On Monday, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that Johnny Teague, the Republican running for Texas' 7th Congressional District, wrote a novel in which he imagines that Anne Frank converted to Christianity and accepted Jesus Christ as her lord and savior in her final days.
Frank, a young Jewish girl whose diary detailed her attempts to hide from Nazi persecution in the run-up to the Holocaust, died in a German death camp in 1945.
"Johnny Teague, an evangelical pastor and business owner who won the district’s primary in March, in 2020 published 'The Lost Diary of Anne Frank,' a novel imagining the famous Jewish Holocaust victim’s final days in the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps as she might have written them in her diary," reported Andrew Lapin. "Published by Las Vegas-based publisher Histria Books, the speculative book attempts to faithfully extend the writing style of Frank’s 'original' diary entries into her experiences in the camps: it 'picks up where her original journey left off,' according to the promotional summary. Teague claims to have interviewed Holocaust survivors and visited the Anne Frank House, multiple concentration camps and the major Holocaust museums in Washington, D.C., and Israel as part of his research."
"'I would love to learn more about Jesus and all He faced in His dear life as a Jewish teacher,' Teague’s Anne Frank character muses at one point, saying that her dad had tried to get her a copy of the New Testament. Anne’s father Otto Frank, who in real life did survive the Holocaust, seems to have been spared a tragic fate in Teague’s telling because of his interest in learning about Jesus," said the report. "Later, Anne does learn about Jesus through other means, reciting Christian psalms and expressing sympathy for Jesus’ plight. By book’s end, Anne is firm in her belief that 'every Jewish man or woman should ask' questions like 'Where is the Messiah? … Did He come already, and we didn’t recognize Him?'"
Teague — who also ran for Congress in 2020 — espouses Christian Nationalism heavily on his campaign website, claiming baselessly that U.S. law is derived from scripture. According to the report, an earlier version of his website even stated that fossil fuels were ordained by God.
Teague is challenging incumbent Democratic Rep. Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, who represents the western suburbs of Houston in Congress.