U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) at a rally in south Philadelphia. (Photo by Peter Hall/Pennsylvania Capital-Star, States Newsroom.)
Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance attended a Christian revival on Saturday near Pittsburgh headlined by self-described prophet and apostle Lance Wallnau, who is a “rockstar” in the religious movement that aims to secure dominion over American society.
Wallnau’s “Courage Tour” is billed as a “celebration of Jesus Christ’s courage and triumph,” but, with stops in seven key swing states, its goal is to tap the voting power of suburban Christians to reelect former President Donald Trump.
A leader in the loosely affiliated but highly networked National Apostolic Reform movement, Wallnau has been a supporter of Trump since 2015. And since Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, Wallnau has been at the forefront of developing strategies to reelect him, experts on the movement told the Capital-Star.
The tour’s Pennsylvania stop kicked off Friday night at the Monroeville Convention Center in Allegheny County.
Wallnau and others who share his view on the role of Christianity in civil society launched the Courage Tour to engage with a largely silent faction of conservative Christians in strongly blue suburban counties, said Frederick Clarkson, senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank in Massachusetts.
“The idea of courage is to embolden those evangelicals to speak out and organize,” Clarkson said.
Wallnau, who grew up in Pennsylvania but is now Texas-based, also stumped in 2022 for Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-Franklin), whose far-right gubernatorial campaign had elements of Christian nationalist ideals.
While the Courage Tour events have the veneer of a pentecostal revival, “It is a very highly coordinated Christian nationalist voter organization effort,” said Matthew Taylor, senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies in Baltimore.
In the lead up to the 2024 election, Republicans have continued to erode the massive registration advantage Democrats once held in Pennsylvania. Taylor, who attended the tour’s stop in Eau Claire, Wisconsin on Monday, said evangelical Christians are likely contributing to the gains and are mobilizing their peers to become actively involved in elections.
In addition to connecting attendees with voter data to knock on doors and mobilize Christian voters, the events try to recruit people to work as poll watchers and election workers.
And while that might sound innocuous, Taylor said, the effort is led by a 2020 election denier who suggests that having Christians in a place of influence would be an advantage on Election Day.
“What happens is, when the polls start to close, or chaos unfolds, they’re going to kick the volunteers out. You are actually going to be a paid election worker,” said speaker Joshua Standifer, the leader of a group called Lion of Judah, at the Wisconsin event.
“I call this our Trojan horse. Then they don’t see it coming, but we’re going to flood election poll stations across the country, with spirit-filled believers,” Standifer said in a video from the event posted on the social media platform that used to be Twitter.
But why do evangelical Christians support Trump, who has faced credible accusations of sexual assault, bank fraud, and 34 felony convictions for falsifying records to cover up his adulterous consortium with an adult film star?
Wallnau, who evangelizes through his podcast, YouTube, and Facebook posts to more than a million followers, made his mark early in the arc of Trump’s presidential saga by making a case for why Christians should vote for a man they might consider immoral, Clarkson said.
Wallnau drew an analogy to the story of King Cyrus, the Persian emperor who, according to the Bible, freed the Jews from captivity and helped them build the Second Temple of Jerusalem. Wallnau posited that if a heathen king could be an instrument of God, so could Trump, Clarkson said.
And Trump would play a role in the Christian revival and reform of America by helping evangelicals conquer what Wallnau has described as the seven mountains of civil society — family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government — necessary to achieve Christian dominion.
“In Wallnau’s realpolitik … [Trump] doesn’t have to play by Christian rules and the Christians can sit back and not be infected by the dirtiness of politics and Washington, D.C.,” Taylor said.
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