Adam Hamilton and Taking Back Religion from the Right

As a longtime Methodist, I can attest that—at least from a distance—it is not the most dramatic of the world’s religious operations. Very little incense, not much speaking in tongues, and sulfur and brimstone are barely in evidence. There are bishops, but they don’t get special hats. Methodist Central Hall, in London, has a magnificent organ, for playing the great Wesleyan hymns (“Love Divine, All Loves Excelling”; “Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus”), but the contrast between its sternness and the ornate Westminster Abbey, across the street, is instructive. Methodism’s adherents have spanned the political spectrum, though perhaps they share a certain earnestness: Nelson Mandela, Ulysses S. Grant, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Walter Mondale, Scout Finch (and Harper Lee), Beyoncé.

Among them is the most earnest and upright of all Americans, Superman, who was raised in a Methodist household in Smallville, Kansas, by his adoptive parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent. This is significant because, earlier this month, Kansas’s current most prominent Methodist, the Reverend Adam Hamilton, won the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate. He is now aiming to become, in November’s election, the first Democrat that Kansas has sent to the Senate since 1932, the political equivalent of leaping Wichita’s Epic Center—at twenty-two stories, the tallest building in the state—in a single bound. It’s a hard task, but not impossible. Indeed, the Cook Political Report recently moved the Kansas Senate race from “Solid Republican” to “Likely Republican”—and that’s in part because there’s something interesting happening in American politics this cycle.

While many observers are focussed on the emergence of the Democratic Socialists of America (who boast a total membership of just over a hundred thousand), a more important trend in the Democratic Party may be the resurgence of the once dominant and long-dormant mainline Protestant tradition. In Texas, Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico—a progressive Presbyterian seminarian who supports reproductive and L.B.G.T.Q. rights and the separation of church and state, condemns Christian nationalism, and has a slight edge in the polls over his Republican challenger—has gained widespread attention. (If he wins in November, he will be the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Texas in nearly forty years.) The Religious News Service reported earlier this month that there are at least twelve pastors, seminarians, and former clergy who have run for federal office on the Democratic ballot this year, and that seven had made it through their primaries. (In Iowa’s Second District, the Reverend Lindsay James, a state representative and a Presbyterian, beat the Reverend Clint Twedt-Ball, a Methodist, to win the primary for an open House seat.) By contrast, according to the Religious News Service, seven clergy have run in G.O.P. primaries, and just three of them, all evangelicals, won. Among the issues on the ballot in 2src26, then, is what Christianity will mean in American politics in the years to come. And since nearly two-thirds of American adults, which is to say roughly a hundred and seventy million people, identify as Christian, it’s a fateful question, one at least as important as what will happen with the D.S.A.

There was a time not that long ago when “mainline Protestant” was white America’s religious default; in 196src, slightly more than half the population was Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Congregationalist, or Reformed or American Baptist, or belonged to some other part of this tradition. (Roughly a quarter of the country was Roman Catholic.) These denominations defined the mainstream in American life; nearly every President from the turn of the century to 196src came out of these churches. And, as the suburbs grew in the nineteen-fifties, the churches grew with them.

But then came the social unrest of the sixties. Most of these churches, or at least their clergy, broke “liberal,” supporting the Black church that was so key to the civil-rights movement, and taking an important role in the antiwar movement. Congregants began to peel off, for a variety of reasons—but in many cases it was because of political disagreements with their denomination or because they wanted something more “spiritual.” As Hillary Clinton told my New Yorker colleague Michael Luo, in 2srcsrc7, when he was a reporter at the Times, “I thought that in the Methodist Church, a lot of the churches had drifted too far on the social-gospel side, which is very understandable, because there were a lot of serious issues, certainly, that were facing me when I was growing up, on race relations and on the Vietnam war, and so much else,” she said. “But you have to keep in balance the feeding of your spirit and your soul and the need to be nurturing your personal faith, while you try to have the energy and the support to go out into the world.”

