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President Donald Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, issued videotaped remarks to attendees at a conference hosted by an avowed Christian nationalist this week.
Trump — who has previously dismissed concerns about the separation of church and state when he announced his “religious liberty commission” and claimed the country would be better if right-wing Christians had more power — declared his support for far-right political operative David Lane via a prerecorded, 90-second address to Lane’s Nehemiah Project Pastors Summit in North Carolina this week. The endorsement shows the president’s alignment with a figure who has advocated for “war for the Soul of America.”
Lane has a history of encouraging right-wing religious figures to run for office as Republicans to put their Christian worldview into political practice. As Right Wing Watch noted, Trump and Vance’s speeches praised those efforts, with Trump crediting Lane for inspiring “dozens of faith leaders to run for office and to win elections” and saying he was “cheering on” Lane’s plan to “recruit 500 church members to run for office in 2026 and 2028.” Vance also praised Lane’s plan and claimed the activist is helping “pastors and congregations re-enter the public square and fight for our nation, helping them to register, to vote, to run for office, and to stand up for biblical truth.”
To be clear, there isn’t anything wrong with churchgoing people — even pastors — running for office, so long as they don’t try to impose their religion on others. But that’s precisely what Lane has encouraged them to do. Right Wing Watch has a list of some of Lane’s positions, many of these dating to around a decade ago:
He once urged conservative Christians to prepare for martyrdom in their fight to ‘save the nation from the pagan onslaught’ of marriage equality and legal abortion. He preaches that the U.S. has a divine mission to glorify God and advance the Christian faith. He called the separation of church and state a ‘lie’ and a ‘fabricated whopper’ designed to stop ‘Christian America—the moral majority—from imposing moral government on pagan public schools, pagan higher learning and pagan media.’ He argued that Christianity must ‘eradicate’ secularism. He once complained that there was ‘not a peep from the Christian Church’ in response to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, when the church ‘should have initiated riots, revolution, and repentance.’
Yet again, I find myself trying to imagine an inverse scenario in which a Democratic president or party leader gushed over a practitioner of, say, Islam or Judaism — one who, hypothetically, was openly plotting a religious takeover of the U.S. government or revolution in response to a Supreme Court decision — and the scale of the conservative backlash that might ensue.
Trump and his allies don’t actually seem to object to the idea of theocratic rule — as long as they can benefit from a Christian horde that’s calling the shots.