Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus content most Mondays, bonus episodes every month, ad-free listening, access to the entire 700-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
This episode of Straight White American Jesus features a conversation with Matt Taylor about the influence of Lance Wallnau, the propagator of the Seven Mountains mandate, and his connection to the Trump campaign. The discussion centers around Taylor's engagement with Wallnau amidst allegations of him being a 'Lance Stalker'. Wallnau's manipulation of rhetoric and his role in evangelical political circles are scrutinized. The episode then shifts focus to J.D. Vance's appearance at Wallnau's Courage Tour, sponsored by Turning Point USA, as a campaign strategy. The political and theological dynamics at play are analyzed, particularly Vance's disconnect with the charismatic audience, influenced by his Catholic background. We conclude with an exploration of the evolving landscape of Christian political engagement in the U.S.
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163
Check out BetterHelp and use my code SWA for a great deal: www.betterhelp.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
you you She can look presidential, and that's, we'll go to this later, that's the seduction of what I would say is witchcraft.
That's the manipulation of imagery that creates an impression contrary to the truth, but it seduces you into seeing it.
So that's so that spirit that occult spirit I believe is operating on her and through her Welcome back Matt Taylor to straight white American Jesus
As always, incredible to have you here and caught you in between NPR interviews, CBS appearances.
I'm sure you're doing Colbert later, so I'm glad we got you on the hour you have free today.
Apparently the Colbert invite is still pending.
I have been talking to a lot of reporters lately.
Unfortunately, the people I study have been very much in the news.
It is great to have you.
Your book is out, The Violent Take It By Force.
It is popular everywhere I look.
I see it and I'm so glad.
So, today we want to talk about...
I haven't seen you in two months, so it's good to see you.
I know both of us are overwhelmingly busy in the run-up to this election.
And I want to just tell you, Matt, that in 2021, I knew that we...
Had done something significant as Great White American Jesus, not because of any insight or brilliance from me or Dan, but because Al Mohler attacked us publicly, and then Tim Keller got upset with us, and then focused on the family.
And I felt really good.
I bring that up because we're going to start here today.
You write about Lance Wallnau.
Lance Wallnau is the originator of the Seven Mountains meme.
He is a traveling salesman slash preacher slash apostle.
And yet, he has now taken notice of Matt Taylor.
So, A, how does it feel to make it?
I mean, do you, like, you know, when you go to bed at night, are you like, I've done something with my life?
And B, what is Lance Wallnell saying about you, and what is behind all this new attention he's giving you?
Yeah, as enemies go, I guess he's a good one to have.
Tells me I'm doing something right.
No, it's strange.
I knew... That this would come at some point.
Both as I was putting together Charismatic Revival Fury and also as I was writing my book, I tried as hard as possible to anticipate and also to foreclose this possibility that these folks would come after me.
I tried as hard as possible to include them in the process of writing, to try to interview them, to try to give them The most charitable reading I could find.
And yet I kind of knew that at some point I would become the demonic object of their wrath.
And so it was kind of a question of when instead of if.
What is he saying? And what is, I mean, I don't know a millionth of what you know about Lance Wallnau, but I almost feel like what I do know about him, I could probably script what he's saying about you in terms of being demonic, but tell everyone else, what is he saying and what seems to have caught his ire?
So, the backstory to this particular episode was I got invited by a CBS News crew to join them in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, because they wanted to do a news report about Walnau's Courage Tour, this swing state tour that he's doing right now, this quote-unquote revival tour.
And so they asked me, they literally said, would you be our Sherpa on this project and kind of help us understand what we're even seeing?
So I flew out to Eau Claire.
I actually intentionally stayed on the margins of the events there.
It was Wallnows day.
I wasn't going to try to talk to him, even though I had requested interviews with him in the past.
I was there to help the news crew.
But then, of course, they interviewed me for the piece.
And I think this was one of the highest profile pieces.
