Conservative Christians Keep Voting For Predators. Here's Why

The senate race in Texas shows that Conservative Christians would vote for Satan himself if he ran as a republican

The Texas Litmus Test

Texas is about to hold a Senate primary race that exposes precisely everything I’ve been telling you about how morally bankrupt evangelical Christianity is in America today. I couldn’t create a better example if I tried.

Let me tell you what’s going on then I’ll tell you why conservative christians will always vote republican no matter what.

On one side, you have James Talarico — a seminary-trained, openly Christian Democrat who talks about feeding the poor and healing the sick. A man who cites scripture often. He has no major scandals. He was born and raised in the church. He genuinely wants to make the world a more kind and fair place

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On the other side, you have Ken Paxton — a man who had two affairs that led to the destruction of his own marriage, was accused of bribes, let a pedophile escape any kind of consequences, and was impeached by his own Republican colleagues. I’m not exaggerating and I’ll go into more detail below.

Despite Paxton’s laundry list of scandals, evangelical leaders, without hesitation, without embarrassment or shame, are going to bat for the corrupt one while comparing James Talarico to Satan.

It’s like 2016 all over again. Only this time, while I am shocked, I am not surprised.

The Candidate Evangelicals Should Love

Let’s start with James Talarico

He grew up in the Christian tradition. He identifies as a follower of Jesus. And when he talks about policy, he talks about it through an explicitly Christian lens of feeding the hungry, expanding health care so the sick don’t have to go bankrupt, protecting the vulnerable, advocating for the marginalized.

“You can’t offer thoughts and prayers on Monday and then debate a bill to loosen gun regulations on Tuesday. I believe prayer can change lives. I believe prayer can change the world. But there is something profoundly cynical about asking God to solve a problem that we’re not willing to solve ourselves. God has no other hands but our hands.”

Amen, James.

These are not just talking points. These are the things that Jesus in the gospel repeats over and over again.

And look, I know as a former evangelical that Christians, conservative Christians in particular, really claim to take the Bible seriously. Here’s a candidate who does just that. He actually believes what Jesus says and taught. He believes that it matters. He is bold in the public square about his faith. From what we can tell, he seems to have lived a pretty moral life. Not a scandal in sight.

As a man who was raised in conservative evangelicalism myself, he ticks all the boxes.

In fact, he’s so committed to his faith that he graduated from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary with a master’s in theological studies. He is kind, he’s humble, and a great communicator. And I know this because (humble brag) I’ve had the privilege of interviewing James Talarico twice. Once virtually on the New Evangelicals podcast and another time when the podcast flew out to Texas to interview James in front of a live audience. It was such a good conversation. (Oh, and by the way, a clip from that interview is being used in a Ken Paxton attack ad against Talarico. Yep, there I am. I made it, everyone.)

I’ve sat across from James. He’s not loud. He’s not vindictive. He’s not performing outrage for cameras. He’s pretty soft-spoken. He’s thoughtful. And he’s genuinely bipartisan. In our interview, he talked about working across the aisle in the Texas legislature because, you know, that’s how governance is supposed to work.

He’s the kind of politician that if you were designing a Christian candidate from scratch, you would design James Talarico.

And I’ll be honest with you, I’m a little bit jealous of his ability to be so calm in the face of such insanity that is the MAGA movement, while still being able to give a prophetic critique. I wish I could be like him, but I can’t. So instead here I am, writing into the void of substack for you, dear reader. Please subscribe.

But by now, you should be able to get the picture I’m painting, right? James is a seminary graduate. He’s a professed follower of Jesus. He’s a man who explicitly is trying to translate the social teachings of Jesus Christ into public policy for the sake of all of our neighbors. And he’s running for Senate out of Texas against a corrupt, impeached, bribery-accused politician.

And the evangelical world is treating James like he’s possessed.

“I would rather my wolves come in wolves clothing rather than look like a sweet, inoffensive, nice young man who happens to be an extreme radical left-winger.” - Ted Cruz

“Talarico can’t love your neighbor while hating the things that God hates and loving the things that Satan loves. And you do. You are an insult to Christianity.” - Allie Stuckey

Come on.

Here’s the point I want you to hold on to for this entire piece: the reason these people are not supporting James Talarico has nothing to do with Jesus. It has absolutely nothing to do with the red letters of what Christ said in the four gospel accounts.

