Vice-presidential candidate JD Vance has told a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, how he became a Christian, and claimed that Kamala Harris is “the biggest threat to religious democracy”.
Following a visit to the grave of Billy Graham, Vance told the crowd at Freedom House Church that the late evangelical had been influential in his conversion.
First stop in Charlotte is the Billy Graham Library where Vance is visiting the late evangelists grave pic.twitter.com/AsAIdr0FEo
— Jon Michael Raasch (@JMRaasch) September 23, 2024
“It's unbelievable, because one of the people who actually helped me encounter the Christian faith for the first time is Billy Graham, with my grandmother," he said.
Vance recounted how his grandmother would watch Billy Graham’s televised sermons, adding:
“I actually was a person who was raised in the Christian household by a grandmother who loved me deeply and took care of me, because my own mother [had an] opioid addiction for a big chunk of life.”
He recounted how he had disavowed faith, but returned to it after leaving the Marine Corps in 2007:
“Even though my grandmother was not an educated woman, she was a very brilliant woman, and there was a lot of wisdom in the faith that I discarded as a young man.
“God didn't care about how much money I made, God didn't care about where I went to school, God didn't care if I wrote a best-selling book or ran for vice president, but God really did want me to be a virtuous husband and a virtuous father...
“The Christian faith that I discarded was, in fact, the best solution to the problems in front of me.”
He told the crowd that he believed the Democrats to be a “threat” to Christians:
“I think that we're living through a time when we have the biggest opponents of religious liberty and people of faith running for office that we have seen anywhere in my life.
'When you've got Kamala Harris, the biggest threat to religious liberty we've had in at least a generation, you better care about politics.”
Billy Graham’s own granddaughter, Jerushah Duford, has been a prominent member of the Democrat group Evangelicals for Harris.