Ken Paxton's political career, more than that of any other Republican candidate campaigning in this cycle, charts the arc of the religious right. The most influential of its activists and donors engineered his rise as a culture warrior at each of its phases from his creation through every disgrace. His race for the Senate, the culmination of his ambition, has become not only his last stand, but also the Alamo for Christian nationalists in Texas.
Impeachment and Sexual Scandals
Paxton's rap sheet explains his Christian identity politics as a shield to distract from the liability of his own record of financial and sexual scandals scrolling back decades. The 20 articles of impeachment against Paxton, adopted by the Republican-controlled Texas house of representatives in May 2023, were double the Ten Commandments that Paxton insists should be displayed in every Texas classroom.
Paxton had allegedly engaged in bribery when a campaign contributor, Nate Paul, secured a job for Paxton's alleged mistress, a former senate aide, at World Class Holdings, a real estate firm owned by Paul. Paul allegedly created a fake Uber account for Paxton to travel secretly for liaisons with his mistress and paid for renovations at Paxton's house. In exchange, Paxton allegedly interfered with a federal inquiry into accusations of financial fraud against Paul involving $172m in loans by passing on sealed FBI documents, installing a special prosecutor in his office as the state's attorney general to target and harass the federal agents and judges investigating Paul's crimes, and halting foreclosures on Paul's properties. In April 2025, Paul took a plea deal of four months of home confinement, five years of supervised release, and a $1m fine.
The Republican-dominated Texas senate by a 16-to-14 vote acquitted Paxton in his impeachment trial in September 2023. After Paxton's federal indictment in 2015 on felony counts of financial securities fraud, he avoided trial by copping a plea under which he would perform 100 hours of community service, take 15 hours of legal ethics courses, and pay $271,000 in restitution to the fleeced investors.
Family and Political Alliances
Paxton's wife, the state senator Angela Paxton, attended the impeachment trial, but was barred from voting. She had been instrumental in advancing his career, a political force in her own right, a crucial conduit to Christian nationalist leaders and funders. They had met as students at Baylor University, had four children, and she presented their “sacred covenant” as a faith-based partisan calling. “I'm a pistol-packing mama, and my husband sues Obama,” she told cheering crowds. He financed her election with a $2m loan from his campaign fund, and once in office she filed bills to increase his office and salary.
In July 2025, Angela Paxton filed for divorce on “biblical grounds”. This July, Paxton was photographed on a trip to Iceland and London with the Christian influencer Tracy Duhon. The religious right that raised up Paxton has cared little about his transgressions so long as they could prop him up to wield power. The alliance has been a perfect marriage of hypocrisy and cynicism in the name of traditional values.
Origins in the Southern Baptist Convention
The origin story begins at New Orleans' legendary Café du Monde in 1967, where Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson forged a pact to take over the Southern Baptist Convention to transform it into a political machine for a “Conservative Resurgence” and to purge moderates. Both had been duly anointed for their holy task.
Pressler's grandfather and hero, EE Townes, an oil industry lawyer, was a leader of the Texas Regulars movement in favor of “white supremacy”, as Townes explained, and the lifting of wartime price controls on oil and gas. The Regulars sought to defeat President Franklin D Roosevelt's re-election in 1944. Four years later, the Regulars folded into the segregationist Dixiecrat party. Townes leveraged the election of his grandson, young Pressler, to the Texas house, where he sponsored pro-segregationist legislation.
Pressler sought out Paige Patterson, an apostle of WA Criswell, fundamentalist pastor of the mammoth First Baptist Church of Dallas, who denounced civil rights activists as “infidels” and John F Kennedy's candidacy for president in 1960 on the basis that he was a stalking horse for the pope. Criswell would appoint Patterson the head of his Criswell Center for Biblical Studies, a power base of 14 churches.
In 1979, Pressler, by then appointed a Texas state judge, and Patterson applied their clout within the SBC to elect its president. “It was like Gettysburg,” said Pressler. “But this time the right side won.” Moderates were systematically fired from Southern Baptist seminaries and bureaucracy. “We are going for the jugular,” Pressler said.
Building a Political Machine
Pressler and Patterson begat Kelly Shackelford, who in 1997 founded the First Liberty Institute, a Christian conservative legal organization, around which he created a powerful political machine, raising tens of millions from a handful of billionaire oilmen, mobilizing evangelicals and electing rightwing Republicans. In effect, the vision of the Texas Regulars was realized.
Shackelford begat Greg Abbott, elected Texas attorney general in 2002, meshing their operations on religious right cases. At the same time, Shackelford begat Ken Paxton, the force behind his run for the Texas house. Shackelford, Paxton and his wife Angela had all attended Baylor together. Then, when Abbott ran for governor in 2014, Shackelford backed Paxton to replace him as attorney general. Pressler served on Paxton's advisory committee.
