Is the religious left roaring back?

Can the Democratic Party reclaim the political power of Christianity? That’s the question asked by Jia Lynn Yang, a senior writer for the New York Times. She took a stab at answering her own question in a piece published Sunday in The New York Times Magazine. Her argument is that several prominent Democrats are at least attempting to motivate religious voters with their own liberal versions of Christianity.

The two most prominent candidates running this playbook are Democratic Senate candidates Adam Hamilton in Kansas and James Talarico in Texas. Of the two, Talarico appears to be running the closest race, but Hamilton is hoping to do something that hasn’t happened in a long time—get elected to the United States Senate as a Democrat in Kansas.

Talarico is constantly advertised as a Presbyterian seminarian, who has been working on a ministry degree at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, a major seminary of the Presbyterian Church (USA), a liberal denomination. Young and energetic, Talarico was raised in a liberal Presbyterian church that leaned far left, even within the liberal denomination. His pastor was an early activist for liberal causes and Talarico has enthusiastically embraced just about every liberal bandwagon.

Currently a Texas state representative, Talarico has attracted controversy through videos and social media postings that have claimed, among other things, that God is non-binary and that human beings can be identified, according to one count, by no less than 16 different gender identities, non-binary among them. He has lately been backing off of some of his older positions, such as support for transgender surgeries and treatments for children and teenagers, but there is no question that he intends to win his race by playing the part of the energetic young preacher turned politician.

Adam Hamilton, the Democratic candidate in Kansas, is running a similar campaign but from a different playbook. Hamilton presents himself as a friendly neighbor who just wants government to work for the people and for everyone to work together to make the world a better place. His genial personality was one factor in founding and leading what has become the largest congregation in the United Methodist Church, the Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kan. It’s a megachurch that attracts thousands of people every weekend, and Hamilton is able to lean left and still draw huge crowds at his church.

Totally committed to the United Methodist Church, Hamilton emerged in recent decades as a major leader positioned against the conservatives who attempted to influence the denomination but eventually lost the battle. After years of struggle, thousands of congregations left the UMC. With the conservatives largely gone, the liberals were left firmly in the saddle and they moved quickly to authorize same-sex marriage, openly gay clergy, and the predictable platforms of the theological left.

In Iowa, the Democrats are running Rev. Sarah Trone Garriott in the race for the Third Congressional District. This reverend is a liberal Lutheran who, if anything, appears more liberal than Talarico and Hamilton. According to Damian Thompson, writing in The Spectator World, “Garriott not only supports gender transition for children; when she was a trainee minister, she participated in the church wedding of two satanists.” How ecumenical of her.

I am in full agreement with J. Gresham Machen, the famous Presbyterian leader who, in his book, Christianity and Liberalism, made the argument that liberalism is not a variant of Christianity, but an entirely different religion. He made that argument more than a century ago now, and his argument gains only more traction as the decades go by. Machen never had to see the day of same-sex marriage, lesbian preachers, and transgender denominational leaders. At the same time, he did see that liberalism has no natural limits—which is exactly the point of the movement.

Is this a winning strategy? Are voters in Kansas and Texas and Iowa just waiting for Democrats preaching liberalism? Damian Thompson sees the strategy as a progressivist pipe-dream: “We can dispose of the fiction that liberal Christians will influence this year’s midterms or indeed any future election. There simply aren’t enough—and, even if there were, it wouldn’t help.”

He is certainly right that there aren’t enough liberal Protestants to shift a major election—not by a long shot. They have a hard time filling a chapel, much less a political rally. But I do wonder if the overtly Christian language used by some candidates will entice some voters in the muddled political middle. That is clearly the strategy at work here. The Democratic candidates are long on quoting Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount, but they will have nothing to do with the rest of the New Testament. Their theological liberalism comes to the fore the moment you talk about the Apostle Paul’s teachings on homosexuality. At that point, their liberalism goes into overdrive and biblical authority is shown the door.

Here in the commonwealth of Kentucky, our Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, has set his eyes on the White House in 2028. In recent days he released a new book, perfectly timed for maximum attention. In Go and Do Likewise, Beshear quotes Jesus in the title, openly declares his commitment to Christianity, and then explains how he deploys his version of compassion to push full speed ahead for abortion rights and the LGBTQ movement, even to the point of vetoing measures to protect children and teenagers from the transgender agenda. It’s all in the name of compassion, of course.

As Yang’s piece in The New York Times Magazine reveals, all this comes as an interesting development, but not as a major movement. It’s not that this attempt from the religious left has come too early. At this point, it has almost surely come too late. It’s hard to see the young progressivist activists of the Democratic Socialists of America giving it the time of day. It will be really interesting to see if voters in Texas, Kansas, and Iowa are ready to buy this repackaged religious left. Election day is coming fast.