity preacher. But something spooked him.
J.D. Vance went into his Saturday afternoon campaign stop in Monroeville, PA well aware of the potential for controversy. The event had been organized by a far-right evangelical preacher, Lance Wallnau, who was active in the Stop the Steal movement that culminated in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Wallnau also periodically makes headlines for incendiary proclamations, most recently that Kamala Harris performed well at the debate because of "witchcraft."
Vance's willingness to campaign with Wallnau -- who preaches that Trump is prophesied by God to be president so that that Christians can take over American government and society -- did not go unnoticed by the press. It was, many analysts concluded, an indicator of Vance's growing ties to Christian nationalism.
It may be for this reason that on the drizzly afternoon, when a smiling Vance strolled onto the stage, it was not Wallnau he shook hands with. Instead, he sat down with a local Pittsburgh pastor named Jason Howard, an earnest and round-faced man whose soft voice and claims of political ignorance formed a perfect counterbalance to Wallnau's slick, openly right-wing televangelism. The theme of the town hall was substance abuse and addiction -- a topic that played to Vance's strengths and kept soundbites about Harris' "Jezebel spirit" at bay.
It was a markedly tame addition to the day's schedule. The campaign stop was part of the Courage Tour, a series of multi-day religious revivals organized by Wallnau meant to electrify the evangelical vote in swing states. At these weekend events, Pentecostal worship and extreme right-wing politics intermingle: there's plenty of praise-singing, faith healing, and speaking in tongues.
This is a kind of Christianity that is booming -- and that Vance has some familiarity with. His mostly absent biological father exposed Vance to his conservative Pentecostal church in Ohio when Vance was a teenager, according to his memoir Hillbilly Elegy. In the book, Vance writes that for a time he was a "devoted convert" of his father's church, rejecting the scientific concept of evolution and believing the world would end in 2007. But he eventually settled into an uneasy agnosticism, spent some time as an "angry atheist," and then, many years later, in 2019, converted to Catholicism. He said five years ago, at the time he was baptized as a Roman Catholic, that he had "spent a lot of his life buying into the lie that you had to be stupid to be a Christian" but when he started to feel the pull of faith, the Catholic Church "appealed most" to him "intellectually."
That has not stopped Trump-supporting evangelicals from embracing Vance as part of the Republican ticket. Wallnau -- a celebrity in the world of MAGA Christianity -- must have been particularly excited to see him, as he once prophesied Vance would be Trump's vice presidential pick.
But Wallnau also seemed aware that he could be a liability to Vance and that both men were being closely scrutinized. Before the vice presidential candidate's appearance, Wallnau explained at length, with a whiteboard, how he was not a dangerous Christian nationalist in the way the secular media implied he was. Ever since the Jan. 6 insurrection, Wallnau has preached that Trump is God's chosen candidate, and that an electoral loss would have to result from the works of forces of evil -- and therefore all Trump's enemies should be treated as agents of the devil. But to hear him explain it at the event, he was merely trying to make sure the millions of Christians in America were properly represented in government.
At one point, after one of Wallnau's speakers -- the founder of an organization called Patriot Academy -- played a video of students learning to shoot guns in a "constitutional defense" course, Wallnau seemed genuinely flustered. "I didn't vet that video before it went out," he said. Later, after a slightly awkward moment while introducing another speaker, Wallnau said, "After Rick's shooting thing, I lost my focus." That didn't stop him from ranting about the dangers posed by the CIA and teachers' unions.
Vance was astute enough to never be spotted with Wallnau or any of the other inflammatory speakers. Everyone at the event was a guaranteed Trump voter already, so Vance could afford to bore his audience. The spacious concrete hall, abutting a vast campus of big-box stores, was built for pragmatism, not spiritual fervor; unlike other Courage Tour events, which were held under tents to evoke past revival movements, Vance's Pennsylvania stop seemed like a nondescript conference. There was no fire-and-brimstone.
Vance, confusingly, seemed to describe the campaign appearance as an addiction and recovery event. He took vetted questions from the audience and, in perhaps his strongest moment, celebrated the 41 months of sobriety of a veteran who asked the first question. Vance brought his mother, a woman who is -- as he proudly announces when he can -- more than a decade sober from a drug addiction.
He portrayed a crackdown on the border as key to saving addicts from fentanyl-related deaths, allowing them to have "second chances." (Mexico cartels are the largest suppliers of fentanyl, but U.S. citizens, rather than undocumented immigrants, do most of the smuggling.) He argued that funds that could go toward addiction treatment and mental health care facilities are instead going to "people that don't belong in our country." As much as he kept blaming immigrants for addiction (and housing shortages and unemployment), he continued to emphasize that his driving impulse was a kind of Christian humanitarianism. "I think the Trump-Vance approach to the border is the way to maximize compassion," he insisted.
To make his case, Vance invoked anodyne expressions of faith. Asked about his own religion, Vance shared one of the most popular verses of the Bible, John 3:16, a non-controversial passage about God's love, to emphasize that addicts who feel worthless are still deserving of love and respect. To this crowd, Vance spoke of his grandmother's personal, eclectic version of evangelical Christianity and didn't mention his own Roman Catholicism. He spoke of Christianity's "social teaching" (a phrase more commonly associated with Catholic doctrine than evangelicalism) and of the "inherent dignity" of human life (a universal Christian idea, but one of particular prominence in that same Catholic social teaching). Vance may come from Hillbilly evangelicals, as he puts it, but as a candidate, he embodied his newer, more somber faith tradition.
On one point, though, he evoked Wallnau's fearmongering and religious fervor. The federal government, he said, was seeking to destroy churches and their place in their communities. "It's a disgrace," he said. "Let's hope that we can take this country back and make our country better."