Paxton hired more than half a dozen of Shackelford's staff lawyers, including his general counsel, Jeff Mateer, who became the assistant attorney general, and threw the full weight of his office behind Shackelford's culture war litigation. In 2020, Mateer had a crisis of conscience and reported Paxton to the FBI for alleged bribery, but Shackelford stood by Paxton, keeping the Christian right in line and providing money for his legal defense.
Shackelford had been busy begetting a slew of rightwing politicians to take over the Texas Republican party: Senator Ted Cruz, the lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, and a host of Texas legislators. The Texas state senate that refused to remove Paxton after he was impeached by the house had been packed. The Defend Texas Liberty Pac, funded by Shackelford's oilmen, threatened the political future of any Republican who voted to convict Paxton. Dan Patrick, who presided over the trial as judge, received $3m in loans and contributions.
Shackelford also begat Mike Johnson, long before he became speaker of the House, originally a litigator at First Liberty, selected in 2010 to become the founding dean of the new Paul Pressler School of Law in Louisiana, which collapsed in 2012 due to lack of funding and failure to achieve accreditation.
Pressler's Abuse Allegations
Since the early 1980s, there were more than rumors about Pressler's predations as a pedophile. Moderate Baptists were closely documenting his observable pattern of sexual abuse of boys and young men. In 2004, the First Baptist Church of Houston where Pressler was a deacon investigated a complaint that Pressler molested a young man. Church leaders sent Pressler a private warning letter saying the conduct was “morally and spiritually inappropriate” and could “distort your testimony” if it came to light. That letter remained private for more than a decade. In a separate incident that year, Pressler privately settled a suit for $450,000 with Duane Rollins, who alleged that as a 14-year-old he had been repeatedly raped by Pressler. Jared Woodfill, Pressler's law partner who helped fundraise for Paxton, was informed of the allegations. For years afterwards, Woodfill maintained Pressler as a law partner, though he performed no work, compensating him by sending him a string of young men to serve as assistants, three of whom have accused Pressler of sexual misconduct. (Pressler, who died in 2024, denied the allegations against him and was never criminally charged. Woodfill has denied wrongdoing.)
Duane Rollins filed a new lawsuit in 2017, this time naming the SBC and multiple Baptist entities, not just Pressler, and alleging the SBC leadership covered up the abuse. After the news of his suit broke in the Texas Tribune, other young men stepped forward with similar allegations. In 2019, the Houston Chronicle reporter Robert Downen wrote investigative reports documenting widespread sexual abuse across Southern Baptist churches broadly, of which Pressler was only one example.
Downen's reporting sparked the SBC to commission an investigation that unearthed allegations against 263 church leaders in 30 states and an extensive pattern of cover-up. After its publication, the SBC stonewalled further inquiry and its officials denounced it all as a “reckless hoax”.
Pressler died in 2024. Paige Patterson was disgraced when he was accused of advising women who endured marital abuse to pray for their husbands while he was president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He was ousted in 2018. Patterson and the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary were dismissed from Rollins's lawsuit against Pressler in 2023. The school had immortalized Pressler and Patterson as virtual saints with stained glass windows in its chapel, but after their fall from grace the windows were quietly removed.
Smears Against Opponent
On a political precipice, Paxton projects himself as a specimen of hypermasculinity to feminize his opponent – his actual opposite in other respects – a Presbyterian seminarian animated by social justice, James Talarico. “Low-T Talarico Too Weak For Texas,” ran one TV ad. Paxton has mocked him with a blizzard of nicknames: “Tofu Talarico”, “Six-gender Jimmy” and “James Tala-freako”. Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, has chimed in, falsely, on X: “The Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender senate candidate.” A conservative group produced an AI generated ad with a phoney Talarico in a dress singing a song from The Sound of Music about “changing the gender of all your offspring”. Paxton then posted an AI-generated ad of a fake Talarico drawing in crayon on a “Talarico King James Bible”, delivering a sermon of false and distorted statements about religion and sex: “wrong for Texas”. A rightwing Pac supported Paxton with a $10m buy of a deepfake AI ad depicting Talarico as a surgeon apparently performing a sex reassignment operation on a girl. In fact, Talarico is opposed to transgender surgery for minors and trans athletes' participation in women's sports.
The more unnerved Paxton becomes, the deeper he descends to smears to incite a sexual panic. Through his calumnies, he positions himself as defender of the faith. He evangelizes for restoring “Judeo-Christian values” and protecting them from the threat of Talarico, “a Christian who hates Christianity”, he says.
Paxton is indeed a throwback to a venerable tradition. His archetype appeared in Sinclair Lewis's novel, Elmer Gantry, published in 1927, about a licentious preacher and political conman. “He had, in fact,” wrote Lewis, “got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason.”
