That's a child preacher, not JD Vance, in 1980s Oprah clip | Fact check

The claim: Video shows teenage JD Vance preaching on Oprah Winfrey’s show

A July 28 Facebook post ( direct link , archive link ) includes a decades-old clip of a boy on The Oprah Winfrey Show shouting a Bible verse.

“JD Vance footage when he was a teenager,” reads text in the video.

The post was shared more than 20,000 times in 10 days.

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Our rating: False

That's not Vance in the video. It's Duffey Strode, a former child preacher.

Video shows former child preacher Duffey Strode, not Vance

Vance, a 40-year-old senator from Ohio , was picked as former President Donald Trump’s running mate . He was raised nominally evangelical before identifying as an atheist , converting to Catholicism in 2019 and portraying himself as a fighter for Christianity .

But that’s not Vance in the video with Winfrey. That’s Strode, who made headlines in the 1980s by preaching outside his North Carolina school.

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The 68-second clip shows Winfrey watching with microphone in hand as the boy screams a Bible verse to the audience before struggling to explain its deeper meaning in plain English. It appears as part of a longer video of Strode's appearance on Winfrey's show posted by Winfrey’s OWN network. Strode started preaching at age 5 and was suspended from school in the late 1980s after he screamed Bible verses on school property, according to both an Associated Press report published by The New York Times and the video’s caption.

The claim also gets the child's age wrong. The episode aired June 14, 1988 , and Strode was 11 in 1989, which means he could not have been a teen when the episode was recorded.

USA TODAY previously debunked a false claim that Vance was divorced twice .

USA TODAY reached out to the Facebook user who shared the post but did not immediately receive a response.

Check Your Fact and Snopes also debunked the claim.

Our fact-check sources:

• OWN (YouTube), March 8, 2016, Does This Child Preacher Understand the Words He's Yelling? | The Oprah Winfrey Show | OWN
• Oprah.com, accessed Aug. 7, Search results
• The Washington Post, Aug. 28, 1988, The Devil Duffey Strode
• The Associated Press (via New York Times), May 15, 1988, Boy, 10, Is Suspended From School for Preaching
• UPI, Feb. 22, 1989, Preacher boy likes book about his family

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: That's a child preacher, not JD Vance, in 1980s Oprah clip | Fact check