“Can Democrats Reclaim the Christian Moral High Ground?” asked The New York Times Magazine in the runup to the midterms. The article was commenting on the relative abundance of pastors and seminarians running as Democratic candidates: a dozen ran for federal office as Democrats this year, with seven becoming their party’s nominees, while “on the Republican side there are only three.” That’s ten candidates in total, a tiny percentage of the nine hundred or so hopefuls who ran in this year’s midterms. This kind of trend-hunting is common in election years, but the small sample can’t support the idea that this is a watershed moment, and the partisan framing oversimplifies things.
Nevertheless, the Democratic seminarian with the highest name recognition was victorious. Was James Talarico’s well-documented progressive Christianity the key to helping him win his Texas Senate race? He had the benefit of facing scandal-plagued Ken Paxton, among the worst candidates in this year’s midterms and no paragon of personal virtue, political ethics, or Christian morality. (Paxton awkwardly took to asking voters to pray for him in the closing days of the campaign.) It’s fair to wonder how Talarico would have done against the popular, long-serving incumbent John Cornyn, who lost his primary after Donald Trump endorsed Paxton.
Talarico and the Democrats owe the president even more thanks: Trump’s failures are so comprehensive that Texas Latinos and young working-class voters, who helped send him back to the White House two years ago, turned away from MAGA en masse. That was a boon to Talarico, who also managed to raise and spend the most money of any Senate candidate this cycle (more than $114 million, with outside groups adding $80 million on his behalf). But who’s complaining? Talarico’s win, the first by a Texas Democratic candidate for Senate since 1988, not only helped Democrats take control of the Senate; it comes with the added bonus of a Democratic governorship and control of the state House.
What about Pastor Adam Hamilton in Kansas? Throughout the campaign, he resolutely reminded voters that he’s not a typical politician, having long ministered to Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike at his mainline Protestant megachurch, the largest in the country. At sixty-two, he’s no fiery upstart, but like Talarico, he faced a weak opponent and took advantage, claiming a very significant victory for Democrats in red territory. Kansas has exhibited some blue tendencies of late—voters rejected a strict anti-abortion referendum shortly after the Dobbs decision—but its turn to Hamilton looks more like a pragmatic rejection of Trump and Trumpism, driven less by the hot emotional and cultural currents sweeping through our politics than by an understandable desire for stability, civility, and competence.
While Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed ran on the notion that “people are really pissing mad,” Hamilton was all about moderation (or “inoffensive straddling,” according to some of his critics from the left), ticking off “compassion, a belief in safety nets for vulnerable people, fiscal responsibility, and strong defense” while on the stump. His incumbent Republican opponent, OB-GYN Roger Marshall, campaigned lackadaisically and spent the closing days explaining why he sued hundreds of patients over unpaid medical bills. It was Democrats’ first Senate seat in Kansas since 1932, when FDR won his first presidential term.
Where exactly is the “Christian moral high ground”? Certainly not where Catholics J. D. Vance and Trump “border czar” Tom Homan are standing. Vance’s appearances on behalf of Republican candidates, including Paxton and the disgraceful Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio, were exercises in rank dishonesty, smug self-regard, and adolescent ridicule. Homan, meanwhile, issued a typically bellicose and profane defense of the administration’s violent ICE crackdowns in a speech to the Georgia Faith and Freedom Coalition just before the election. “God bless the men and women of the Border Control and God bless the men and women of ICE,” he told the Evangelical crowd, exhorting them to “get out there” and vote. He left no doubt about the administration’s plans to continue its mass-deportation program. “We’re going to get this shit done,” Homan promised his audience. “You got my word.”
Homan’s crude and frankly un-Christian messaging didn’t do Georgia Republicans any good. Former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms won the Georgia governor’s race, becoming the first Black woman to win a governorship in American history. And Democratic senator Jon Ossoff, in the least surprising of the Democrat’s wins in the South, handily defended his Senate seat and heightened speculation about his presidential aspirations. Much more shocking was centrist Democrat Annie Andrews’s win over Republican Darline Graham (sister of the late Lindsey) in the South Carolina Senate race. In her more honest moments, Graham acknowledged her lack of qualifications, and South Carolinians were kind enough to relieve her of the pressure of serving.
“We love God by loving our neighbors,” Talarico reminded us repeatedly during the campaign, and Hamilton’s focus on compassion and care for the vulnerable obviously resonated. But those echoes from the trail will fade quickly and must be followed by deeds. Seventy-two years ago in Commonweal, Minnesota congressman and eventual senator Eugene McCarthy wrote that Christian politicians are not necessarily those who participate most visibly in public religious activities, confer most often with religious leaders, or simply proclaim their position to be the most Christian one. “The Christian in politics should be judged by the standard of whether through decisions and actions he has advanced the cause of justice.”
The point is not to simply reclaim the Christian moral high ground, which can remain an abstraction; it’s to execute on McCarthy’s straightforward aim in a concrete way. Advancing the cause of justice now means undoing the Trump administration’s deportation program, addressing gross economic inequality, expanding healthcare, restoring aid to humanitarian initiatives, ending illegal wars, investigating profiteering by Trump and his family—the list goes on. A handful of American “Christian Democrats” can help guide these efforts. But in our system of governance—its resilience blessedly reaffirmed on Tuesday night—this will still require cooperation and compromise among a diverse range of factions, interests, and personalities, not least those within the Democratic Party itself.
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