A few months ago, I was cautiously optimistic that the national news media had started paying attention to Christian nationalism – a movement which I and many others view as one of the most pressing threats to American democracy, and which is a major animating force behind Donald Trump’s current presidential campaign, but is rarely discussed as either. After seeing how the national media covered Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance’s recent appearance at a traveling revival carnival helmed by one of that movement’s leaders, though, I realized my optimism was clearly misplaced. Some in the media are paying attention, but they still aren’t getting it; what they think is a sideshow is actually the main event.
On Saturday, Vance appeared at a Monroeville, Pennsylvania stop of the Courage Tour, a traveling road show which has attracted massive crowds of evangelicals in towns around the country this year, half political rally, half Holy Ghost revival. Led by charismatic Christian showman and self-appointed prophet Lance Wallnau, the tour, which aims to turn-out Christian voters for Donald Trump, originally intended to hold events in 19 pivot counties in swing states like Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, but is adding dates as it goes.
“In a world increasingly challenged by the erosion of core values like faith, family, and freedom,” the tour’s website says, the tour “[aims] to significantly alter the spiritual atmosphere across seven states and nineteen counties.”
Wallnau, the tour’s leader and main draw, is a major figure in the Christian nationalist movement. He also has extensive ties to Colorado, as a close colleague of Woodland Park-based evangelist Andrew Wommack, with whom he co-founded the Truth & Liberty political organization to further the Christian nationalist project.
First rising to national prominence in 2016 with his ‘prophecy’ that Trump would win the Presidency, Wallnau’s popularity and influence grew during Trump’s term in office – then, paradoxically, grew even more following Trump’s loss in 2020. In the chaotic aftermath of that election, Wallnau fully embraced the stolen election narrative, using his sermonizing to sanctify the effort to ‘stop the steal,’ and growing his faithful following in the process. He later toured with former General Mike Flynn.
Wallnau also has a penchant for saying kooky things, a direct result of his belief in many kooky things. He routinely uses the language of “spiritual warfare,” and recently claimed that Vice President Harris was aided in her September debate performance by witchcraft. “Occult-empowered deception, manipulation, and domination,” as he put it. And it was that – his controversial comments, not his sinister political theology, not his very real influence over millions of American voters – which the national news media seized on last week when reporting on Vance’s planned appearance at the Courage Tour.
“Vance to attend event with evangelist who said Harris used ‘witchcraft,’” read the NBC headline. “Vance Appears at Event of Evangelical Leader Who Spoke of Harris’s ‘Witchcraft,’” The New York Times contributed. The Washington Post came closest to the mark with “Vance appears at event hosted by hard-right Christian nationalist.”
In every write-up, Wallnau is played for laughs. Or, at the very least, for knowing chuckles. He is not presented as a serious person, much less a serious threat, and Vance’s entanglement with him is treated as a political faux pas, not as what it really is: part of a conscious, if troubling, political strategy.
I don’t think the media figures missing the point are doing so on purpose: they don’t know what they don’t know. Topics which don’t penetrate the personal, professional, or social lives of reporters and managing editors at major publications might as well not exist. As a result, they often miss the importance of topics which very much penetrate the lives of average voters. I have no doubt that Lance Wallnau’s influence is virtually unheard of in the cloistered media bubbles of Manhattan and D.C. – but it’s booming outside the Beltway, and the media is missing it.
Last Friday, a panel of talking heads on CNN demonstrated the worst of the media’s blindspot to the growing threat of Christian nationalism in a segment about Vance’s then-upcoming stop at the Courage Tour.
“I don’t know who on the Trump-Vance team failed at vetting before they scheduled this event,” Erin Perrine, the former communications director for Never Back Down PAC, which supported Florida governor Ron DeSantis’ aborted presidential bid, commented in the segment. “There’s no place for this,” she said of Wallnau’s ‘witchcraft’ comments (as if she’s never been on Facebook or to a Trump rally).
Only Leigh McGowan, a political commentator who grew an audience on social media under the handle PoliticsGirl, chimed-in with the obvious and correct point. “Maybe he was vetted.”
“I’ve never even heard of [Wallnau] before,” quipped Shermichael Singleton, a former top aide to Trump’s HUD Secretary, Dr. Ben Carson, once again leaving only McGowan in touch with reality. “He’s been around for a long time,” she cut in.
