The Democratic Senate candidate for Kansas gets off his campaign bus and pulls out of his pocket, smiling, some Gospels so worn that the leather cover already shines. He always carries them with him, he says. Adam Hamilton is not just a newly minted politician. He is also the founder and pastor of one of the great megachurches in the United States, the Church of the Resurrection, a Unitarian Methodist. “Faith is the story that defines my life,” he says during one of the stops on his tour to mobilize the vote in this farming state in the American Midwest on the eve of next Tuesday's midterm elections.
His speech, in which he threads the teachings of Christ with his political program, seems to resonate: according to polls, he has a significant chance of winning the seat he is contesting with Republican Roger Marshall and becoming the first Democratic senator in Kansas in 94 years.
"I carry these Gospels with me every day, I read them every day and I ask God to guide me, to take me, to speak to me. My goal, and my hope, is to be a follower of Christ above anything else," he declares, when asked about his faith and the role he plays in his life as a politician, in a brief aside with media, including EL PAÍS, during a campaign event in Olathe, on the outskirts of Kansas City.
Hamilton is no exception. At least a dozen pastors, seminarians and former clergy ran this year in the Democratic primaries for Congress, most in states considered conservative strongholds; A handful achieved the nomination and are now fighting very close battles against their Republican opponents in territories such as Kansas or Texas.
It is a phenomenon that would have seemed unthinkable a few years ago. Although Democrats had the support of many white Protestant voters in the decades between the 1960s and 1980s, that support faded in the 1990s as Christian Americans became more evangelical and this segment of the population increasingly leaned toward the Republican Party and a nationalist vision of Christianity. Over the last three decades, talking about faith from the political platform has become the almost exclusive territory of conservatives. At the same time, the Democratic Party was becoming increasingly urban and secular.
Now, this group of Democratic candidates, several of them with experience in state legislatures, is betting on the opposite. They are convinced that Christianity is not the heritage of the right and that the language of the gospels can also serve to defend public health, wages or immigrants. And at their rallies they convey the message that the beliefs they profess every Sunday in religious services coincide with Democratic political principles.
Unlike what could happen in other countries, this combination of politics and religion does not clash with voters who hear that message: “The United States is still a country of believers,” says pollster and political analyst Frank Luntz. "Citizens don't necessarily want to be suffocated by religion. But they also don't want it to disappear from public life."
Hamilton's case is perhaps the most striking of all. At just 25 years old, he founded the Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, outside of Kansas City. Today that church gathers about 24,000 members in nine locations in Kansas, Missouri and Ohio, and its founder has written more than 30 books.
Hamilton was a Republican for years, and he even considered running in these elections as an independent. Finally, he announced in May that he was leaving the pulpit to run as a Democrat. "Part of what changed was, first, that I have a deep passion for the things that Democrats care about: education, families, children, social coverage. I toured many cities in Kansas to listen to people's opinions, and in each place they told me: 'Perform yourself as a Democrat, it's what you are, these are the things you defend.' So it was easy to make that decision," he explains.
At his rallies he talks as much about the cost of healthcare, fuel and fertilizers—crucial issues in rural Kansas—as he does about his faith. Its line is very moderate; Their motto is “lead from the center.” It is a message that seems to be liked in this State.
“I think that, even if he doesn't win, he has made great strides in favor of the Democrats and the next one who comes will have an easier time,” says Israel Sánchez, a digital media specialist. As a contributor to the Methodist Conference, he knew the pastor personally before he entered politics. "I think Hamilton was the only viable Democratic candidate in Kansas for the Senate. His message of being kind, of welcoming strangers, carries much more weight because he is a pastor and because he was a Republican. He knows how to speak the language that people understand."
In other states, other Democratic candidates spread similar messages.
In Texas, the new face of this trend is James Talarico, a 37-year-old Presbyterian seminarian, on leave from his studies, who became known as a state legislator for his criticism of Christian nationalism and the reactionary cultural line he represents. The night he won the Democratic nomination for the Senate, among signs with the slogan of loving your neighbor, he turned the commandment into a defense of diversity: "My faith teaches me to love my neighbor as myself. Not only my neighbor who looks like me, not only my neighbor who prays like me, not only my neighbor who votes like me."
His rival, Attorney General Ken Paxton, is far from being the face of biblical values: he is burdened with a divorce that his wife requested on “biblical grounds” and with an impeachment promoted by his own coreligionists in the state Congress.
Also in Texas, the Rev. Frederick Douglass Haynes III, 65, is seeking to succeed Jasmine Crockett in the 30th House District, a safe seat for Democrats in the Dallas area. For four decades he turned Friendship-West Baptist Church into a progressive megachurch: he welcomed it with 83 parishioners and today it has more than 13,000. He is the grandson of a pastor named after the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and is an heir to the prophetic tradition of the black churches. His program includes a living wage, universal healthcare and the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“It is not enough for Democrats to diagnose demolition,” he said in September at a party gala in Fort Worth. “We have to have the vision of a new reconstruction.”
There are also women among the clerics turned politicians. In Iowa, two are running for seats in the House of Representatives. Sarah Trone Garriott is a Lutheran minister and still preaches several Sundays a month; and Lindsay James is a pastor. Both maintain that their faith inspires their politics, but does not dictate it. Completing the group are Robb Ryerse in Arkansas and Anna Golladay in Tennessee, also pastors, as well as Ben McAdams in Utah and Chaz Molder in Tennessee, who boast of their work as Sunday school teachers.
The dispute over the Christian vote
The opposite screen is that of white evangelicals, a fishing ground for votes for Trumpism. They are 13% of the US population, but they go to the polls in such numbers that they usually represent around 20% of the electorate, according to the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). About eight in ten voted for Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024. Although, in 1994, only a little more than 60% identified with the Republican Party, according to the Pew Research Center.
That bloc is not changing political sides. But Trump's approval has fallen across all religious groups since the start of this term. The challenge for Democrats, therefore, is to mobilize the rest of the believing electorate.
The candidates who try to appeal to them are not seeking to fight on abortion or LGBTQ rights, where their party has been losing among evangelical voters for decades. Instead, they place “loving your neighbor” at the center of their discourse and use it to justify their positions: stopping immigration raids, opposing healthcare cuts, and presenting inequality, the minimum wage, or labor rights as moral rather than economic issues.
Republicans have responded by questioning the faith of their rivals. At a conservative religious summit in July, Joe Mitchell, the candidate facing Lindsay James in Iowa, accused the pastor of misrepresenting her credentials. “She's one of those people who call themselves pastors, just like James Talarico, just like Sarah Trone Garriott,” he said. "I call them PINO: pastors in name only. They are not real pastors. They do not profess the true gospel of Jesus Christ." In Texas, Paxton has said on a podcast that Talarico's beliefs are “literally the opposite of Christianity.” Vice President J. D. Vance has accused Hamilton of not being a true believer, something to which the Texas candidate shrugs his shoulders: “If they say I'm not a Christian, that's up to them.”
For now, the attacks do not seem to have stopped these candidates. The battles in Kansas and Texas, in which only a few months ago the victory of the Republican candidates was assumed, are red hot.
But analyst Luntz has a warning: "Given a choice between a different attitude toward religion or paying the bills, voters will always choose an economic solution over a faith-based one. People want a good life. What that is is an individual matter, but the general consensus is that getting a good life right now is harder than ever. For Democrats to win, they have to remove the obstacles to getting that good life."
