RALEIGH, N.C. — In a video of a private call with campaign supporters, obtained by The News & Observer, the Republican candidate for a key state Senate seat compares voting to a biblical parable of God sorting people into heaven or hell.
The candidate, E.C. Sykes, then encourages his wife to tell a story about challenging a school board candidate to prove his faith. After his wife invokes Judas, the false disciple who betrayed Jesus, Sykes then jumps back in, telling supporters on the call to remember that message.
“Sometimes you’re voting on policy issues that are not so spiritually based,” he said in the private call. “But in this particular time, a lot of them are. So wow, talk about being in the middle of a battle. We’re right there.”
The Senate race in northern Wake County and Granville County is expected to be one of the closest in the state this year. It’s possible that it will be the race that determines whether Republicans have a veto-proof supermajority for the rest of Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s time in office.
“Disrespectful, denigrating and degrading rhetoric is not leadership,” the Democratic candidate in the race, Mary Wills Bode, said Friday. “And there is no room for vitriolic language in Senate District 18. We need to be electing people who will bring people together, and not tear them apart.”
Sykes is a former manufacturing CEO who led religious outreach for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign. Bode is a lawyer who previously led the anti-gerrymandering group North Carolinians For Redistricting Reform.
Sykes never directly says, in the leaked video, that people will go to hell if they vote for Democrats. But his use of a well-known biblical parable, to compare voters sorting themselves at the polls to how God will sort people into heaven and hell, raised questions of whether he intended to imply that.
When asked Friday about his comments in the video, Sykes said he does not believe people will go to hell based on how they vote.
“From a salvation, heaven or hell standpoint, it’s not party,” he said. “It’s your belief in Jesus Christ, and that alone. I don’t reasonably believe there’s parties in heaven. So that’s not the intent at all.”
As told in the Gospel of Matthew, the parable of the sheep and the goats contains some of the most well-known Bible verses, revolving around the main message: “‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”
People who do good deeds will go to heaven, the parable tells believers, while those who don’t “are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” The parable says God will know and be able to sort people into heaven or hell just as easily as a shepherd can sort the sheep from the goats in his herd.
A similar type of sorting has been happening at the polling places this year, Sykes said in the video obtained by The N&O.
“It’s almost like a sheep and goats type thing, when you walk down the lines,” he said in the call.
He then asks his wife, Susan Sykes, to tell a story about how she recently challenged a Democratic candidate for Wake County school board, who is also a preacher, to prove that he’s really a Christian. She starts off by mentioning that many people believe Democrats inherently can’t be Christians — but that when she meets Democrats at polling places, “I just try to remember they’re people.”
But one day at the polls she met Doug Hammack, a candidate for school board with a doctorate and masters in divinity, who is a registered Democrat and who has been a Christian minister for 30 years. She said she challenged him to testify to his faith, she said in the call, then compared him and other Democrats to Judas.
“I saw very clearly that this man did not know Christ,” Susan Sykes told her husband’s supporters on the call. “And I was telling E.C., I think it was yesterday in prayer time, I said, this is like a sorting. People are coming to the polls and it’s like they’re being sorted. ... It was just so sad. And I thought of Judas, and him selling out.”
Susan Sykes never named Hammack specifically, but he’s the only school board candidate who’s a Democrat and a minister. Reached by email Thursday, his campaign manager said Hammack had already spoken with E.C. Sykes and they buried the hatchet.
“He can confirm that conversation happened, he saw the video and he initiated a subsequent conversation with E.C. about it,” wrote Hammack’s campaign manager, Angie Scioli. “They have sorted it out, he is at peace, and he has no further comment.”
Sykes agreed to meet with a reporter Friday morning while talking to voters at an early voting site in Wake Forest.
The line was wrapped around the building, eventually leading to a two-hour wait by lunchtime, as many of his potential future constituents cast their votes in the closing days of early voting, which ends Saturday.
Sykes said the call was intended to be “a sacred, confidential time” of prayer, and that “it hurts” that the call was leaked to the media. But he wants to be clear that he doesn’t think anyone is going to hell based on what political party they’re in, he said, adding that he does think Democrats can be Christians.
“Oh, for sure,” he said. “Yeah. Like I said, it’s not a party-affiliated type thing. It’s solely your belief in Jesus Christ. It’s not a party thing. I mean, I do think values are important. But when you hear people who talk about their values, that’s not a determining factor of what your faith is.”
Sykes and Bode said in separate interviews that the two main issues they hear about most from voters are inflation and the economy, and abortion. And one clear area of bipartisan agreement among voters, both said, is that people are simply fed up with all the negative ads that this race and others have attracted.
“Most voters are concerned with the negative ads and the coarseness of the language, and have just expressed their frustration with all the negativity,” Bode said.
“The biggest thing people bring up is ‘I am just tired of television commercials, tired of getting stuff in the mailbox, and can we just get it over?’” Sykes said.
But the negative ads were guaranteed from the start, in a high-profile a race that will help decide whether Republicans have a supermajority or not.
Sykes’ campaign had spent $1.5 million as of this week, and Bode’s campaign had spent $2.2 million. Political parties and outside groups have also spent heavily on the race.
The high stakes of this race have put it under a microscope that legislative races don’t often receive. Democrats recently hired private investigators to follow Sykes, leading to allegations he doesn’t live where he’s registered to vote.
Sykes says he does live in the district, in a camper — and not in his house that’s in a different district — The N&O has previously reported. He said Democrats want to distract from real issues like inflation.
During the private call Sykes told supporters they could ignore the complaint filed by “a person that is a wealthy Democrat, atheist, LGBTQ person.”
Todd Stiefel, the wealthy Democratic donor who backed the investigation, has been heavily involved in atheist and secular groups including the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science and his own investment company, Heretical Reason Productions. But he’s also straight.
“I am a married, straight ally of the LGBTQ community,” Stiefel said in a written statement via his attorney, after being informed of Sykes’ statement. “I don’t take it as an insult, but E.C. Sykes clearly hoped that calling me LGBTQ would undermine me and my protest of his eligibility.”
Stiefel added: “I challenge E.C. Sykes to provide evidence tomorrow that he paid utility bills for the property in Senate District 18 during November and December 2021 so that voters in this district can know if he is actually eligible for election.”
State law requires legislative candidates to live in their districts for at least a year before the election. Sykes generally denied the allegations on Friday, as he has in the past, but declined to get into details.
“It really hasn’t been an issue,” with any voters he has met, Sykes said. “We put out a statement on that, and that really is just local drama.”
