Texas Senator Banks on Faith Leaders Who Pushed Gang of Eight Betrayal

John Cornyn wants Texas conservatives to trust him. He’s banking on that trust by rolling out a Faith Advisory Council stacked with pastors who’ve got their names all over an amnesty push funded by George Soros. You read that right. The senior senator from Texas, locked in a runoff with Attorney General Ken Paxton, thinks evangelical cover will smooth over the inconvenient truth that his spiritual advisors have been championing open borders policies for years.

Let’s talk about who these pastors really are. Max Lucado from Oak Hills Church in San Antonio, Dr. Jack Graham of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, and Dr. Gus Reyes of Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission in Dallas all signed onto something called the Evangelical Immigration Table. Sounds harmless enough until you dig into what they’re actually advocating. Their principles include establishing a path toward legal status and citizenship for illegal aliens. That’s amnesty, plain and simple, no matter how many flowery words you wrap around it.

The Evangelical Immigration Table isn’t some grassroots movement of concerned pastors. It’s a project of the National Immigration Forum, a left-wing organization that’s taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Financial records don’t lie. This is the same playbook we’ve seen for decades now. Progressive money flows into organizations that then recruit well-meaning religious leaders to provide moral cover for policies that undermine American sovereignty and the rule of law.

Here’s what grinds my gears about this whole setup. These aren’t fringe figures Cornyn is embracing. Graham leads one of the largest Baptist churches in America. Lucado has written dozens of bestselling Christian books. They’ve got massive platforms and genuine influence among believers. And they used that influence to push the Gang of Eight amnesty bill that would’ve been a disaster for American workers and border security. That bill would’ve legalized millions of illegal aliens while promising enforcement that everyone knew would never materialize. We’ve seen this movie before with the 1986 amnesty that was supposed to solve everything and instead created the incentive structure for today’s border crisis.

The timing here matters too. Cornyn is facing a serious challenge from Paxton, who’s built his reputation fighting federal overreach and defending Texas sovereignty. So what does Cornyn do? He surrounds himself with religious leaders whose immigration stance aligns more with Chuck Schumer than with the average Texas Republican primary voter. It’s political malpractice or calculated deception, take your pick.

You know what’s missing from this conversation? Any acknowledgment that supporting the rule of law and controlled immigration isn’t incompatible with Christian compassion. Plenty of evangelical leaders understand that a nation without borders isn’t a nation at all. They recognize that importing poverty doesn’t solve poverty and that American workers deserve consideration too. But those voices don’t get the Soros money or the favorable media coverage.

Cornyn’s Faith Advisory Council reveals the establishment playbook in miniature. Find respected community leaders, preferably ones with moral authority. Get them to endorse your campaign. Hope voters don’t look too closely at what these leaders actually believe about policy. It’s cynical and it treats conservative voters like we’re too unsophisticated to notice the contradiction between campaign rhetoric and governing reality.

Texas Republicans deserve better than this shell game. They deserve a senator who doesn’t need to hide behind pastors with questionable alliances to make his case. The faith community has every right to speak on immigration, but voters have every right to ask why their senator keeps gravitating toward the voices funded by progressive billionaires pushing amnesty.