I mean, it was on network news.
And so Walnau has been written about in Rolling Stone.
But this is a lot of the kind of outlet New Republic and all.
But this was one of the bigger, kind of more high profile hits that he was getting.
And so he posted, I'll even read the tweet for you because it'll give you a sense of his critique.
He says, I just discovered the Courage Tour was broadcast by CBS Eye on America and heard they did a decent job.
But as an aside, it's rich that he acts like he didn't actually watch the seven minutes of the thing.
But anyway, he goes on.
Only negative, I'm told, is a Lance Stalker named Matthew Taylor.
He misspelled my first name with only one T. Who parades as a church elder, but is a bit of a left-wing nut.
Someone funds progressive puppets like this.
We need some investigative journalism of our own.
So he made me into a stalker, and I parade as a church elder.
I am ordained as a Presbyterian church elder.
And I think I mentioned that once on Twitter, talking about going on a Presbyterian podcast.
And then I'm a left-wing nut who has nefarious funders, evidently, as well.
There's so much here. I mean, one of the things that I think is interesting, if I decode this, is, you know, you can't really be a church elder if your politics don't line up with Lance or other folks on the right-hand side of Christianity.
It's a classic attack.
You're not a real Christian. There's no way you could be an elder.
You're pretending, just like Stacey Abrams pretends to be a Christian, or Raphael Warnock, or Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris.
Yeah, all of them.
So that's one. Two is the funding.
It's just like, it's always about, like, you know, yeah, I'm sure, Matt, you enjoyed a flying economy class in row 36 of the United flight you were on, which was, you know, super luxurious.
And so that's there.
But I think the fact that he talks about you being a stalker, like, let's pause there for a minute.
When you read that, what hit your brain?
What hit my brain was an email that I sent to Lance.
Actually, to his ministry.
I couldn't find his direct email.
But I emailed his ministry several times actually in the course of writing the book asking if I could interview him.
And I know that one of those emails at least got through because I got a reply from his assistant.
Who said that she was new.
This was like four months after I sent the email.
She said she was new and that she was going through his inbox and discovered my request and was wondering if I still wanted to interview him.
And I said, of course, I would love to interview him.
And I never heard back again after that.
So clearly, at some point, my request pinged on his radar.
And so to claim that I'm a stalker, I mean, I literally wrote a book about the man and asked to interview him.
And as far as I know, I mean, maybe at some point our paths have crossed in some proximity.
But as far as I know, that was the first time in Eau Claire that I even been within 50 miles of the man and did not intend to speak to him there.
So it's striking that he wants to project on to me as a scholar that I'm obsessed.
I mean, he's one of seven primary characters in my book.
I wrote one chapter about him.
But I do think that there's the projection of obsession, of stalkerism, it's intended to push me down and elevate him, right?
He is stalker-worthy.
I deign to be a stalker.
So, no, it is... But I just think it's funny that that would be the instinct is to make me into some sort of a celebrity hound as somebody who wants to somehow bask in his glory or something like that.
And what's also just striking to me when he said that is...
In the chapter that I wrote about Wallnau, I make the case that I think this would be fairly controversial within mainstream evangelicalism, but I actually argue in that chapter that Lance Wallnau is, as far as I can tell, the most influential evangelical political theologian of the 21st century so far.
Which is an enormous compliment to him in terms of the reach of his ideas.
And I think if he actually bothered to read the chapter, he would be quite pleased.
I mean, I'm not saying that's a good thing.
I'm saying that that's been a very harmful influence that he's had on American and global evangelicalism.
But I am pointing to just the reach of his ideas.
And I also argue in that chapter that if you want to understand where evangelicalism is going, don't look at the Colorado Springs crowd.
Don't look at the kind of...
Infrastructure of the religious right, per se.
Watch Wall now, because he has had his finger on the pulse of the evangelical id like no religious leader in the last decade.
