Why Democratic pastors are being attacked for their faith, not merely their politics.

Pastors, seminarians and other faith leaders are running for office as Democrats across the country. Their campaigns are making progressive Christianity newly visible — and prompting opponents to challenge not only their politics but their legitimacy as Christians.

RNS national reporter Jack Jenkins joins Amanda to examine James Talarico’s rise, attacks involving a “Satanist wedding” and biblical inerrancy, and the theological dispute between Raphael Warnock and Mike Johnson over Matthew 25. Do these candidates represent a durable religious political force, or are they a temporary reaction to Trump?

This transcript was generated using AI tools and may contain minor transcription errors.

AMANDA HENDERSON: From RNS and the Institute for Religion, Politics, and Culture, this is Complexified, a podcast for the religiously curious and politically frustrated. I’m Amanda Henderson. Across the country, an unusual collection of Democratic candidates is stepping out from behind the pulpit and onto the ballot. In Texas, Kansas, Iowa, and across the country, pastors and other faith leaders are running for office as Democrats. They aren’t all part of one movement, but taken together they raise an intriguing question: is there a deeper well of progressive Christianity in America than our politics has allowed us to see? Jack Jenkins is a national reporter for Religion News Service and the author of American Prophets: The Religious Roots of Progressive Politics and the Ongoing Fight for the Soul of the Country. Jack, welcome back to Complexified.

JACK JENKINS: Thanks so much for having me.

HENDERSON: Jack, you were reporting on James Talarico before James Talarico became a national figure. For people who have only encountered him recently, who is he and what made you start paying attention to him?

JENKINS: Yeah, so James Talarico is currently a state-level lawmaker in the state of Texas. He is also, in addition to that role, a seminarian at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary — that’s the seminary affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). So he’s pursuing a Master of Divinity and potentially becoming a pastor. He’s doing those at the same time. And now, as a third prong of his life, he’s also running for Senate as a Democrat in the state of Texas and has emerged victorious in the Democratic primary.

Now, an interesting thing about what he’s done throughout his career as a lawmaker and in the Senate campaign is he’s made very public how he feels about his faith — talks about it very vocally and prominently — and he was a vocal critic of Christian nationalism in Texas on the floor of the state capitol. That’s when I first spoke to him, about a series of bills they were seeking to pass in Texas that critics were alleging were tantamount to Christian nationalism — things like the Ten Commandments on the wall in public schools.

So now, as he’s running for Senate, the opening video for his Senate campaign was him standing on the back of a truck in front of a church delivering his opening argument to potential voters, and the campaign slogan was “Let’s Flip Some Tables” — a direct religious reference. So he has really centered faith as a centerpiece of his otherwise pretty progressive politics, particularly within the state of Texas.

HENDERSON: When did Talarico begin to look less like an individual figure who was interesting and more like the leading edge of something larger?

JENKINS: I think there was an interesting turn that happened, particularly when he won his primary. It was one thing as he was coming up — that he’s a Democrat who’s a person of faith. As we all know, that’s actually not super uncommon. But he really was pushing it very hard. Once he won the primary, within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, it was fascinating to watch as a religion and politics reporter: there was this avalanche of criticism of him coming from the right that wasn’t really about his policies, or not just about his policies, but specific allegations about his faith — saying that he’s blasphemous, an apostate, going to hell. These were coming from Republican officials in the state.

So suddenly he became this figure, both for progressive religious people who saw themselves in him — particularly white mainliners, who have been well represented in politics in general but haven’t necessarily centered their faith in a campaign the way he has — and, in addition, this figure lifted up as something to be concerned about on the right: that this is someone who doesn’t represent Christianity, and if you’re a conservative evangelical Christian, this is something to be feared and voted against.

HENDERSON: Now he’s not alone. There are several other Democrats right now running for political office. Can you tell us about some of the other candidates — or I guess I should say the other pastors who are now candidates? Talk to us about them.

JENKINS: Yeah, so there are around ten to twelve pastors, seminarians, and ex-pastors running on the Democratic ticket this year. You actually have another one right there in Texas, Reverend Freddie Haynes III, who has already won his Democratic primary for a congressional seat there. That’s a pretty blue seat, so he is likely to end up in Congress, which would lead to at least two prominent Black pastors in Congress, alongside Reverend Raphael Warnock of Georgia, the senator from Georgia.

