Washington, D.C.

Collars on the Ticket

The midterms did not only move seats. They moved pulpits into the Senate chamber. Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico won a Texas Senate race. United Methodist megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton took Kansas—the first Democrat in that seat since 1932. Wire stories and op-eds are already calling it a rebirth of the “religious left.” Five new Democratic members of Congress are clergy or seminarians. For a week the same press that treated orthodox Christians as a museum exhibit has discovered that faith can still win votes when it wears the right stole.

Faith Is Not a Costume Party

Lucid will not pretend that every man in a collar preaches the same Christ. A progressive Christianity that baptizes the sexual revolution and calls it mercy is not the faith of the creeds, whatever the polling says. That is opinion, and Lucid owns it. But something else is also true, and conservatives who sneer at “religious Democrats” should hear it: when one side fields pastors and the other fields consultants, the public draws a conclusion. The left did not invent the language of neighbor-love. It borrowed it because too many on the right left the vocabulary on the church steps and went looking for a cheaper rhetoric.

Hamilton and Talarico did not win because America suddenly became Methodist. They won, in part, because they spoke as if moral claim still belonged in public. Conservatives who want the Ten Commandments on the wall and then treat Sunday as optional should not be shocked when someone else fills the silence with a different gospel.

The Mustard Seed Again

Lucid’s counsel is not to copy the religious left’s politics. It is to recover the seriousness they are parodying. Build churches that catechize. Raise children who can name the Creed before they can name a candidate. Put orthodox believers on ballots without apologizing for orthodoxy. The “religious left” narrative will fade the moment it collides with abortion, marriage, and the sexed body. What will not fade is the vacuum that invited it. A civilization that will not argue about God in public will soon find that someone else is happy to do the arguing—and to take the Senate seat that came with it.

References

• AP: Clergy candidates and Democrats’ midterm gains
• Washington Post: Some see a new era for the ‘religious left’
• NPR: How religion helped Democrats win control of Congress
• Vox: Talarico, Hamilton and a new kind of Democrat

Photo by Andre Carrotflower via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; cropped and color-adjusted.