The Democratic Party Has Rediscovered the Power of Christianity. The GOP Should Be Worried.

3 min readAnd Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves. And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.Matthew 21: 12–13Listen to James Talarico, celebrating his massive victory over Ken Paxton, who must have a really ugly portrait of himself up in the attic.I’m reminded of that story from Scripture of a shepherd boy who goes up against a giant. For 40 days, Goliath teases and taunts. On the day of the fight, he shows up in full armor. He’s carrying so many weapons, he needs someone else to carry his shield. In this race, we went up against our own Goliaths. The richest man in the world, the most powerful man in the world, and the entire Washington, D.C., establishment. David wasn’t as big or as strong as Goliath. He didn’t have as many weapons, but he had hope.And...My granddad was a Baptist preacher in south Texas, and when I was little he told me that we follow a barefoot rabbi who gave us two commandments, “love God and love neighbor.” Because there is no love of God without love of neighbor. Every single person bears the image of the sacred. Every single person is holy. Not just my neighbor who looks like me. Not just my neighbor who prays like me. Not just my neighbor who votes like me. I am called to love all of my neighbors the way I love myself.In conclusion...Now the real work begins. Two thousand years ago, when the people at the top hurt his neighbors, that barefoot rabbi didn’t stay in his room and pray. He walked into the seat of power, and he flipped over the tables of injustice. As this movement heads to the seat of power, as we head to the United States Senate, we know what this moment requires of us. Texas, it’s time to start flipping tables.On Tuesday night, the voters elected two Democratic preachers to Senate seats that once seemed vastly out of reach: Talarico and Adam Hamilton in Kansas. They will be joining Senator Raphael Warnock, the pastor at Martin Luther King Jr.’s church in Atlanta, in the upper chamber of the national legislature. It is possible that, after decades in the wilderness, the Democratic party may be rediscovering the true political power of the actual gospel, not the gospel preached by the megachurch charlatans making culture-war hay out of things Jesus never actually said or believed. When Talarico said that God was “nonbinary” and the performance Christians of the Right jumped all over him, he was right and they were wrong. For those who believe in him, God is pure spirit, beyond all gender. So, technically, God is nonbinary. But, anyway, Jesus never said fck all about transgender people.For his part, Adam Hamilton is the founder of a huge Methodist church in the Kansas City area. He has given sermons in which he asked his congregation to repent of eating beef and driving cars as part of a sermon on climate change. The Republicans attempted to freakify him with these ideas, but Hamilton’s fundamental decency, and his sincere belief in “stewardship” of the planet, which used to be the Republican dodge on environmental issues, were able to overcome the usual campaign slanging. His acceptance speech called for a gentler, more charitable politics. Again, a more Christian Christianity than the one purportedly practiced by the ratfcking Pharisees of the American Right.This is a very interesting development if it survives this election cycle and if it isn’t dependent on uniquely charismatic candidates like Talarico. If the Democrats can reckon with a lost source of political power, then that cannot be a bad development.