Vance Links Up With Christian Extremist Who Called Harris a ‘Jezebel’ Practicing ‘Witchcraft’
Fresh off an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s extremist election tour, Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance is set to sit for a Pennsylvania town hall hosted by far-right Christian nationalist Lance Wallnau.
Wallnau will be hosting Vance as part of the “Courage Tour,” a collaboration with the right-wing activist group Turning Point USA (TPUSA) aimed at ushering in “the dawn of our nation’s Third Great Awakening,” by recruiting “civically enlightened” pastors to lead their flock into the fold of the MAGA movement — a project that could run afoul of legal prohibitions barring churches and nonprofits from engaging in campaign activities.
The tour has concentrated on generating turnout for Donald Trump in critical swing states, and melding the evangelical right with the growing Christian nationalist movement within the Republican Party.
Vance is their biggest get to-date. Wallnau, who will host the town hall, was a major figure driving evangelical support for the 2020 “Stop the Steal” movement, and promoted the deification of Trump as a figure akin to the biblical King Cyrus.
Wallnau has pushed a litany of extreme views, including that Vice President Kamala Harris of embodying “the spirit of Jezebel.”
“What you’re seeing now is a real Jezebel,” Wallnau said earlier this month. “When you’ve got somebody operating in manipulation, intimidation and domination — especially when it’s in a female role trying to emasculate a man who is standing up for truth — you’re dealing with the Jezebel spirit.”
“So, with Kamala, you have a Jezebel spirit, a characteristic in the Bible that is the personification of intimidation, seduction, domination and manipulation,” he added.
Disdain for women is just one shared position between Wallnau and Vance, who has sparked intense criticism for a series of comments maligning women without children as something he finds “disturbing” and “disorienting.”
Both Wallnau and Vance have described the right to abortion care in apocalyptic terms.
Vance has asserted that he would “certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally,” compared abortion to slavery, and referred to pregnancies resulting from rape or incest as “inconvenient.”
In December, Wallnau expressed frustration with the fact that the overturning of Roe v. Wade had allowed some states to enshrine reproductive rights into state law. “For those Christians like myself who thought we had a victory regarding abortion at the Supreme Court, we need to face the fact. The Court merely sent abortion policy back to the states — where referendum after referendum has been approving wildly liberal abortion laws,” he said. “Republicans at the RNC have no messaging campaign for Life. We better come up with one on our own or our pro-life victory will be a pro-abortion victory for 2024 and the White House is in the balance.”
In a statement provided to Rolling Stone, Harris Campaign Spokesperson Sarafina Chitika wrote that “it should come as no surprise J.D. Vance, who has spread Trump’s election lies and has said he would not certify election results, is campaigning alongside a January 6 rioter and conspiracy theorist.”
“While Vance and Donald Trump are peddling lies, stoking division, and clinging to the past because they have no solutions to lead us forward, Kamala Harris is leading us into a future of opportunity for all Americans. That’s the leadership Americans deserve, not the distraction and dysfunction the Trump-Vance ticket has to offer,” she added.
The meeting of these two conservative minds is unsurprising. As previously reported by Rolling Stone, Vance’s 2019 conversion to Catholicism has deeply — if quietly — shaped his profile as a politician. In recent years, Vance has melded his political philosophy with a rising movement of conservative Catholicism melding traditionalist dogma with the increasingly violent nativism of the political right.
“For Vance, Christianity and the church are not the problem but the solution to the ills of the political-religious project called the United States of America,” Catholic theologian Massimo Faggioli wrote in LaCroix International earlier this year.
Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA and the main backer behind the Courage Tour, has adopted a similar philosophy. Kirk and his organization have invested heavily in imbuing Christian congregations with pro-conservative political activism, and has offered resources to pastors seeking to “challenge the IRS.”
According to Wallnau, TPUSA’s work has already recruited 2,500 churches “to stand with an America First Agenda.” It’s clear that the fervent hope of Wallnau and his allies is that under a TrumpVance administration, Christian nationalism will become the law of the land.
More from Rolling Stone
Best of Rolling Stone
Sign up for RollingStone's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.