The Democratic Party has often seemed allergic to religion—remember President Barack Obama’s “cling[ing] to guns and religion” gaffe? It’s the Republicans who have been more comfortable with God, whether George W. Bush naming Jesus Christ as his favorite philosopher on national television or Donald J. Trump receiving a laying-on of hands in the Oval Office.
But Tuesday night’s election turned that story upside down with the victory of almost a dozen Democrats who are ordained pastors, chaplains, and seminarians. It was not just James Talarico, whose time as a Presbyterian seminarian is central to his campaign narrative. There were more—many more—who put their faith front and center, framing it as an asset for the voter.
To be sure, Exhibit A is Talarico, whose election to the U.S. Senate helped tip Texas blue for the first time in forty years. His campaign speeches and slogans directly quoted Jesus’ words in the Gospel of Mark: “Love thy neighbor.”
But there were other Democrats with Christian pulpits or credentials, like:
• Adam Hamilton, a United Methodist Church megachurch pastor who won a Senate seat in Kansas;
• Sarah Trone Garriott, a Lutheran pastor and Iowa state senator, now headed to the House of Representatives;
• Lindsay James, a Presbyterian chaplain who triumphed in Iowa’s second congressional district; and
• Frederick Haynes III, pastor of a Progressive National Baptist megachurch in Texas now going to the House.
But one blue wave does not make a sea change. Some pundits argue that voters haven’t embraced religion so much as rejected the Republican version of Christianity, on stark display in the first Trump presidency and playing on loop since 2024.
“I think Talarico and Hamilton and the candidates in Iowa, their approach to having dignity and respect for others and not going for their opponents’ jugulars, really resonated with voters after two more years of Donald Trump’s crassness and vulgarity,” said Ryan Burge, who teaches at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. “But at the end of the day, people went to the polls and voted as they did because gas prices were high.”
Why did this current crop of religious Democrats resonate with voters? Democrats have been trying this playbook for a long time; clearly secular politicians like Hillary Rodham Clinton have talked up their Methodist backgrounds, or whatever credentials they can tout. But this time, it seemed to work. So what are the takeaways, for both Democratic and Republican officials, for the presidential election in 2028?
Gary Adler, a sociologist at Penn State, sees a couple factors at work. First, the Democrats have made an effort in recent years to go to places where they did not have a strong party infrastructure and recruit leaders with networks of support in different places.
“Places like unions and churches and universities,” he said. “It makes sense to me that in Nebraska and Maine the people they recruited were union leaders, and in Kansas it is the pastor of one of the biggest churches.” (Indeed, by some measures Adam Hamilton’s church is the largest Methodist congregation in the world.)
At the same time, Adler continued, the Democrats’ framing of personal faith seems to have shifted. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden often spoke of their personal faith—but they did not overtly connect that faith to their policies. Tuesday night’s winners repeatedly connected those dots, especially on the issues of immigration, health care, and economics.
“They are not talking about how they are religious and therefore they are anti-trans or want the Ten Commandments posted in classrooms,” Adler said. “Instead, they are talking about moral issues, and this is a type of language that can pull people in whether they are religious or not.”
The Democrats may also be borrowing a page from the Black church’s long history of “speaking prophetically.” “You saw this in the anti-ICE mobilization,” Adler said. “Pastors were out there getting arrested, planning meal chains and school pick-ups. There was a sense of them stepping into a vacuum and speaking in a way that is more prophetic, not just about policy, but about their own candidacy. Mainline Protestants and Catholics do not usually do that and this just felt different.”
Nichole R. Phillips studies the Black church and has written extensively about its involvement in politics. She, too, thinks the Democrats were more willing to focus on faith, especially after the successful election of pastor Raphael Warnock to the Senate from Georgia in 2020. “Warnock articulated and is living out what has become and can become a political narrative that these other mainline progressive candidates have seen as valuable,” Phillips said.
In a recent interview with Politico, Warnock himself referred to a new openness to personal faith among Democrats: “I think Democrats have been reticent where matters of faith are concerned,” Warnock said. “I think in part out of a deep commitment to the separation of church and state. And I believe firmly in the separation of church and the state. And I think it’s important for me, particularly as a pastor, to say that we don’t live in a theocracy. I don’t want to live in anybody’s theocracy, but here’s how my faith shows up in my public service. It’s not the creeds; it’s not the orthodoxy. It’s my values.”
And don’t underestimate the boomerang effect in the voting booth. Christian voters who don’t recognize their faith in what comes out of the White House might have had enough.
“Christian nationalism has been the predominant public form of religion since Trump took office,” Phillips said. “It has silenced other forms. But now people are saying, ‘Is that the only form of Christianity? Oh no! That cannot be! It is time to take up your banner and reclaim your Christianity and how you practice it.’”
Burge sees that impulse in the voting booth, too, and says it is a major takeaway for Republicans.
“They should not assume that religious voters are going to vote for Republicans because that is what they do,” he said. “They don’t want you to arrest people and gloat about it. They don’t want you to revel in breaking up families. It’s like that ad Vivek Ramaswamy ran in Ohio. Everyone saw that and said, ‘You can’t do that, man.’ That crosses a line. It shows that we do have a sense of morality in this country and if you cross it, you will be defeated.”