But then there’s another interesting dynamic happening in Iowa, where we have two different pastors who have now become the Democratic nominees in their state. One is Reverend Sarah Trone Garriott — she’s a Lutheran minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. She’s already a state lawmaker, but now has emerged as the nominee, and her race is actually one of the most contested and closely watched races in the country. And then right nearby her, in the Iowa 2nd, Reverend Lindsay James, who’s a Presbyterian minister affiliated with the same denomination as James Talarico, has also emerged as the Democratic nominee there.

HENDERSON: And she actually had to beat out another pastor in the primary — a Methodist pastor. Pastors coming out of the woodwork.

JENKINS: Exactly. And then we have, just nearby there, another pastor running in Kansas, Reverend Adam Hamilton. He’s actually one of the most prominent United Methodist pastors in the country — I believe he runs one of, if not the largest, United Methodist churches in the country, in Kansas. His primary isn’t until early next month, but he’s apparently already setting fundraising records in that state. And that’s only a few of the ones I’ve mentioned. But I think one of the more telling things here is that these folks aren’t just running in far-flung races where Democrats are destined to lose. They’re either running in races where, like Freddie Haynes, they’re more likely to end up in Congress because it’s a bluer district, or in hyper-competitive districts. So they’re going to get a lot of attention between now and Election Day.

HENDERSON: When you put these candidates next to each other, are they working together? Is this a coordinated effort in any way? Do they share a theology or any sort of vision for why they are running and what they hope to do?

JENKINS: I don’t think there’s a coordinated effort per se — again, some of these pastors have run against each other. I do think, as someone who covers religion and politics, it’s not that surprising that some of these folks have ended up running for office. And I should note that Talarico, James, and Garriott have all already been state-level lawmakers before deciding to run for federal office — this trend is kind of years old. I actually profiled Sarah Trone Garriott when she was running for state office back in 2020.

But what I’ve seen over the course of the Trump era — if we place that from 2016 until now — is that a lot of mainline pastors have joined with Black pastors from historic Black denominations and really entered the political milieu in a very serious way. So you see a lot of overlap. In this cycle, there’s a lot of discourse around ICE and pushback to the president’s immigration agenda, and then there’s a lot of conversation about the moral fabric of the Trump administration, arguing there are moral questions around it. But after that there’s a lot of variability, because these folks are running in different kinds of races. You’ll see folks running in bluer districts for Congress with more stridently progressive positions, whereas folks running in more moderate or highly contested districts stress kitchen-table issues. But it’s worth noting that several of the denominations I just mentioned — whether it’s historic Black denominations or some of the white mainlines — have had prominent, vocal critics of Trump since he started running for office in 2015.

HENDERSON: You mentioned that Sarah Trone Garriott has been preaching while also campaigning and running for office. What happened when her opponents began looking into her ministry? I saw some clips about the wedding she performed — how are her opponents pulling from her sermons and the work she’s doing as a pastor to critique her?

JENKINS: Yeah, this is part of a really fascinating broader trend that’s emerged after these pastors won their primaries, where they’re being attacked — which is pretty normal for Republican opponents to do, particularly in hotly contested races — but they’re attacking their faith because that’s such a visible part of their political persona.

In Garriott’s case, what they’re looking at is that she — she was an intern at the time, she told me — this couple came to the church and self-identified as Satanists, and they wanted to get married. The pastor and the church team said, we’ll do that, but we’re going to have a Lutheran wedding. Sarah actually read scripture —

Love is patient, love is kind.

— during the wedding. It was not a Satanist wedding. She told the story publicly as this really emotional retelling of meeting people where they are — you could argue it’s actually low-key evangelical, in terms of reaching people with the gospel. But it has been reframed by her political opponents, including a claim repeated by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson a couple of times now, that she officiated a Satanist wedding — which is factually untrue. They’ve also referred to her as “the wicked witch of woke.” That’s a term the Republican Party is using. And there’s been criticism of her involvement in a sermon series after the 2016 election that either explicitly or implicitly criticized President Trump — which, again, was not uncommon in mainline contexts.

That’s not unique to her race, either. Lindsay James, nearby — this Presbyterian minister who worked as a chaplain for many years — her opponent recently attended a conservative pastors’ gathering in Iowa and referred to James, as well as Garriott and Talarico, as, quote, “pastors in name only” — PINOs, as he put it — and said they do not preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. That’s a specific theological rejoinder to them, and we’ve seen a lot of that with regard to the pushback to Talarico in Texas — that’s been pretty intense.

