James Talarico and clergy running for Congress spend the pulpit
By Caroline Ashford · Reporting from Richmond, Virginia ·
Democratic clergy running for Congress bring pulpit rhetoric to the midterms, spending down ancient institutional authority for fleeting Washington power.
The Cross of Gold in Texas and Iowa
A long time ago, a populist orator stood before a convention in Chicago and told the men of gold that they were pressing a crown of thorns upon the brow of labor. As Religion Unplugged notes in its guide to the 2026 midterms, William Jennings Bryan used the language of the mount and the garden not to lift souls toward eternity, but to move the price of silver. The Cross of Gold speech worked splendidly for the afternoon, and it secured him a nomination, and it left the Methodist chapel a little emptier of mystery the following Sunday.
We are watching the same transaction across the red states this midterm cycle. NPR reports that a number of Democratic candidates for Congress are making religion the centerpiece of their campaigns, including at least six ordained clergy and others studying for the ministry. In Texas, state representative and Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico is running for the U.S. Senate. He tells congregations he speaks as a fellow Christian, warning against Christian nationalism while denouncing the Department of Defense and tax cuts for billionaires. In Dallas, Frederick Haynes III, who has led the 13,000-member Friendship-West Baptist Church for more than four decades, won the Democratic primary for the House seat in Texas District 30. In Iowa, Lutheran pastor Sarah Trone Garriott is running for the House in the 3rd District, and Presbyterian chaplain Lindsay James is running in the 2nd District.
The NPR report shows these candidates drawing large crowds and quoting scripture to frame health care cuts and economic inequality as moral failures. But when a pastor takes the sacred text of a Sunday service and drafts it directly into a stump speech against his Republican opponent, he is not preaching the Gospel. He is spending the capital of an eternal kingdom to buy a seat in a very temporary legislature.
The price of political translation
The strongest opposing case for these candidacies is argued with a fierce, democratic urgency by believers who feel exiled from their own pews. Candice Stroud, a member of Brentwood Baptist Church in Houston for over 40 years, told NPR that Democrats have talked about religion for years, but nobody wants to listen if you do not say what they want to hear, adding that Republicans do not want to hear that they go to church and believe in the Bible. Doug Pagitt, an evangelical pastor and founder of Vote Common Good, insists that his group is not trying to evangelize the party, but to include religious people in the pro-democracy movement.
This is a generous and neighborly defense. It rests on the plain truth that Christians belong in public life, and that the modern conservative coalition has sometimes treated the faith as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican National Committee. The Baylor Religion Survey following the 2024 election found that 84% of Trump voters support the idea that the president should defend Christian values as a part of his job, while 71% agree that the United States' success is part of God's plan. New York Magazine highlights how this partisan spiritual branding invites a mirror image on the left. When one political tribe claims the Almighty as a precinct captain, the other tribe feels compelled to draft its own chaplains.
Yet this defense mistakes the grammar of politics for the grammar of grace. To bring faith into the public square as a citizen is one thing; to put on a clerical collar and convert the pulpit into a political action committee is quite another. When James Talarico tells a television audience that Jesus would flip over the fancy desks on the floor of the U.S. Senate, he is not offering pastoral correction. He is using the furniture of the temple to score a debate point against Ken Paxton. The historical pattern predicts exactly what follows this sort of translation: the church becomes a partisan auxiliary, the sacred language is worn thin by cable news, and when the election is over, the congregation is left to pick up the pieces of a fractured fellowship, much as voters witnessed during Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign when broad religious appeals were tethered to party machinery.
What remains when the returns are in
Institutions are load-bearing, and they do not ask for much maintenance, but they do require that we leave them alone. A church is built to outlast a Senate term by a few centuries; a congregation is meant to be a place where the man who votes for the Democrat and the woman who votes for the Republican can take the bread and wine side by side without wondering if their pastor is auditioning for a committee chairmanship.
When Adam Hamilton, founding pastor of the United States' largest United Methodist church, or Frederick Haynes brings partisan calculations into the vestry, they are spending an inheritance they did not build. They are trading the quiet, steady work of parish care—visiting the sick, burying the dead, teaching the children their catechism—for the hot, noisy air of Washington. The local paper closing does more damage than federal policy, and a church losing its witness to become a campaign stop does more damage than any lost vote. We do not need chaplains in Congress; we need citizens who go to church on Sunday and leave their partisan grievances at the narthex door.
James Talarico and his fellow clergy-candidates will learn what every preacher before them has discovered when he tries to serve two masters. The kingdom of this world is very hungry, and it will consume every drop of grace a pastor brings to it, leaving him with nothing to offer the least of these when the cameras finally go home.