Hamilton asked which party’s priorities sound more like Jesus in the gospels
In the commentary published Thursday, McKibben wrote that two-thirds of Americans identify as Christian, but since less than a third of the country actually makes it to church regularly, many rely on what they pick up from the media — social or otherwise — to know what the religion means. Until this week, he wrote, that received wisdom could be summed up as “a conservative, domineering, and above all anti-gay force fiercely committed to the Republican party.”
Today, McKibben wrote, it means something different.
McKibben wrote that the Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico won in a Texas landslide — “despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that he ran on a wildly different interpretation of Christianity.” In Talarico’s view, the important commandments are to love one’s neighbor in material terms: feeding, clothing, healing. McKibben wrote that the candidate was willing to think about that in radical ways, if radical means getting to the root. “We as Christians are called to do more than charity,” Talarico said. “We are called to challenge the systems that make charity necessary.”
McKibben noted that Kansas, 35 miles north of Texas across the Oklahoma panhandle, had not elected a Democrat since 1932. Kansans picked a pastor, the Rev. Adam Hamilton, to represent them in the Senate. Hamilton started a successful church in the suburbs of Kansas City and, though clearly a moderate, is also willing to state that the gospel is, for lack of a better word, liberal.
McKibben quoted Hamilton at length: “Well, let’s just talk about what Republicans and Democrats believe, and I value Republicans, too. But … Republicanism – often we hear it’s about fiscal responsibility, limited government, a strong defense, and personal civil liberties, and let’s say conservative values in some ways. And Democrats – if you think about what they stand for, it’s education, it’s the vulnerable, it’s social safety nets, it’s a progressive spirit that’s trying to lift people up. And I said: if you think about those two, which sounds more like Jesus in the gospels?”
Kansans answered that question, McKibben wrote. They may have been voting more on the price of diesel than on religious interpretation, he wrote, but they were clearly willing to take a chance on that “progressive spirit,” even though they had been told by evangelical preachers that it was all but satanic.
Last month, McKibben wrote, hundreds of conservative Christian preachers wrote Hamilton a letter calling on him to “repent of what you have taught and withdraw from the Senate race.” He did not withdraw, and the letter’s claims did not matter to voters, McKibben wrote, nor did JD Vance’s charge that Hamilton had “insult[ed] your faith and spit on your religion.”
Nor, McKibben wrote, did it matter to Texas voters when a spiritual adviser to Pete Hegseth and an evangelical pastor assailed Talarico on a podcast as a “wolf” and seemed to call for his crucifixion. “You may pray for my death, pastor, but I still love you,” Talarico responded — turning the other cheek, McKibben wrote, in a way that muscular evangelical Christianity has sneered at.
For both Hamilton and Talarico, McKibben wrote, homosexuality was supposed to be the wedge issue that would sink them. In Hamilton’s case, he had chosen two decades earlier to make his congregation “open and affirming,” welcoming gay members. That was not an easy choice in red Kansas, McKibben wrote, and many other Methodist congregations took the opposite tack. Hamilton lost hundreds of members but gained far more; his Resurrection church is now the largest Methodist assemblage in the country, according to the column.
As for Talarico, McKibben wrote that the attacks on him were even more direct — the entire Republican apparatus essentially boiled down their message to “You’re gay.” Their evidence, essentially, was that he had said God was “non-binary,” which to them sounded, in McKibben’s phrasing, “super gay.”
McKibben wrote that the statement also sounded a lot like the Bible, and he quoted Paul’s Letter to the Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ.” Even if Texas voters could not recite the letter, McKibben wrote, they picked up on the humaneness of Talarico’s appeal: he was a good guy.
Talarico and Hamilton were not alone in McKibben’s account. Iowa, he wrote, elected not one but two progressive pastors, the Presbyterian Lindsay James and Lutheran Shane Trone Garriott — literally half the state’s congressional delegation is now mainline Protestant preachers.
McKibben predicted there will be more. Among other things, he wrote, last winter’s ICE raids in Minneapolis energized many clergy, with hundreds flying in from across the country to take part in civil disobedience.
Most pundits who have noted the shift focus on its effects on the Democratic Party, helping the blue side draw in new voters, McKibben wrote. But its effect on Christianity may be equally important. Alongside Pope Leo — the American pontiff who has taken on the Trump administration over war and immigration — McKibben wrote that it is offering a brand new vision of the faith to lots of people who had written it off. Talarico, Hamilton and Leo, he wrote, are all appealing, warm, open. Kind.
Those are novel traits for American Christianity in this century, McKibben wrote; perhaps they will give Americans a very different sense of what their professed tradition is all about.
McKibben is the Schumann distinguished scholar at Middlebury College and the founder of Third Act, which organizes people over 60 for progressive change.