A growing evangelical church was there to take up some of the slack. The emerging megachurches of the exurbs were tightly focussed on a “personal relationship” with the divine—a theology that fit well with an emergent emphasis on individualism in American politics as the Reagan years unfolded. The politics of these congregations swung sharply right, behind the Republican gospel of low taxes and limited government, and with a renewed emphasis on sin as personal, not collective. (Think premarital sex, not racism.) There was also a well-funded and coördinated conservative campaign to disrupt and divide the mainline denominations; the United Methodist Church, for instance, endured a decades-long siege led by the Institute on Religion and Democracy, funded by the foundations of right-wing industrial barons such as John Olin, Richard Mellon Scaife, and Lynde and Harry Bradley. These campaigners centered on the most divisive issues, particularly the full inclusion of gay Christians in the life of the church. Eventually, the conservatives succeeded; the denomination finally divided in a schism in 2src24, with more than seventy-six hundred congregations leaving to join a conservative Global Methodist Church.

Faced with similar pressures in other denominations, the mainline population shrank dramatically—at this point, it is perhaps less than fifteen per cent of Americans. But that’s still a large group—roughly the same percentage of the population that self-identifies as Black. And in the past few years, there have been signs of a renewal. If the mainline church lost confidence, it still had a conscience, and, spurred partly by Donald Trump’s repudiation of so many long-standing norms on issues such as diversity, race, poverty, and immigration, its clergy and laity have become steadily louder.

The first public moment of resistance in Trump’s second term came immediately, during the Inaugural prayer service, when the Episcopal bishop of the District of Columbia, Mariann Budde, asked him to “have mercy” on gay, immigrant, and other marginalized Americans. The President, naturally, responded by saying that the bishop was a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater” who owed him an apology, and whose service had been “very boring and uninspiring.”

Then came last winter’s events in Minneapolis. There’s no clear account yet of why the President and his team chose midwinter Minnesota to make their most aggressive stand on immigration, but it’s clear it was a bad decision. They’d picked a place with high levels of social trust and organization, derived at least in some part from the state’s long Lutheran tradition. (I’m on an advisory board to an immigrant-support organization now known as Global Refuge, but which for most of its life was known as the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.) And, along with many other groups, mainline Protestantism rose to the occasion. Renee Good, a mother of three who had opposed the crackdown and on January 7th was killed in her car by an ICE agent, was a Presbyterian who had taken mission trips as a youth. Following her death, the Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire instructed his clergy to “get their affairs in order—to make sure they have their wills written” so that they could be ready to stand between “the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.” Hundreds of clergy members from across the country flew to Minneapolis to join the protests. On January 23rd, many of them temporarily disrupted the airport to protest deportation flights; about a hundred were arrested. The next day, Alex Pretti, an intensive-care nurse and a lifelong Catholic, was shot and killed by federal agents.

This season’s slate of clerical candidacies is the next obvious step in this resurgence, and it’s clearly reverberating because Trump’s extreme positions have left an opening. But, at some level, these campaigns also seem a response to the right-wing evangelical hijacking of the Gospel message. That is, a political debate is growing out of a theological one: How should we read the Bible, and what does it mean?

Here, again, we need to turn to American history. Largely forgotten now, Harry Emerson Fosdick was the most important Protestant leader of the first half of the twentieth century. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., built the imposing Riverside Church opposite Grant’s Tomb to serve as his Vatican; for decades Fosdick preached a weekly “national vespers” service on NBC radio. He was a liberal—in 1933, Ruby Bates said that Fosdick had persuaded her to recant her previous testimony against the Scottsboro Boys, whom she and another woman had falsely accused of rape. But Fosdick’s real radicalism lay in his insistence that Scripture was not static or inerrant but needed to be read in the context of an evolving culture and country. In his most important sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?,” from 1922, he wrote:

God, having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by divers portions and in divers manners, hath at the end of these days spoken unto us in His Son. . . . There are multitudes of Christians, then, who think, and rejoice as they think, of the Bible as the record of progressive unfolding of the character of God to His people from early primitive days until the great unveiling in Christ; to them the Book is more inspired and more inspiring than ever it was before; and to go back to a mechanical and static theory of inspiration would mean to them the loss of some of the most vital elements in their spiritual experience and in their appreciation of the Book.

