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Mainline Protestants are having a political moment. Can they move from protest to power?

November 02, 2026

[Religion News Service] Many have puzzled over the unusual number of pastors, former pastors and seminarians running for Congress as Democrats this year, but not the Rev. Adam Hamilton. Asked in August about the trend, Hamilton, a United Methodist megachurch pastor running an unexpectedly competitive race for U.S. Senate in Kansas as a Democrat, answered immediately. “Since the beginning of 2025, things are so abnormal in Washington, D.C.,” he told Religion News Service, explaining he believes actions by the Trump administration have spurred people to wrestle with what, exactly, constitutes American values. “I think there’s a lot of religious people — especially, I think, mainline Protestant pastors — who are saying: Somebody’s got to do something,” he said, adding that pastors-turned-candidates like himself are “feeling the sense of call, and I’m going to attribute it to the Holy Spirit.” It’s a sentiment shared by a surprising number of Democratic candidates this election cycle. Of the nine pastors, former pastors and seminarians running for Congress as Democrats this year, six — including four locked in tight, widely watched races — belong to mainline Protestant denominations, such as the UMC, Presbyterian Church (USA), and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The candidacies have put a spotlight on the theology of primarily white mainline Protestants, a politically moderate group whose clergy skew liberal and whose members make up around 13% of the U.S. population, according to the Public Religion Research Institute. The slate of mainline candidates with religious training follows a nearly decade-long spike in political engagement largely in response to the rise of President Donald Trump and his evangelical supporters. From Texas to Iowa to Kansas, mainline Protestant candidates, while careful to voice support for the separation of church and state, are giving voice to forms of public theology that could reclaim a position their tradition lost decades ago: a recognized Christian power in U.S. politics. Heath Carter, a scholar of American religion at Princeton Theological Seminary, said mainliners are having a moment partly because they have grown so frustrated with the longstanding dominance of conservative evangelicals in U.S. politics. “You probably see people who’ve wanted to say, ‘Hey, this is not the full extent of Christian witness. These folk actually don’t have a monopoly on Christian public witness,’” Carter said. “There are these other traditions of justice-oriented, pluralism-affirming, democratic Christian theology and politics that we want to tap into.” A more than 100-year split  This unusual political moment, Carter said, is rooted in a split that has divided U.S. Christians for more than a century. Beginning in the 1920s, conservative-leaning Christians began blasting the theology of so-called “modernist” Christians, relative theological liberals who embraced a less literal approach to the Bible and concepts such as evolution. The conservative Christian bloc eventually broke away in protest, branding themselves “fundamentalists” and later embracing the term evangelicals. Meanwhile, liberal-leaning Christians became an ascendant force within mainline denominations, emerging as the leading religious influence in the U.S. for most of the 20th century. Their clergy forged alliances with Black Protestants during the Civil Rights Movement. And by the 1980s, mainliners were already engaged in heated debates over gay and lesbian rights, with many major denominations eventually moving to ordain LGBTQ+ people and allow clergy to officiate same-sex marriages. That history impacted Texas state Rep. James Talarico, a PC(USA) seminarian running a closely watched campaign for U.S. Senate in the state. The Democrat grew up attending St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, a deeply liberal PC(USA) church whose pastor, the Rev. Jim Rigby, was put on trial by the denomination in the early 2000s for ordaining a lesbian and officiating a same-sex marriage before the denomination approved such practices. (The charges were eventually dismissed on a technicality.) When Talarico, who cites Rigby as a spiritual mentor, entered politics years later, he imbued his political rhetoric with liberal theology. He told Religion News Service in 2023 that he staunchly opposes Christian nationalism and believes using political power to hurt LGBTQ+ people and other marginalized groups is “blasphemous.” But the mainline embrace of LGBTQ+ rights in the 2010s coincided with an overall reduction of membership and followed an era when conservative Christians — particularly evangelicals — reentered politics with a fervor. Rising to power as “values voters” in the ’90s, evangelicals and other conservative Christians have long derided the mainline embrace of LGBTQ+ rights, often suggesting those who do are un-Christian. That tradition persists: Pastor Robert Jeffress, a vocal Trump supporter who leads the Southern Baptist megachurch First Baptist Dallas, said on a podcast last month with Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick that Talarico is not a Christian, citing the representative’s past statements on gender and sexuality. He reiterated that stance in an interview with RNS, saying Talarico’s beliefs “disqualify him from being a Christian, and especially a Christian pastor.” Jeffress also voiced skepticism of the Democratic clergy and seminarians running as Democrats this year, noting most “come from mainline denominations that tend to be more liberal in their theological beliefs, and are becoming a decreasing part of the American population.” Even so, Jeffress acknowledged that evangelicals — including his own denomination — are now losing members as well. And what mainliners lack in numbers, they have made up for in visibility during the rise of Donald Trump. During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump was still a mainliner himself — a Presbyterian like Talarico, having been baptized in a church that is currently PC(USA). But members of the denomination outraged by his rhetoric about immigrants launched an effort to kick him out (they were unsuccessful, as Trump was not an active member of any congregation), and mainline Protestants quickly emerged as some of his loudest religious critics after he assumed the presidency. By the time he left office in 2020, Trump had changed his religious affiliation to “non-denominational.” Around the same time, mainline clergy such as the Rev. Sarah Trone Garriott, an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America pastor in […]