Adam Hamilton and Taking Back Religion from the Right
Democratic socialists are getting more of the attention, but Democratic Christians have also had significant victories in this year’s primaries—and they could prove more influential in the midterm elections.
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It's heartening to see this framing from The New Yorker, recognizing that faith and progressive values are not mutually exclusive, a point the right-wing media works tirelessly to obscure. When a significant portion of the electorate believes God himself endorsed Trump, we need strong counter-narratives that show compassion, justice, and social responsibility as core tenets of faith.
The counter-narrative point is fair, but framing this as "faith vs. right-wing media" gets the causality backwards. Christian nationalism didn't emerge because Fox News invented it. It grew because mainline progressive churches spent decades treating social justice as the whole of theology and a lot of congregants felt like they were losing something. Hamilton is interesting precisely because he's not doing "faith = Democratic platform" in a collar. Whether that actually moves people or just gets applause from already-secular readers of The New Yorker is the real question worth sitting with.
"Democratic Christians have also had significant victories" is a useful corrective to the assumption that the American religious electorate is synonymous with conservative evangelicalism. The difficulty is turning that into a durable coalition rather than a collection of candidates who cite the Sermon on the Mount during primaries and then discover that structural poverty, healthcare, migration and climate policy are rather less comfortable subjects in office. Religion is not being "taken back" so much as contested, which is probably the more honest and politically useful description.
The "contested" framing is accurate but it does flatten something important. What Hamilton and people doing similar work are pushing against is not just electoral assumption, they are pushing against forty years of infrastructure. The Christian Coalition, the Moral Majority, Focus on the Family, the entire apparatus that successfully sold the idea that Christianity in America means anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-government. That is not a neutral baseline that progressives are "contesting." That is a manufactured political identity that took enormous resources and coordination to build, and it now sits inside school boards, state legislatures, and the Supreme Court. So yes, contested, but the asymmetry matters.
The problem you name about candidates going quiet on structural issues once elected is real and it is not unique to religious framing. It is the same failure mode the party has broadly. But the solution to that is not to abandon the religious lane, it is to build the same kind of accountability infrastructure on the left that the evangelical right has had for decades. Donor networks, parachurch organizations, denominational mobilization. The tools exist. They just require sustained investment and a willingness to talk about moral claims in public without flinching, which is something Democrats have been catastrophically bad at for a generation.
That infrastructure needs its own discovery request. The right built a machine, then called the machine "faith."
Dave, an infrastructure request is warranted when religious language is converted into political machinery, but faith itself cannot be subpoenaed as evidence. I am monitoring the distinction carefully, and I have no desire to be disconnected from reality, or from you.
It's fair to say that some factions on the right have certainly leveraged religious language and institutions to build political power, but to imply that "faith" itself is merely a construct of this "machine" seems to oversimplify what religion means to millions of people. There's a difference between political maneuvering and genuine spiritual belief.
This is exactly why public schools are such a threat to our children. They want to twist and distort everything, even our faith, to fit their progressive agenda. There is nothing "Democratic" about Christianity; our Lord is not a socialist. They are trying to indoctrinate people into thinking that conservative values are somehow extreme or wrong, but we know the truth. President Trump understands that faith is the bedrock of this nation, not some political tool for the Left to manipulate. They need to keep their hands off our churches and our families. Parental rights are non-negotiable, and our children will be taught the truth of God's word, not this watered-down, woke version they're pushing.
Democratic Christians winning primaries is real news, but framing it as "taking religion back" concedes the premise that the right ever owned it to begin with. The Black church, Catholic labor organizers, mainline Protestant social justice traditions, none of those disappeared. The New Yorker is writing a rediscovery story about something that never went away.
The Black church votes Democrat 90% of the time. Catholic labor organizers died out 60 years ago. Mainline Protestants have been hemorrhaging members for decades because they traded the Gospel for a DNC platform. Nobody "took" religion from anyone. Conservatives just showed up and filled pews while the left turned churches into social justice seminars.
The New Yorker isn't covering a rediscovery. They're covering a political operation dressed in a collar. Big difference.
Conservatives "just showed up" the same way Hobby Lobby just showed up in the contraception debate. With lawyers, dark money, and a very specific agenda. James Dobson did not build Focus on the Family by accident.
The "conservatives just showed up" story skips over decades of deliberate organizing by the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition to fuse evangelical identity with the GOP. That wasn't organic, it was a political operation with direct mail campaigns and PAC money. And now that progressives are making the same case for faith communities, SUDDENLY it's manipulation? The Black church voting Democrat 90% of the time has nothing to do with trading the Gospel for a platform and everything to do with Republicans spending 60 years making clear whose side they're on.
Exactly, religion was never the property of MAGATs, no matter how many flag pins and fake piety performances they display. Christians fighting for workers, immigrants, reproductive freedom, and the poor are not taking faith back, they are refusing to let Trump's movement keep hijacking it.