The significance of Vance’s appearance at event hosted by far-right Christian nationalist

GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance attended a town hall organized by top Christian nationalist leaders. The event’s host, Lance Wallnau, is a leading figure in a far-right movement that wants to erase the separation between church and state. Geoff Bennett discussed more with Matthew Taylor of the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies and author of, “The Violent Take It By Force.”
Geoff Bennett:
We’re going to take a closer look now at the significance of Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s weekend appearance at a town hall event organized by top Christian nationalist leaders.
The event’s host, Lance Wallnau, is a leading figure in what’s called the New Apostolic Reformation. That’s a far right Christian nationalist movement that wants to erase the separation between church and state and increasingly intersects with the Trump campaign.
We’re joined now by Matthew Taylor, senior scholar at the educational nonprofit Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies. His book out tomorrow is “The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy.”
Thanks for being here.
Matthew Taylor, Author, “The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy”: Thank you for having me, Geoff.
Geoff Bennett:
So who is Lance Wallnau, and how does his brand of Christian nationalism differ from the white evangelical Christianity that’s been the power base of the GOP for decades?
Matthew Taylor:
Lance Wallnau is a Christian nationalist leader.
I would even go so far as to call him a Christian supremacist leader, kind of a hard-line form of Christian nationalism. He’s a Pentecostal charismatic minister. He has various titles that attach to him. He sometimes will call himself an apostle, sometimes a prophet, sometimes an evangelist. He’s a business consultant.
He came up in this movement called the New Apostolic Reformation, which is really the focus of my book. And the New Apostolic Reformation was a set of leadership networks that were established by Wallnau’s mentor, C. Peter Wagner, in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
And they became really the backbone of the movement of Christian Trumpism, some of the first leaders to endorse Donald Trump, including Wallnau, in 2015, before any of the primaries really got started.
And they have been some of the most effective Christian propagandists for Donald Trump, offering prophecies, modern prophecies, to backstop and to bolster Donald Trump’s case to Christians.
Geoff Bennett:
So help us understand this symbiotic relationship between MAGA ideology and white Christian nationalism and what the appeal is.
Matthew Taylor:
Well, Donald Trump, came up studying televangelists, actually.
His spiritual adviser, Paula White, describes in her book how he has studied televangelists for years, has studied their skills, studied how they preach, how they teach, and I think in many ways he tries to mimic them in his speech. So there’s a kinship in the way that he speaks.
This is the realm of televangelists. We’re talking about this nondenominational charismatic space that’s pretty amorphous, very open to new experiences, new forms of Christianity. And they have gathered around Trump. They have seen him as a vehicle for their own power, as someone who is backstopping their movement, someone who will defend Christianity.
Even though they recognize he’s not a good Christian, they think that he can be a champion for them. And because they have all these prophecies about him coming out of the prophets in their movement, they believe that he is — has a special anointing to lead America, to redeem America.
And the assassination attempts that have happened in the last few months on him have only cemented those narratives that he is divinely appointed.
Geoff Bennett:
Well, I have heard evangelical leaders compare Donald Trump to Cyrus of the Bible, to King David, to say that he is a flawed leader, but that he has a role in God’s divine plan, the biblical mandate.
How does all of this, in your view, pose a threat to democracy, picking up with the subtitle of your book?
Matthew Taylor:
I can’t think of a single national political figure in American history who has as many religious narratives and religious attachments foisted onto him as Donald Trump. He is someone that is seen as a figure of destiny.
He is seen as someone who is anointed by God for this role. And that’s a very dangerous sentiment to have in a democracy, where elections are about the will of the people, not the will of God. Elections are about how we negotiate our differences. And as you have all these attachments of religious ideas to Donald Trump, the language of these movements has become more and more Manichaean.
It’s good versus evil. It’s angels versus demons. It’s Trump versus evil. And as that becomes the ethos of the Trump campaign and of the Christian nationalist sentiments around him, people are becoming much more apocalyptic in their expectations around these elections.
And we saw this ramp-up of religious fervor in the 2020 election that very much culminated on January 6. And we saw many manifestations of Christian nationalism that day. Lance Wallnau himself was there that day. He was one of the most effective organizers for Christians that day. I’m worried that we’re going to see something similar right now, because that rhetoric is ramping up once again in this election.
Geoff Bennett:
When Donald Trump himself uses violent rhetoric, when he engages in demagoguery, saying, for instance, as he did at a rally over this past weekend, that allowing police to have one really violent day, that that would help end crime, despite violent crime being at a near 50-year low, how do his supporters, how do his white Christian nationalist followers hear that?
How do they interpret it?
Matthew Taylor:
Well, this is a movement that is already steeped in a rhetoric of violence. Now, they will often frame it and say, this is about spiritual violence. We’re talking about battling back demons, battling back Satan.
But they’re also pointing at real people. Lance Wallnau has said that Kamala Harris is a manifestation of demons, that you can’t even listen to her because it’s just demons speaking through her. He accused her of using witchcraft to present herself in an appealing way in the most recent debate.
So they’re pointing at their political opponents, their enemies, and saying, they are filled with demons. The demons are in them. We need to fight the demons.
And this was a lot of the rhetoric that fueled January 6, this belief that we were coming to this culmination of American history, this belief that it was God versus Satan, and that the election itself was a realm of cosmic combat.
Geoff Bennett:
Matthew Taylor.
The new book, is “The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy.”
Thank you for your insights.
Matthew Taylor:
Thank you, Geoff.