T wo-thirds of Americans identify as Christian, but since less than a third of the country actually makes it to church regularly, many rely on what they pick up from the media – social or otherwise – to know what the religion means.
And until yesterday, that received wisdom could be summed up as: a conservative, domineering, and above all anti-gay force fiercely committed to the Republican party.
Today, it means something different. The Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico has won in a Texas landslide – despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that he ran on a wildly different interpretation of Christianity .
In his view, the important commandments are to love one’s neighbor, in material terms: feeding, clothing, healing. And he’s quite willing to think about that in radical ways, if by radical you mean getting to the root: “ We as Christians are called to do more than charity,” he said. “We are called to challenge the systems that make charity necessary.”
If you go 35 miles north of Texas, across the Oklahoma panhandle, you reach the deep red state of Kansas , which hadn’t elected a Democrat since 1932. But Kansans last night picked a pastor, the Rev Adam Hamilton, to represent them in the Senate. Hamilton started a successful church in the suburbs of Kansas City, and though he’s clearly a moderate, he’s also clearly willing to state that the gospel is, for lack of a better word, liberal. Read this carefully – it is far sharper than you’d think at first glance:
double quotation mark Well, let’s just talk about what Republicans and Democrats believe, and I value Republicans, too. But … 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 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?
Kansans answered that question last night. They may have been voting more on the price of diesel than on religious interpretation, but they were clearly willing to take a chance on this “progressive spirit”, even though they’d been told by evangelical preachers that it was all but satanic.
Last month, in fact, hundreds of conservative Christian preachers wrote him a letter calling on him to “repent of what you have taught and withdraw from the Senate race”. He did not, and the letter’s claims did not matter to voters, any more than JD Vance’s charge that Hamilton had “insult[ed] your faith and spit on your religion”.
Nor did it matter to Texas voters when a spiritual adviser to Pete Hegseth and an evangelical pastor assailed Talarico on a podcast as a “wolf” and seemed to call for his crucifixion.
“You may pray for my death, pastor, but I still love you,” Talarico responded – turning the other cheek in a way that muscular evangelical Christianity has sneered at.
For both Hamilton and Talarico, homosexuality was supposed to be the wedge issue that would sink them. In Hamilton’s case, he had chosen, two decades ago, to make his congregation “open and affirming”, welcoming gay members.
That was not an easy choice in red Kansas, and many other Methodist congregations took the opposite tack. He lost hundreds of members, but he gained far more; indeed, his Resurrection church is now the largest Methodist assemblage in the country.
As for Talarico, the attacks on him were even more direct – the entire Republican apparatus essentially boiled down their message to: “You’re gay.” And their evidence, essentially, was that he had said God was “non-binary”, which to them sounded … super gay.
But of course, it also sounded a lot like the Bible: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ.” And even if they couldn’t recite Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, Texas voters picked up on the humaneness of Talarico’s appeal: he was a good guy.
Hamilton and Talarico weren’t alone – Iowa, for instance, elected not one but two progressive pastors, the Presbyterian Lindsay James and Lutheran Shane Trone Garriott (literally half the state’s Congressional delegation is now mainline Protestant preachers).
There will, I think, be more in the future: among other things, last winter’s ICE raids in Minneapolis energized many clergy, with hundreds flying in from across the country to take part in civil disobedience.
Most pundits who have noted this shift focus on its effects on the Democratic party, helping the blue side draw in new voters.
But its effect on Christianity may be equally important – alongside Pope Leo, the American pontiff who has taken on the Trump administration over war and immigration, it is offering a brand new vision of the faith to lots of people who had written it off. Talarico, Hamilton, Leo – they’re all appealing, warm, open. Kind.
Those are novel traits for American Christianity in this century; perhaps they’ll give Americans a very different sense of what their professed tradition is all about.
Bill McKibben is the Schumann distinguished scholar at Middlebury College. He is the founder of Third Act, organizing people over 60 for progressive change
