Today I want to focus our attention on the state of Kansas as a prism for what’s happening all over the country.
A Pastor Wins a Primary
On August 4th, Adam Hamilton won the nomination for US Senate in the Democratic Party. Hamilton won 35% of the vote in a crowded Democratic primary field. He will now face Senator Roger Marshall in the general election.
While Kansas has elected Democrats as governor of the state in recent decades, a Democrat has not represented the state in the Senate for 90 years. Nevertheless, Hamilton has broken fundraising records and received key endorsements in the state.
Adam Hamilton is the pastor of the largest United Methodist Church in the country. The UMC is part of the American Mainline, which means it is a denomination whose doctrinal approaches to the Bible, and theologies of gender, sex, and marriage - are quite different from their evangelical counterparts. Hamilton’s church has 24,000 members. Yet, that hasn’t stopped some from claiming that Hamilton is not a real Christian.
In a piece for Breitbart, journalist Hannah Knudsen - who has no publicly available credentials as a theologian, minister, or other religious training - criticized Hamilton’s approach to the Bible:
“He recommended that his congregation read the Bible through the lens of Jesus, contending that things that do not line up should be tossed away — a remarkable claim given that Christians believe that Jesus can be seen throughout all of scripture, the Old Testament points to Him, and that He is the ‘image of the invisible God.’
Hamilton ended his sermon holding a colander, using it as an analogy, calling Jesus a colander and urging believers to toss away everything in the Bible that is seemingly not consistent with Jesus’s words.”
She finishes the article without a conclusion, but instead with a blunt statement about the United Methodist Church:
“The United Methodist Church (UMC) is radically leftist, most notably demonstrated by the fact that most orthodox Methodists left to form their own denomination, the Global Methodist Church.”
The Rise of the “PINO”
Hamilton’s nomination in the senate race is illustrative of trends across the country. As Jack Jenkins reports at Religion News Service,
“At least 12 pastors, seminarians and former clergy have run for federal office as Democrats this year, and seven have already become the Democratic nominees as of Wednesday (Aug 5).”
James Talarico is of course the most known of these candidates. The Presbyterian Seminarian is the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas. However, just as Knudsen, criticizes Hamilton’s theology as a Methodist, Republicans and others have taken to saying that Christian Democratic candidates are nothing more than Pastors in Name Only, or PINOs, a moniker that recalls the RINO label given to “Republicans in Name Only” during the Tea Party era. Here’s Jack Jenkins at RNS one more time:
“At last month’s Family Leadership Summit in Des Moines, Iowa, Joe Mitchell, a Republican running for U.S. Congress in the state’s second congressional district, jabbed at his Democratic opponent, state representative the Rev. Lindsay James, saying she ‘calls herself a pastor.’ He then turned to the crowd of conservative evangelical pastors and coined a term he said applies to James, a Presbyterian minister, and other faith-forward Democratic candidates — namely, Lutheran minister the Rev. Sarah Trone Garriott, an Iowa state senator also running for another seat in Congress, and James Talarico, a state senator and Presbyterian seminarian running for U.S. Senate in Texas. ‘I call them PINOS,’ he said, explaining the term is an acronym for ‘Pastors in Name Only.’”
Now, conservative Christians claiming that other people of faith who don’t share their views on Scripture and family is nothing new. One of the phenomena that I examine in American Caesar is how the nuclear family became the standard of orthodoxy in conservative American Christianity in the 1970s. In essence, anyone who supported a family structure that deviates in any way from a heterosexual married couple with children - including abortion abolitionism - was deemed not a real Christian. This rings true in the cases of Hamilton, Talarico, and other more liberal Christian public figures today.
The Quieter Story: Rewriting the Rules of the Game
There is another story out of Kansas that I think highlights a major factor in the upcoming midterm elections.
Clay Wirestone reports for the Kansas City Reflector on Senate Bill 105, which was passed last year in Kansas:
“It appears to open a loophole for eternal Republican control of the two U.S. Senate seats from Kansas.
As it stands, that brief section of the bill could be taken even further than granting Republicans a bonus two years in the U.S. Senate. It could be abused in such a way to void U.S. Senate elections in the Sunflower State forever and ever.
Once again, here’s the actual text and controlling law of the state of Kansas:
If the vacancy occurs on or after May 1 in an even-numbered year, then such vacancy shall be filled by election at the election of representatives in congress held two years following the year in which such vacancy occurs.
So what’s to prevent every U.S. Senator from Kansas from resigning June 2 each year an election would be held? The law keeps pushing the next election two years away. It could go on and on and on.”
This is part of a national pattern in which election guardrails have been torn down by the Trump administration. In May, ProPublica published a summary of these actions.
ProPublica’s investigation argues that the institutional safeguards that prevented Donald Trump from overturning the 2020 election have been significantly weakened ahead of the 2026 midterms. The report says the administration has removed or reassigned dozens of career election security, Justice Department, and Homeland Security officials, replacing many with political appointees who either supported efforts to overturn the 2020 election or have ties to the election-denial movement. It details the dismantling of election-related teams at agencies such as CISA, the FBI, and the DOJ, describes new federal efforts to obtain state voter data and identify alleged noncitizen voters, and highlights the shrinking of internal oversight offices that traditionally guarded against politically motivated investigations. ProPublica concludes that these personnel changes and structural reforms have concentrated election-related authority in the hands of officials more aligned with Trump’s claims about election fraud, raising concerns among current and former government officials and election experts about the federal government’s ability to maintain public confidence in the integrity and impartial administration of future elections.
What’s the takeaway?
On one hand, Democrats are threatening to take over the faith lane from the GOP. Candidates like Hamilton and Talarico, not to mention Muslims like Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Zohran Mamdani in New York, are politicians who are genuinely religious and who use their faith as a way of explaining why they are running for elected office. As we’ve chronicled on this channel, there is a sense of threat in the GOP - a party who has relied on Christian nationalist approaches to faith and politics for decades in order to win the “God and country” vote. That may be changing.
In response, one of the tactics may be to tamper with our elections, either through slick state bills like the one in Kansas or through the systematic tearing down of election safety measures by Donald Trump - a man who pardoned the 1500 rioters who stormed the Capitol after he lost the 202 election.
As always, we’ll keep an eye out on these races and issues as we get closer to the midterms.
The Axis Daily Brief will be off next week; if you have thoughts on coverage as we head toward the midterms, join the conversation on Substack or Discord, or reach out via axismundi.us and straightwhiteamericanjesus.com.
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