Why I’m Thinking about Senator James Lankford on Election Day

 

For over 50 years, the Baptist General Convention of Texas (Texas Baptists) has invited high school students to Super Summer, a weeklong summer retreat held on Texas Baptist campuses around the state. The leadership training camp is geared toward students who show special promise and have an eye toward ministry or Christian service in the world. “Send us your best, and we will send them back better” has been Super Summer’s defining slogan since at least 1989, when I first attended.

In addition to typical Christian camp activities such as games, Bible study, and evening worship, Super Summer divides attendees into small “family groups” made up of students who aren’t typically from each other’s home church. Adult Team Leaders (TLs) lead family groups and facilitate conversations and prayer.

Anyone who has been a part of white evangelical camp culture would recognize the group-therapy feel of Super Summer family groups. Students talk through what they are learning during Bible studies and worship, and process how it all applies to their daily lives. Often, trust built throughout the week led to deeply emotional moments of sharing on the last night of Super Summer and a promise to always stay in touch, which rarely happened.

Team Leaders come from a wide range of backgrounds, including pastors, youth ministers, Sunday school teachers, and college students. At the last Super Summer I attended before graduating from high school, my TL was a young seminary student named James Lankford.

I knew James Lankford for just a few days over three decades ago, so my memories are mere fragments. I do remember him as kind and thoughtful, but the adjective that stands out most is earnest. He was just a few years older than I, but having gone through college and the early years of seminary, he struck me as someone who took God seriously and believed the rest of us should as well.

After that week, I finished high school and attended various colleges before graduating from East Texas Baptist University, the campus where Lankford served as my Super Summer Team Leader.

Lankford completed seminary, served as director of Falls Creek Youth Camp, and oversaw student ministry programs, including Super Summer, in Oklahoma. In 2010, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Oklahoma, and in 2014, he won a special election to the U.S. Senate, where he has remained since.

As far as I know, Lankford and I never ran into each other after Super Summer, and I have no reason to believe he would remember me. But the Baptist waters we swam in were small, and I followed his relatively high-profile ministry and political career from a distance. And although our politics and theology have diverged significantly in recent years, he still strikes me as a decent human.

Walking the Tightrope

He isn’t a marquee name in U.S. politics, and he isn’t up for reelection. Even if he were, his seat would likely be very safe. Still, I’ve been thinking a lot about Lankford during this election cycle because he represents a particular category of American, one occupied by many in religious traditions similar to the Texas Baptist world that nurtured us.

Lankford isn’t slimy like Ted Cruz, but he still stands resolutely within the same evangelical stream of conservatism as his Senate colleague from across the Red River. And with John Cornyn, Texas’ other senator, he shares an ability to advance very conservative legislation while also pragmatically working across the aisle.

Another comparison with Cornyn, however, is a defining feature of Lankford, the evangelical who is otherwise mostly aligned with traditional Chamber of Commerce and internationalist Republicans: They both made a conscious decision after Donald Trump descended the escalator to do everything in their power to tiptoe through the MAGA years undetected. This meant a nearly 100% voting record with Trump’s policies and doing their best to ignore Trump’s brazen racism and misogyny. It included perfecting the “That’s not how I see things” response when Trump said or did something outrageous (or murderous), without addressing Trump’s actions directly.

But it also meant a keen awareness that Trumpism wouldn’t last forever, so they needed to carry themselves in a way that deviated from the obvious charlatanism of Franklin Graham and Paula White.

This worked strategically for Cornyn, until it didn’t. The president’s endorsement of Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who led the way in prosecuting Trump’s 2020 election lies, sank Cornyn’s political career. It will be interesting to see if Lankford meets a similar fate when he is up for reelection in 2028.

In 2017, Lankford condemned white supremacy after the Charlottesville riots, although he avoided mentioning Trump’s comments. He has tepidly spoken out against Trump’s tariffs and pardons of January 6 insurrectionists, but only on procedural grounds.

The closest he ever came to exhibiting political courage in public was during President Biden’s 2024 State of the Union address. Biden described the bipartisan border bill that Lankford helped negotiate and then named what was widely reported, which is that Trump tanked the bill so he could use the immigration issue on the campaign trail. With the cameras on him, Lankford voiced the words, “That’s true.”

After a group of Oklahoma GOP officials censured him for his apparent agreement, Lankford said he wasn’t agreeing with Biden’s comments about Trump, but with the details of his bill. He went on to criticize Biden’s handling of border issues.

After Trump

Today marks the beginning of the end of Trumpism, regardless of the outcome of the election. Whether Democrats take control of one or both houses of Congress or Republicans prove the polls and conventional wisdom wrong, the party of Trump will begin negotiating what a future without Trump looks like.

That doesn’t mean that Donald Trump won’t do some serious damage over the next two years, and it certainly doesn’t mean the Christian nationalism and white supremacy of his movement will die. Just as the white sheets became MAGA hats, it will simply find new clothes to wear.

But things change after today. Some in Trump’s circle will resign to pursue the presidency. Trump will pardon others before they can be held accountable in the MAGA Nuremberg Trials, whether those occur next year or decades from now.

I’m uninterested in any of those figures. History is clear on how they will be judged. I am immensely curious, however, about James Lankford and the particular brand of conservative Christians he represents.

Like many Christians in our native Texas and his adopted home of Oklahoma, he has sought to take advantage of all the policy benefits of the MAGA movement while avoiding any of the responsibility or shame. He expects everyone to treat the Trump moment like any other, while he lies low, waiting for it to pass.

Meanwhile, the blood of Alex Pretti, Renee Good, Wilber Perez, and 120 Iranian schoolchildren cries out from the ground. Women everywhere watch the most powerful person in the world — who has been held liable on multiple counts of sexual assault — yell “Quiet, Piggy” to a female reporter, in yet another of a multitude of indignities that go without comment from Republican officeholders. Americans everywhere are working second and third jobs away from their families to pay for tariffs and a war.

That’s why I’m thinking about James Lankford and the Christians he represents today. I want to see how they respond as Trump’s years wane.

Will they find their voices? Will their private condemnation of the immoral degeneracy of Trump be made public? Will they speak clearly and call him out by name, or will they continue with the rhetoric of ambiguity, demanding their opponents call out hate with specificity while they pussyfoot around condemning those who give them power by proximity?

Come to Jesus

Most importantly, will they repent of their silent complicity in the horrors of the past decade?

At Super Summer and other similar camps, Thursday night was a big night. It was the worship service where the week’s exhaustion and the emotions of the week’s end collided with the Spirit of truth. An invitation was given for students to change their ways and commit their lives fully to the Christ who bids all of us to “take up our cross and follow him.”

Those moments came with an unhealthy level of pressure and shame, and many of us have spent years recovering from the psychological damage of that form of Christianity. But they also represented something that may need to be revived in this moment, which is a sense of being convicted and seen for who we are, and encouraged to do better.

I suspect James Lankford and others like him are weary from the burden of tiptoeing around the President as they watch his Caligula-like impulses erode the possibilities of what could have been. I pray this moment for them is a moment of repentance, so they can be relieved of the burden and move forward with hope.