The Religious Revival Tour That May Swing 2024 w/ Anne Nelson
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Brad interviews Anne Nelson, author of the Shadow Network, about the modern intersection of religious movements and political campaigns in the U.S. They discuss the 'Courage Tour,' led by Lance Wallnau and Charlie Kirk, which aims to mobilize votes for Donald Trump through religious fervor and political organizing. The conversation traces the historical roots of such campaigns back to Jerry Falwell’s I Love America rallies in the 1970s and explores the sophisticated strategies and technologies now employed. Anne also highlights the role of the Council for National Policy and the targeting of swing states and diverse demographics to influence the 2024 election.
Read Anne Nelson: https://washingtonspectator.org/michigan/
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163
00:00 The Rise of Jerry Falwell and the Religious Right
00:51 The Courage Tour: A Modern Political-Religious Movement
01:19 Interview with Anne Nelson: Insights on the Courage Tour
02:51 The Mechanics of the Courage Tour
08:09 The Role of Pentecostalism and Political Strategy
13:15 Council for National Policy: Historical Context and Influence
21:14 Targeting New Demographics: Black Voters and Suburban Women
26:14 Digital Campaign Tools and the As One App
28:38 Conclusion and Reflections
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- Axis Mundy. - In the late 1970s, Jerry Falwell, the luminary of the religious right and the moral majority, held I Love America rallies.
These were political rallies fused with the sensibility of a religious revival.
At the end, Falwell would hold an altar call, but it was not for saving souls, but for saving America.
For me, that's a touchstone in modern American religious political history.
It's a moment when Falwell used all the force of his celebrity, along with the cohorts of Billy Graham and Pat Robertson and others, to fuse a religious movement with a political identity.
Over half a century later, that movement continues.
There's a direct line from Falwell's I Love America Tour to The Courage Tour, led by Lance Wallnau of the New Apostolic Reformation and Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA.
The Courage Tour is targeting key swing counties across the country, harvesting votes for Donald Trump.
And they are incredibly focused, specific, and technologically apt.
Today I talked to Ann Nelson, author and lecturer, a veteran journalist, about her new piece at the Washington Spectator.
She attended a Courage Tour stop in Michigan, and she reports back what she heard, what she found, and why this is a phenomenon that could swing the 2024 election.
Since 2003, Anne Nelson has been teaching at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs.
She was a correspondent in El Salvador and Guatemala, won the Livingston Award for Best International Reporting from the Philippines, She's the author of Shadow Network Media Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right.
It's one of the best books out there, in my opinion, on the networks, the institutions, the billionaires who fund the religious right and Christian nationalism in the United States and the ways they maneuver our political system.
Welcome back, Anne.
Thanks for doing this all the way from Italy.
I appreciate it.
My pleasure, Brad.
We've had some trouble here trying to record.
My power was out yesterday.
I screwed up the time zones today, so Anne has been gracious enough to stick around.
We're doing our best to record this across continents, and we're here to talk about the Courage Tour, which recently went to Michigan.
Anne wrote a fantastic piece in The Washington Spectator about what that is like, the spectacle and the The Crusade that is The Courage Tour.
So let me start here.
I've been talking about this for a while.
I've mentioned it on this show maybe three or four times.
It's a Lance Wallnau, Charlie Kirk production.
It scares the hell out of me.
Let me just ask, Anne, what is The Courage Tour?
If you can give folks who've never heard of it a little bit of a primer.
So Lance Wallnau has been a Figure from the New Apostolic Reformation, and I would imagine your listeners are familiar with the NAR, so I don't have to go into that.
He was a really early supporter of Donald Trump from the evangelical community, as in 2015.
And has been looking for ways to support Trump ever since.
So he organized this Courage Tour, which is going to Seven Swings Faith.
It's done in conjunction with Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA, which is now operating as Turning Point Faith.
And from my perspective, it is a really transparent attempt to use Pentecostal religiosity as a harness for support for the Republican Party.
And I've been flattering this subject for some years, you know, five or six years now, very closely, as you know, Brad.
And I have never seen that transparent political operation within a religious context.
What is the difference between the Courage Tour and, say, an old-fashioned tent revival meeting?
Well, it starts out, at least in the Michigan chapter, which is the one that I experienced, but I believe there's a standard format.
We're what they call Christian music, in this case pretty hard-driving stadium rock with Jesus lyrics, but electric band version.
And then Lance Wallnau, who is running the show and is what I call a religious entrepreneur, makes His remark, he strides across the stage in kind of a stand-up comic approach.
There's no podium, there's no pulpit.
It's a guy with a microphone and half the time he's cracking jokes.
And then he calls on people who are in the tent to come down to the front for faith healing if they are in pain or if they are ailing.
