Emma Green writes:

One recent Sunday, Adam Hamilton, the Kansas pastor who has been running an unexpectedly competitive Democratic bid for U.S. senator, was scheduled to visit four churches around Kansas City. As he settled into a pew at Oak Ridge Baptist Church, he was fretting. “I want to stay for the entire worship service,” he said.

People milled around the sanctuary, greeting one another warmly. Nearly everyone there was Black; all the churches in the day’s lineup were Missionary Baptist, a historically Black denomination. Hamilton, wearing a neatly ironed blue suit and carrying his personal Bible, greeted parishioners warmly, as he has done nearly every Sunday morning of his adult life. Finally, Ricky Turner, the church’s pastor, called him up to stand by the podium. “Adam knows that we don’t give the mike to politicians,” Turner said. But Hamilton was not just any politician, he said: “This is a man of God.” When Turner’s daughter was in a car accident recently, “I got a call from Adam Hamilton,” he said. “You know what he did? He just started praying for me.” The congregation cheered.

Much has been made of the fact that Democrats are running avowedly Christian candidates in November’s midterms. There’s James Talarico, the Presbyterian seminarian running for the U.S. Senate in Texas, who has got in trouble for such theological provocations as “God is nonbinary.” Or Rob Sand, the Iowa gubernatorial candidate, who likes to say that “Jesus is for the little guy.” But no other candidate is as well established in the Christian world as Hamilton. He is the founding pastor of the Church of the Resurrection, which, with twenty-three thousand members across nine locations, is the country’s largest United Methodist congregation. His books and Bible studies are read all over the country.

Less than a minute after Turner finished speaking, Hamilton was out the door, moving so fast that a normal person would have to jog to keep up. After a twenty-minute drive, he strode into Forest Grove Baptist Church, where about forty people were at the morning worship service. Here, Hamilton got to take the pulpit. “My deepest desire is to help people know Christ,” he said. As he’d watched the news in the past year and a half, he said, he’d thought, “This does not look like the kingdom of God I have prayed for and preached for my entire life.” During Lent, he and his wife fasted every day, and they decided that he should jump into the race after Easter. “I’m going to ask you not for your vote—I’m going to ask for your prayers,” he said. “That God will continue to guide me, strengthen me, and help me—and, if I do get elected on November 3rd, that God would use me to push back the darkness in our country.” [Continue reading…]