And his ideas have really been a big part of the spark of the shift that we've seen in American evangelicalism.
I think if he had read the chapter, he might have been a little more embracing of my analysis, but it is what it is.
Couple comments here.
One is, friends, if you're not totally familiar with Lance Wallnau, I think most of you are.
Listen to Charismatic Revival of Fury, read Matt's book, The Violent Take It by Force.
But Lance Wallnau is really the innovator of the Seven Mountains meme or mandate.
It was really a kind of something I think was thought up by Bill Bright and a couple of others.
But Lance Wallnau really made it something that has taken the Christian right by storm.
So that's number one. Number two, we're going to get to this here in a second.
He is very high profile.
He's more high profile than I think, and I'm happy for you to correct me here, than any other New Apostolic Reformation figure I can think of, just in terms of, like, everyday people who hear about him.
Dutch Sheets and the Appeal to Heaven is one thing.
Che On and all of his networking is another.
Cindy Jacobs, Paula White.
But Lance Wallnau is somebody who I think's name is creeping into the sort of popular consciousness.
I'm also just imagining the historical theologian in me is like, well, 20th century, most influential theologian.
Is that Karl Barth? Is that Karl Rahner?
Is that Henri de Lubac?
Who is that? We can argue about it, Matt, if you want.
I don't know. Jürgen Moltmann just died.
Is he going to raise his hand there?
Wolfhard Pannenberg is in here.
The open theologians, Clark Pinnock.
I mean, we can do it.
We can do the whole weird historical theology thing.
I mean, we probably should talk about liberation theologians.
I don't know. Gustavo Gutierrez.
I mean, there's so many to talk about.
Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer. Okay, yeah, you're right.
There's a glaring omission.
And then we get to the 21st century.
Yeah. It might be Lance Wall now.
I don't know. I just...
All right. I'll leave it there.
I mean, go ahead. Yeah. One of the things that this also calls to mind for me, because I've been doing quite a bit of comparisons and trying to look at, as you have these more authoritarian style movements emerging within democracies, what is the path to That they forge.
How do they get to power?
And then who do they go after as they start to come to power?
And one of the things that's very striking in that research, if you dig into it, is when these authoritarian groups emerge, especially when they're very ideological on one side of the political spectrum, they actually really like having foils who are opposite them on the political spectrum.
So Walnau's attempt to link me to the far left or pretend that I'm somehow being funded by far left causes really fits his narrative that, oh, he's crusading.
Walnau, who was there on January 6th, who I argued in my book was one of...
The most influential Christian leaders mobilizing Christians for January 6th was supposed to speak at a rally on January 6th.
But Wallnau has maintained that it was Antifa and the FBI that caused January 6th.
And so that attempt to label centrists and moderates as the far left It's actually part of the strategy for authoritarian movements.
Because when you have the real far left actors, they can kind of play off of that.
But people who are... I'm pretty darn centrist in my politics.
I mean, I am registered independent.
As an evangelical, I voted for George W. Bush twice.
After I left evangelicals, I voted for Barack Obama twice.
So it's like the...
I really do have...
I'm kind of... We're right around that median voter profile, as close as maybe you can find in real life.
But he wants to push me off to the left because it is much easier to caricature.
Yeah. Whereas if I'm coming in and actually using my voice as a Christian to challenge his theology, and you see this dynamic playing out with David French or Christian Cubes Dumais, right?
People who have chosen to inhabit more centrist identities and positions in this argument, I think actually come in for greater castigation often because they are more inconvenient foils.
They're critics that Wall now and his ilk don't want.
Because they really want to be able to portray themselves as being mainstream and try to cast any critic as extreme.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And I think it also is just a window into the thinking that we've talked on the show about a lot, which is unless you're with him, you're against him.
And to be against him means to be a left wing nut.
There are no moderates.
There are no Christians who don't agree.
There's just Christians and then left wing nuts.
And so I think that's right.