For these Christians, the criteria was never who actually follows the way of Christ. The criteria has always been what letter is next to their name on the ballot.

And once you understand that, everything else makes sense.

The Lesser-of-Two-Evils Indoctrination

Because as a former evangelical, I can tell you that the logic goes something like this:

Sure, maybe Republican candidate A isn’t perfect, but he’s going to be much better than any Democrat.

That’s how it works. It’s that simple.

This indoctrination, that Democrats are always worse than any Republican candidate, is very powerful. It’s part of what makes it so hard to break through to the people still in that dark, damp basement of evangelicalism.

This is how you get the “lesser of two evils” talking point during the 2020 and 2024 elections. Maybe you had friends who are more conservative but didn’t like Trump but thought that Biden or Harris would be so much worse. They’ve been taught since day one: nothing is worse than the Democrat in power. Nothing

And what they’ll tell you is: “Yeah, look, Trump isn’t great, but Biden would have been so much worse.”

And then you say, “Well, on what?”

And they’ll say, “Well, probably abortion.”

But then when you show them that abortion rates went up under Trump they’ll move to a different issue like the broad topic of the economy, whatever that means. But when you show them that Trump exploded our national debt, they’ll move to another issue.

The goalpost is always moving.

Ken Paxton: The Perfect Embodiment

Now let’s talk about Ken Paxton. Because if James Talarico is a living rebuke to the party of Christian nationalism and the brand of family values, Ken Paxton is its perfect embodiment — not in the way that they’d want, but in the way that tells the truth about what the movement has always actually been about.

Ken Paxton is the attorney general of Texas. And in 2023, he was impeached.'

And I want to be clear about something because this detail is really important: he was not impeached by Democrats. He was not impeached by the media. He was impeached by a Republican supermajority in the Texas state legislature. His own people. His own party. People who share his ideology and his worldview, even his donor base. They looked at this man and said, “We have to remove him from office right now.”

That is how serious his misconduct was. It was only the third time in history that the Texas legislative body has impeached someone.

The charges against him read like a case study in corruption. One of the major parts of the story is that Ken Paxton was in cahoots with a real estate developer named Nate Paul. They were scratching each other’s backs in the form of favors. Paxton would use the attorney general’s office to intervene legally to help Paul, and then Paul would donate to his campaign in return, or pay to renovate his homes, or in one shocking case, employ Ken Paxton’s mistress to keep the affair quiet. Not joking.

Family values, am I right?

When whistleblowers came forward, Paxton fired them in an act of retaliation. There were 20 articles of impeachment, and they referred to felony charges of securities fraud, obstruction of justice, and misusing taxpayer money by diverting staff time during office hours to help his buddy Paul which costed taxpayers $72,000.

Where is DOGE when you need them?

But being impeached by his own party is just the tip of the iceberg.

In 2008, Paxton failed to disclose his investments that got millions of dollars worth of state contracts that he voted to push through. In 2013, he stole another lawyer’s pen — and while you might be thinking, “Who the hell cares about that?” well, when you find out that the pen was $1,000, left behind by a lawyer in a metal detector tray and then magically ended up in the hands of Ken Paxton, it matters.

In 2015, he was indicted while acting as attorney general for accusations of defrauding investors. The trial was delayed for 9 years, where he eventually struck a deal with prosecutors and agreed to pay $300,000 in restitution and do community service to get the charges dropped. Paxton characterized the charges as a political prosecution. Does that sound familiar at all?

In 2022, the State Bar of Texas sued Paxton for professional misconduct after he brought lawsuits against several states over election fraud claims which we all know were utter horse shit.

Last year, his wife divorced him after discovering his second affair.

And here’s the irony that I need you to sit with for a moment: Ken Paxton has been one of the most vocal champions of eliminating no-fault divorce in Texas. He has supported legislation that would make it so much harder for spouses to leave their marriages. The same man who blew up his marriage is fighting to make it harder for other people to leave theirs.

You genuinely cannot make this up.

His office asked a judge to declare a Muslim civil rights group a terrorist organization. He investigated schools that walked out in protest of the inhumane treatment of immigrants in concentration camps by saying, “I will not allow Texas schools to become breeding grounds for the radical left’s open borders agenda.”

