Brent VanNorman is a conservative businessman who is running for mayor in Tulsa, Oklahoma. On Sunday, he made an appearance at right-wing Christian nationalist MAGA pastor Jackson Lahmeyer’s church, where he declared that “we need to get back” to requiring elected officials to be Christian.
VanNorman opened his remarks by saying that Proverbs 14‘s “righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people” is one of his favorite Bible verses. After declaring that “righteousness [also] exalts a city,” VanNorman then cited Proverbs 29 to declare that “when the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice.”
As such, VanNorman then proclaimed, “my number one qualification for being mayor of Tulsa is that I am an unashamed follower of Jesus.”
“I think that if you go back and study the history of our nation and our founding,” he added, “the pulpit was the primary tool [during] the Revolutionary War [for] communicating to people. But [also], public officials had to be Christians in many areas and we’ve gone so far away from that and we need to get back.”
When questioned by the Tulsa World about his comments, VanNorman backtracked, claiming that he didn’t mean what he had very clearly said:
“No, no, no, no. My point would be that I think people that are informed by Christian values make good public servants and they have a servant’s heart,” VanNorman said. “And so I would hope that, as a result of my value system, in which I care for humanity and … I try to treat people with equality, I try to treat people with love, and there’s a moral foundation that gives me that I hope people would appreciate, and that I hope that my motives are pure in what I’m doing and I’m not doing them for the wrong reason.”
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