Tom Guyton is about as small-town Texan as a man can be—right down to his distinctive regional accent and easy smile. The former high school band director serves as secretary of the school board in Lockhart, about an hour northeast of San Antonio, and pastor of Promiseland Lockhart, a nondenominational evangelical church. He’s also a husband to Lisa, who coleads the church with him and works for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, and, according to his bio on the Lockhart ISD board page, the “proud father of three ‘perfect’ daughters.” He sees all of these roles as part of a life lived in service to God. And he is adamant that religion and politics shouldn’t mix.
Unless you follow school district politics, he said, “You’re not going to know that I’m an elected official.” So when a member of the congregation left Promiseland, telling Guyton that the church was getting too progressive, he was shocked. “Progressive?” Guyton said, recounting the conversation. “That’s a political term. I never talk politics from the pulpit. I pride myself on that.”
It turns out it was what Guyton wasn’t saying that presented the problem. The entire month of June had passed and Guyton hadn’t denounced, or even mentioned, any of the LGBTQ Pride events taking place in Lockhart and nearby communities. He had not, like other local evangelical pastors, preached that marriage is legitimate only between a man and a woman, nor had he posted on social media about “biblical sexuality”—coded language for monogamy within heterosexual marriage. The disgruntled congregant saw Guyton’s silence as complicity with liberals. But for Guyton, wading into a fight over Pride celebrations didn’t advance the kind of “good news” he was trying to preach. “I’m trying to give you encouragement to make it through the day.”
Political polarization and mounting election excitement are creating new tensions for pastors, in Texas and elsewhere, as they decide how to talk about abortion, LGBTQ rights, immigration, and other issues where religious ethics and politics overlap. New data from More In Common, a social research and communication firm based in New York, shows that religious Americans across the country’s largest faith groups say it’s important to discuss social issues in a religious setting, but are more split on whether congregations should ever talk about explicitly political issues. That’s the nuance creating trouble for pastors like Guyton.
Others don’t seem as bothered.
Take Landon Schott, pastor of Fort Worth evangelical megachurch Mercy Culture. Schott has explicitly dared the IRS to come after him for violating the Johnson Amendment, the law prohibiting churches and other nonprofits from campaign activities under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
“[The IRS is] threatening to take your 501(c)(3) away,” Schott said in a sermon just before Election Day in 2022. “So take it. And we’re gonna preach the gospel.” In fact, the IRS doesn’t discourage nonprofit churches from preaching the gospel. Its rules, however, would seem to prohibit the large banner hanging across the church’s stage directing parishioners to the campaign website for a church elder who was running for mayor. The tax code prohibits churches from endorsing specific candidates or donating to their campaigns. Schott has been outspoken from the pulpit of his support for far-right state representative Nate Schatzline, and he recently used his Instagram account to blast the Democratic party as “the demon party.”
When More in Common asked how much trust religious Americans had in their spiritual leaders, respondents were highly positive. Around three quarters of evangelicals (77 percent), Mormons (74 percent), and Muslims (69 percent), and well over half in each other religious group listed, expressed trust in their faith leaders.
As a freelance contract editor for More in Common’s 140-page public report detailing their findings, this data was surprising to me, because public trust in institutions, including religious ones, has been declining for years. Gallup’s 2023 public opinion survey of U.S. adults put trust in churches at 32 percent—slightly higher than trust in the Supreme Court, but less than in the health-care system. I liken the divergence between the “faith leader” and “institution” trust numbers to attitudes about public schools, which ranked even lower in Gallup’s poll. The broader discourse suggests that public schools are a morass of academic underachievement and social disorder. But most parents love their own public schools. The U.S. public may not trust religious institutions, but religious Americans trust their own leaders.
Why? One reason is that, at most churches and many schools, the folks who attend are quite similar. In his book The Big Sort, journalist Bill Bishop shows that Americans tend to cluster in churches, neighborhoods, and schools where others tend to look, work, and vote like them. The More in Common research supports that notion. For example, while only 9 percent of evangelicals said that their congregation was politically divided, 39 percent said that Christianity in America was politically divided.
Given the level of trust they command, spiritual leaders are uniquely positioned to speak with influence on divisive issues—a responsibility many routinely take on. Historically Black mainline churches have a long tradition of backing candidates and speaking out on specific legislation or ballot initiatives that advance racial justice or community wellbeing. Catholic clergy often step into political conversations, and may find themselves sharing the podium with Republicans on abortion and Democrats on immigration. Leaders at mosques often offer political guidance as well, especially when their communities are directly affected by local ordinances and U.S. foreign policy.