But despite all of this, according to evangelical leaders, this is the man. This is God’s candidate for Texas.

Really?

Detailed list of Paxton’s scandals can be found here.

I thought the Bible taught us that out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. Didn’t Jesus in Matthew 17 say that “a good tree produces good fruit and a bad tree produces bad fruit? A good tree can’t produce bad fruit and a bad tree can’t produce good fruit. So every tree that does not produce good fruit is chopped down and thrown into the fire. Yes, just as you can identify a tree by its fruit, so you can identify people by their actions.”

Does that apply here?

The Adam Hoffman Case

There’s one story I left out that trumps, no pun intended, everything else I just told you. And it’s the story of Adam Hoffman.

Adam Hoffman sexually abused a boy for three years. And Ken Paxton’s attorney general’s office did such a poor job that the trial ended in a hung jury. So what did they do? They offered Adam Hoffman a sweetheart deal.

I’m not kidding you when I say this: he only had to go to prison for one day under this plea agreement. He didn’t have to register as a sex offender, even though he admitted in writing that he abused the boy for his own gratification. The deal took three years to complete. Three years for a child abuser to plead guilty of two misdemeanors and serve a total of one day in jail — prompting the judge to be so shocked that, according to transcripts, he asked for someone to explain it to him.

The judge then upped the sentence to 30 days in jail, and then upped it again to 60 days when the victim’s mother said the prison time was not enough and her son did not want to testify again because of how painful the experience was.

I’m sorry, isn’t this the party of protecting children?

We hear conservative pundits yap day in and day out about the looming threat of the gay agenda and how it poses a threat to children everywhere. But the truth is that they don’t care.

These MAGA politicians either protect predators or are themselves predators.

And I have proof of this. In response to the Paxton story, megachurch pastor Josh Howerton framed the case on his podcast by saying Paxton advocates for “more righteous policies,” while downplaying the corruption as just “accusations.” Imagine standing on your social media soapbox, demanding everyone listen to you because you have the truth, and then looking at this story and downplaying what actually happened.

These people do not care about children. They care about control and power.

And it is evil that despite the laundry list I just spent way too much time going through, conservative Christians still genuinely believe that Paxton is the right choice for Senate and Talarico is the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

It’s completely backwards.

The Pattern: This Is Not an Anomaly

Ken Paxton is not a blip. He’s not just one bad apple in an otherwise principled barrel. He is the logical conclusion of a pattern that has been building in American evangelical culture for decades.

That “family values” phrase you hear all the time in American Christianity? It was manufactured. It was built in the late 1970s and 1980s by men like Jerry Falwell Senior, the founder of the Moral Majority, and by people like Ralph Reed, the founder of the Christian Coalition movement. This rhetoric was shaped by an entire generation of political operatives who recognized that they could fuse evangelical Christianity, steeped in racism and fundamentalism, with Republican political power.

The sales pitch was so simple: We are the party of God, traditional marriage, sexual purity, and the American family. The Democrats are the party of moral decay.

I can tell you from firsthand experience as a child, raised on talk radio, that I heard this framing day in and day out from people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. It was reinforced in the social circles I swam in and in the media I consumed.

The liberals hate God. They hate religion. They hate faith. They hate Christianity. They hate the family. They hate America. So vote for us to restore those things.

Is it BS? Yes. But is it effective? 100%.

In fact, it works so well that an entire generation of American Christians handed their moral framework to the Republican party and never asked for it back.

But here’s the problem about building your entire brand on family values while being a political party: eventually, the candidates start showing up. And the candidates did not always cooperate with the brand.

So when Ken Paxton gets the evangelical endorsement over James Talarico, instead of being surprised, maybe we should just expect this behavior going forward.

The “Why”

So what’s the underlying motivation here? Clearly, it’s not about family values. That was never a sincere moral framework. Even on a policy level, Republicans consistently cut social safety programs. They refuse to solve the healthcare affordability crisis. They give tax cuts to the billionaire class while refusing to demand corporations pay workers a living wage.

So why? Why would Christians who claim to sincerely believe in Jesus and the sanctity of marriage and the importance of moral character keep doing this? Are they just hypocrites? Are they stupid?

I don’t think it’s that simple. I think the answer is a little more complicated and disturbing than that.