HENDERSON: And Adam Hamilton’s been attacked over biblical inerrancy, which for those in the religious world know is an old theological divide, and now it’s becoming part of this congressional campaign in Kansas. Some of these things being brought up as controversial “gotcha” moments are actually old fights that have been happening in theological circles for a long time. When they’re attacking Adam Hamilton for biblical inerrancy, tell me more about what that argument is tapping into.

JENKINS: So what you’re referencing is a post — an article from Breitbart, the conservative publication — that said they were exposing that Adam Hamilton, this United Methodist minister, had preached a sermon in which he said the Bible — they said this is a pastor who believes the Bible is full of errors — and they included a clip of Hamilton discussing errors in the Bible. Which seems to elide the reality that debates over biblical inerrancy are very old, and that in the American Protestant context there was a significant divide at the turn of the last century, over a hundred years ago, that arguably created the division between what we now call mainline Christians and what were at the time called fundamentalists and are now called evangelicals. That divide has been around for a while. It’s usually not hard and fast — a lot of Methodists self-ID as evangelical, you could have debates about inerrancy. But this isn’t something that would get Hamilton in trouble in the United Methodist Church — it’s very normative in terms of that denomination’s belief. So we’re seeing these century-old arguments suddenly show up in a political context. It’s almost — are we going to talk about infant baptism next? Is that going to come up in a Senate debate? It’s fascinating as a religion and politics reporter to see these get life again.

HENDERSON: These are ordained pastors — serious religious figures, educated, credentialed. Why has establishing that they’re not really Christian become politically useful for their opponents?

JENKINS: A big subtext here is that the Trump administration is significantly less popular than he was when he got reelected. The Iran war, among other things, has really complicated and whittled away some of his support. So Republicans feel vulnerable — that’s just a political reality between now and November. And in that posture of defense, it raises the question of what to do with these candidates who carry moral weight by virtue of being ordained — being a pastor still carries some degree of weight, particularly at the local level. In polling, people have the most trust for their local pastor or priest, or rabbi or imam or what have you. They may not trust the bishops above them, the hierarchs, the institutions themselves, but their local pastors, they do have some degree of trust and affinity for.

So if you’re a Republican candidate with a lot of negatives — for instance, Ken Paxton, who is James Talarico’s opponent, has been a pretty successful Republican official in the state of Texas, but when polled, his negatives — how people view him as a person — are significantly lower than Talarico’s. That doesn’t mean he won’t win, especially in a red state like Texas. But you’re seeing some people like Talarico more, who again is not a pastor but is a seminarian. So you can see the logic: if you can cut into the moral credibility that these seminarians, pastors, or ex-pastors have, that could continue to bolster the Republican argument that the left is coming for American values — dismissing them as socialists and communists, and arguing these people are only going to destroy the values you hold dear, not uphold them. That seems to be guiding a lot of the GOP’s posture here. And it’s indicative of a longstanding political posture: attack your opponent, and if you can make people think about them differently, as not a particularly good person, that only helps your candidates — so long as they don’t get dragged down with them.

HENDERSON: But for years, from the right’s perspective, progressive Christians could be treated as politically marginal or invisible — they didn’t even pay attention to them. But now they’re spending energy and time and money arguing that ordained pastors aren’t Christian at all. When we come back, what changed?

HENDERSON: Jack, you mentioned that Raphael Warnock is already working as a pastor and a United States senator. What does his presence introduce into Congress that wasn’t there before?

JENKINS: To be clear, there have been clergy who are Democrats in Congress off and on for some time — Warnock’s not the first. But a few things are true about Warnock. One, he’s a significantly prominent pastor sitting in the pulpit that was once home to Martin Luther King Jr. — this isn’t some far-flung church people have never heard of; it’s a big deal in Atlanta and arguably across the country. Two, he’s elected from the state of Georgia — a traditionally red state in modern American politics — so his status is significant; it showcases that these red states are flippable in some regard. He embodies that political hope for Democrats. And third, he isn’t just a pastor — he has a PhD and has written quite a bit about theology at a granular level that would bore many people. He’s well schooled in this.