This interpretation was not universally popular—in fact, conservative elements in the Presbyterian Church threatened to put Fosdick on denominational trial for heresy. But the establishment came to his defense—John Foster Dulles, who later served as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, offered to serve as his counsel—and over the course of the century his view prevailed. (Martin Luther King, Jr., inscribed a copy of his 1958 book, “Stride Toward Freedom,” to Fosdick, with the words “If I were called upon to select the greatest preacher of this century, I would choose your name.”) Or, at least, it prevailed until the reaction against the mainline church began, in the post-civil-rights era of the nineteen-seventies and eighties. Then a more literal reading of the Bible came back into fashion—in some ways it was like the resurgence of “originalism” in constitutional interpretation. In the case of the Bible, this renewed fundamentalism focussed especially on the “morality” of homosexuality, citing a few widely scattered verses in the Bible that seemed to condemn it.

That brings us back to Adam Hamilton. At sixty-two, he has been a minister for thirty-six years, and he is the author of more than thirty books, including “Selling Swimsuits in the Arctic: Seven Simple Keys to Growing Churches.” He’s running for Senate, he says, to “build bridges” across political divides, and he seems more likely than most to have a shot at succeeding. He’s not just a Methodist pastor, he’s the founding pastor of the largest United Methodist church in the country, the Church of the Resurrection, which has a congregation of roughly twenty-four thousand, divided between a number of locations across the Kansas City area. In some ways, then, he’s a megachurch preacher; the website for Resurrection has some megachurch hallmarks (glossy portrayals of happy congregants; “modern” worship services, with lots of electric guitars; requisite podcasts). Given Kansas politics, it might have been easier for him to take his giant congregation out of the United Methodist fold during the schism over homosexuality. But he did not. In part, that was because he had come to know plenty of gay congregants. But it’s also because he insisted on reading the Bible as Fosdick had—as an ongoing conversation, not a once-and-for-all user’s manual. While discussing the role of the church in supporting L.G.B.T.Q. rights with two fellow-clergy, in a 2src21 podcast conversation called “Changing My Position,” he said that he had spent conservatively “twenty thousand hours studying the Bible,” and that “the more you study it, the more you find there are challenging passages, and not just about this issue.” Then, “You find yourself saying, O.K., I have to recognize the Bible wasn’t—it wasn’t dictated by God” but that “human beings wrote this book, and they wrote in a particular time and place, and the Spirit prompted them.” He added, “We’re not expecting the author of Genesis . . . to understand modern cosmology when it comes to the universe. And we’re going to give a pass there.” In the same way, he pointed out, Paul’s injunction that women were to be silent in church was the product of a long-ago time and culture. He concluded, “What is crystal clear is that the driving ethic of the Christian faith is love, and we’re going to love and welcome people here, gay or straight.” (The right has noted Hamilton’s stance; in July, Breitbart News published an article characterizing statements he had made about inconsistencies in the Bible as claiming that it was “full of errors.”)

Hamilton had first taken a stand on gay marriage roughly twenty years ago, he told the clergy on the podcast, and at that time some eight hundred people left the church, which made him “so stinking depressed.” He said, “I would pray. Every day, I would go take these prayer walks, you know, ‘God, have I disappointed you? Have I failed you?’ But more people joined than left, people who said, ‘This is the kind of church I was looking for. This is a church that takes the Bible seriously.’ ”

It’s not as if Hamilton had become some kind of radical. If you listen to his sermons (neatly archived online) or read his books, he’s a truly moderate figure. In his Senate campaign, he spends a lot of his time talking about the impact of tariffs on Kansas farmers, and the increased prices they’re paying for diesel and fertilizer. Neither is he in the prophetic tradition of, say, Senator Raphael Warnock, of Georgia, who inherited King’s pulpit at the Ebenezer Baptist Church. But he’s also not pulling any punches about how he reads the Bible in our moment; he’s taking on the G.O.P. quite straightforwardly for sidestepping the Gospel.