In Texas, evangelicals exercise outsized influence on state politics. When evangelical pastors talk politics, they are often talking to thousands or, via radio and TV, tens of thousands. When some frame Democrats as demonic baby killers, they make voting for Republicans a matter of “spiritual warfare,” the biblical idea that Christians are locked in battle against evil spirits acting on earth. Pastors who pick a side, politically, benefit from the partisan fervor of congregants and often gain attention and influence. John Hagee, Robert Jeffress, and Rafael Cruz (Ted’s dad) are all Texan preachers whose celebrity status increased alongside their allegiance to the state’s dominant political party.
While some evangelical leaders see the discourse on issues such as abortion and LGBTQ rights as too politically divisive to yield any sort of spiritual benefit, others feel duty-bound to ensure that moral absolutes are reflected in the nation’s laws. “They do believe that it was the founders’ intent to establish a Christian nation,” said David R. Brockman, nonresident scholar in the religion and public policy program at Rice University’s Baker Institute. “But also there is, I think, a desire for power.” The push for an overtly Christian government has its roots in twentieth century movements such as dominionism and Christian reconstructionism, which taught that “society was falling into sinfulness,” Brockman said. Followers of those movements felt that federal court prohibitions against mandated prayer in schools, and in favor of abortion rights and legal protections for LGBTQ Americans, were evidence of moral decay.
By describing Democrats as “pro pornography in schools” and “pro abortion / murder / child sacrifice,” Schott’s Instagram post caption follows this logic. Schott’s views aren’t shared by most Christians, according to the More in Common report. Only 20 percent of evangelical respondents said that being a “good Christian” required support for the Republican Party. That’s the same percentage of Catholics who said “good Catholics” must vote Republican, and Muslims who said “good Muslims” must vote Republican. For most, the tenets of religious faith are independent of contemporary politics, which is part of what allows faith traditions to spread globally over centuries. “People can share theological beliefs; they can say the same Nicene Creed or Apostles’ Creed and differ on particular political questions,” Brockman said. “When the church becomes political, it knocks away that common ground.”
But not every effort to influence politics—or at least the politics of the voters gathered to worship on Sunday morning—is rooted in this kind of merging of church and state, said George Mason, adjunct professor at Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology. He sees a moral hazard in fully excluding religion from civil discourse as well. Defaulting to pure reason or science leaves unanswered questions for democracy, especially as it pertains to ethics, and the purpose behind our laws. “All religions have a sort of universal vision of the world—why it’s here, what it’s about,” Mason said.
Across faith groups, most respondents to the More in Common survey said that “being kind to others,” “human dignity,” and “believing in God” were the three most important values of their religion. The researchers also found that 47 percent of religious Americans say their faith influences their politics. That leaves it to pastors to decide how transcendent values such as kindness and human dignity apply to hot-button political issues such as immigration and the treatment of gay Americans.
In June 2023, Midland Bible Church pastor Andrew Adams preached a sermon on immigration, one of the most animating political topics of the past eight years. Midland Bible is the church home of Tim Dunn, the right-wing oil billionaire and Christian nationalist who ranks as one of the state’s leading donors to political candidates. Dunn’s son Wally is the music director, and other son Luke is a deacon. Several elders work in the oil and gas industry. Theologically, Midland Bible is conservative; all elders and deacons are men, and the church affirms the Bible as “inerrant.” It includes in its core beliefs a statement that God created two genders, man and woman. If a visitor walked into Midland Bible and heard that the pastor would be preaching about immigration, they might have assumed he would excoriate illegal immigrants as invaders and call for them to be rounded up and deported.
But that’s not what Adams said.
“Whatever our disagreements on immigration policy, we must not disagree about immigrants as persons,” Adams said, calling the political language of “invasion” unbiblical. “There’s no Biblical passage that’s going to inform you on how to deal with the southern border.”
Adams seemed to understand, in his sermon, that many in his congregation were concerned about border policy, and he reminded them that in a democracy, we voice those concerns by voting. However those listening chose to vote, Adams said, “we have the power to be kind to the [immigrants] who are here, regardless of how they got here.”
In mid-August, Ryan Keeney, pastor at Grace Church Southwest in Fort Worth, wrapped up a two-part sermon series, God and Government, by calling for wisdom and humility in determining where the Bible clearly speaks to politics, and where the line is more “jagged.” Opposing abortion, which Keeney equates with murder, is essential for Christians, he said, yet, “that doesn’t mean we’re going to agree on the best legislative or judicial strategy to stop abortion, or . . . or how to help those that are in that situation. . .”
The key to healthy political engagement both inside and outside the church is “epistemic humility,” Mason said. “We have to realize we can be wrong, and so we have to be kind.” The two don’t know each other, but Guyton said almost exactly the same thing. “I’m a praying guy,” he said. Before a school board vote on a tough issue, he said, “I’m going to pray about it, but I don’t believe I have the only right answer.”