So what you end up with is this dynamic where there’s only one active pastor in the U.S. Senate, and that’s Warnock. And he continues to serve his church — he hasn’t given that up. He’s both a pastor and a senator; a lot of pastors give up that role to become an elected official, but he has not. And what that means is he carries around this religious gravitas in Congress. Recently there was a debate among members of Congress over how to interpret Matthew 25 — the passage about serving “the least of these.” Mike Johnson, who is not a religious professional but has worked in conservative religious circles for a long time, offered an alternate interpretation than the one often voiced by liberal Christians — that this passage means the government should care for the poor and the sick. Johnson argued no, that it actually applies to individuals. We heard another member of Congress, Michael Cloud, who used to work for an evangelical church in Texas, argue something similar during a congressional hearing, in a back-and-forth with a United Methodist minister. Then Warnock very publicly questioned Johnson’s faith in an interview with The New York Times, and Johnson called a meeting with him. Warnock went — which he didn’t have to do, since he’s in another chamber of Congress — and they had a thirty-minute conversation. I talked to Warnock about it. He said they did discuss Matthew 25, and Warnock voiced bewilderment at Johnson’s interpretation. That hits the argument in a different place — you have these religious professionals arguing against Johnson in Congress in a way that wasn’t true five years ago.

HENDERSON: So for those who might not have been paying attention to this Matthew 25 debate — first off, what does Matthew 25 say in the Bible for those who might not be familiar?

JENKINS: This is a section where Jesus is discussing a story about what will happen at the final judgment — it’s often referred to as the sheep and the goats passage, where God will divide people, the sheep and the goats, into heaven or somewhere else — that’s one of the classical interpretations. Jesus talks about how you should care for others: did you care for me when I was hungry, did you care for me when I was thirsty, did you visit me in prison? And if they say yes, Jesus says, as you cared for the least of these, you cared for me. This passage has often been used, particularly in mainline traditions, to say: this is our collective call to care for the poor and the downtrodden and those who are imprisoned, irrespective of who they are — that’s just the instruction of Christ, down to the level of, if you don’t do it, you might go to hell. That’s one of the ways it’s interpreted.

HENDERSON: But this is a pretty common text people often use to talk about caring for those in need — this call from Jesus to care for those in need. And then Mike Johnson invokes it, but he has someone actually in the legislature who can push back, who has credentials — as you said, Warnock has a PhD, he’s the pastor of a big church, he’s actually in that space and can push back on the way Speaker Mike Johnson is using this text. Tell me more about what you heard from that conversation in the room — what happened, and how did that theological battle — I’m just imagining it happening in a political space — how did that play out?

JENKINS: I should note the original catalyst here: during Warnock’s interview with The New York Times, he was discussing the passage of what Republicans call the “big beautiful bill,” this big budget bill. Warnock argued that the bill pushed people off of health insurance, among other things, and he noted that Johnson had talked a lot about prayer ahead of the bill’s passage. He essentially said, I don’t know how you could pray and then go pass something that kicked all these people off of healthcare. He said, “I’m a Matthew 25 Christian” — that’s how he defined himself — “I just don’t understand that.” And he was questioning Johnson’s faith.

So Johnson called him into his office — about a thirty-minute meeting. We don’t know much, and Warnock only shared a little with me, but he mentioned that Johnson’s interpretation of Matthew 25 — which Johnson has publicly said he believes applies to individuals, not something that requires the government to care for the least of these — is, as Warnock put it to me — and I’m quoting Warnock here — that it applies to “individuals, not nations, when the text says nations,” which is true. There’s a lot of fascinating variability in interpreting Matthew 25 over history, but that direct theological split between the two was embodied in that conversation. It really put a microscope on the fact that there are different kinds of Christianity in this country, and they have different political implications that we haven’t talked about as much. He referred to Johnson’s approach as a “narrow faith” — that was his criticism. And I think once that was on display, it widened the conversation beyond what we’ve had in the past, where the religious right was, at least in the media, taking up a lot of the oxygen of what it means to be a Christian in politics.

HENDERSON: And the long history of what we call the religious left — looking at these candidates now, what are we learning about the actual profile of American Christianity at large?

JENKINS: An interesting thing has happened in the Trump era, and I write about this in my book: Black Protestants in particular have been deeply involved in the political square, particularly around protest, for a long time. The argument of many scholars is that that was the entry point into holding and wielding power for a lot of Black Protestants. Mainline Protestants, as we call them now, enjoyed a lot of security and prominence and privilege throughout most of the twentieth century — the average American often reflected the average mainline Protestant, and that wasn’t a coincidence.

