You really have to feel sorry for Robert Jeffress. The faithful are looking to the pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, which once claimed to be the world’s largest Baptist congregation, for political advice. He’s under some pressure to deliver.
Over the past three presidential elections, Jeffress declared that Donald Trump was the right choice for evangelicals, praising him as the most “faith-friendly” president in history. This support has created some awkward moments.
During the 2016 campaign, for example, when the Access Hollywood tape appeared and Trump bragged about grabbing women, Jeffress told Fox that the candidate’s words were “crude, offensive, and indefensible, but they’re not enough to make me vote for Hillary Clinton.”
Or consider Jeffress’ response to Trump’s sexual relationship with the adult film actress Stormy Daniels, which occurred shortly after Melania Trump gave birth to Barron Trump. “Even if it’s proven to be true,” Jeffress shrugged, “it doesn’t matter.” He added that evangelicals “knew they weren’t voting for an altar boy.”
It’s important to stick with your principles. Family values and all that.
There are 30,573 false or misleading statements documented by the Washington Post during Trump’s first term, not to mention his 34 felony convictions.
How about when Trump threatened to bomb Iranian bridges and power plants in an expletive-laden post on Easter Sunday? “Open the Strait, you crazy bastards,” he wrote, inserting a rather well-known expletive. If not, Trump promised, Iran would be “living in Hell.”
Jeffress dismissed such crude and bellicose language as inconsequential. “If President Trump were a third-grade Sunday school teacher in our church, that might be a problem, but he’s not a third-grade Sunday school teacher,” Jeffress told CBS. “He’s the president of the United States, and presidents sometimes have salty language. Every president we’ve had, Republican or Democrat, has had salty language.”
Well, maybe so. When I was writing my biography of Jimmy Carter, I came across his reaction on learning that Edward M. Kennedy would challenge him for the Democratic nomination in 1980. The president told reporters that he would “whip his ass.”
Jeffress is not the first pastor of First Baptist in Dallas to equivocate on religious and political matters. One of his predecessors, W.A. Criswell, defended the separation of church and state in 1960 when John F. Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, was running for president. “It is written in our country’s constitution that church and state must be, in this nation, separate and free,” Criswell declared, adding that “there can be no proper union of church and state.”
During the Reagan era, however, the heyday of the Religious Right, Criswell changed his tune: “I believe this notion of the separation of church and state was the figment of some infidel’s imagination.”
Moral flexibility apparently is considered a virtue at First Baptist.
With no presidential election this year, the followers of Jeffress are waiting—with bated breath, I’m sure—to hear the pastor’s wisdom on the Senate election in Texas. James Talarico, a member of the state House of Representatives and a Presbyterian seminarian, captured the Democratic nomination. He speaks frequently about his Christian faith and how it informs his politics.
Ahead of a runoff on the Republican side, pitting John Cornyn, the four-term incumbent, against Ken Paxton, Texas attorney general, Jeffress was asked who he would support in the general election.
Cornyn has been one of Trump’s enablers in Congress, but Paxton’s record of corruption rivals that of Trump himself—which may explain why Trump endorsed Paxton ahead of the runoff. Paxton was indicted on felony charges for securities fraud in 2015, and the attorney general was impeached in 2023 by the Texas House of Representatives, a chamber dominated by fellow Republicans. The twenty articles of impeachment included bribery, false statements, conspiracy and obstruction of justice.
In 2025, Paxton’s wife, Angela, a state senator, filed for divorce on “biblical grounds,” shorthand for adultery.
So, whom shall it be, Pastor Jeffress, Talarico or the Republican nominee?
That’s easy, the pastor told Christian Post. Anyone but the Democratic nominee, including the “family values” avatar, Ken Paxton. Talarico, Jeffress declared, “cannot be the next senator from Texas.”
So, Paxton it is. Moral flexibility apparently is considered a virtue at First Baptist.
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
An Episcopal priest, Balmer is John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College and the author of more than a dozen books, with commentaries appearing in newspapers across the country. He is a contributing correspondent at Good Faith Media.