Several Democrats with religious backgrounds are seeking federal office in the November 3 midterm elections, many of them in states that lean strongly Republican. Around nine Democratic faith leaders, seminary students and Sunday school teachers are in the running, and at least a dozen were on the ballot during this year’s primaries.
Among them is Reverend Adam Hamilton, who founded the Church of the Resurrection, described as the largest United Methodist congregation in the country. The church spans nine campuses and has 23,000 members, and Hamilton has written more than 30 books. He is now seeking a Senate seat representing Kansas as a Democrat, a state where no Democrat has won a Senate race since 1932.
Democratic faith candidates test conservative states
The candidacies are part of a wider trend in the 2026 midterm cycle, with Christian leaders standing for election in largely right-leaning states. Their campaigns have raised questions about whether appealing to Christian voters could help Democrats win in hotly contested races. Many are competing in Iowa, Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee, states that have a history of backing right-wing candidates in statewide elections.
Reverend Shannon Fleck, executive director of Faithful America, a progressive Christian advocacy organisation, said some voters have become disillusioned with the Republican claim on religious values. Democratic candidates, she argued, can offer an alternative. Fleck, an Oklahoma resident, said faith has long been part of daily life for many Americans, but that it has also been manipulated by leaders. She added that faith-inspired Democrats have “more opportunities for turnover” in right-leaning states “because we are so intimately familiar with the other option”.
The candidates include a range of figures:
- Adam Hamilton, who founded his own church, running for the Senate in Kansas
- Robb Ryerse, who also founded his own church, in Arkansas
- Frederick Haynes III in Texas, Sarah Trone Garriott and Lindsay James in Iowa, and Anna Golladay in Tennessee, all serving as faith leaders or pastors
- Ben McAdams in Utah and Chaz Molder in Tennessee, who have highlighted their work as Sunday school teachers
- James Talarico, a seminary student locked in a heated race for the open Senate seat in Texas
Historical roots of the religious left
Experts say Democratic candidates with faith backgrounds are not a new phenomenon and are drawing on a long tradition of religious advocacy on the political left. Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, vice president of programmes and strategy at the Interfaith Alliance, an advocacy organisation for religious freedom, said that there have always been progressive Christians in American history. He has studied the influence of religious leaders on movements ranging from the civil rights movement, with figures such as Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, to the push for women’s rights.
Graves-Fitzsimmons also noted that conservative groups once took part in efforts such as the environmental movement, citing a Christian responsibility to care for nature. “Every movement that we associate with the left or progressive movement in American history has been full of Christians, as well as people of other faiths and the non-religious,” he said.
Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Washington University in St Louis, traces the religious left even further back, to the 19th-century fight over slavery. He described the abolitionist movement as largely religious, involving many liberal and progressive Christians in the North. Burge also pointed to the early 1900s Social Gospel movement, when theologians and pastors sought to apply Christian principles to poverty and social justice.
Shifting religious voting blocs and risks for Democrats
Experts say the Republican Party began cultivating Christian voters largely in the 1970s and 1980s, when leaders such as Jerry Falwell grew disillusioned with the social policies of Democrat Jimmy Carter, himself a Sunday school teacher. Groups including the Moral Majority, founded in 1979, and the Christian Coalition of America, founded in 1987, supported issues popular on the religious right, including restricting abortion and limiting the government’s reach.
According to the Pew Research Center, 85 percent of white evangelicals leaned towards the Republican Party in 2024, up from 65 percent in 1994. Pew findings also suggested that Trump’s hold on that vote has begun to weaken. As of January, his approval rating among white evangelicals had slipped from 78 percent in 2025 to 69 percent this year, and only 40 percent of respondents said they were confident he had acted ethically in office.
Burge argued that the religious right is more homogeneous than the religious left, which has stronger representation among other faith groups. He noted that Muslims and Jews are strong Democratic constituencies, and that African-American Christians also lean heavily left. Still, he said the number of overtly religious voters may be shrinking. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, the share of Americans identifying as white evangelical Christians fell from roughly 23 percent in 2006 to 13 percent in 2024, while religiously unaffiliated Americans rose to 28 percent.
Experts also say there are drawbacks to courting Christian voters. Democrats have avoided being overtly religious in recent years as their coalition has become more diverse. Burge said that “candidates being overly religious is not a huge turn-on for a lot of Democrats”, adding that they “want strong separation of church and state”.
Values messaging and attacks on the campaign trail
Several candidates have built their campaigns around shared values. Burge said he has noticed a strong emphasis on the Gospel command to “love your neighbour as yourself”, applied to issues such as income inequality, the minimum wage, workers’ rights and healthcare. He said the religious left frames these issues “not as economic issues but as social justice issues motivated by religion”.
Talarico, who is 37, leaned on the same theme after winning the Democratic nomination in Texas. In his victory speech he tied the phrase to diversity, saying he is called to love all his neighbours. Hamilton used the same biblical command when accepting his party’s nomination on August 4, arguing that it includes making sure children do not go to bed hungry and that people do not have to choose between their mortgage and healthcare.
Religion has also become a point of attack. At the Iowa State Fair in August, Lindsay James, a Presbyterian minister running for Iowa’s 2nd congressional district, used the parable of the good Samaritan to portray her opponents as unfeeling. Republicans have also challenged the faith of some Democratic candidates. Joe Mitchell, James’s Republican rival, accused her of misrepresenting her credentials at a conservative religious summit in July, calling her and other Democratic pastors “Pastors in Name Only”. In Texas, Republican Ken Paxton described Talarico’s beliefs as “antithetical to historical Christian views” on a podcast.
It remains unclear whether the religious backgrounds of Democrats like Talarico will matter to voters when they cast their ballots.