The reality is this: for a significant segment of American Christianity, the faith has been quietly, gradually, and almost completely converted into a vehicle for cultural power and societal control.

And once you understand that, the voting patterns make perfect sense.

What do I mean by cultural power? I mean the ability to define what America is and isn’t. To define its values. To define its laws. To define who is normal and who is seen as deviant. To define what gets taught in schools, what gets displayed in courthouses, what is considered acceptable in the public square.

That is what is at stake for this movement.

It’s not primarily about salvation. Not discipleship. Not following the way of the risen Christ.

It’s about control.

Now, they’ll use Christian language like discipleship, and maybe on an individual level they’ll care about that. But when it comes to society as a whole, they want to be able to make the rules that everyone else must play by. It’s just that simple. It’s the seven mountain mandate. It’s Christian nationalism 101.

This is why so many of these people are obsessed with Pride Month. Even though queer people are not at all threatening the marriages of evangelicals, that’s not enough for this movement. They must demand that gay people are seen as deviant, that their marriages are a sham, and that our culture must reflect that.

They are obsessed with three major issues: abortion, LGBTQ+ people, and immigration.

• Abortion — because it’s the ultimate symbol of control over women’s bodies and sexuality.

• LGBTQ+ rights — not because the red letters or the words of Christ contain a single syllable about gay marriage, but because the acceptance of queer people represents a direct threat to the sexual hierarchy they’ve spent decades constructing.

• Immigration, especially from non-white European countries — because deep down they believe that America is mostly a white Christian country and other people groups are a threat to their grip on culture.

It’s so ironic, of course, that the only teaching Jesus has about immigrants is a command to welcome them. But hey, why let the teachings of Jesus get in the way of a good culture war, right?

The Democratic Party, by design, is pluralistic. It makes room for people who are not Christian, who are not straight, who are not white, who do not share the same cultural framework. That kind of pluralism is an existential threat to a movement that is fundamentally about dominance.

So when they go into a voting booth and look at Ken Paxton on one side and James Talarico on the other, they’re not asking which of these men follows the way of Jesus. They’re asking which of these men will advance laws that keep us in power. Which of these men will appoint judges that protect our cultural dominance? Which of these men will hold the line against the pluralism that threatens everything we’ve built?

(aka keep America as white as possible?)

If those are your concerns, then clearly Paxton is your man. His moral compass isn’t needed for that agenda. Who cares about his infidelity or his insider deals or letting a pedophile go free?

Trump did teach evangelicals something important: you don’t need a moral man. You need a useful man. A man who will do what you need done, who will sign what you need signed, who will appoint the people on the Supreme Court that you need appointed.

Character is irrelevant for that agenda. Utility is everything.

The Bottom Line

I’m not saying that the people in the pews don’t love Jesus. I’m not even saying that individually they are bad people. I am saying that the Jesus they follow is not the Jesus of the gospels. It is the Jesus of white Christian nationalism.

That’s why, if you pay attention to the leaders of this movement, they rarely, if ever quote the words of Jesus found in the gospels. Because you can’t reconcile a Jesus that tells his followers to carry their cross with a white Jesus that tells you to build crosses instead. It’s irreconcilable.

The risen Christ calls his followers into a life of radical love, radical sacrifice, and radical solidarity with the marginalized. But that Jesus is deeply inconvenient for a movement built on cultural dominance. So what do they do? They build a different Jesus. A Republican Jesus. A culture war Jesus. A Jesus who hates the same people they hate and fears the same people they fear. A Jesus who wants the same power they want. And they’ve wrapped that Jesus in an American flag, put him on the ballot, and called it Christianity.

James Talarico is trying to follow the Jesus we read about in scripture. The uncomfortable one. The one who said that blessed are the poor and the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers, nothing that looks like MAGA at all. And they’re treating him like a threat because he is a threat to Christian nationalists. He absolutely is. James Talarico threatens their power and control.

Here’s the bottom line, friends: the Talarico vs. Paxton race is not just about a Texas story. It is a mirror. It is showing us clearly and without ambiguity what American evangelical Christianity has actually become.

It’s not a movement built on the way of the risen Christ. It’s a movement built on power and control. And the sooner we name that plainly, without apology, and clearly, the sooner people still trapped inside hopefully can find their way out — if they want to.

The modern evangelical movement needs to be dismantled. There is nothing redeemable about it.

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