In an interview, describing a recent conversation on the campaign trail, Hamilton said, “I was talking to somebody in the ag industry in western Kansas and . . . she said, ‘O.K., I just need to ask you this question. I don’t want to insult you, but I don’t understand how can you be a Christian pastor and a Democrat?’ And so, this was my response: I said, Well, let’s just talk about what Republicans and Democrats believe, and I value Republicans, too. But I said, So, Republicanism—often we hear it’s about fiscal responsibility, limited government, a strong defense, and personal civil liberties, and let’s say conservative values in some ways. And I said, So, Democrats—if you think about what they stand for, it’s education, it’s the vulnerable, it’s social safety nets, it’s a progressive spirit that’s trying to lift people up. And I said, If you think about those two, which sounds more like Jesus in the Gospels?”

One reason that Christianity is getting less attention than democratic socialism as the election season unfolds is probably just that most of the media isn’t comfortable talking about theology. Regular day-in, day-out discussion of it has taken place mostly on the Opinion page of the Times, where it has been conducted primarily by three conservatives: David French, Bret Stephens, and Ross Douthat, who recently left the paper for CBS. It’s not that they haven’t seen this shift under way; French has written admiringly of Talarico. But this year’s politico-religious revival on the left should help the conversation to keep growing, as increasingly the idea of “Christianity” will be broadened, and new voices will emerge. “Pastor” and “right-wing conservative” have been all but synonymous since the days of Jerry Falwell, so everyone should welcome a new depth to the debate.

And this kind of progressive theological clarity is showing up in many places. Another prominent American Christian, Pope Leo XIV, has been straightforward in condemning both the Trump Administration’s treatment of immigrants and its prosecution of the war: the Gospel says to welcome strangers; Catholic teaching back to Augustine says a just war must be defensive. “Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth,” the Pope said in April, not long after Trump had posted and then deleted an artificially generated image of himself as a Christ-like figure.

Yet such acts haven’t deterred the evangelical Christians who make up much of the faithful segment of the MAGA base. In April, Trump’s spiritual adviser the Reverend Paula White-Cain, said that he was the “greatest champion of faith that we’ve ever seen in a President,” and she told Trump himself, “You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our Lord and Saviour showed us.” And the base has been angered by what it sees as a left-wing appropriation of Biblical messages. The right-wing theological website Protestia has attacked Hamilton for not heeding Paul’s insistence that women stay silent in church. Breitbart has also published an article skewering Hamilton for suggesting that adherents of other religions might get to Heaven. Meanwhile, his Republican opponent, the incumbent senator, Roger Marshall, has denounced him as “woke.” The G.O.P. has also been hounding a Lutheran pastor running for Congress in Iowa, the Reverend Sarah Trone Garriott, as “the wicked witch of woke.” (She has directed interfaith engagement for the Des Moines Area Religious Council Food Pantry Network, an organization providing food to thousands of people.) Similarly, the Republican Texas House member Jeff Leach has said that Talarico “isn’t reading the same Bible I’m reading. And his ‘values’ couldn’t be more unTexan.” And a recent best-seller from the Christian right is “Toxic Empathy,” by Allie Beth Stuckey, a podcaster who is the daughter of a senior adviser to the Heritage Foundation. In the book, she insists that Christians must resist liberal calls to “exploit Christian compassion,” and instead get down to the hard tasks of, say, deporting undocumented immigrants. But that’s a difficult case to make, given that the Gospels are more or less a guide to empathy.

Even before Hamilton decided to run, he was bothered by the increasing incivility in American politics. So his church—which has raised many millions of dollars for good causes, and operates a local food pantry and food truck—decided to distribute lawn signs simply encouraging people to be kind. There have been campaigns around the themes “Do Unto Others,” “Love Your Neighbor,” “Be Just. Kind. Humble,” and, this year’s iteration, “Love One Another.” At most points in American history, these would have read as pretty anodyne, even saccharine. But in the Trump era, evidently, these are potent political slogans. ♦