And then many people, scores and perhaps even a few hundred, come in for the laying on of hand.
And then it segues really quickly into political operation.
And I'm talking about people who come across the stage during specific organizing.
So, for example, there's one group that recruits them to work for the Republican precinct organization.
and do canvassing and yard signs and letter writing and phone calls.
And then there are others that are organizing them to pressure their pastors to host weekly meetings where they distribute materials from Turning Point Faith.
And Turning Point Faith offers them the organizing materials which are to create The ground game for Trump.
And if they can get people to commit to a weekly meeting, they'll give them free pizza of her up to groups of 400.
So you intersperse this political organizing, which would be very familiar to anybody in an actual political party.
It's identical.
But then you intersperse it with religious music and making references to sections of the Bible.
And the other part of it, which again would be familiar to people who know about the N.A.R.
is a lot of commentary about the need to fight demons and saying that the opposition, referring to Democrats, are demons, are possessed by demons, are controlled by demons, and that this is a stage of spiritual warfare.
Another element that concerned me a lot is that there were a lot of references to the last election in 2020 having been stolen and predicting that 2024 would be stolen.
And so they have to prepare themselves now for the stolen election, which they're doing before there is ever any evidence that the last, much less the next election, was that big a fraud.
So it's really indoctrinating people into a military posture about events that haven't even occurred yet.
So we have Lance Wall now, who is somebody who, you know, those who listen to the show will know, is the progenitor of the Seven Mountains meme, at least in its current iteration, taken from Bill Bright and YWAM and other folks.
He's working on this Courage Tour with Charlie Kirk, and you've already mentioned the ways that the Courage Tour includes these modes of getting people into an ecosystem of organizing.
Is that the influence of Charlie Kirk?
Is Wal now the kind of spiritual director and Kirk is the mobilizing organizer of this whole thing?
Well, there are several organizations that are heavily involved.
So another one is the America First Policy Institute, which includes both Christian nationalists and former Trump administration officials.
And then, of course, there's overlap between those two groups.
So they're involved in some of the nuts and bolts.
But I think Wolnow has seen himself as as a political supporter of Trump, specifically, and the Republican Party as a secondary factor, although he was he was pretty critical in this in this courage tour event of the Republican Party and basically calling them weak-willed.
And really at the outset, he proclaimed to the people in the tent that at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, God had told him that Trump was to be president again.
So that set the stage for the three days of that, right?
It was going to be Trump.
And again, with the NAR, there's this whole emphasis on prophecy.
So it was it was this very strong current of prophecy.
This is going to happen.
We have to make it happen.
We have to stop the demonic forces from preventing it.
And that will lead us in religious terms to where we need to go.
Right.
So to the extent that Tom Kurtz started out organizing And there's even videos circulating of him a few years ago, not that long ago, believing in the separation of territory.
And now suddenly, I don't know exactly when, but he found Jesus and he's transferred his operations.
The university operations are continuing to occur, but Tony Kirk himself has become increasingly identified with the NAR.
So he's going to pulpits across the country.
His organization has grown geometrically.
I mean, it's gone from a budget of $8 million a few years ago to $18 million and a staff of 350.
And they have this whole operating organization out of Phoenix that is now trying to seed the political activity into churches.
And one thing that's very impressive about it is how tightly focused they are on the swing state.
So these events, the Curves Tour, has already taken place in Phoenix, in Atlanta, Michigan, within the small town called Heartland, Michigan, and then there was another chapter of the event in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, just over the last couple of days.
And so we had expected them to move on to several other swing states.
They said they would be going to Pennsylvania and perhaps North Carolina.
So, you know, Walnut has published the same list of The short list of counties they're focusing on, Father Grove County, 19 of them.
That also echoes what America First Policy Institute is targeting.
So, it's a sophisticated political operation, really depending on the fervor and the labor of what I would call left-informed, unsophisticated And this is really where the religion comes in.
There's a there's a chance with religious revival and religious invitation to gather groups of folks who are perhaps not as likely to to become involved in a purely political operation.
I want to talk about political operations.
You are an absolute expert, my go-to expert, on the Council for National Policy.
And what you explain in your recent article is that Lance Wallnau has done wonders to connect the New Apostolic Reformation and his networks to the Council for National Policy.
I want to talk about why that's significant and up to a decade ago would have been somewhat surprising.
Would you just tell us real quick, maybe one minute, what is the Council for National Policy and why is it so important for people to know about it?
The Council for National Policy is an umbrella organization that was created in 1981.
And what's important about it is that it brings together mega donors like the DeVos family, as in Betsy DeVos, and a lot of fossil fuel interests.
to fund operations in media and in political organizations, many of them from the religious right.
And it kind of grew out of the needs of televangelists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
But it also served the economic interests of of both the classical people and other billionaires.
