John Shimkus grew up in a big family in the St. Louis suburb of Collinsville in southwestern Illinois, and after earning his teaching credential from Concordia University Irvine (then Christ College Irvine), he ultimately went on to serve in the U.S. Congress for 24 years, retiring in 2021.
“I loved my 24 years as a member of Congress, not that I didn’t get into trouble and not that I cast all the right votes,” he says. “The founders were amazing in that they separated powers. All we’re doing is trying to create and maintain a more perfect union as imperfect individuals.”
Considered a governing conservative Republican, Shimkus specialized in bread-and-butter issues such as helping to establish a national 911 emergency line and promoting ethanol as a gasoline additive. Upon retiring, he came home to teach civics at the local university and served as the part-time principal at his childhood alma mater, Holy Cross Lutheran Church and School, which just celebrated its 175th anniversary. He even took the 8th grade class on a trip to Washington, D.C.
Attending Holy Cross Lutheran Church and School as a child with many family members, just a block from his house, was “the big formative aspect of my life,” he says. His father had attended the school as well. After high school, Shimkus shipped off to West Point, drawn by the appeal of serving his country and becoming a “renaissance man.”
“The academy wants the whole character,” he says. “There is moral instruction with the honor code. There’s a big athletic component, and it’s the first engineering school in the country. I found [all of that] very appealing.”
Though the academic rigor and military environment initially shocked him, he graduated in four years and served on active duty for five, including in West Germany in the mid-1980s when it was on the front lines of the Cold War. Traveling to a divided Berlin for training required going through East Germany on a train with blacked-out windows. He spent a day in East Berlin in uniform traveling through Checkpoint Charlie.
He was later assigned to the Seventh Infantry Division at Fort Ord, California, and “that’s where the Irvine connection started,” he says.
While deciding if he wanted to stay in the military or not, he met Karen Muth, the church organist and Director of Christian Education (DCE) at Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Monterey. The two started dating, eventually marrying in 1987.
Prior to that, in January 1986, Shimkus decided he wanted to become a high school teacher, so he went south and enrolled at Concordia, then Christ College, in Irvine.
“I thought, what better thing to do than develop future generations of people?” He says.
For eight months he was recruited to teach at Metro East Lutheran High School in Edwardsville, north of Collinsville, where his cousins had attended school. Karen joined him a year later, after they were married. Both taught at the school, and three of their sons graduated from there. John later earned an MBA from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
While teaching high school government and history, public service came into view.
He was sending his students to attend city council meetings, township meetings, and county board meetings. The area at the time was dominated politically by conservative Democrats who “controlled all the levers of power,” Shimkus says. “It was in essence a one-party government from state senators all the way down to city halls.”
But in his view, “One-party rule is not good, so I decided to run.”
His small-government, pro-life, pro-Second Amendment convictions put him squarely in the Reagan Republican camp, but his first campaign - for county board in 1988 - faulted, not least because most voters in the area voted a straight Democrat ticket. But in 1989, an election came up for the non-partisan position of township trustee. The top four vote-getters were elected, and Shimkus, perhaps because of his family’s name in the area and his dogged door-to-door campaigning, won with the second most votes.
In 1990, he quit his teaching job to campaign full time for his next position as Madison County treasurer.
”I won that race, and it shocked everybody,” he says. “I was the first elected countywide Republican official in ten years.”
In 1992, young and ambitious, he tried to dethrone Illinois Congressional stalwart, Dick Durbin, in a new district. He was out-spent four to one and lost.
“I’m glad I did it, but it was pretty naive of me,” Shimkus says. “By that time, Dick had moved further left than when he originally ran, so there were clear ideological differences between us, but that was Bill Clinton’s first election [as president], and Durbin ended up beating me by ten points.”
In 1996, that same seat opened up when Durbin ran successfully for the U.S. Senate.
In one of the closest races in the nation, Shimkus won by just over 1,200 votes and entered Congress in January 1997 having never been a legislator. The history and pageantry of the nation’s capital captivated him.
”Everywhere you turn there’s a symbol of a military leader or a memorial to one of our wars or political leaders. I thought it was awesome,” he says. “It was one of those things where you pinch yourself and really don’t believe that you're there. I’m one of seven kids. My dad was a telephone lineman; my mom was a stay-at-home mom. We were middle class, if not lower-middle-class. What an amazing country this is!”
Much of his time was spent on Eastern European issues, promoting democracy around the world and expanding NATO. He established the Baltic Caucus on the House side to bring attention to new democracies that had emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union. His deep Lutheran roots gave him a perspective of faith on issues of the day.
“The connection with the church is critical because, in reality, heaven is our home, so having a proper perspective on life based upon what Christ has done [is important],” he believes. “My faith-based position made it easier on me.”
He also believes all Americans have the responsibility to participate in civic life. “We have a stewardship government, so I go back to the parable of the talents,” he says. “God has given us this blessing, and we need to be involved. There are a lot of ways. You can be the candidate, or a supporter working for the candidate, or a supporter giving them money or praying for him or her, or just casting your vote. But you have to participate, because God has given us this great blessing of a constitutional republic with democratic and free elections.”
One of his career accomplishments was establishing 911 as the national emergency number. Before then it was administered by a patchwork of local agencies, made further confusing by the advent of cell phones and internet calling. Shimkus also co-authored an energy bill which brought ethanol to notional markets – not surprising for a congressman from a corn-growing state.
His proudest achievement was an update to the 1976 toxic substances control act which regulates how industrially useful but harmful chemicals can be used. It was passed by a Republican-controlled house and a Democrat-controlled Senate and signed by a Democrat president. Shimkus calls it a “capstone” of his career.
After winning reelection multiple times, including in a larger, redrawn district, and raising his family in Collinsville, he left Congress in 2021, satisfied that he had done his best to exercise the rights and responsibilities of the citizenship grounded in “the natural rights granted by God, the rights of property, religious freedom, and free press,” he says.
In addition to voting, volunteering, canvassing, and running for office, Shimkus says Americans, and Christians in particular, have a responsibility to pray for our leaders.
“We know biblically we are to obey the authorities over us, unless they are declaring we do something outside of Scripture,” he says. We are supposed to pray for our leaders. In Illinois, I am praying for a [governor who is a Democrat] and a legislature that is Democrat-controlled by a super-majority. I’m not calling them names. We are praying for them. That’s being a good citizen. That’s really lost in our society right now because we attack our political opponents, and if you say something nice about an opponent, your party attacks you.”
Shimkus works with KBS group, which is a regional bipartisan and bi-state economic development and lobbying firm. He remains involved in democracy issues in Eastern Europe. This fall, he will again serve as an election observer, this time in the county of Georgia.
In spite of the fraught social climate, “I’m still optimistic,” he says. “People lose their optimism and think the world’s coming to an end. The world is going to come to an end when Christ comes. I believe God is in control. He places people into authority for his good, whatever that is. we don’t always understand, but this is the gift that’s been given to us.”