On Election Day in Texas, I was working out at the Elzie Odom Recreation Center down the street from my home. As I reached the top of the stairs, I encountered signs pointing right to the Democratic polling room and left to the Republican polling room. As I lifted weights, my eye was drawn to the stream of retirement-age men and women wandering down the hall to vote for either Ken Paxton or John Cornyn in the Republican run-off.
They looked like normal Texans, like people who get in the car every Sunday morning and drive to a Baptist or nondenominational church. And yet most of them — if the polls are any indication — were intent on voting for Paxton, arguably the most corrupt political figure in American history.
Alan Bean
Later that evening, when I searched for election results, I wasn’t surprised to see Paxton winning in a runaway. It wasn’t close. Asked to choose between a standard-issue Texas Republican and a man who has used the office of Texas attorney general to enrich himself while engaging in a public affair with a mistress and firing former staffers who dared to criticize his bad acts, they went with the bad guy. They voted for a man who has engaged in the grossest forms of race baiting and anti-Islamic mud-slinging. They voted for a man who continued to portray himself as a faithful Christian even as his wife, Angela, was divorcing him “on biblical grounds.”
The margin of victory, coupled with the fact that Cornyn has spent decades earning his conservative bona fides, suggests Texas Republicans, especially those of the MAGA (and evangelical) persuasion, weren’t holding their noses. They were somehow excited by Paxton’s lowdown ways. They were drawn to his transgressive persona like bugs to a flame.
“After a decade dominated by a flamboyant sinner like Donald Trump, this should come as no surprise.”
After a decade dominated by a flamboyant sinner like Donald Trump, this should come as no surprise. Normal church-going folk love the sin and love the sinner (at least a certain species of sinner) even more. Why?
For the same reason, I suppose, Satan got all the best lines in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Sinners, the Prince of Darkness included, are exciting.
That’s why every other drama on Netflix revels in the sordid details of serial murder.
Imagine professional wrestling without bad guys.
Imagine a novel without a single protagonist.
When my son, Adam, was 10, he wrote a little story about the boy who could only hit home runs. Because he always knocked it out of the park, his team won every game, then swept through the playoffs and took home the big trophy without breaking a sweat. Hardly gripping stuff. A good story needs a villain.
The hard-working, decent people of Germany weren’t drawn to Adolf Hitler because they didn’t realize what he was up to. They knew, at least in general outline, that Jewish men, women and children were being shipped off to a very bad place.
“The hard-working, decent people of Germany weren’t drawn to Adolf Hitler because they didn’t realize what he was up to.”
I remember talking to an elderly woman in one of my congregations who had lived in Nazi Germany as a girl. “In the middle of the night,” she told me, with tears streaming down her face. “I remember the trains. I remember seeing all those people crammed in like cattle. I didn’t know what was happening, but my mother, my father, my grandparents had to know! And now I’m not sure how I live with that!”
Dedicated Christian white folk were drawn to standard Southern lynching precisely because it was transgressive. The more sadistic the horrors heaped on the poor wretch being garroted or probed with hot irons, the greater the delight. The act of lynching violated every tenet of the Christian faith to which everyone in the crowd ascribed. It provided a needed counterpoint to the love of God. In fact, worship services often would let out early so people wouldn’t miss the excitement. Worship was the yin; lynching was the yang.
This is what the theologians mean by human fallenness. There’s something wrong with us. Way deep down. We need fixing. Hence the Christian gospel.
But what if the gospel-people revel in being the worst offenders? What if our redemption doesn’t appear to be taking? What if the folks most inclined to celebrate the glorious love and tender mercy of God are far more likely to bar desperate migrants from crossing the border, more likely to resent the growing success of minority communities, and more willing to dismiss the egregious behavior of their political and religious champions, than the balance of the population?
How do we live with these contradictions?
We live with them because we must. Bugs are drawn to a flame; human beings are drawn to the heat and excitement of transgressive darkness. It’s just a fact.
“Bugs are drawn to a flame; human beings are drawn to the heat and excitement of transgressive darkness.”
The miracle is that some people are really and truly in the process of being redeemed. The old cliché that “no one is perfect” needs to be eliminated from conversation. Of course none of us is perfect. We don’t even qualify as pretty good.
That said, the gospel does take root in human soil. Here and there, we find whole communities of people confessing their sins with wholeness of heart. We find people willing to sacrifice for hurting people they never will meet. We find people caring for the stranger.
In other words, we can be converted. We are morally compromised, but we aren’t completely stuck. We can turn around and march (or, at least, hobble) in a love-ward direction.
And, mercifully, this applies to the good Texans I watched wandering down the hall of the Elzie Odom Recreation Center to vote for a philandering crook. I don’t claim to understand this behavior, but because I believe the gospel, I am saved from despair.
We can’t shake the darkness altogether. We move through this world as self-absorbed, fearful people. But our world is leavened with the love of God in Christ Jesus, so we do not give up. We don’t give up on ourselves. We don’t give up on our ideological opposites. We can’t give up on humanity. And we shouldn’t give up on the good men and women of Texas who appear desperate to send a cartoonish villain to the United States Senate.
Alan Bean leads the nonprofit Friends of Justice and lives in Fort Worth, Texas, where he attends Broadway Baptist Church.
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