So it supported Trump's candidacy in very significant ways by organizing Evangelical through, partly through a strategist, Ralph Reed.
And they found ways to convince Evangelical to give Trump a pass as a figure, but consider him an instrument of God through references to King Cyrus of Persia and so on.
So they had roots in the Southern Baptist Convention.
A lot of their leadership initially were Southern Baptists.
There were Pentecostals.
One of the significant individuals was Elvira King, Martin Luther King's niece.
And she has worked closely with both Wallenell and Charlie Kirk.
She was a classical canonical policy member for a long time.
They used her to try to win over the African-American Pentecostal community.
Another figure who's similar is E.W.
Jackson, another Pentecostal pastor.
And My theory, for which I have some evidence, is that they went after the traditional Southern Baptists and other fundamentalists when in 2016 they got 81% of the evangelical vote.
And maybe that was tapped out.
Maybe that's as much as they were going to get.
In the meantime, Southern Baptist membership isn't dropping and Pentecostal membership is just growing off the charts.
It's the fastest growing religious movement in the country and in the world.
And they needed to find ways to reach into Pentecostal congregations, including Blacks and Hispanics, in order to win a vote
That would not Necessarily gravitate toward 12 policies since they would be so detrimental to their community So I believe that that they I mean, yes has been a very clear and definite Attempt to use these religious arguments about spiritual warfare and demonic influences to win this vote over There's a
A way that Jerry Falwell and some of the other folks who were really in on the ground of the moral majority and the religious right and would have been around for the formation of the Council for National Policy in the early 80s are similar to someone like Lance Wall now.
You know, Jerry Falwell was a showman.
He had a TV show.
He had a radio hour.
He loved to be on stage.
He himself had his I Love America rallies in the late 70s.
But I also have maintained that there's a world where the Falwells are embarrassed by the Wallnaus of the world because they see Pentecostals, at least of this stripe, as below them, as not dignified in the Southern Baptist or Baptist tradition, speaking in tongues, rolling on the ground.
And that all changed.
To a really important degree when Trump became a serious nominee and Paula White Cain became his spiritual advisor and the kind of liaison between the Trump campaign and evangelicals.
And so what I'm driving at here, Anne, is that Lance Wallnau And now having a close connection to the Council for National Policy is surprising in some historical sense, but it is also scary because it connects the largest and fastest growing religious group in the country to the umbrella organization that really has acted as the kind of Kingmaker and pipeline for conservative power in the country.
I mean, someone like Mike Johnson is is not going to be in the place he is without the Council for National Policy.
Does that does that strike you as somebody who studied the CNP in detail?
Or do you think that I'm off in terms of thinking about the ways some of these Baptists and others would have looked down on the Walnows and the NAR types?
Oh, absolutely.
And and I, as you know, I grew up in a community in Oklahoma where we had Pentecostals and we had Southern Baptists, both of them in profusion, and their values were in conflict.
The Southern Baptists had very strict rules about no drinking, no dancing, no card playing, and had a very, I would say, reserved form of worship and liturgy.
And the Pentecostals were the opposite.
It's a very emotive form of liturgy and worship.
It's a very free form and very physical, right?
So I puzzled over this.
How is it that these two movements You know, have converged and converged in the person of Mike Johnson, who came from a Louisiana Southern Baptist upbringing.
And he was a creature of the Louisiana Southern Baptist political establishment, including Tony Perkins.
And all of a sudden he's using all of this N.A.R.
language, spiritual warfare and demonic influences.
And I just have to think that it is political expedience.
Because they needed each other to propel this project of Donald Trump.
And again, as somebody with a long history in journalism, I just keep saying, follow the money.
Who benefits from this?
The people who don't want to pay taxes on their enormous wealth.
That's who benefits.
Who suffers?
The people whose boats they're buying, who are screwing their own kids in their public schools, who are screwing themselves with public health policies.
Selling people on voting for these these policies that are gonna hurt them based on this concept of Demons, so it's not what I consider a very modern project Now, you mentioned this earlier, but I think this is the point that if anyone is listening and needs something to take away today, it's what you said earlier, and I want to connect that dot now.
Eighty-one percent of the vote for Trump in 2016, increased votes for Trump on the part of evangelicals in 2020.
And you've said it.
I've heard Matt Taylor say it.
I've heard many others say it.
You're almost at a point where you're maxing out your turnout with the white evangelical voter, and that demographic is shrinking, at least according to some metrics, when you look at the Southern Baptist Convention or around other denominations.
So what do you do?
Well, you turn to groups that have not traditionally voted for Republicans and a candidate like Trump in the past, and you see what kind of hay you can make.