What seems to have been the case after Trump was elected is that a lot of those mainliners — and I should mention some of those denominations have had minor schisms over the last twenty, thirty, forty years over women’s ordination, LGBT equality, and so on — have become more solidly liberal and progressive on many postures, and their clergy in particular have become very prominently liberal and progressive. I should note, for instance, the denomination Talarico belongs to — the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) — despite having very liberal clergy, is still roughly evenly split Republican and Democrat in the pews. That’s true of a lot of these mainlines. How those Republicans vote is a whole other question. But because of that, we landed in a spot where, when Trump was elected in 2016, in addition to any number of other religious groups who felt pressure and besieged by the Trump administration in that first term, mainliners felt like their values weren’t represented by that administration either. And suddenly you saw a lot more folks with collars, from churches that had never protested, out in the streets — and churches are very well organized compared to other entities.

So I write in my book about how the religious left, broadly defined — which isn’t just Christian, it’s a myriad of different groups — became the beating heart of progressivism through a lot of this era, because they’re so good at protesting. And what you end up with, on the other end of it, is that some of those folks — activists do a lot of protesting, and they run for office. This is how we ended up with John Lewis.

HENDERSON: So what changes in Congress if some of these pastors get elected? What difference does it make?

JENKINS: The short answer is I don’t know. The longer answer is that dynamic I mentioned earlier, where Warnock represents the religious left broadly defined, de facto, whether he wants to or not — that becomes even more salient. If these three or four candidates in hotly contested races — Talarico in the Texas Senate race, for instance — if they were to win their races, that increases the number of Democrats who are either clergy or close to it to five, or four, depending on whether Emanuel Cleaver wins his race, which he may not, since he’s been redistricted. That suddenly adds more heft to the public, outward expression of religion by Democrats in a way that’s heard as authoritative by the average voter.

I should mention there are actually multiple Democrats with divinity degrees in Congress, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they carry the same gravitas as someone like Raphael Warnock. So if you were to have more pastors, and deeply, overtly, publicly religious Democrats who want to talk about that all the time, that forces — I’ve already seen it — political writers who write about the religious left have to include a kind of “Warnock caveat,” where they say, by the way, there’s also folks here and here — and that caveat wasn’t there in the same way before he became a U.S. senator. I’d expect that to get even more complicated for the public narrative. Again, it doesn’t mean these lawmakers are going to vote as a bloc, or that they’ll all have the same priorities — they’d be elected from different districts, some very blue, some deeply purple, and as a general rule lawmakers from different districts have different priorities. But at the end of the day, when it comes to religion in politics and how we envision it, I do think this would arguably be the biggest show of force for the religious left in a governing sense in quite some time, were these folks to win in a big way — moving from the streets and the protests to the halls of power.

HENDERSON: How will we know if this is something durable, or just a political reaction to Trump and this moment?

JENKINS: An important thing to keep in mind is that the religious left, as I talk about it a lot, is structured fundamentally differently from the religious right. The religious right, as a bloc and a political machine — there’s nothing on the left, religious or otherwise, that looks like that, operates like that, has that sort of central column of power in the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party in the modern era is really a coalition of coalitions, and that’s even more true for the broader progressive coalition. So whether it has a durable stay is hard to gauge, because they aren’t necessarily interested in operating as a bloc. There’s not a single organization or summit, faith-rooted, that they’re all going to — not in the way you might find figures on the religious right all participating in the same events. It’s possible that could get organized — there are certainly organizations that have been around for a while, which I write about in my book, that would be interested in being a convening space for a lot of these folks, and that might organically occur.

But I think it’s more likely that these are, in fact, seen as a reaction to Trump. That said, reactions to political movements have a long tail — that’s arguably where the religious right came from. We’re still fighting the fundamentalist-modernist controversy; it’s never been resolved. So I think what’s most likely is that the reaction to Trump will be a defining piece of both the Democratic and Republican parties for long after Trump leaves office. And if it is the case that you get a bunch of clergy, or aspiring clergy, on the Democratic side elected to Congress this time around, I’d be surprised if that suddenly went away next cycle. That’s what I’ll say.

HENDERSON: Jack Jenkins, thank you for being on Complexified and continually bringing us your insight and wisdom.

JENKINS: Appreciate it. Awesome. Thanks so much for having me. Always a pleasure.

HENDERSON: Complexified comes to you from the Institute for Religion, Politics, and Culture at Iliff School of Theology, in partnership with Religion News Service. Our producer is Jesse Steinmetz. Associate producer is Josh Perez. Consulting producer is Roxanne Stone. The executive producer is Jonathan Woodward. I’m Amanda Henderson. The world needs us now — we need more thinking, more questions, more curiosity, more Complexified. Share this episode with the last person who wanted to debate biblical inerrancy with you. And email me right now at complexified@iliff.edu. That’s complexified@iliff.edu.

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