(RNS) — I recently found a years-old copy of a national political magazine with a cover story I had written, titled “Will Democrats Ever Get Religion?” It built off the subtitle of one of my books, “God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It.” I smiled as I looked at this piece from over 20 years ago asking the same question I still find myself wondering even now.
For decades now in America, the Republican Party has claimed to own religion and religious values. They proceed to use, abuse, co-opt and reduce religion for their own political agenda. Faith should stay private, they say, except in the cases of “moral values” issues like abortion and gay marriage. Of course, that is bad theology. It is unbiblical theology, ignoring the more than 2,000 verses in the Bible that focus on the poor and oppressed. But Republicans want to command religion in America.
That is made easier by the Democratic Party, which tends to ignore, dismiss or even discredit religion. Part of the reason why Democrats don’t talk much about faith is that they struggle to know how to express it without sounding like they are proselytizing or imposing their religion upon a pluralistic society.
I cannot count the number of times that Democratic senators and members of Congress — many of them names you’d recognize — have asked me privately how to talk about their faith. They don’t want to “wear it on my sleeve,” as they say, or make people feel uncomfortable, or offend those of other faiths or no faith at all. They have concerns around expressing their own religion alongside their strong commitment to the separation of church and state. And while all of that is understandable, the reluctance to speak about faith has ceded religion to the Republicans.
This is despite the fact that Black women, the strongest and most consistent Democratic voting group across any racial or gender demographic group, are also the most religious group across any racial or gender breakdown.
The other factor is what I call secular fundamentalism. I have been fighting religious fundamentalism most of my life, with the public description of being an alternative to the religious right, which gets tiresome. But there is a bias against religion per se in some parts of the political and cultural left, which is just as irrational and openly prejudiced as religious fundamentalism is.
All this makes many Christians committed to social justice often feeling without a party’s support, and sometimes even politically homeless.
I strongly believe that faith communities should be morally independent of party politics, and their values should both help challenge and shape both political parties. But an amazing thing seems to be happening.
An increasing number of Democratic office holders and candidates in upcoming elections are no longer apologetic about their personal faith. Indeed, they want to apply their own devout faith to the social arena where so much is at stake for justice and the common good, beyond the individualism of private religion.
I spoke to Sen. Tim Kaine from Virginia, who coined a new phrase, “faith-forward democrats.”
For Kaine, his Catholic faith and, in particular, serving as a young Jesuit volunteer alongside poor people and families in Honduras shaped the rest of his life and career as a civil rights lawyer and now a U.S. senator.
We had a very encouraging discussion about a new group of Democrats who are not afraid to put their faith forward, while being deeply committed to a pluralistic country of people with many faiths and no faith whatsoever. Together, they can all work for the common good — a core goal of Catholic social teaching.
Kaine is close with other faith-forward Democratic senators, including Chris Coons of Delaware, who attended Yale Divinity School alongside Yale Law School. Then there’s the Rev. Raphael Warnock of Georgia who, despite serving in the Senate, is still pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the home congregation of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Sen. Cory Booker was also forthright about his Christian faith during his historic 25-hour speech on the Senate floor, where he and Coons had a long discussion about what we are called to do by Scripture.
The electoral landscape is changing, too. A new generation of candidates is speaking openly about faith as a guiding force in their campaigns. Now running for the Senate is Methodist clergyman Adam Hamilton from Kansas, who leads a diverse political church of 24,000 members. Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico is running in Texas and has given faith and politics a fresh face. Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, a devout Catholic and Indigenous leader, is also running for the Senate as a former community organizer who is close to the ground in people’s lives.
Running for the House of Representatives is the Rev. Frederick Douglass Haynes III, pastor of Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas, and is perhaps the leading Black revival preacher in the country. And a new Iowa House candidate and Lutheran minister is the Rev. Sarah Trone Garriott. If these candidates win, they will join other leaders of deep faith in Congress like pastor and Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II, the former mayor of Kansas City, among others.
This is a striking shift in American politics — especially in a moment when religion is being dangerously manipulated and weaponized by Christian nationalists for their own political agenda.
These Democrats are reclaiming religion not as a partisan weapon, but as a moral framework for public service. Many of them meet regularly with Republican colleagues of faith at a weekly prayer breakfast for senators. Conversation about the moral values of public life are taking place, before, after and maybe even during prayer times.
We are seeing a dynamic that is finally changing. These “faith-forward Democrats,” as Kaine calls them, are showing that faith can be spoken in the language of compassion and justice, dignity, religious freedom, human solidarity and service to the neighbor. For the first time in a generation, Democrats are learning to speak of faith with authenticity instead of apology.
They do not want to use faith to impose beliefs on others or to hide their faith in private. Instead, they hope to let it shape their conscience, judgments and decisions in public life.
Faith may be our last line of defense in saving, and then restoring, our democracy.
Kaine talks honestly and powerfully about privileged people needing to take risks in the trajectory to dictatorship. Are we up to this test of our faith in God and belief in democracy?
Decades after I first asked whether Democrats would ever get religion, I think I finally have an answer: A group of Democrats are ready to meet their Republican colleagues in the space where faith and democracy meet.
(The Rev. Jim Wallis is Archbishop Desmond Tutu Chair and director of Georgetown University’s Center on Faith and Justice and is the author, most recently, of “The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy.” A version of this commentary appeared on the Substack God’s Politics with Jim Wallis. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)