Let's move into something that I think got a lot of press, and I'll admit I saw so many headlines, I saw so many tweets, I saw so many Instagram posts.
I saw very little meat on the bone in terms of analysis, and that is Pennsylvania.
Lance Wallnau is joined by J.D. Vance at the Courage Tour stop.
Would you help us understand first what happened that day?
You know, in terms of content, we can analyze what it means here in a minute, but what actually took place with J.D. Vance stopping by to hang out with Lance Wallnau at the Courage Tour?
So the Courage Tour is a very highly targeted voter mobilization effort operating as an adjunct to the Trump campaign sponsored by Turning Point USA and the America First Policy Institute.
Run by Lance Wall now.
But it masquerades as a revival tour.
And I've been trying to call attention to this for quite a while.
And there's a bunch of other researchers in the space who are also very, very concerned about the Courage tour because it's a more NAR version of Reawaken America in many ways.
So premised on... 2020 election denialism premised on kind of this very far right vision of America, but then just injected straight into the heart of our swing states and this voter mobilization effort.
And one of the things we've also been really calling attention to is this effort that they have, and we've talked about this on the podcast before, to enlist conspiracy theory believing 2020 election denying Christians to be Election workers in the swing states, people who are actually counting the votes and then kind of trying to orchestrate and set pieces on the board to uphold claims of election fraud if Trump has declared the loser.
So it's a very concerning manifestation of this hand-in-glove dynamic between the charismatic Christian far-right and the Trump campaign.
Halloween lets us have fun with what scares us, but what about those fears that don't involve zombies and ghosts? In the past I've benefited from therapy.
It's helped me overcome some of my fears. It's also helped me develop positive coping skills and learn to set boundaries.
It's empowered me to be a better person, a better version of myself.
If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. All you have to do is fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge.
Overcome your fears with BetterHelp.
Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month.
That's BetterHelp.com.
Last time you were here, you went through and told us how you did go to Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
You spoke to some people there.
There was a woman there who you spoke to and she just kind of broke down after a while because you just asked her basic questions.
You talked about the ways that the Courage Tour starts as a kind of...
Charismatic revival.
There's healing, speaking in tongues, prophesying.
And then it shifts into this voter mobilization effort.
And then there's this whole effort to basically be the people in the room counting the votes.
And we talked about that with Standifer and his whole approach.
And Lance Wall now has targeted swing states and swing counties, 19 counties, I believe, on the Courage Tour.
So that leads us to J.D. Vance.
J.D. Vance then jumps into the arena and a lot of the headlines were like, can you believe J.D. Vance would get on stage with a guy like this?
What happened when J.D. Vance showed up?
So it's very interesting.
So they announced, it was actually on the Trump-Vance campaign website, announced that they were going to be at the Courage Tour and that Vance would be doing a live town hall that would be recorded and broadcast on the Lance Wall Now podcast.
And it was very clear that this was about Wall Now and connections to Wall Now.
And as soon as that hits the news, as soon as people like me and other analysts who are watching this started calling attention to that, then it gets announced that Wall now is not going to be the one who's interviewing Vance.
There's this other local pastor from Pennsylvania who will be interviewing Vance, a guy I had never heard of.
And so on stage, on the day of, you have kind of the normal morning Courage Tour shtick.
And then in the afternoon, Walnell gets up and introduces the guest host and Vance without them on stage.
And then Walnell leaves the stage.
The other pastor who's interviewing Vance gets up and you can tell he's stalling for time.
In fact, he even says, like, I need to kill 10 minutes right now.
And he starts telling his own biography.
And then finally Vance comes out and is on stage and they spend like 45 minutes talking back and forth.
And it was a very... By campaign standards, especially by J.D. Vance standards, it was a very banal conversation.
I mean, it was about addiction. And he said some kind of predictably right-wing Christian things and even tried to sell everyone on the idea that his favorite Bible verse was John 3.16, which I like.
