'Pastors in Name Only'??

United Methodist Focus | Aug. 20, 2026

For several years now, there has been an acronym used by Republicans for other Republicans who do not share the hard conservative agenda of their leader. It is RINO for “Republican in Name Only.” Now, out of Iowa politics, comes a new disparaging acronym, PINO for “Pastors in Name Only.” Here is how that happened.

Clergy have been running for office and serving as public officials for a long time. Methodist pastor Peter Cartwright ran against Abraham Lincoln for Congress from Illinois in 1846! This pattern has especially been the case with Black pastors such as current Georgia U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock (Baptist) and Missouri U.S. Representative Emanuel Cleaver II (United Methodist).

But something is different this year. More clergy are running for office, and many of them are mainline Protestant. Iowa presents good examples of Congressional races that are not on the national radar as much as some of the Senate campaigns involving clergy. Two clergy who are current members of the Iowa state legislature are running for Congress. State representative Lindsay James, a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary, is the Democratic nominee in the second congressional district. Ordained in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), James had to defeat another clergy, United Methodist Clint Twedt-Ball, to win the nomination. State senator Sarah Trone Garriott, a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is the Democratic nominee in the third congressional district. Her theology degrees are from Harvard Divinity School and the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. Both nominees have spent numerous years in chaplaincy as well as in pastoral roles.

“Pastors in Name Only”

A recent Religion News Service story discusses some of the pushback these clergy – all mainline Protestant clergy running as Democrats – are receiving. Jack Jenkins, in “’They’re not real pastors’: As clergy run as Democrats, Republicans question their faith,” reports on comments made in July at the Family Leadership Summit in Des Moines, Iowa. Joe Mitchell, a Republican running against Lindsay James in the second congressional district, said James “calls herself a pastor.” He then coined a term to apply to candidates such as James and Sarah Trone Garriott and other progressive clergy candidates in other states. “I call them PINOS,” he said, to describe them as “Pastors in Name Only.”

But notice that the reason he gave for calling them not real pastors had nothing to do with their serving in the legislature or having been chaplains. He said they are not real pastors because “They don’t profess the true gospel of Jesus Christ.” This is not a peculiar thought by an isolated politician. For a number of years, those on the far right have suggested that only they represent the true gospel of Jesus Christ. Here, then, some take the further step to declare that those following long-standing strains of the Christian tradition do not witness to the gospel of Christ at all.

Consider the judgments and pushback against other clergy candidates. These are not against their public policies but against theological beliefs attributed to them. These challenges tend not to represent their opponents’ positions from an objective statement of their ideas but rather call them blasphemy or anti-Christian. There is, for example, the case of James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Texas. Talarico is a member of the Texas House of Representatives and a recent graduate of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Mark Wingfield describes what the Texas Tribune and others reported as Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick saying of Talarico, “It’s James Talarico who decided to bring the Bible into this election. And let me tell you, that’s not a Bible I’ve ever read. I’ve never seen so much blasphemy from anyone running for office,” Patrick said. He continued, “If he campaigns against God as he’s been doing, he’s going to hell, for sure.” Talarico’s opponent Ken Paxton, not known previously to focus on theology and ethics, has declared that Talarico “isn’t Christian” and that his beliefs are “antithetical to historical Christian views.”

My own experience with such criticism is that for politically conservative Christians, the argument quickly moves to “your position is not in the Bible.” This is where Randall Balmer’s concept of “selective literalism” is useful. Balmer is a noted historian and evangelical who teaches at Dartmouth. While all of us are tempted to use selective literalism when convenient, Balmer points out some of the biblical teachings that Paxton apparently misses in his exegesis of what he calls Talarico’s biblical heresy. Those teachings include caring for the poor, welcoming the stranger, treating everyone with dignity, caring for “the least of these,” feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned, treating the foreigner as one of your own, plus avoiding false witness, adultery, and avarice.

