These days, Instagram is full of Democrats talking about God.
“James 1:27 in the Bible tells us to look after orphans and widows when they’re going through challenging times,” announces former Navajo President Jonathan Nez, running for Congress in Arizona.
“Helping my neighbors is core to my faith, core to this campaign, and core to Iowa values,” Iowa House candidate Lindsay James wrote in a post about the cost of health care.
Republicans on the campaign trail have long paired politics and Christian faith tightly. But in 2026, Democrats in a handful of states like Kansas and Texas are also taking up the creed.
Nearly a half dozen ministers and seminary-trained candidates this year are running on the Democratic ticket, from pastor Frederick Hayes in TX-30 to minister Sarah Trone Garriott in IA-03. Nez, a devoted Baptist, told The Contrarian that he tries to attend a local church every Sunday as he campaigns across Arizona’s rural 2nd Congressional District. And Iowa state auditor Rob Sand, running in one of the nation’s most high-profile gubernatorial races, regularly references his faith and even his father’s missionary service at town halls.
This groundswell, experts say, represents a frustration among moderate and progressive Christians with Trump administration policies they find antithetical to Christian values, and also a resistance toward the support Trump still receives from a majority of evangelicals – despite those policies.
“[White, conservative] Evangelicals and their really over-the-top support of Donald Trump … has damaged the Christian brand,” said Paul Djupe, professor of politics and religion at Denison University in Ohio. “[Democratic Christians] believe they need to get out there and represent so people have a more nuanced, diverse understanding of what Christianity is.”
Nationwide, about 74 percent of right-leaning voters identify as Christian, according to Pew data from 2024, while about 50 percent of left-leaning voters identify as Christian.
Support has recently shifted, however, among evangelicals for some of the Trump administration’s policies. In June, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that half of evangelical Christians now believe the Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement and the Iran War are not in line with their beliefs.
“2,000 verses in the Bible that talk about how we’re to be concerned for our neighbor, particularly the poor, and yet somehow all of that was brushed over in favor of supporting a president whose actions did not reflect Christian faith,” Kansas Senate candidate Adam Hamilton, a Democrat and Methodist minister, told me in a mid-September interview.
Hamilton pastors the nation’s largest Methodist church in Kansas City, and his win in the August Democratic primary moved the Kansas Senate race from “solid red” to “likely red.” Cook Political Report now has it as “lean red.”
The attention and support that Christian Democrats are receiving this year is in part because many are white, political experts point out. Black Democrats have long campaigned similarly, but there is a greater assumption that Black Democrats are Christian, Djupe says, while white Christian Democrats have not been as quick to discuss their faith in recent years.
“Talarico’s popping up on late-night shows saying the same thing that Raphael Warnock has been preaching from the pulpit for decades,” said University of Texas professor Eric McDaniel, arguing that the faith of Black Democrats has been regularly overlooked and not respected by white progressives.
Many young, white progressives moved away from religion after the ‘60s and ‘70s, McDaniel explains, but Black Democrats remained outspoken about their faith. Former President Barack Obama talked regularly about his beliefs, and sitting Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock is the minister of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Ga.
McDaniel argues that over the last few decades, many liberal Americans came to see religion as a way of abusing people, and progressive and mainline Christian denominations became stuck in “trying to defend themselves and to defend their legitimacy against the fundamentalist push.” Now, Democrats are working to reframe some policies — like less aggressive immigration policy and healthcare reform — through a biblical lens.
In response, Republicans on the campaign trail are largely avoiding theological arguments and instead attack the legitimacy of Democrats’ faith.
“That is not Christianity, that is left-wing radicalism dressed in the skin suit of our religion,” Vice President J.D. Vance said of Hamilton at a Kansas rally on September 14, noting the pastor’s statements on white privilege and the environment, and his church’s participation in a pride festival in Kansas City.
Vance repeated the turn of phrase in a Sept. 29 podcast appearance, again accusing Talarico of wearing religion as “a skin suit.”
Hamilton told The Contrarian that Vance’s argument is going to “backfire” with Christians who don’t take kindly to others questioning their faith.
“It’s going to make them look pathetic and mean-spirited,” Hamilton said.
The accusations that Democratic Christians are heretics or “pastors in name only” (as Lindsay James was called), Djupe argues, are the “rearguard battle just for exclusive control of the Christian environment.”
Back in Iowa, James puts faith front-and-center. It’s the first line on her website and the first word in her slogan (“faith, hope, love”).
At a Cedar Rapids coffee house in September, James told The Contrarian she decided to go to seminary after losing a friend on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001 — an event that motivated her to help people in their worst moments. As she travels her heavily rural, Northeast Iowa district talking about her faith, she says she finds that “folks are really longing for someone with conviction” to represent them in Congress, and sharing her beliefs resonates with them.
“How many of you are familiar with the parable of the Good Samaritan?” James often asks at campaign events (and she asks me the same over coffee). She recounts the part of the parable where passersby ignore someone who is hurt and in need, then says: “That sounds to me a lot like what’s happening in Washington, D.C. right now.”
With regards to Adam Hamilton, a second Republican former governor of Kansas has endorsed the Democrat Adam Hamilton over Republican Roger Marshall for the US Senate. https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/another-republican-ex-governor-of-kansas-endorses-democrat-in-tight-senate-race/ar-AA2dtAHK