That is some old school evangelical pandering there.
You need to catch up to the times.
So what was interesting to me about all of this is I think it fits a pattern that I have observed in the way that the Trump camp, and by that I mean the Trump campaigns, the Trump inner circle, the Trump administration, finds Wahl now to be a very, very useful tool.
But they also have very carefully maintained just an inch of daylight between themselves and Wallnail.
So if we go back into the history, in the fall of 2015, Paul Y. Cain is gathering charismatic leaders at Trump Tower to meet with Trump.
These are the first religious leaders that meet with Donald Trump.
The people who are at those meetings become the nucleus of Trump's evangelical advisors.
And this is part of this changeover.
That occurs that I'm observing in my book of how these previously fringed characters from these independent charismatic spaces move into the center of right-wing politics because of their association and closeness to Trump.
Wallnau is in those meetings. In fact, he talks to Trump in these meetings personally.
And he's one of the first Christian leaders to endorse Donald Trump.
And even when he is endorsing Donald Trump, he's offering this prophecy, this prophecy about Cyrus that he's cribbing it from Jeremiah Johnson.
But he's the one who really popularizes a lot of these ideas and gets the ball rolling on this whole Trump prophecy element to the Christian campaigning for Donald Trump.
But then, Wallnau is never put on the official board of evangelical advisors.
Many of his friends are, but he's not.
And he's invited into the White House at different points during the Trump administration to advise the White House.
But I'll be damned if I can find any photos of that, where he's in the White House.
And so he is brought in.
He's clearly an interlocutor.
He's clearly a voice that they value.
And he is one of the most effective Christian propagandists for Donald Trump, just bar none.
I mean, he's the one who's using these seven mountains ideas.
I mean, one of my, I don't know if I've ever told this story on here.
So after The Access Hollywood tape comes out in October of 2016.
And it's this moment, for those who were politically paying attention at the time, it's this moment where everyone was like, okay, Trump's done for.
The evangelicals are just going to abandon him.
Even Mike Pence, Was on the fence about whether he could even talk about defending Donald Trump on this question.
And it's one of the few times in Donald Trump's life, especially political life, that he's actually apologized.
But in the midst of that, Walnut had just issued, just published his book, God's Chaos Candidate, predicting and prophesying that Donald Trump would win the election.
And so he is really in a tough spot because he has just said Donald Trump is God's anointed candidate and then it comes out the trumpets like from his own mouth describing how he sexually abuses women.
And so Lance is in Israel at the time.
And he goes on Facebook Live and records like a 10-minute video.
And in this video, it's so fascinating.
So again, he's using the Old Testament Hebrew Bible imagery.
And he says, this is the core of his message.
And he says, God could use the jawbone of an ass to slaughter a thousand Philistines.
But God could never use a Jezebel.
And so to unpack that, he's linking together these two Old Testament stories.
So there's the Samson story where Samson takes the jawbone of a donkey and slaughters a thousand Philistines.
And then Jezebel, the evil, wicked queen, the most pagan of all the queen, the female characters in the Hebrew Bible.
And so what he's saying there is like, Donald Trump is the jawbone of the ass.
Donald Trump is a donkey's jawbone, but he's an instrument.
He's a weapon. In the hand of God.
But God could never work through a Hillary Clinton, a Jezebel.
And this video gets more than 4 million views before the election.
And I would argue it's one of the major factors in bringing evangelicals back into the fold.
Keeping them on the Trump train, not letting them jump off saying, hey, he's a bad dude.
We all acknowledge that, but he's an instrument in the hand of God.
And so that is the role Wall now has played for Trump.
And yet he never, apart from those very first meetings, you never see a picture of him with Trump.
And you never see him in the White House.
And so I think that is kind of the pattern that we're seeing even with this J.D. Vance thing.
They want his audience, they want his people, but they want to maintain a little barrier so that there's a little plausible deniability.
