In early July, before the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, Texas Democrat James Talarico preached on the proper place of religion in politics. In his sermon, he argued for the importance of the separation of church and state while emphasizing that religion could still inform a person’s approach to and involvement in politics. He stressed how Christianity should shape the tone of one’s politics. Drawing on Jesus’ Parable of the Good Samaritan, Talarico claimed that loving one’s neighbor includes respecting people of different faiths.
This message raised the ire of Talarico’s opponent, Ken Paxton, and many evangelicals have questioned the legitimacy of his faith. But he’s also earned the applause of a few Christian conservatives such as David French, who approvingly contrasted Talarico with MAGA Christian politicians.
Talarico is not alone. There are currently a dozen ordained Christian ministers running for various public offices as Democrats, including Lutheran Pastor Sarah Trone Garriott (Iowa’s Third Congressional District), and United Methodist Pastor Adam Hamilton (Kansas-U.S. Senate).
Many of these politicians, including Talarico, Trone Garriott, and Hamilton, have emphasized their religious faith not only as a part of their overall message, but they have situated their Christianity at the core of their identity. While there’s nothing “new” about Democratic politicians whose religious identity is central to their politics — this was common a century ago with progressives such as William Jennings Bryan and Barbara Jordan during the Civil Rights era (and still is quite common among African American politicians) — today’s candidates do represent a departure from the trend of the past four decades of Democratic Party politics.
It hasn’t always been this way. Prior to the 1980s, candidates conversant in religion were common and unremarkable. At the time, evangelical and “mainline” Protestants were not aligned with political parties in the way they are today. As social scientist Ryan Burge has pointed out, in the 1970s most white evangelicals were Democrats and evangelicals helped elect “born again” Jimmy Carter in 1976 — the so-called “Year of the Evangelical.”
But evangelicals’ rejection of Carter for reelection in 1980 signified an important shift for both parties. Explanations for white evangelicals’ turn away from Christian politicians like Carter and toward Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party — newly perceived as a reliably religious unit — usually point to several events in the 1970s.
By 1972, the number of delegates at the Democratic National Convention identifying as agnostics, atheists, or people who almost never attended church had grown to 24% (compared to 5% of Americans who listed “no religion” on the General Social Survey.) These delegates helped to add progressive positions on women and gay rights into the party platform at a time when they were to the left of mainstream America’s sensibilities.
Then in 1978, the IRS targeted mostly white private elementary and secondary schools, sometimes known as “segregation academies,” many of them religious, that had formed in response to desegregation, threatening their tax-exempt status unless they could demonstrate non-discrimination toward Black students. Additionally, by this time, the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade began to galvanize evangelical activists in a space that had been historically dominated by Catholic priests and laypeople.
Both of these issues came together in the 1980 election, the latter thanks in part to the attention Francis Schaeffer drew to the issue in his writings and speeches across America and the organizing of Jerry Falwell Sr.’s Moral Majority. Because of the growing number of Democrats who self-identified as atheist, agnostic, or non-church attending, white Democrats tended to cede the religious political ground to the new Religious Right, even though plenty of Democrats were religious. Over the next decade, this helped create a binary between a “religious traditionalist” Republican Party and a “secularist progressive” Democratic Party.
Demographic trends over the next 40 years reinforced this shift. In 1975, 30% of Americans were part of the Protestant “mainline” (e.g. United Methodist, Evangelical Lutheran, Presbyterian USA, Episcopal Church, American Baptist, Disciples of Christ, and United Church of Christ). Today the mainline only accounts for between 9% and 13% of Americans. Theories for this decline abound, including loss of identity, aging congregations, poor retention of children as they grow into adulthood, controversies over sexuality, ordination of women and LGBTQ clergy, and same-sex marriage, which led to conservatives joining more evangelical churches.
Over this same period, the number of Americans identifying as “unaffiliated” (the so-called “nones”) rose from 5% to nearly 30%.
Factors driving this growth include people being more willing in a secularizing environment to admit they aren’t religious, young people who choose not to identify with any religion, and the general population becoming less religious over time. Democrats have enjoyed a decided advantage among the voting “nones” going all the way back to the 1984 election.
For Black Americans, there has also been a more modest decline in affiliation with historically Black churches (e.g. National Baptist, Church of God in Christ, and AME Zion). Yet these churches have maintained a continued source of relevance for Black Protestants, playing a vital role in Black life as a source of social support, political organizing, community engagement, aid to the needy, and defense against racism and ethnic solidarity. Today, 53% of African Americans are still associated with historically Black Protestant churches, which probably accounts for the persistence over the past 40 years of progressive Black politicians with ministerial credentials.
Meanwhile, evangelicals shifted from a slight majority favoring the Democratic Party before the 1980s toward a reliable core of the Republican Party, at a moment when their numbers were increasing. By the end of the 20th century, evangelicals grew to represent nearly 30% of all Americans, in part by having larger families, retaining their children in the church at higher rates, and maintaining cultural and theological distinctiveness.
Collectively though, these trends meant the Democratic Party became less beholden to a religious demographic within its own constituency, and consequently, religiously-oriented politicians seemed less relevant to the Democratic Party.
The exception was the African American wing of the party, where Christianity remained central to most voters’ identities. Here, a political figure like U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock (senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta, a historically Black mainline church that Dr. Martin Luther King Sr. and Jr. pastored) is not exceptional. The Black church’s historic emphasis on social issues and inequality allowed for adherents’ continued support of Democratic candidates who were white and less religious, even as it did lead to some tension over progressive social goals, such as same-sex marriage.
In fact, it was the emergence of a Black politician in 2004, then-Senate candidate Barack Obama, who helped call attention to the dearth of religiously-conversant Democratic politicians, arguing that his party needed to reengage religiously-affiliated voters. From 2004 to 2008, the Democratic Party emphasized outreach to religious voters in a concerted way. But after the 2008 election, and Obama’s win, this focus for the Democrats declined so much so that, by 2016, Michael Wear and others involved in rallying Democratic religious voters for Obama had become frustrated at the lack of dedicated outreach.
So, does the emergence of Democratic politicians such as Talarico, Trone Garriott, and Hamilton signal a new shift on the order of what happened in the 1970s?
It may be too early to tell.
It may be, as Wheaton College Professor Esau McCaulley has argued, that the emergence of these politicians is linked to the backlash growing among Protestants tired of MAGA evangelicals defining what Christianity means in America today. Or, perhaps, these candidates are simply the culmination of a growing recognition within the Democratic Party of its need to reengage Christian voters.
Regardless, it’s not an accident that the new crop of ordained Democratic candidates are located in regions of relative mainline Protestantism vibrancy in the Midwest and South.
With the exception of Presbyterian Pastor Matt Schultz of Alaska, all 12 of the ordained candidates are running in Midwest or Southern states. Perhaps, politicians such as Talarico will succeed in reshaping how Christianity functions in the political space and reclaim a lost politics of religion within the Democratic Party. Time will tell if they are part of a new vanguard, or only a brief aberration.
Joseph P. Slaughter is an associate professor of history and religion at Wesleyan University. His first book, “Faith in Markets: Christian Capitalism in the Early American Republic,” demonstrates how religious identities in the United States’ early decades influenced economic decision-making and the formation of the American capitalist system.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.
