Prestonwood Baptist's Jack Graham has long mixed religion with politics. Now he joins Gov. Greg Abbott and billionaire Elon Musk in attacking liberals.
Among Texas Republicans, Plano pastor Jack Graham is known as a powerful ally against the left. Graham, the 74-year-old leader of the SBC-affiliatedPrestonwood Baptist Church in North Texas, has long told his predominantly white, roughly 50,000-member congregation—which includes Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton—that they are engaged in a "spiritual war" against liberals in opposition to God, Jesus and scripture.
Graham, once a spiritual advisor to the Trump White House, has joined an increasingly vocal squad of conservatives including Gov. Greg Abbott and mercurial billionaire Elon Musk in criticizing the new Democratic Party ticket of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Governor Abbott took to X on Tuesday just after the campaign announced its selection of Walz as the running mate, saying that "a Harris-Walz ticket would be the most radical and dangerous administration in modern history." The following day, Musk, who owns X and has moved the headquarters of SpaceX and Tesla to the Austin area in recent years, denounced Harris as "quite literally a communist" on his platform. Pastor Graham then reposted Musk's comments, adding that "Marxist ideology is taking over the democrat party….this would be the death of America."
Graham has since continued reposting messages from X users criticizing Walz's for championing the rights of LGBTQ people and of abortion advocates during his time as Minnesota governor. On Thursday, Graham reposted a statement from The Christian Worldview radio program that cited the New Testament Book of Revelation: "Pity and pray for MN Gov Tim Walz, for unless he repents of his murderous advocacy, he is on a collision course with God on judgement day and will be justly 'thrown into the lake of fire' for eternity."
Harris is reportedly Baptist. Her home church in San Francisco is affiliated with the Nashville-based National Baptist Convention, the nation's largest Black Baptist denomination, per reporting by Liam Adams of the Tennessean. Walz is Lutheran and attends a progressive-leaning parish in St. Paul, Minn., which has ties to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
Trump, who once identified as a Presbyterian, has been calling himself a non-denominational Christian since at least 2020, per the Religion News Service. Ohio Sen. JD Vance, Trump's vice-presidential running mate on the Republican ticket, was raised Christian, became an atheist and then converted to Catholicism in 2019, according to the National Catholic Register.
Graham, who began pastoring the North Texas megachurch in 1989, has served as "a bridge" in the way he connects conservative Christians and kindred politicians, said Angela Denker, a journalist and Lutheran pastor who earlier this year attended a conference on Christian nationalism hosted by Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy and the Boniuk Institute for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance in Houston.
"Jack Graham and pastors like him want us to think that the thing that connects him to Governor Abbott and to Paxton is their faith and Jesus and a commitment to Christianity," Denker told me in April. "But when you look into what actually connects them, it's a shared desire for money and power."
Conservative Texans who seek to blend their versions of Christianity with politics isn't a new phenomena, said Denker, who wrote about Graham in her 2019 book titled "Red State Christians: Understanding the Voters Who Elected Donald Trump." However, she believes it's important to consider the similar ways Graham and his political counterparts use language.
Ahead of the first debate in June between Trump and then-Democratic nominee President Joe Biden, Graham joined a conference call with evangelical pastors and a Jewish rabbi to pray for Trump as he sat on the call. On it, Graham said Trump would act as "a warrior for us" in the debate and that he believed the GOP nominee was "standing for us and always has been representing the principles and precepts of God's word that we strongly believe."
Trump, who earlier this year was convicted on 34 felony counts in a New York court for his participation in a hush-money scheme, said that Christians have been "persecuted" under Biden, a known devoted Catholic. "We need Christian voters to turn out" to win the November general election, Trump said. "Christians cannot afford to sit on the sidelines."
https://www.chron.com/culture/religion/article/texas-sbc-pastor-harris-walz-19629226.php
