In the race for U.S. Senate in Kansas, the Democrat quotes the Bible from memory on the campaign trail and has described voting as “an act of Christian discipleship.” He is the pastor of the largest church in the state.
His Republican opponent derides him as a “megachurch C.E.O.”
With just a few weeks until Election Day, the race appears neck and neck in a state that has sent only Republicans to the Senate since 1932.
Adam Hamilton, the Democrat seeking to unseat Senator Roger Marshall, a Republican, is a political newcomer. But Mr. Hamilton had a relatively high profile even before entering the race, thanks to his long career as a pastor at Church of the Resurrection, a Methodist congregation based outside Kansas City. Many Kansans have seen television broadcasts of his church services, read his books in their Bible studies or watched his DVD series tracing the story of Jesus’ birth.
His campaign doesn’t use the word “megachurch,” but with about 24,000 members across nine locations in Kansas, Missouri and Ohio, his church is one by any standard.
Mr. Hamilton, a former Republican who considered running as an independent, has emphasized issues like the rising costs of health care, fuel and fertilizer in his campaign. But he also speaks often of his life in the church, describing it as a role that goes beyond preaching.
He notes in his stump speech that with dozens of pastors on his church staff, there is no need for him to make the kinds of personal visits to members in crisis that are part of the job for leaders of smaller congregations.
“But I still go to the hospital, and I still go to hospices to sit with people while they’re dying,” he told voters at a campaign stop in Wichita last month. “I do it for me, because it helps my heart stay alive.”
Mr. Hamilton is part of a small but notable cluster of Protestant clergy or seminarians who are pursuing national office as Democrats this cycle. A strong showing by these candidates could remind their party that Republicans do not have a monopoly on the religious vote, said Michael Wear, the founder and president of the Center for Christianity and Public Life. Blue and purple states have many religious voters, too, and candidates who appeal to a broader swath of voters should be deployed beyond the country’s deepest red areas, he said.
“It’s one thing for Democrats to be open to a candidate like Adam Hamilton in Kansas,” Mr. Wear said. “A candidate like Adam Hamilton will probably also be really useful in more obviously competitive states.”
The group includes James Talarico, the party’s nominee for U.S. Senate in Texas, who speaks easily and often about how his faith influences his politics. Mr. Talarico is on leave from his studies at a Presbyterian seminary. A candidate for Congress in Iowa, Sarah Trone Garriott, is a Lutheran minister who still preaches several Sundays a month.
But Mr. Hamilton’s perch as the pastor of his state’s largest church is unique. He stepped away from the pulpit in May to campaign but has said he plans to stay on as a senior pastor if elected.
Mr. Hamilton and his wife, LaVon, married a week after graduating from high school. He was 25 when he founded the church in 1990, holding Sunday gatherings for the first few years in the chapel of a funeral home. Before getting started, the church’s leaders sent pamphlets to thousands of households in the area describing the ideal church as a “place to be loved,” to care for those in need, and to find God.
By 1998, the congregation had grown and raised enough money to move into a 1,500-seat sanctuary. Two years later, it had more than 6,000 adult members.
Mr. Hamilton has described himself as both a Mainline Protestant, belonging to a tradition that tends to be theologically liberal and emphasize community service, and an evangelical, with a focus on personal spiritual development and church growth. From the beginning, he strategized to ensure his church would not simply poach members of other congregations, but appeal to nonreligious people, including skeptics.
“There’s a lot of people out there who are intellectuals, who felt like so often the Christian faith they hear about is an anti-intellectual faith,” he said in an interview. “That’s not true for most Christians, but it is some of the most vocal Christians.”
Mr. Hamilton’s first book, “Confronting the Controversies,” included chapters on abortion, homosexuality, and the separation of church and state. But intentional outreach to the “unchurched” meant thinking from the beginning about how to handle charged topics in an evenhanded way.
“Just statistically, more nonreligious and nominally religious people are Democrats and progressive,” he said in a 2024 interview with the evangelical podcaster Carey Nieuwhof. “If they come to church and feel they’re hearing a Republican rally, they’re not coming back.”
About 40 percent of Americans who at least lean Democrat are religiously unaffiliated, according to the Pew Research Center. Just half identify as Christian, compared with three-quarters of Republicans.
“His background freaks me out a little bit,” said Erica Roger, a Democrat who lives outside Kansas City in Johnson County, a populous area that Donald Trump won in 2016 but lost in 2024. “I don’t like that he was head of a large church.”
Yet Ms. Roger said she planned to vote for Mr. Hamilton anyway: Her negative feelings about Mr. Marshall’s tenure are stronger still.
Mr. Marshall attends a Mainline Protestant church in Great Bend, Kan., where he has served as a Sunday school teacher, elder and deacon, according to his campaign website. He is an obstetrician-gynecologist who won his Senate seat in 2020.
He and his allies have attempted to mine Mr. Hamilton’s long tenure as a pastor for ammunition. One attack ad used clips of sermons in which Mr. Hamilton criticized beef consumption and referred to repenting for his blind spots as a white person. The ad calls the pastor “way too woke for Kansas.”
But Church of the Resurrection is a difficult congregation to paint as “woke.” When Mr. Hamilton’s congregation surveyed its members in 2016, it found that about 49 percent identified as Republicans, 21 percent as Democrats and 24 percent as independent.
Mr. Hamilton has said he does not expect all of his congregants to vote for him.
He was a leader in his denomination’s embrace of same-sex marriage and gay and lesbian clergy that culminated in 2024, and which led to thousands of conservative congregations leaving the United Methodist Church.
His own public evolution on the issue began two decades earlier, when he preached a sermon at his church confessing that he was increasingly unsure that his previous traditionalist views were correct. Church of the Resurrection, he said in the sermon, would be a church “that loves gay and straight people.” Hundreds of families stopped attending in response.
Mr. Hamilton’s evolution continued, and the church now performs same-sex weddings and describes itself as “L.G.B.T.Q. friendly.” But Mr. Hamilton has said he wants the church to be open to people with a spectrum of views on the issue.
“You can be traditional or progressive, but you’re going to have to commit to love people,” he said on the podcast in 2024.
Mr. Hamilton is confronting skepticism from secular-minded voters head on, describing his church as a civic institution as well as a spiritual establishment.
“A lot of people are turned off by Christians and church,” he acknowledged to a standing-room-only crowd a few Sundays ago in Wichita.
He went on to explain that Church of the Resurrection is the largest source of volunteers for the Kansas City public school system, the largest source of blood for its blood banks, and the operator of a bookmobile and a foodmobile.
“I just wanted to you know that’s the kind of church we are,” Mr. Hamilton said.
That afternoon, he stopped by his campaign office in the city to greet about 30 volunteers. Walking into the room, he waved hello to Kim Burton, who babysat his children decades ago in Kansas City.
Ms. Burton, an aircraft worker who now lives in Wichita, was surprised her former pastor had recognized her after so many years. But it was an example of why she had shown up to volunteer for him. Although she has been “sick of Trump and the MAGA people” for years, she said, she was a Republican until August, when she switched parties to vote for Mr. Hamilton in the primary.
In recent years, she said, more progressive Christian voices have been overshadowed.
“It’s like they’re taking our religion from us,” Ms. Burton said. “I’m tired of people thinking that to be a Christian and be politically active, you have to be on the right.”
Ilana Arougheti contributed reporting from Johnson County, Kan.
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