These politicians love talking about religion. They’re also Democrats

Faith Becomes a Campaign Weapon as Democrats Push Into Red-State Senate Races

Cybersecarmor.com – The 2026 midterm cycle is producing an unusual political phenomenon: a wave of Democratic candidates in deeply Republican states are foregrounding their religious identities, staking their campaigns on scripture, sermon, and denominational tradition. At the center of this shift stands a Kansas City-area pastor who has spent decades preaching on ethics and moral responsibility, and who now finds himself the Democratic nominee in one of the most reliably Republican states in the country.

Adam Hamilton, founding pastor of the Church of the Resurrection — described as the largest United Methodist congregation in the United States — was selected by Kansas Democrats earlier this month to take on incumbent Republican Senator Roger Marshall. The selection marks the first time in more than 90 years that a Democrat has been chosen to represent the ruby-red state in the U.S. Senate.

A Pastor’s Long Preaching Career Meets Washington

Hamilton has spent his ministry calling congregants to examine their communities critically. In his own words, he has urged his flock to look around and ask what does not look the way it is supposed to look.

“I have called our congregation to look at the community and say, ‘What doesn’t look the way it’s supposed to look?'”

His theology extends beyond the pulpit into civic engagement. He has taught that believers who love Jesus and seek to live out their faith carry an obligation to act when they encounter poverty, injustice, and racism. Yet the past eighteen months, he argues, have produced something from the federal government that strikes at the very values he has preached for 36 years.

“But over the last year and a half, what I found coming out of Washington was an assault on the values that I’ve preached for the last 36 years.”

Why Faith Is Entering the Democratic Playbook

For decades, the Republican Party has held a near-monopoly on voters who weigh religious conviction heavily in their ballot choices. That grip tightened further as the evangelical right grew in political influence throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This cycle, however, is breaking the pattern. An unusually large number of Democratic candidates running in red states are openly sharing their faith, attempting to build bridges to voters who might otherwise default to the GOP ticket.

The result has been campaigns that devolve into arguments over theological interpretation, the proper reading of scripture, and the boundaries between religious community and government’s role in shaping public life. At the core of these disputes, experts note, is a fundamental question about what it means to be Christian in contemporary America. Traditional conservative values — protecting the unborn, preserving the nation’s Judeo-Christian heritage — are set against a more liberal vision that embraces pluralism across religions and cultural backgrounds.

Many of the Democratic candidates making this pivot come from mainline or more liberal denominations rather than from evangelical traditions. Hamilton’s own church was founded, in his telling, for people who had drifted away from organized worship or been alienated by faith altogether. He wanted to show them that intellectual honesty was compatible with belief.

“For people who didn’t go to church anywhere, for people who maybe had been turned off by faith altogether, and to let them know you didn’t have to check your brain at the door of the church, that it was okay to ask questions and have doubts.”

The Cook Report Shifts, and Super PACs Strike Back

The Cook Political Report, a widely watched tracker of congressional races, moved its assessment of the Kansas Senate contest from “solid Republican” to “likely Republican” after Hamilton won the Democratic primary — a small but meaningful signal that the race has become somewhat more competitive. Marshall’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Within days of the primary, Main Street Fund, a newly launched Massachusetts-based super PAC, aired a commercial branding Hamilton as “way too woke for Kansas.” The spot stitches together fragments from two sermons he delivered in 2020 — one addressing climate change, the other responding to the mass Black Lives Matter protests that followed George Floyd’s death. Since the ad’s debut, a wave of right-leaning and faith-oriented publications has combed through his extensive body of sermons and writings, searching for lines that can be repurposed against him.

Hamilton says he anticipated this scrutiny the moment he entered the race. What he finds frustrating is the editing itself.

“They’ve taken three words from one paragraph and then they grab three words from another paragraph and two from another and they sew them together and they put them into a commercial, making me say something that I never actually said.”

He insists his preaching aligns with positions held by the Catholic Church, mainline Christian denominations, and certain evangelical congregations. His hope is that voters who encounter the clipped language will seek out the full sermons online and hear the complete argument.

“It’s easy for them to take a line or two out of context. But I really hope when people listen to those lines, they’re going to go, ‘Oh, I want to go back and listen to the whole sermon.’ And when they do, I think they’re going to find that what I preached is consistent with Scripture, and it actually makes a lot of sense to most people.”

The Secular-Religious Tightrope

Quantifying exactly how many Democratic candidates are centering faith in their campaigns is difficult. Some hold faith-based professional roles; others speak frequently about personal belief without framing it through a partisan lens. The strategic calculus is complicated by the composition of the Democratic electorate itself.

David Campbell, director of the Notre Dame University Democracy Initiative, notes that the Democratic coalition is simultaneously the most religiously diverse and the most secular of the two major parties. Candidates must thread a narrow needle.

“Democrats actually have to walk a line between attracting those moderately religious voters that are certainly inclined to vote Democratic without alienating that more secular base.”

His research indicates that secular voters generally do not object when Democratic candidates discuss their faith, provided the discussion does not become a platform for policy prescriptions rooted in doctrine. The challenge, then, is not whether faith can appear in a Democratic campaign, but how it is framed, how often it surfaces, and whether it is presented as a personal compass or a governing mandate. Hamilton’s Kansas race will be one of the clearest tests of that distinction in the 2026 cycle.