John B. Judis writes the Substack “Foreign & Domestic.”
Since the rise of the religious right began, Christian-inflected politics has been associated with the Republican Party. But if the midterm elections are any indication, that is changing. A number of Protestant pastors are running for national office as Democrats, and rather than downplaying their faith, they are speaking in unabashedly Christian terms.
James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminary graduate, is running for Senate in Texas; Adam Hamilton, the pastor of an evangelical megachurch, is running in Kansas. In Iowa, Sarah Trone Garriott, a Lutheran minister, and Lindsay James, a Presbyterian minister, are running for the U.S. House. Other Democratic candidates for the U.S. House include Anna Golladay, a former Methodist minister, in Tennessee, Frederick Haynes III, a Baptist minister, in Texas, and Robb Ryerse, an evangelical pastor, in Arkansas.
Each of these pastors has his or her own reasons to run, but as a group, they appear to have been impelled by two occurrences. First, they are responding to what they see as President Donald Trump’s blatant repudiation of Christian morality. Ryerse said: “Trump is an anathema to everything I was taught to love about Jesus … His disdain for decency, disrespect toward basic tenets of right and wrong and complete disregard for the most vulnerable among us could not be more fundamentally un-Christian.”
Secondly, the pastors have been reacting to the rise of Christian nationalism. Christian nationalists contend that the United States is a Christian nation and that the government should protect and give priority to what they see as Christian belief (for instance, by reinstituting school prayer).
Talarico has probably been the most outspoken in denouncing this trend. “I define Christian nationalism as the worship of power — social power, economic power, political power — in the name of Christ. And in my reading of the gospel, Christian nationalism is antithetical to the teachings of Jesus. It’s a betrayal of Jesus,” Talarico has said.
These progressive Christian candidates see the contemporary right as betraying true Christianity. Rather than insisting on humility and concern for the weak, Trump has preached a gospel of success that edges toward cruelty. This creed, along with the rise of a post-religious right, has opened an opportunity for the left to reclaim Christianity.
Doug Pagitt, a Minneapolis pastor, founded Vote Common Good in 2018, in the wake of Trump’s election. He has been a key figure in encouraging liberal and progressive pastors to run. “These candidates watched how the Trump administration has weaponized religion and the way Christian nationalism has been put forward,” he said. “They are putting themselves on the ballot as if it say, ‘Christian nationalists are not going to speak for all Christians.’”
In the place of Christian nationalism, these candidates are reviving a form of Christianity known as the Social Gospel. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Protestant Social Gospel movement provided the underlying framework for progressives, populists and socialists from William Jennings Bryan to Eugene Debs. Its central idea was that Christians should collectively tend to the social ills of humanity to create a kingdom of God on earth. It was set off from Evangelical revivalism, which sought individual salvation and implicitly endorsed the rugged individualism and laissez-faire capitalism of the era. Debs notably described socialism as “Christianity in action.”
Since that time, many liberals and progressives have embraced the Social Gospel’s framework, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the pastors who spurred the civil rights movement did so explicitly. King’s dream was the kingdom of God on earth. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Georgia) has followed this path. But most Democratic politicians have steered clear of overt Christian appeals. In the current midterms, however, the Social Gospel is being heard loud and clear.
“We as Christians, we as people of faith from all traditions, have a responsibility to take our faith from the sanctuary to the streets to not just love God, but to love neighbor,” Talarico says. “My faith in Jesus leads me,” he says, “to reject Christian nationalism and leads me to recommit myself to the project, the unfinished project of a multiracial, multicultural democracy.” When Hamilton was asked about his fellow Democratic Senate nominee, he responded that he and Talarico think faith “looks like caring for the poor, looks like compassion, looks like mercy, it looks like not bullying and picking on people, it looks like not starting foreign wars, you know, initiating those wars.”
On his campaign website, Talarico announces, “It’s time to start flipping tables,” referring to Jesus’ assault against the money changers in the temple in Jerusalem. The midterms will tell whether it really is time, or whether the revival of the Social Gospel is merely a passing phenomenon of the Trump years.
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