About nine pastors, seminary students and Sunday school teachers are running for Congress as Democrats in the Nov. 3 midterms, most of them in states like Kansas, Texas, Iowa and Tennessee that have long backed Republicans in statewide races.
The best known is the Rev. Adam Hamilton, who founded the Church of the Resurrection, considered the largest United Methodist congregation in the country, with nine campuses and 23,000 members. He is challenging Senator Roger Marshall, the Republican incumbent, in Kansas, where no Democrat has won a Senate race since 1932. Chris Hughes, writing for Al Jazeera, described Mr. Hamilton as a mild-mannered pastor with square glasses and a receding swoop of white hair. He has written more than 30 books.
The race is close. CNN reported on Monday that polling showed a tight contest, and Time reported this month that Kansas had turned into a Senate battleground. Mr. Marshall won the seat in 2020 with 53 percent of the vote. Mr. Hamilton, once a registered Republican, calls himself a centrist, Forbes reported.
Robb Ryerse in Arkansas also founded his own church. Frederick Haynes III of Texas, Sarah Trone Garriott and Lindsay James of Iowa and Anna Golladay of Tennessee work as pastors and faith leaders. Ben McAdams in Utah and Chaz Molder in Tennessee have campaigned on their years teaching Sunday school, and James Talarico, a seminary student, is in a heated race for the open Senate seat in Texas. At least a dozen such candidates were on primary ballots earlier this year.
The Rev. Shannon Fleck, an Oklahoman who is executive director of Faithful America, a progressive Christian advocacy group, said some voters had soured on the Republican claim to religious values.
“This is going to move the needle even more in red states because, in our homes, faith has been a part of our ecosystem for forever, but it’s also been manipulated by our leaders for forever,” Ms. Fleck said. Faith-minded Democrats have “more opportunities for turnover” in those states, she said, “because we are so intimately familiar with the other option.”
The numbers they face are steep. In 2024, 85 percent of white evangelicals leaned toward the Republican Party, up from 65 percent in 1994, according to the Pew Research Center.
President Trump, who has set up a religious liberty commission in his second term and pledged to root out “anti-Christian bias,” has lost some ground with that group. His approval among white evangelicals was 69 percent in January, down from 78 percent in early 2025, according to Pew, and only 40 percent were confident he acted ethically in office. A Pew survey released Oct. 13 put his approval among them at 58 percent. In that same survey, 73 percent of white evangelical registered voters said they would vote for the Republican in their House district. Twelve percent picked the Democrat.
Leaning on religion carries risks inside the Democratic coalition, too. As of 2024, 66 percent of Muslims and 69 percent of Jewish voters identified with Democrats.
“Candidates being overly religious is not a huge turn-on for a lot of Democrats,” said Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis. “They want strong separation of church and state. They don’t want their politicians to sound like Republicans. They don’t want to talk about Jesus.”
The pool of devout voters may also be shrinking. White evangelicals were roughly 23 percent of Americans in 2006 and 13 percent in 2024, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, while the share with no religious affiliation has risen to 28 percent. Of the religious voting bloc, Mr. Burge said, “I would even argue it’s probably the smallest it’s ever been in the last five years.”
The candidates are drawing on an old tradition. Mr. Burge traced the religious left to the abolitionist movement, and Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, vice president of programs and strategy at the Interfaith Alliance, pointed to the civil rights movement and the push for women’s rights. “Every movement that we associate with the left or progressive movement in American history has been full of Christians, as well as people of other faiths and the non-religious,” Mr. Graves-Fitzsimmons said.
On the trail, Mr. Burge said, the candidates keep returning to the Gospel command to love your neighbor as yourself. “There’s a lot of emphasis on the dignity of each person, in terms of income inequality as a moral issue,” he said. “That filters down to things like minimum wage, workers’ rights, unions – but also to things like healthcare and health insurance.”