We Need a Coherent Theory of Voting, Not Drive-By Denunciations
As primary season rolls along, Donald Trump continues to rack up win after win. His latest endorsee, current Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, roundly defeated U.S. Senator John Cornyn, a four-term establishment Republican who was clearly out of step with the GOP under Trump. Paxton will be squaring off against Democrat James Talarico in the fall.
Talarico is a perfect candidate for the modern Democratic Party: a radical threat to the basic building blocks of civil society wrapped in a consultant-approved aesthetic, as he daintily eats Texas BBQ while holding a napkin. He is the party’s version of a Christian for the Negative World, as he uses Christian heresies as a vehicle to forward the most extreme policies championed by the Left.
The Daily Wire reports that the Austin-based church Talarico attends has a children’s library with books such as The Courage to Be Queer, This Book Is Gay, and Called OUT: The Voices and Gifts of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Presbyterians. Talarico has proclaimed that “God is nonbinary” and has said Jesus was a “radical feminist.” Talarico’s church openly promotes the slogan “abortion is a blessing” and proudly stands as a “Reproductive Freedom Congregation.” On the question of abortion, Talarico has recently argued that neither Jesus nor the Bible talks about abortion, with the clear implication that abortion is perfectly fine for a Christian.
That all of this is an insidious rejection of Christian orthodoxy and the basic evidence offered by general revelation is obvious.
Christians cannot in good conscience cast a vote for James Talarico. But can they vote for Ken Paxton? From reading prominent evangelical voices since Paxton’s primary victory, the answer is a hard no.
Radio personality and Reformed seminary graduate Erick Erickson observed in response to Paxton’s win that “actual Christians” are “gonna have to opt out of politics” until the parties “improve the quality of their candidates.” David Bahnsen was more strident: “It is depressing that Texas voters have to choose between a grifting adulterer dirtbag and an extreme far left lunatic with heretical and unacceptable cultural, theological, and political positions. Neither are acceptable candidates.”
Paxton indeed has a checkered political and personal history. The Texas House impeached him in 2023 on 20 articles of impeachment, including bribery and abuse of the public trust, though state senators declined to convict him. Paxton was also under FBI investigation and was charged with federal securities fraud, which was dismissed in a pretrial deal in 2024. Finally, his wife of 38 years filed for divorce last summer, alleging he had committed adultery.
As Aaron Renn has noted repeatedly, the moral baseline in the Negative World is lower than in previous eras of American politics, so candidates like Paxton will become more common in the years ahead. But before accepting the evangelical elites’ verdict on Paxton, their assertions deserve closer scrutiny.
For one, the digital world has effectively collapsed the boundary between the public and private. Had today’s social media environment existed during the 20th century, scandals would’ve likely torpedoed many presidents’ careers.
There is evidence that at least six presidents had affairs, some even happening while in office, such as the infamous case of John F. Kennedy. Victor Davis Hanson has pointed out that if Harry Truman had X, he would’ve gotten himself into an endless string of trouble due to his well-known volcanic personality, quick resort to pugilism, and use of coarse language.
Applying the stated moral stances of evangelicals like Erickson and Bahnsen, they wouldn’t have been able to vote for most 20th-century presidents, with the possible exceptions of Jimmy Carter and Calvin Coolidge.
Even Ronald Reagan, whom many evangelical leaders still hold in high regard, was divorced and signed the Therapeutic Abortion Act in 1967 as California’s governor, which significantly expanded abortion access in the state. And he rarely attended church while he was president, thereby violating the Fourth Commandment. Were millions of Christians right to have voted for Reagan twice, a man who violated a First Table commandment?
Another consideration, as seen with the reaction to Paxton, is that evangelicals view personal morality as far more important than the effects of bad policies. Evangelical elites, for example, tend to spend far more time heaping vitriol on Trump for using crude language and his past affairs than on the catastrophic costs of the Bush administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Conservative estimates put civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan at 250,000 from 2003 through the end of those wars. Total war deaths from all U.S. conflicts in the Middle East during that time are estimated to be around 900,000, with most of that number being civilians. As Onsi Kamel has observed, American Christians tend to use “Middle Eastern Christians as props in political debates but” continuously fail “to take their plight seriously.” All this touches on the gravest moral concerns, but rarely are any of these points addressed, much less acknowledged.
Yet none of the good policies Paxton has championed—from protecting pastors from legal troubles if they don’t perform gay marriages to pushing back against the Biden administration’s radical trans activism—are brought up by his evangelical detractors. Paxton is among the most active, effective, and forward-thinking AGs in America. To properly evaluate his candidacy, the benefits he could bring to the U.S. Senate must be weighed against the negatives.
Texas resident Matthew J. Peterson has brought up an additional point worth contemplating: the full-scale political operation against Paxton is being waged by those who dislike his record and are cynically—and selectively—using his failings against him. The tactic of weaponizing morality against one’s opponents while abandoning it in practice is one of the most used political strategies today, especially against evangelicals. They need to understand how seasoned political operators use these strategies to manipulate them.
They also need to reject the platitudes that regularly pass for evangelical political theology, which consists of repeating moral denunciations that cannot survive scrutiny. And they should look askance at those who accuse Christian Paxton voters of possibly not even being Christians, as Erickson did in his post.
Evangelical moralism is a form of political escapism. It’s a substitute for fashioning a coherent theory of voting and a systematic account of how Christians should evaluate candidates.
Stephen Wolfe examined this problem in a piece for Sovereign Nations. David and Nancy French backed Mitt Romney in 2012 because “theological” disagreement was not a barrier, but they declined to support Trump in 2016 due to his “immorality.”
As Wolfe points out, this bifurcation is not based on any kind of coherent principle: “If supporting a candidate endorses his immorality, then why doesn’t voting endorse all the candidate’s immorality, including errors concerning worship (viz. First-Table precepts)? What is the principle of distinction that makes some sins endorsable in voting and others not?”
This is similar to the case of Talarico versus Paxton, wherein evangelical leaders tend to retreat to “both-sidesism” with a heavy dose of moralism. This move should be interpreted not as a sign of biblical wisdom but as a signal that they don’t have the proper tools to evaluate the candidates—and are opting out of making political choices altogether. However, our times demand far more than washing one’s hands of politics.
As Reinhold Niebuhr once wrote about politics, “[T]he demand of religious moralists that nations subject themselves to the ‘law of Christ’ is an unrealistic demand, and the hope that they will do so is a sentimental one.” Though this might sound like capitulation to creeping secularism, Niebuhr was attempting to draw attention to the distinction between evangelism and politics. To hold U.S. voters responsible in the same way that one would a congregation is a category error—one that recurs persistently in evangelical political thinking.
As we continue to traverse the Negative World, Christians need to be equipped to deal with the political turbulence ahead. Moralism, drive-by commentary, and politics-by-denunciation cannot produce a coherent strategy for evangelicals to properly assess politics. A rigorous Christian realism is needed to help Christians navigate the midterms and the 2028 presidential election.
