I sat vaping in Church of the Resurrection’s sprawling parking lot with the windows up, peering at the multiple buildings and modern architecture, and the sight of a bored-looking construction crew half-working on the other side of the campus. Campus is the right word. Resurrection is more community college than Sistine Chapel. It’s the country’s largest United Methodist congregation, a liberal megachurch, if you can imagine such a thing. I couldn’t, frankly, and that’s why I found myself in its parking lot in Leawood, Kansas, on a Monday afternoon earlier this month.
Later that day, I’d see its pastor, Reverend Adam Hamilton, host a town hall in nearby Lenexa as part of his surprisingly competitive bid to become Kansas’s first Democratic senator since the Great Depression.
Or so I thought at the time. We’ll get back to that.
Hamilton is one of a number of former and current Christian clergy running as Democrats this midterm cycle. There are safe bets like Reverend Dr. Frederick Douglass Haynes III, a Baptist pastor who’s running to replace Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett in Texas; long shots like Anna Golladay, a former Methodist pastor who was fired in 2018 for officiating a gay wedding, who is running in Tennessee’s deep-red Third Congressional District; and others somewhere in between, like Sarah Trone Garriott, a state senator and Lutheran minister who’s running in Iowa’s Third Congressional District against GOP incumbent Zach Nunn in a race the Cook Political Report says is leaning toward the Democrat. Then, of course, there’s James Talarico, the Presbyterian seminarian running a competitive race for Senate against Texas attorney general Ken Paxton.
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