A Trump-voting Nebraska pastor is running for Senate as a Democrat. He insists it’s in good faith.

PAXTON — On a Sunday morning, Bill Forbes stood behind his pulpit and read from the Book of John.

“‘You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free,’” the pastor recited, before offering: “Truth agrees with what is reality. Truth agrees with what we see with our own eyes.”

But the truth that congregants at Paxton New Life Lutheran Church know from the gospel is far different “from the propaganda-driven reality that is manufactured by the rest of the entities vying for our loyalty for them,” Forbes said in his sermon, video of which from his deleted Facebook page was obtained and reviewed by the Flatwater Free Press.

Those forces want us divided, he said. They want us to distrust each other. Most of all, they want us to continue to march in lockstep with their dictates, he told his church. 

“The truth is far different,” Forbes said. “So when they say to us, ‘Here’s the science,’ you can no longer believe it. When they say to us, ‘Research shows us,’ you can no longer believe it. When they say to us, ‘The Supreme Court ruled either constitutionally or unconstitutionally,’ you can no longer believe it. When they say evolution has been proven, you can no longer believe it. 

“When they say someone is binary and there are 78 different sexes,” he said, shaking his head and offering a dismissive wave. “We all know that. Let’s move on here.”

Flatwater reviewed more than two dozen now-deleted videos of Forbes’ sermons ahead of next week’s primary. In them, Forbes frequently espoused conservative views, demonized Muslims and took jabs at Democratic politicians, once referring to former President Joe Biden as “Dementia Joe.”

In an interview at his western Nebraska church following the last Sunday service in April, Forbes, 79, explained why an anti-abortion advocate who has voted three times for President Donald Trump and has at times used his pulpit to advance a conservative political agenda is running for U.S. Senate as a Democrat: His candidacy is about the truth, he said.

“Lying used to be a moral category, and now lying has become a commodity,” Forbes said. “And this is for every politician … The better liar you are, the higher on the ladder you get, and that’s just general in Washington.

“That is what makes me want to go. It has to be exposed.”

But as Forbes mounts a long-shot bid for Senate, Democratic leaders are accusing him of being untruthful.

“William Forbes is a total liar,” said Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party.

The party, which is supporting nonpartisan candidate Dan Osborn for Senate, initially did not put forward any Democrats. That move was intended to put Osborn in a one-on-one race against Sen. Pete Ricketts in November, increasing the odds of unseating the GOP incumbent in a state that has elected only Republicans to the Senate for 20 years.

Kleeb has accused Republican political operatives of recruiting Forbes to run as a Democrat, drawing support from party-line voters and diluting Osborn’s chances of unseating Ricketts. “That’s the only reason William Forbes is in the race,” she said.

Democrat Cindy Burbank entered the race in what she has said is an effort to stop Forbes. If Burbank wins the May 12 primary, she could decline the party’s nomination, and the party could opt not to replace her, clearing the lane for Osborn. Nebraska’s top election official sought to withhold Burbank’s name from the ballot over her attempt to “divert votes and confuse voters,” but the state’s Supreme Court intervened.

Forbes’ campaign has sent text blasts promising he “will stand up to the MAGA agenda and stop Trump’s handpicked Senator,” referring to Ricketts. But Forbes voted for Trump each time he was on the ballot and posted a photo of Ricketts speaking at a Right to Life rally in Lincoln in a since-deleted Facebook post, a screenshot of which is plastered to Burbank’s campaign website. Forbes declined to say who is running his campaign.

He also initially declined a Flatwater interview request. But he agreed to answer questions about his Senate campaign when a reporter approached him at his church following a service last month. Afterward, Forbes said in an emailed statement that the reporter “barging into a church to ambush me with pointed political questions was highly inappropriate.

“I made it clear I was more than willing to answer any questions on the record — all you had to do was send me a proper email,” he wrote. “Instead, you violated every unwritten rule of decency by turning the church into a political gotcha moment. Gotcha politics does not belong in the sanctuary. Period.”

Democrat-aligned groups, including the New York-based Common Defense Action Fund, have seized on Forbes’ past, depicting him in mailers with Ricketts and noting his past support for Trump. 

A spokesman for Ricketts’ campaign said no one on the campaign, including the senator, has ever spoken with Forbes and that the campaign “has played no role in the Democratic primary or the Legal Marijuana NOW primary,” where another alleged plant candidate also is running for Senate.

“Unlike Jane Kleeb and Dan Osborn, we believe voters should choose their nominees without meddling and king-making from political insiders,” the spokesman, Will Coup, said in a statement. “Sen. Ricketts can stand on his record of delivering for Nebraskans regardless of who is on the ballot.”

A spokesman for Osborn’s campaign did not respond to an email seeking comment about the Democratic primary or the criticism from Ricketts’ campaign.

During the recent interview, Forbes denied that Ricketts or anyone else asked him to run for Senate. He insists his candidacy is in good faith.

“We got eight kids, 17 grandkids, and we got one coming. They’re trying. That means 18, right?” he said. “What kind of world do I want to leave them? That’s why I’m involved. I want to leave a better world where they don’t have to question everything.”

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The pastor at the town’s Lutheran church is running for Senate, but there’s no inkling of it in Paxton. 

Yard signs planted across the Keith County town endorse Sheriff Jeffery Stevens in his reelection bid and David Huebner’s attempt to primary a 10-term incumbent GOP congressman on a platform that includes faith, family and patriotism. But, while driving every street in the small western Nebraska town on a recent Sunday, a Flatwater reporter saw no such signs promoting Forbes.  

The Senate candidate is one of fewer than 700 registered Democrats in Keith County, home to 5,710 registered voters. Nearly 70% of those voters are Republicans, including many members of Forbes’ own church.