So there's people listening who are thinking, you know, they're informed and they're thinking, okay, I know there's pictures of Sean Foyt in the White House touching Donald Trump.
Paula White, for goodness sake, was the spiritual advisor.
Donald Trump has done so many events with people in the, like, Evangelicals for Trump or the, you know, he had the whole...
The Latinos for Trump and that was kicked off at an NAR church.
Here's my point. Donald Trump takes pictures with everybody.
The guy had dinner with Nick Fuentes and Kanye West.
So if I'm listening right now, can you help me understand why is Lance Wall now beyond the pale?
He's not allowed to have a photo?
You know, much less they basically like made sure Lance was not touching the stage before like JD took one step onto the stage because they didn't want anyone to ever say they shared the stage.
Why is Lance beyond the pale and compared to all these other people?
Well, if you go back, the Nick Fuentes, Kanye West dinner, that was before Trump had entered the race.
So this was in that kind of interregnum where he had lost in 2020 before he had really fully kind of stepped into and launched his 2024 campaign.
So I think there was an element of wanting to kind of Again, play this sort of game there.
With Walnut, though, if you track Walnut...
I just have to say this.
So back in the days when he was not a candidate, when he was allowed to, I don't know, call Putin on his free time, have classified documents behind the toilet, and have dinner with Nazis.
I mean, he wasn't even in the race yet, Matt.
It's not a big deal. He was a private citizen.
Who cares? I mean, gosh.
Brad, aren't we all having dinner with Nick Fuentes on the side?
I mean, come on. You know, I'm not running for office.
So, hey, what's the big... I'm sorry.
I just had to say that. Like, I'm not doubting what you're saying, but it's ridiculous.
So, go ahead. Wallnau, of all of the Trump Christian propagandists, is really willing to push the envelope.
And again, it's not that he is persona non grata.
It's not that he's a bridge too far.
They want his audience.
They bring him in.
But it's about maintaining a little bit of plausible deniability there.
Because I don't think they want to be on the hook for the things that he says.
Because Waldo is, of all of these leaders that I have seen, the most willing to demonize his political opponents.
The most willing to...
I mean, he has at least three or four times now Gone after Kamala Harris, said that she is an amalgam of the Jezebel spirit, that you can't listen to her because it's just demons speaking through her, that she used witchcraft to win the debate with Donald Trump.
So he really leans in And attaches these narratives to his political opponents.
And he's also very deep into these conspiracy theorizing.
In fact, just the other night, he was tweeting, hey, Marjorie Taylor Greene might be right.
She's saying that they control the weather.
And hey, if this next hurricane, this Hurricane Milton, hits a bunch of red counties, then I'm going to suspect that she's right.
He plays footsie with Alex Jones, and he very much is actually modeling himself off of Steve Bannon and Alex Jones right now.
If you watch how he runs his kind of podcast and media empire, he's merchandising the way that they merchandise.
He pays homage to Steve Bannon frequently.
I mean, he's really kind of taking these models of other far-right provocateurs and playing with them.
I think a figure like Sean Foyt still plays as a worship leader.
Even though I have done the deep dive on Sean Point, he is an extreme far-right figure who has used his influence to very nefarious and harmful ends.
But Wallnau is so public.
And has so many of these things attached to him.
I think that the Trump campaign, they want to use him, and then they also want to keep just that sliver of daylight, just so that they don't feel like they ever have to answer for the things that he says.
But he can keep saying them, and they can keep promoting him.
I'm wondering how JD was at the Courage Tour, because my take for months on this show has been JD Vance is a Catholic convert, and I'm happy for you to correct me if I'm wrong here, Matt, in your own mind, but to me he strikes as the kind of Catholic convert who is very much a bro, very much into like The guy that would say, hey, should we get cigars tonight and some whiskey and just talk over Aquinas?
What do you think, bro?
On a leather couch?
There's probably a leather couch.
So my point is, he's always talking about how the ways Catholicism is intellectual.
