Pence’s church drop-ins come amid a growing rift between Trump and evangelical leaders who supported him in 20 but now want a fresh face, as I wrote last month.
Jeffress’s problematic record of comments is also noteworthy: The pastor has, for instance, called homosexuality “filthy.” Hagee is not the only prominent evangelical leader Pence will have met with this month: Last 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. Worse still, Hagee resorted to antisemitic race science while theorizing about Hitler’s lineage, writing in his book Jerusalem Countdown that the Nazi leader was born from a line of abominable “half-breed Jews.” “Their own rebellion had birthed the seed of antisemitism that would arise and bring destruction to them for centuries to come,” he said, according to a Columbia Journalism Review piece from 2008. In the late 1990s, the pastor said that God “allowed” the Holocaust to occur because he sought to have Jews “come back to the land of Israel.” Hagee has also described antisemitism as God’s righteous wrath toward the Jewish people for failing to convert to Christianity. It should also be hardly entirely surprising that Pence, in particular, has a relationship with Hagee, especially when the two hold somewhat similar religious beliefs.ĭespite extolling Israel as being vital to the Second Coming, the pastor also has made antisemitic remarks, raising more questions about what Pence is willing to ignore in service of his political aspirations. Bush’s 2000 campaign, Hagee has remained active in GOP primary jockeying for decades. Such sordid remarks have done little to dim Hagee’s political influence in the calculus of Republicans eyeing the White House. (Hagee later tried to walk back the Hurricane Katrina comment.) Pence is scheduled to appear Sunday at San Antonio’s Cornerstone Church for a fireside chat with John Hagee, the church’s founding pastor who has made sexist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, and otherwise offensive remarks-including a 2015 sermon reportedly declaring that “women are only meant to be mothers and bear children” and an infamous 2006 interview in which he hailed Hurricane Katrina as “the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans” and gay pride parades. Mike Pence has yet to publicly declare a 2024 presidential run, but that hasn’t stopped the former veep, a self-described Christian, from quietly courting evangelical leaders who could put him in the crosshairs of public scrutiny.
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