So give us insight into how the Courage Tour is really setting its sights on black voters, on suburban women, and on others who they think they can win over for Trump.
Well, one thing that was very interesting in Michigan was that when they got up to really, you know, go into the hardcore organizing, I should add that it was in this enormous white tent.
It goes from venue to venue, and it's advertised as holding 3,000 people.
And every seat was taken.
The first night, hundreds of people were, you know, in standing room only.
The demographics of the crowd, I would say, were mostly older Michigan people.
Not entirely, but predominantly.
And they said from the state that the low turnout they were worried about were with senior citizens, gun owners, and Christian males.
So that's what they were pushing for.
Now, that audience in Michigan, I would estimate, was perhaps 90% white.
However, they have a new project that is called MAGA Black, and a black Pentecostal preacher and failed congressional candidate, Leon Benjamin, is running that.
And he says that they've organized.
They've got 100 organizers at this point in three African-American communities in Swing State, and they plan to expand to others.
They're working in conjunction with a group called Lion of Judah.
And that group is organizing people to take training to apply to be the election worker and to get the spot, the positions as election workers before anyone else does.
And in that case, they would be the ones to actively count votes in November.
And when the head of this organization was signing people up with a QR code for this operation, Lance Wallnau said, yes, then you can be a spy in the camp.
Right.
So you've got Lion of Judah and MAGA Black both working on this front.
I don't know how successful they will be.
There's no way to tell at this point, but what is obvious is that they're trying some new tactics.
I haven't seen exactly this approach.
Before now, and I also think it's really important to recognize how targeted it is in the swing state and in communities that are.
Critical in terms of these narrow bans or votes.
In terms of suburban women, there's a lot of emphasis in the Courage Tour of what they describe as this enormous national campaign of lesbian school teachers who are turning the school children into trans people.
And, you know, the way they described it, it was just, you know, like, like the Arleys.
They had several speakers who were talking about this.
And I don't know if people in the tent had ever seen a trans person, but it was a way to really upset them and disturb them.
And to believe that there's this massive conspiracy against them and against their children.
So that seems to be the approach they're taking.
And I should add that groups who are core members of the Council on International Policy, like the Family Research Council and the Leadership Institute, have online and in-person training in school board disruption that is tied into this whole effort to demonize cruelty.
So they're operating on multiple fronts.
Truly frightening, and it all comes to head in something called the As One app, and this is a mobile app that people are told to download.
I want to ask you about that, but I also know there's a long history of this kind of micro-targeting, and you have been part of projects that have really helped us understand that.
You were part of a film a few years ago with Katerina Galane and Charles Creel, who made a film, People You May Know, about Cambridge Analytica and the micro-targeting of people in churches.
And so, would you give us a little history of this kind of tactic, and then what's happening with the As One mobile app at the Courage Tour now?
Yeah, among my expert community that I consult, it seems to be accepted that the Republicans are ahead of the Democrats in terms of digital campaign tool.
And it really started after Obama was elected for the first time.
And they realized they were behind.
And at that point, the cult network invested $50 million in a state-of-the-art political data collection operation called I-360.
And there were groups of apps that were built from the same template by the same company that were used by the National Rifle Association and the Susan B. Anthony list.
So, for example, if it was a gun owner who had a home invasion last year, it would be about how terrible gun control was.
And if it was a cavert housewife, it would be about abortion.
and get crafty scripts for each person whose door they knocked on.
So, for example, if it was a gun owner who had a home in Dayton last year, it would be about how terrible gun control was.
And if it was a cat or a housewife, it would be about abortion.
And so that's been going on for a while.
And the other thing that they do in this new generation of apps, it seems as though as one app is the centerpiece.
And then there are a number of other apps, including Turning Point USA and some others that are, again, using the same template by the same app creators.
And it has a function where they can access your directory.
So, in the last round, when they accessed your personal phone directories, then they could send text, some of them in your name, to everybody in your directory, telling them where to go to vote, and when to vote, and who to vote for.
Now, the As One app seems to be in its early stage.
Right now, it just basically runs a lot of news-type collection.
The Western Journal, which is a right-wing media platform, is also part of the Courage Tour.
So my guess is, at the moment, they're just trying to get as many people to sign up for it and use it for data harvesting moving forward.
It just continues.
And I guess one thing I can't get out of my mind, Dan, is I'm thinking about Jerry Falwell doing altar calls for America in like 1977.
And here we are a half century later.
And it's, there's a direct line to me between that and where we are with the Courage story, except for the tactics, the know-how, the strategy has just gotten, it's just become so sophisticated.
Thanks for listening to our episode today.
As bonus content for subscribers, I have about 15 more minutes with Anne about the effects of the court's tour in swing states and the ways it links up with the Council for National Policy and Project 2025.
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