“On paper, he’s a Democrat,” said Vina Finch, a farmer from near Paxton who stepped out of New Life Lutheran Church and into a light rain alongside her granddaughter on a recent Sunday morning. Forbes has long been open about his party registration, she said. But he doesn’t strike her as a Democrat, she said. He supports the president and “what Trump’s trying to do.”

A registered Republican, Finch can’t vote for her pastor in next week’s primary. But she said she hopes his run for Senate prompts a religious revival in the United States. “A rally for God,” she said.

“Everybody says don’t mix politics and church,” Finch said. “But the Declaration of Independence and all that — that’s politics, and it was founded on the Bible. It was based on morals and the Lord. I don’t think you can have one without the other.”

From the pulpit, Forbes has embraced the same beliefs. He repeatedly called for the church to re-entrench itself in American culture, mourning what he sees as the country’s cultural decline in the sermons reviewed by Flatwater.

An anti-abortion advocate who circulated a petition in 2022 to ban abortions in his town of 500, Forbes in one sermon praised Republican governors Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Ron DeSantis of Florida for their efforts to outlaw the procedures. In a sermon earlier this year, Forbes labeled the Black Lives Matter movement as “cultural Marxism.” In the same sermon, he said Marxists and Islamists — who he said “slaughter people, they kill people” — are “working together.”

“Their goal is to destroy Western civilization,” he said in the sermon. “And the reason that they have to destroy Western civilization is because they know the wisdom of God. Western civilization was founded on the wisdom of God. That’s our values. And we are in the way.”

His church was not the first audience to which Forbes had taken his concerns. In January, he attended training for conservative political candidates and organizers sponsored by the Nebraska Republican Party in Kearney, he recalled weeks later in his sermon. 

During a break in the program, Forbes approached one of the speakers, Steven Panchenko, a regional director at a conservative nonprofit that put on the training. Forbes said he told Panchenko that “Islamists” are “producing babies faster than we are” and “will eventually overtake us,” he recalled in the sermon.

A photo of Panchenko was featured in the slideshow that accompanied his sermon that day, with his name written below it. His name appears, too, in Federal Election Commission filings for Ricketts’ campaign, which paid him a $671.56 mileage reimbursement in March 2025, according to the filings.

A spokesman for the campaign said the reimbursement was for travel expenses Panchenko incurred interviewing for a job on the Ricketts campaign in early 2025, and the campaign “has had no communication with him since.”

Panchenko did not respond to messages seeking comment. Forbes, who filed the paperwork for his Senate run 30 minutes before the March 2 filing deadline, said no one at the January training encouraged him to enter the race.

In fact, Forbes found Panchenko’s advice to the GOP crowd — to avoid primary challenges to Republican incumbents — to be “nonsense,” he said. “I listened to him, and I shook my head, and I thought, ‘You can’t be serious in what you’re telling these people,’” he said.

Forbes was left similarly unsatisfied with Panchenko’s response to what the pastor cast as the Islamic plot to take over the West, he told his church.

“He didn’t have an answer,” Forbes said. “You see that? You see where we will go if we listen to that? … They don’t know what to do.

“We do. It is obvious to me now more than it’s ever been before. We must have revival.”

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Standing inside his church, Forbes expressed disbelief when a Flatwater reporter presented him with the phrasing of his own campaign’s text blasts.

“Did it really say anti-MAGA?” he asked. “Anti-Trump?”

Indeed, the first two words of the message and accompanying graphic promoting the pastor’s Senate campaign were “STOP TRUMP.” The text, too, promised Forbes would “stand up to the MAGA agenda.”

“OK,” he said, after a reporter read him the excerpts from the message in late April.

“Is that a lie?” he asked, then answered: “No. It wasn’t.”

In the dozens of sermons reviewed by Flatwater, Forbes did not mention Trump nor invoke his “Make America Great Again” slogan from the pulpit. 

But repeatedly, he called for the return of a different era. He pointed to the 1960s as the beginning of the country’s decline. He specifically cited a pair of Supreme Court decisions that banned mandatory Bible readings in public schools and prohibited state-sponsored prayer. And he called for the restoration of “the Christian worldview” that came before. “We need to retrieve the freedom that we once enjoyed,” he said in one sermon.

“We never took the keys out of our car, never locked our house,” Forbes said. “I ran the streets wild. My parents were never worried about me. I was free.”

Forbes had started that sermon by reading a passage from Ezekiel. God had appointed the prophet to be a spiritual watchman for the people of Israel being held in Babylon. In the same way, Forbes told his congregation, God had appointed Christians to protect their country “against the sword that is coming against it” — even in the face of “criticism and rejection by our culture.”

But the church, for most of 70 years, had failed, he said. The country was “now at a very precipice of lawlessness,” he said. They had allowed the sword “to come against us and begin to destroy our nation.”

“We need to be able to identify the enemy,” he said.

Then, like a teacher in a classroom, Forbes asked his parishioners to do so.

“The judicial system,” one offered.

“Taking God out of schools,” said another.

“Our schools,” said a third.

“Our schools is another one,” the pastor agreed.

The congregation named enemies in rapid succession, some drawing reassuring echoes from their pastor.

Social media. The government. Roe v. Wade. TV. Welfare. The death of the traditional family. Hollywood.

“News stations, then,” one congregant said. “CBS, NBC.”

“News station, yes,” Forbes said. “ABC, CBS, CNN. Yes. They lie to us. We recognize the lies.”

“They devalue and demoralize this country,” the congregant said. 

“Amen,” Forbes said. “Devalued and demoralized our country.”

“They don’t care that they lie to us and that we know it,” another parishioner said. “But it’s the young people who don’t know they’re lies, and believe it.”

“That’s right,” the pastor said. “That’s right.”