A Good Night for the Christian Faith
· The Atlantic
THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS delivered a crushing, across-the-board defeat to Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and the MAGA movement. The dimensions are staggering.
But even on a night filled with remarkable results, the victories of James Talarico in Texas and Adam Hamilton in Kansas stood apart. It’s not simply that a Texas Senate seat went Democratic for the first time since 1988, or that Kansas Democrats broke a 94-year losing streak, having last won a Senate race in 1932. It’s that Talarico and Hamilton are both committed and prominent Christians. They speak naturally about their faith, and their speeches and interviews are laced with scripture and biblical themes.
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Talarico, whose grandfather was a Baptist preacher in South Texas, earned a master’s degree in theological studies from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. He had been studying there for a master’s in divinity on the path toward ordination, but he put his seminary training on hold to run for the Senate.
Adam Hamilton has been a United Methodist pastor for more than 35 years. In 1990, he founded the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, whose first services were held in a funeral home. Today it is the largest United Methodist congregation in America, with about 24,000 members and locations in three states. He considers himself to be both a mainline Protestant and an evangelical. His church is politically diverse, almost equally divided between Republicans, Democrats, and independents. He continued as senior pastor of the Church of the Resurrection during his campaign, and his intention has been to remain in the role, on a part-time basis, even while serving in the Senate.
The arrivals of Talarico and Hamilton in the Senate are significant in two respects. The first is their effect on the Democratic Party, which has become increasingly secular over the past several decades.
[Peter Wehner: The issues Christian voters are neglecting]
At times, Democrats have shown a barely concealed hostility toward Christianity—on other occasions, it’s been entirely unconcealed—and many Christians have returned the favor. Even in the absence of open hostility, there has clearly been discomfort on both sides, and the greater the discomfort, the further apart they have drifted. As a result, a number of Democrats have come to view many Christians less as voters to win over than as opponents to defeat, and many Christians have come to view the Democratic Party less as misguided than as malicious, even evil.
The notable exception is Black Christians, many of whom are theologically conservative yet have long found a home in the Democratic Party. Raphael Warnock, the Democratic senator from Georgia, still serves as the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
With Talarico and Hamilton joining Warnock in the Democratic caucus, the party’s unease with Christians, especially evangelical Christians, could recede. It may take longer for that to be reciprocated, because many evangelicals remain wary of the two men’s political theology and stances on certain issues. But if these new senators can help their colleagues better understand people of faith and teach them how to speak with them, then Christians, in turn, may begin to feel more seen and heard. Over time, the dynamic between the party and the faithful can change, and the layers of ice separating them can begin to thaw. That should help the Democratic Party. But it should also help the Christian faith.
EVANGELICAL PROTESTANTism constitutes the largest religious tradition in the United States, accounting for slightly more Americans than Catholicism. Fifty years ago, white evangelicals split their support between the Republican Gerald Ford and the Democrat Jimmy Carter, himself a born-again Southern Baptist. By 1980, though, evangelists had begun to move decisively into the Republican camp, and that trend has only continued. Unlike Catholics, who have remained divided between the two parties and kept a measure of independence from both, white evangelicals became the most loyal constituency in the Republican coalition. Roughly eight in 10 voted for Trump in each of his three campaigns.
What began as an alliance eventually became a fusion, and that fusion came with a cost. The historian Mark Noll, describing the mobilization that began in the mid-1970s, wrote that well-established traditions of evangelical and fundamentalist religion were transformed “into a political instrument.”
In 1979, Jerry Falwell, the pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, and the founder of what became Liberty University, launched the Moral Majority. Its purpose was to mobilize Christian conservatives against “secular humanism” and what Falwell later called “the flood tide of moral permissiveness.”
“We are fighting a holy war,” Falwell said at the time, “and this time we are going to win.”
An entire infrastructure of advocacy groups, voter guides, media outlets, and get-out-the-vote operations grew up around the movement, until evangelicalism became a de facto arm of the GOP. In my decades in politics, I haven’t seen a group more easily seduced by political power than evangelicals. That isn’t surprising; the history of Christianity is full of cautionary tales about getting too close to political power.
The problem wasn’t that Christians became involved in politics. They had every right to do so. And because politics is about the proper ordering of human society, which inevitably touches on questions of justice and human flourishing, there is arguably an imperative that they do so. What went wrong is that in far too many cases, Christians’ sensibilities—their temperament and cast of mind—were disfigured, and at times corrupted. Their rhetoric became apocalyptic: America was always on the brink of moral collapse, and progressive barbarians were always at the gates. This catastrophism bred fear, anxiety about cultural displacement, and a sense of grievance. Anger rose and, for some, hardened into hatred.
For many, Christianity became a blunt-force instrument. Many fundamentalists and evangelicals seemed to relish conflict. They went looking for a political figure to be their fighter, their warrior, someone who would not just defeat the other side but bloody it. They found him in Donald J. Trump. The cruelest and most corrupt president in American history became the avatar of many of those who most loudly professed to follow Jesus.
WHICH BRINGS US BACK to James Talarico and Adam Hamilton. Those who watched their campaigns, and who saw their victory speeches last night, witnessed something altogether different. Talarico and Hamilton speak another language; they are in a different register. Talarico declared that “the politics of division is no match for the politics of love.” Both champion decency and kindness.
They draw on the Hebrew scripture, especially Micah 6:8, where the prophet says the Lord requires us “to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” They draw, too, on the New Testament: the parable of the Good Samaritan and the Sermon on the Mount; on the two great commandments to love God and to love your neighbor; and Matthew 25, where Jesus says that whatever we did for the least of these we did for him.
There are Christians all across America who may not agree with Talarico and Hamilton on every issue but who are deeply grateful these men won, because they offer an ethic and a disposition profoundly different from those of MAGA world. The senators-elect from Texas and Kansas believe that statecraft is soulcraft, that words should heal rather than wound, and that mercy is not weakness. They take seriously Isaiah’s invitation: “Come now, and let us reason together.”
In politics, very good people, religious and secular alike, have earnestly tried to be repairers of the breach and failed. Proclaiming that we need a “politics of love” is easier than practicing it. Talarico and Hamilton will face many of the same temptations others have faced before them: to politicize their faith, to use scripture to validate their ideology, and to lose their prophetic voice under pressure to be loyal to Team Blue. Judging by how they conducted themselves during the campaign, and, from what I can tell, over much of their lives, I’m hopeful about the quality of their witness. But time will tell.
[From the February 2025 issue: The army of God comes out of the shadows]
The pastor and author Brian Zahnd has described a crisis of faith he once went through, though not one about Jesus. “I felt like the Jesus I knew deserved a better Christianity than the Christianity I knew,” he said.
The victories of Talarico and Hamilton are rooted, in part, in a growing sense in America that many in politics who claim to be Christians, and to be fighting on behalf of “Christian values,” have slandered the name of Jesus in their words and their deeds. Even unbelievers can see that the politics of cruelty is at odds with Jesus’s command to love your enemy.
The singer-songwriter Jon Guerra, in his compelling 2024 song “American Gospel,” defines this counterfeit faith as “Blessed are the powerful / Blessed are the rich / Blessed are the merciless / and the hypocrites.” That is not, as Guerra’s song makes clear, the heart of the true Gospel, in which the blessed are the meek and the poor, the merciful and the pure in heart.
Many millions of Americans, and not a few evangelicals, have been sickened by those who distort the Gospel while pretending to proclaim it. Something deep and good is stirring in our land.