Mark Lamb threatened to send law enforcement after a woman who could testify against him. That is the finding at the center of the Arizona Republic’s investigation of his tenure as Pinal County sheriff, and it is the breach this congressional race is actually about.
Two rules are in play in this district, and the record places him in breach of both. The first is the rule of the office: a sheriff’s authority exists to establish facts and to protect the public from liars and predators. It does not exist to punish a private citizen for telling the truth about the sheriff. The second is the rule of the covenant: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints holds chastity — fidelity within marriage — as sacred, and reserves the right to discipline members whose conduct violates it. Two of the state’s six temples of that church sit inside this district. Mark Lamb runs for Congress on the second rule’s vocabulary — “God, Family, Freedom” is his campaign slogan — while his tenure as sheriff stands charged under the first.
Here is the record, stated plainly, because the record is where this question lives. The Arizona Republic’s investigation alleges multiple affairs, sexually explicit messages sent to a woman outside his marriage, and a threat to send law enforcement after her if she spoke publicly. Set the first two allegations aside for a moment — not because they do not matter, but because there is one breach here that stands independent of all the others. Even if every allegation about Lamb’s private conduct were false, he has declined to demonstrate that by answering any of them — and the reported threat is itself a breach of the office regardless. A sheriff who would send the department after a woman for speaking has converted the machinery of law into a silencing instrument. That is not a scandal in a man’s private life. That is the weaponization of entrusted authority against a witness.
And the witness is not a politician. She is a private woman — not an opponent, not a party operative, not a figure of the public square. She was reportedly threatened with the office he held for the crime of what she might say about him. That asymmetry is the heart of the breach: a powerful man, shielded by the very institution that exists to pursue truth, using that institution to threaten the person who could supply it.
I have sat in women’s Bible studies where Matthew 18 was read aloud — the passage that tells a believer how to handle a brother’s fault: go to him privately; if he will not listen, take witnesses; if he still will not listen, tell it to the church. I have watched that passage do its full work on women in the congregation — the quiet removal, the discipline, the loss of standing — and I have watched it stall in front of men with authority. I taught some of those lessons. The machinery does not fail by accident. It fails toward the powerful.
Which brings me to the text, because the text is where this question lives, and the text does not say what a campaign slogan needs it to say.
Matthew 18:15–17: “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church.”
Read that in plain English. I was raised on a reading of this passage that had it saying almost the opposite of what it says — the reading that treats Matthew 18 as the church’s instruction to keep a matter quiet, to go privately and stay there, to protect the institution’s name. That reading is a legalism, and it is younger than the text it claims to derive from. The plain language of the passage moves in exactly the other direction. From private, to corroborated, to open — “tell it to the church,” which means: bring it before the community, in the open, where the matter can be weighed. The process Jesus describes does not end with the accused’s denial before an audience that has already decided. It ends with the community establishing what is true.
Now set that passage beside the district. The church, as the Arizona Republic reported, examined the claims about Lamb’s sexual improprieties. Whether formal discipline followed — and what it consisted of — is a matter the voters of this district are entitled to know. A covenant that reserves the right to discipline must be willing to name its own process and disclose its own outcome, or the reservation is decoration on a slogan. And the candidate himself must answer the record rather than the room. At a June appearance at the Encores Conservative Club, Lamb denied the allegations — “I’ve been called a racist. I’ve been called a misogynist … these are lies. Every single bit of it.” That is not a rebuttal; it is a crowd’s applause doing the work that testimony is supposed to do. A rebuttal would name the findings: which affair did not occur, which message was not sent, and why a woman was reportedly threatened with law enforcement for speaking. He has named none of them.
Which is precisely what the church’s own standard forbids. The witness standard Holly Andersen cited from 2 Corinthians 13:1 — “In the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established” — is old. Paul is quoting Deuteronomy. The community establishes what is true by weighing corroborated testimony, not by counting the friends in the room. Multiple women have come forward. The candidate has one performance at one club. On the church’s own standard, the witnesses are not outweighed by the crowd; they are the procedure.
And there is one more thing the text will not let me set aside, because it is the very thing this slogan trades on. Mark 7:13. Jesus rebukes the Pharisees for a specific maneuver — “thus making the word of God of none effect through your tradition.” His complaint is not that they abandoned the covenant’s vocabulary. His complaint is that they kept the vocabulary and voided the content: tradition had become a way to honor the covenant in speech while releasing it in practice. “God, Family, Freedom” is covenant vocabulary in campaign dress. The question a voter in this district is entitled to ask is not whether the slogan is well made. It is whether the slogan is true of the man holding it — and, if it is not, what the slogan is doing on the literature.
The women turning away from Lamb are not Democrats discovering politics in a church parking lot. Kimberly Tait is a lifelong Republican who changed her registration to independent in 2016; she did not leave her standard, she applied it — and found that “the candidate and all that they represent is the antithesis” of the slogan he runs on. Suzanne Lunt, a former Republican who co-chaired Republicans for Biden after January 6, left the party on the same principle she is applying to this candidate: a stated standard the powerful are exempt from is not a standard. These are not operatives. They are the precedent — believers who decided that a covenant is not a credential.
I want to be careful here, because there is a move available to me that I will not make. It would be easy to write that this is what a political party has become, or that religious voters are fools for ever trusting a man with a slogan. I have no interest in any of that, and the text has none either. What happened in this district is not a verdict on a creed. It is what happens when a religious vocabulary is detached from the discipline it names and put on a ballot — the covenant quoted, the conduct excused, and the community asked to treat the quote as the answer. That maneuver is not the property of one party or one church. It is the shape a legalism takes wherever it appears. The legalism is the substitution. The faith is not on trial.
Concede what can be conceded, plainly. The Cook Political Report rates the seat Solidly Republican. Trump carried it by roughly twenty points. Andy Biggs is sitting it out to run for governor, and Mark Lamb will probably be elected to Congress from Arizona’s 5th District in November. The Democrats see a scandal and a swing seat; that is their business. The political result is not in much dispute. What is in dispute is what the voters of that district are being asked to bless on their way to it.
So here is the demand, and it does not move with the polls. Name the church’s process. Disclose the discipline, if any was imposed. Test the candidate’s denial against the Arizona Republic’s specific findings instead of waving it away at a conservative club. And treat the women applying their own covenant’s standard as what they are — the ones doing the church’s actual work, weighing testimony, refusing to let a slogan stand in for an answer. A discipline that is never applied to the powerful is not a discipline. It is a brand. And a covenant is not a brand.
Matthew 18 ends: “tell it to the church.” Not “tell it to the club.” Not “tell it to the crowd that has already decided.” To the church — which, in the plain language of the text, means into the open, where the matter can be weighed and answered. The women of this district are already there, doing the weighing. The question is not whether these believers can see what they are looking at. The question is whether the institutions that claim his covenant will look at it with them.