Mainline Protestant Voices Are Different

The public discussion of public issues from a mainline Protestant perspective may seem strange to the public after decades of dominance by those associating Christianity with only one side of political options, the most conservative, including those advocating Christian nationalism. That was not always the case. For much of the twentieth century, the voice of religion on public matters tended to be from mainline Protestant denominations and their leaders, generally in a moderate to liberal direction. As public issues became more polarized, those mainline groups and leaders appeared at times as partisan as today’s conservatives.

Conservative evangelicals had in the mid-twentieth century come to identify politically with a conservative political agenda far different from that of many nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century evangelicals in their social attitudes and aspirations. It was the evangelical tradition in this earlier period that often exemplified the progressive goals of abolition, women’s suffrage, prison reform, public education, and concern for the poor. Even prohibition was understood among evangelicals as a progressive cause at the time as part of an overall concern for alcohol’s impact on families, poverty, and crime.

The public did not make the connection between white evangelicals and such a narrow political agenda for many years after the 1940s since activism was not encouraged among white evangelicals except on a few selected issues such as liquor and pornography. All of that changed in the 1970s with the emergence of the Religious Right as a political force. Not only has the Religious Right been the loudest voice in bringing religious language to public issue debates, but they have also engaged in the practice of using “Christian” as synonymous with their narrow and minority interpretation of Christianity.

Their talk of a “Christian view of family” is narrowly circumscribed in contrast to the expansive version of Christian families that people experience. When you see “Christian” dating sites advertised, be assured they are not for linking folks from the United Church of Christ or Episcopal Church. The tragic downside of such presumptuousness is that the political evangelicals of today may discredit the entire Christian enterprise since much of the public may be less informed about or not engaged with the true differences among expressions of Christianity in the nation. Thus, fewer people want to associate with a Christianity that appears to know nothing of the priorities of Jesus toward the poor, strangers, justice, and peace, and appears often insensitive or adversarial on matters of race. This does not mean that mainline denominations and leaders have not stayed in the conversation, but such voices no longer are amplified by the media as once was the case.

A Moral Center and the Common Good

What these new mainline Protestant candidates do is what Black clergy political figures, as well as many Black lay politicians, do so well. They are not only comfortable in talking about their faith motivations, but their purpose is to serve the common good, especially those on the margins. Another candidate for Congress this year is a third-generation pastor, Frederick Douglass Haynes III, pastor of Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas. He is the Democratic nominee for the thirtieth district in Texas. He told Religion News Service that he sees the success of Democratic clergy at the polls this year as a testament to their “track record of community service” and “fighting for the people.” Any religious person, clergy or lay, must always remember that the goal of all public service is the common good. With so little talk about the welfare of the whole community, and especially the most vulnerable, these candidates are indeed offering a fresh and different message.

Clergy candidates understand what it means to live with tension and paradox. Brooks Holifield in his comprehensive and richly documented history of clergy in the United States, God’s Ambassadors: A History of the Christian Clergy in America, says that clergy embody “an irreducibly paradoxical relation to American culture.” This tension at the center of Christianity called for “priests and ministers to work within the culture and yet offend it repeatedly.” He says that the recurring sense of crisis among clergy is a sign of how hard it is for clergy “to live with the paradox of working within and affirming a cultural context, while at the same time knowing that no society reflects fully God’s reign as it is known in Jesus Christ.” While a few clergy may fail to understand the tension, most are acutely aware that the world is of God, but the ways of the world are never synonymous with God’s ultimate will. Holifield resists the temptation to identify certain clergy in history as “baptizers of culture” or to identify others as prophets standing up to the culture. Whether pastoring a congregation or running for public office, no one is pure. Even those most associated with “prophetic witness” have made their own compromises.

