'This is not an endorsement'
Mercy Culture has once again anointed its candidates for the upcoming election.
Hello and thanks for reading.
I'm not, in principle, opposed to people bringing their religious beliefs into politics. Political movements are always a reflection of people’s values, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to ask believers to simply set aside their basic moral worldview in order to participate in a political process. Plus, I have a lot of respect for liberation theology and other religious traditions that actually care about the poor and the oppressed.
What I am opposed to are openly theocratic projects that want to dismantle secular governments and replace them with a punitive police state in which laws are simply an extension of a particular church’s doctrine. And I'm especially opposed to churches that show open disdain for election law while pretending they are doing no such thing.
That’s right, I'm talking about Mercy Culture again.
In 2022, its pastors drew media scrutiny for supporting a slate of far-right Republican candidates for elected office, in defiance of federal laws that bar churches from openly endorsing individual politicians. As the Fort Worth Report documented, in a story published two days before the midterm elections:
During the Republican primaries this spring, [senior pastor Landon] Schott and other church leaders threw their support behind [Tim] O’Hare and [Matt] Krause. This fall, Mercy Culture has promoted a “friends and family list” of candidates – all Republicans – that share 12 core traits, including Christian values, which the group describes as the pursuit of purity, daily personal encounters with God, trust and generosity, among others. The list includes O’Hare and [Nate] Schatzline, among other statewide and local candidates.
Lest you conclude the obvious — that the church or its nonprofit surrogates were endorsing candidates, which would violate federal tax law — Mercy Culture paired its preferred choices with an unconvincing disclaimer: “This is not an endorsement.”
The church and its political arm, the nonprofit For Liberty and Justice, are adopting the same strategy in 2024. Early voting for primary elections in Texas is already underway, and right on cue, Mercy Culture announced this year’s list of “friends and family” candidates at last week’s Sunday service.
Here’s a video of the full service, though if you follow this link, it should take you to the precise moment I’m talking about.
The livestream of the service in question is actually difficult to find. Normally, recordings of Mercy Culture’s services are posted to the church YouTube channel. But for some reason, while a video of pastor Aaron Christopherson giving a stilted sermon is accessible on the main feed, the video of the full Sunday service is unlisted, meaning you can only access it if you already have the link. Intentionally or not, this makes it more difficult to research and document the church’s political involvement.
Here’s how this year’s definitely-not-endorsements went down:
After an initial forty minutes of uninterrupted worship music, Nate Schatzline, current sitting representative for Texas House District 93 and founder of For Liberty and Justice, walked out on stage and introduced himself, as if he wasn’t already well-known to the congregation, advertised Mercy Culture’s online worship program, and then started talking politics from the pulpit.
“In the last two years we have seen — and I know this is insane, it’s hard to even believe — we have seen forty-eight of our friends and family take public office in Tarrant County alone,” he said. “Is that not insane? It’s insane.”
I haven’t fact-checked this number or seen it fact-checked by local news outlets, nor have I been able to track down a concrete list of the forty-eight public officials Schatzline refers to. While I have no particular reason to think he’s lying, that number seems high and may include statewide candidates that For Liberty and Justice endorsed named as part of its “friends and family” list like Gov. Greg Abbott or Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Schatzline continued:
“So what we do is: we invite some of our friends and family,” he said. “The way we think of it is this: If your brother, sister, cousin, uncle — you name it — was running for office, you would want to know. So we have some of our friends and family — if you would stand — right here, who are taking a leap and running for public office in Tarrant County.”
He then name-checked the candidates in attendance at Sunday’s service:
John O’Shea and Clint Dorris, who are both hoping to replace Kay Granger in U.S. House District 12;
Texas House Rep. David Cook, who represents District 96 and is up for re-election, along with Schatzline in District 93;
Cheryl Bean, who is seeking to represent Texas House District 97;
Bill Waybourn, who Schatzline described as “the greatest sheriff in America;
Rick Barnes, former Tarrant County Republican Party Chair, who is running for county tax assessor-collector;
Michael Barber, who is running for Tarrant County Commissioner Precinct 1
Constable Scott Bedford of Precinct 4;
William Knight, a candidate for judge in Criminal District Court No. 2;
Judge George Gallagher of the 396th District Court, who has held the office since 2000.
Then came the disclaimer: “It’s not an endorsement of these candidates,” Schatzline said and reiterated that these political figures are “friends and family of ours and our church that share our values.”
I want to dwell, briefly, on the precise implications of the “friends and family” language. On one level, it’s a blatant attempt to deny the reality that anyone with eyes can see: That Mercy Culture and its nonprofits are political institutions that routinely intervene and attempt to influence local civic issues, whether that’s a primary election or the mayor’s summer reading list. To try and pretend Mercy Culture’s list of preferred candidates is equivalent to your brother or close friend running for office is disingenuous and, frankly, insulting. No one actually believes this.
But using the term “friends and family” also feels like a very particular manifestation of how conservative, cult-like churches exercise power over their congregations. Transforming a mass political mobilization into an intimate relationship — a matter of friends supporting friends, family supporting family — is a method of ensuring loyalty. Friendships and family ties are easily disrupted by political disagreements. Do you want to lose your church family by voting the wrong way? Do you want to alienate your church friends by disagreeing with their politics?
“We have a civil obligation as the church to get out and vote so we can take ground in the political realm,” Schatzline said at the end of the service.
This is the same “political realm” that Mercy Culture Church elder and failed Fort Worth mayoral candidate Steve Penate told the congregation was being occupied by “the enemy” back in 2022. How long do you think you’d last in a church if you disregarded your civil obligation, if you voted against Schatzline or any of the other candidates at Sunday’s service, if you voted for the enemy? This is a very clear way of drawing political battle lines and ensuring that your supporters stay on the correct — in this case, the right — side.