Eric Johnson is the Mayor of Dallas. He’s also a faithful Christian whose faith led him to switch his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican, as he recently explained during an appearance on the “Verdict with Ted Cruz” podcast. Mayor Johnson’s party affiliation switch-up came after he won the race for America’s ninth-largest city with more than 90% of the vote.
Speaking with Sen. Cruz on the podcast, Mayor Johnson explained how he came slowly to the decision that he needed to change his party affiliation, with his focus particularly being on the issues he has with the Democratic Party’s stances on matters that he sees as conflicting with his Christian faith, a faith he has held since a young child.
Speaking on that, Mayor Johnson explained that his party-affiliation switch was an “evolution” that came as the result of him finally “coming to accept who I have always been and why I’ve struggled as a Democrat the whole time.” Continuing, he explained that the decision was the “manifestation of problems I had been having with the Democratic Party because of who I am as a person for a long time.”
Mayor Johnson then turned to explaining his faith background, noting that he had been raised in a family focused on faith and that the church was quite important to his family. “I was raised in a … family that was very, very faith-oriented,” Mayor Johnson explained. Emphasizing the importance of the church, he said, “The church was hugely important to us.”
Further emphasizing that point, he said that he “spent more time in church than really any place else.” Explaining the prominent role faith-focused activities played in his family life, he added, “We’d go to church Sunday morning, stay almost all day, go home for just a couple of hours and come back for Sunday evening. We’d go to Bible class on Wednesday.”
Mayor Johnson then turned back to the political situation, saying, “My family wasn’t political at all,” but adding that his family did teach him “a strong sense of just right, wrong” and “ how you treat people.” Those family teachings helped him understand “how you behave” and the important lesson that “you follow the law.”
But, despite those values, he became a Democrat. “I think I was always politically in a weird posture with the Democratic Party,” he said. Explaining his original party affiliation and how he came to it because of his ethnicity, he said, “you sort of inherit the Democratic Party as a cultural heirloom when you’re African American in this country.”
That then led to much unpleasantness when he switched his party: “It sort of gets handed to you as part of who you are. I know I had … more phone calls with people distraught about this party switch than I ever would have gotten if I had told people that I was actually leaving the church.”
But he switched his party affiliation despite that, as he saw the GOP and its values as better fitting his faith and views than the Democratic Party, particularly with the lessons it was teaching. He said, “The story of my life and then the rhetoric my party wanted me to put out there as the justification for what we were doing politically just never really matched.”
Featured image credit: By US Department of Labor – L-21-06-10-A-312, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=111556401
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