The talking heads’ broad unawareness of Wallnau is not surprising to me. Despite his following numbering in the millions, he has never broken through into mainstream awareness. Their quick dismissal of him, though, betrays a fundamental unseriousness in their grasp of the issue – and their inability to understand why Vance would make the pilgrimage to pay homage to Wallnau reveals that they have completely missed one of the most important narratives of the election.
The fact is, if Donald Trump emerges victorious from the 2024 election, if he returns to the White House, he will have done so on a wave of religious voters who have a fundamentally different vision for this country than you, I, or the CNN talking heads do.
In the CNN clip, Singleton commented that he had worked on evangelical coalitions under Carson. “There are a lot of incredible pastors out there with large megachurches, huge followings, more so than this particular guy,” he said. “It would make a lot of sense to be with one of those individuals if he’s trying to appeal to the evangelical community.”
It was a telling comment: it’s not that mainstream media and political figures are unaware of the size and impact of the evangelical voting bloc. It’s that they are operating on a completely outdated and outmoded understanding of that bloc.
They’re still imagining Billy Graham. They should be imagining Lance Wallnau.
Data from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) puts the lie to the commentators’ old-fashioned conception of right-wing Christian voters. The fact is, evangelical voters have largely become Christian nationalist voters. According to a large 2023 survey by PRRI, “identifying as evangelical or born-again is positively correlated with holding Christian nationalist views,” and “white evangelical Protestants are more supportive of Christian nationalism than any other group surveyed.”
In practice, what this means is that the evangelical voting bloc has shifted from one primarily concerned with culture war issues and fiscal conservatism to one with a distinctly authoritarian bent. According to another PRRI survey, released last month, there is significant overlap between the embrace of Christian nationalism and the embrace of authoritarian political views. PRRI also specifically surveyed adherents to apocalyptic religious views, like the “Seven Mountains Mandate,” which both Wallnau and Woodland Park’s Andrew Wommack are major proponents of. According to PRRI, belief in things like Seven Mountains theology is “strongly linked to support for authoritarianism.”
The talking heads on CNN and others in the mainstream media are witnessing the effects of the Christian nationalist political movement every day, even if they fail to recognize it as such. From inside their cloisters, media personalities can tell that immigration is a defining fight of the current election, but remain largely blind to the reality that even that “secular” fight is being driven in no small part by the Christian nationalist movement. Where old-fashioned evangelical voters were concerned about prayer in school, modern Christian nationalist voters are preoccupied with preserving what they see as the United States’ racial and cultural heritage.
According to last month’s PRRI survey, “nearly two-thirds of Americans agree that immigrants are generally good for America’s economy.” Among adherents to Christian nationalism, though, those figures are more than reversed: “Most Christian nationalism supporters…agree that immigrants are a burden to local communities [79%] or increase crime [63%].” More strikingly, the survey found that “over six in ten Christian nationalism Adherents and Sympathizers…agree that immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country.”
It is these people, with these beliefs, who are packing the seats at every stop of the Courage Tour. They are the same people who are packing the seats at Trump rallies, who were storming the Capitol on January 6 – many of whom are ready to do it again. And it is these people, with these beliefs, who the media needs to have in mind when thinking about the evangelical voting bloc; who they are, and what they want.
Wallnau is one of the major figures animating those sentiments. “The intent of the Marxist element in our country is to collapse our borders,” the pastor proclaimed from the stage earlier in the day of the Vance appearance – scrawling on his whiteboard like a pentecostal Glenn Beck – shortly after jotting down the word “globalism” in near-illegible script, and just before scrawling a backwards swastika while declaring “Hitler was not a nationalist.”
“I don’t know who failed at vetting,” Erin Perrine commented in the CNN segment, as if it were only by some oversight that Vance came to share Wallnau’s stage. The answer is: someone with a better understanding of the nature of the coalition and the reality on the ground than Erin Perrine.
I watched the video of Vance’s appearance at the Courage Tour. To tell you the truth, there was nothing remarkable about it. Vance, a practicing Catholic who attended pentecostal churches in his upbringing, is no stranger to the general milieu accompanying the Courage Tour, but made no real use of his own comfort with the setting (an asset he posses in far greater quantities than Trump). He sat for an hour-long town hall style Q&A, moderated by local pastor Jason Howard, and stuck largely to his campaign script: Biden bad, immigrants bad, Trump good.
Despite the lackluster nature of the appearance – phoned-in like any other campaign stop – the fact of the appearance, the fact that Vance chose to book the event and show up at all, is remarkable. It shows that the Trump-Vance campaign has recognized something which the media is still lagging behind on: evangelical politics have changed.