Catholicism has meat.
He grew up around folks in Appalachia who were Christian, but there was no head to it.
It was all just heart and speaking in tongues and all kinds of stuff.
I'm wondering if he, in your mind, was comfortable?
Was he trying to get out of there?
Did he seem like, I don't really want to be here, but the boss sent me?
I'm just wondering how Vance played to this quintessential charismatic audience who's not even really old-school evangelical.
As you've outlined in so many places in your work as a whole, this is a different kind of religious rite.
How was J.D. at the Courage Tour?
He didn't do great. All right, next question.
One of the things that I'm watching for, because it very much will be a harbinger for what will come, is to find who can inherit the mantle of Trump's connection to these folks.
What political figure can take on all of the...
When Trump leaves the scene, whether by the hand of God, the hand of man, or he just decays into senility...
Who will step forward?
Who will kind of take on the role that he's been playing?
And you could see, even in the orchestration of this event, that Vance was trying to play to that, to cater to that audience, to speak to the new, new religious rite, this more charismatic, more populist religious rite.
And, but he just, he came off as pretty flat-footed in this event.
And you can tell, because, I mean, the video is online if you wanted to watch it, but occasionally they'll pan to the audience.
And when Lance Wolnow is speaking, or when Mario Murillo, his kind of co-host of the Courage Tour speaking, or really any of the charismatic Pentecostal folks are speaking, you can see the audience Just reacting the way the charismatic audiences do when there's a good preacher.
There's the amens, there's the shouting, there's the clapping.
Sometimes people will kind of echo back what the person's saying.
It was very mild with Vance.
And you could tell at points that he was, I don't think he mentioned being Catholic in the entire 45 minutes that he was speaking.
So you just speak about Christian.
But then he would use phrases that, if you know what you're talking about, sound very Catholic.
And so at one point, he even invoked quote-unquote Christian social teaching, which if many Protestants, you could very much tell from this audience, had no idea what he was talking about.
Because the phrase is not Christian social teaching, it's Catholic social teaching.
And this is one of the traditions within the Roman Catholic Church in the way that it thinks about politics, the way that it thinks about social issues.
And yet here, Vance is trying to kind of pull these phrases.
Oh, and he even volunteered that John 3.16 was his favorite verse.
So he was clearly trying to win these folks over.
But honestly, he sounded even less effective than Mike Pence seemed with these folks.
At least Pence could do the evangelicalese.
And Vance really kind of fell flat with that audience.
And it almost was like there was more energy when this pastor, his last name is Howard, was introducing himself.
There was more feedback from the audience, more excitement than the entire time that Vance was on stage.
Because Vance just doesn't know how to speak to these folks.
What is still shocking in some ways is that Trump can't.
Because Trump comes from even a weirder world in terms of distance from this stuff than Vance does.
I mean, Vance grew up around Pentecostal charismatic and evangelical folks, but Trump has charisma in all the senses of that word.
Vance does not. And he isn't able to kind of grab hold of audiences the way, especially Christian audiences, the way that Trump does.
And part of it might be intellectualism.
At his heart, I think Vance views himself not as a populist, but as an intellectual.
And I think he tries to straddle those two ideas, but he much more comes off as the intellectual.
And that just is not going to win him over with Wallnau's audience.
Thanks for listening today, y'all.
I have about 20 more minutes with Matt Taylor for premium subscribers.
If you're not yet a Premium Swash supporter, check it out in the show notes.
You'll get access to the full episode for today, bonus content every Monday, a bonus episode every month, access to our 600-episode archive, and ad-free listening, not to mention an invite to our Discord server.
I appreciate all your insight and expertise, Matt.
Thanks for stopping by. I know you're in high demand and so busy right now.
We'll catch you next time.
Friends, remember, November 21 and 22, USC and San Diego.
Catch us there. And other than that, we'll be back next week with all our regular programs.
