Mike Pence has but to publicly declare a 2024 presidential run, however that hasn’t stopped the previous veep, a self-described Christian, from quietly courting evangelical leaders who may put him within the crosshairs of public scrutiny.
Pence is scheduled to look Sunday at San Antonio’s Cornerstone Church for a fireplace chat with John Hagee, the church’s founding pastor who has made sexist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, and in any other case offensive remarks—together with a 2015 sermon reportedly declaring that “girls are solely meant to be moms and bear kids” and an notorious 2006 interview wherein he hailed Hurricane Katrina as “the judgment of God in opposition to town of New Orleans” and homosexual delight parades. (Hagee later tried to stroll again the Hurricane Katrina remark.)
Such sordid remarks have executed little to dim Hagee’s political affect within the calculus of Republicans eyeing the White Home. An early supporter of George W. Bush’s 2000 marketing campaign, Hagee has remained energetic in GOP main jockeying for many years. It must also be hardly fully stunning that Pence, specifically, has a relationship with Hagee, particularly when the 2 maintain considerably comparable non secular beliefs.
Hagee is a agency adherent of dispensationalism, a pressure of end-times beliefs that asserts Jesus’s return will likely be triggered by the state of Israel regaining its biblical borders. Suffice it to say, Pence’s public flirtation with Christian Zionism has not gone that far. However he has referred to as the founding of contemporary Israel a biblical “prophecy actually got here to move”—and in 2019, Pence personally thanked Hagee, the founding father of the most important Christian Zionist group on this planet, for advocating on the state’s behalf.
Regardless of extolling Israel as being very important to the Second Coming, the pastor additionally has made antisemitic remarks, elevating extra questions on what Pence is prepared to disregard in service of his political aspirations. Within the late Nineteen Nineties, the pastor mentioned that God “allowed” the Holocaust to happen as a result of he sought to have Jews “come again to the land of Israel.” Hagee has additionally described antisemitism as God’s righteous wrath towards the Jewish folks for failing to transform to Christianity. “Their very own rise up had birthed the seed of antisemitism that will come up and produce destruction to them for hundreds of years to come back,” he mentioned, in accordance with a Columbia Journalism Evaluate piece from 2008. Worse nonetheless, Hagee resorted to antisemitic race science whereas theorizing about Hitler’s lineage, writing in his guide Jerusalem Countdown that the Nazi chief was born from a line of abominable “half-breed Jews.”
Hagee isn’t the one outstanding evangelical chief Pence can have met with this month: Final weekend, he appeared at First Baptist Dallas, an influential megachurch led by Robert Jeffress, who was a member of Donald Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Board. Jeffress’s problematic report of feedback can be noteworthy: The pastor has, as an illustration, referred to as homosexuality “filthy.”
Pence’s church drop-ins come amid a rising rift between Trump and evangelical leaders who supported him in 2016 and 2020 however now desire a recent face, as I wrote final month. The previous president this week {accused} evangelicals of “disloyalty,” arguing that he achieved sufficient in his first time period to earn their help subsequent yr. “No one has ever executed extra for proper to life than Donald Trump,” he informed the Christian Broadcasting Community’s David Brody. In the meantime, Pence, whose new, shadow candidacy memoir is titled So Assist Me God, can promote himself as a born-again, ideologically pushed evangelical—a model he’s been cultivating for many years that stands in sharp distinction to Trump’s extra political relationship with leaders on the non secular proper.