Another clergy running for office, Adam Hamilton, is pastor of the largest United Methodist church in the country and the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Kansas. (Interestingly, the Democratic nominee for Senate in 2022 was also a United Methodist pastor.) It is perhaps not surprising to see accusations already that Adam is an “extreme leftist.” He has had his critics over the years, but no one ever considered calling this graduate of Oral Roberts University and Perkins School of Theology a radical leftist. He does believe that both theological and social issues are not nearly as simple as many Christians assume they are.

One of Adam’s many books is Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White: Thoughts on Religion, Morality, and Politics. In it he reminds us how poorly the church and the world have been served by the Old Left and the New Right, who take partial truth and present it as the whole truth. Hamilton provides a prophetic alternative voice to partisan advocates with their familiar polarities and polemics and takes seriously the inevitable tension in which pastors (and public officials) seek to live with integrity. In his foreword to the book, founder of Sojourners Jim Wallis says that Hamilton seeks to “forge a new path that transcends the extremes of our polarized and paralyzed political culture and our divided church.” Wallis believes people are “yearning for a ‘moral center’ to our public life and political discourse, with a fundamental emphasis on the common good.”

Faith Requires Discernment of the Way of Christ

The oversimplification of God’s hope for our world does not easily fit neat political aims. However, if we keep before us some of the major themes of Jesus’s teachings, we have a good start to making political choices from our faith rather than the more common practice of making faith decisions based on our politics.

In the early days of the Religious Right, I was a pastor. One common feature of groups like the Moral Majority was the distribution of “Report Cards” in their churches and among others in the community. In choosing what they graded, I found they were guided more by politics than Jesus’s teachings. They ranked candidates on such things as support for private schools (not public schools), increased military spending (and not peaceful humanitarian outreach), opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment (rather than advocacy for the rights of women).

I was surprised when I saw the ratings for one year when two members of Congress, whose records I knew well, scored on the opposite ends of the scale: one received zero and the other 100 percent. The one with zero had been an active leader on food for the hungry in the U.S. and abroad, increased health access for the poor, and increased monitoring of racial and gender discrimination. But those topics were not graded though they seemed to reflect the ways in which Jesus valued those he served. One of the issues that helped the other person gain a 100 rating was support for abolishing the Department of Education. It was difficult for some people of faith during that era to connect the Department of Education with the ministry of Jesus. But for those setting the standards, it emerged as one of the defining “moral issues” on which people of faith were supposed to base their votes. Such was the trivialization of the Christian witness.

The Peter Cartwright and Abraham Lincoln Campaign

Not all clergy candidates take the high road. Such was the case in 1846 when Methodist circuit rider Peter Cartwright ran for Congress in Illinois as a Democrat against the Whig candidate, Abraham Lincoln. This was not their first campaign. Fourteen years earlier, in Lincoln’s first run for public office, Cartwright defeated him for a seat in the General Assembly. This second time, Cartwright was 24 years older than Lincoln and had an uphill challenge as a Democrat in a Whig district.

Eighteen years after this congressional campaign, Lincoln would look back on it as the least acrimonious of his political career. But, at the time, he grew frustrated with Cartwright’s efforts to cast Lincoln as a “skeptic” and “infidel.” Exasperated, Lincoln finally issued a handbill in which he said it is true that he was “not a member of any Christian church,” but that he had “never denied the truth of the Scriptures” and had “never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular.” That seemed to address the issue, though many of his friends had long wished Lincoln would not speak so often and casually about his religious doubts.

They never met for a debate. Lincoln reminded people that the Illinois constitution stipulated that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office.” The people of the district knew both candidates well. Lincoln won easily.

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United Methodist Focus is the Substack blog of the Rev. Dr. Lovett H. Weems, Jr., distinguished professor of church leadership emeritus at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC. He came to Wesley in 2003 as the founding director of the Wesley’s Lewis Center for Church Leadership after eighteen years as president of Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City. Previously he was a pastor in Mississippi for many years. He is the author of many books on church leadership that have had a broad appeal to a large constituency of leaders in both the public and private sectors.