Listen to James Talarico, celebrating his massive victory over Ken Paxton, who must have a really ugly portrait of himself up in the attic. 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.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
