"It turns out that Americans believe in religious freedom, diversity, and democracy, not racist theocracy"

The blue wave is cresting five weeks ahead of Election Day. The extent of the wave depends on a range of factors, from a late money surge/negative ad dump from desperate MAGA Republicans to the propensity of Republican voters as the election approaches to “come home” to their party to the danger of Democrats’ overconfidence and reliance on “good news” polls, which may be subject to the same sort of error rate we saw in primaries.

Regardless of the final margins, we nevertheless see evidence that, at least in one critical respect, the fascist MAGA movement has not entirely remade the fabric of American democracy. Instead, we may be seeing, finally, a backlash to Republicans’ embrace of white Christian nationalism, the noxious ideology that America is a white Christian nation for the benefit of those “real” Americans descended from white Europeans who merely tolerate (or don’t) others’ presence.

It turns out that Americans believe in religious freedom, diversity, and democracy, not racist theocracy. “While 56 percent of Republicans support Christian nationalism, only 32 percent of Americans overall do,” a survey from Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the Meanings of Democracy Lab of the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University recently showed. “Majorities in all but four states reject Christian nationalism.” Helping fuel the backlash is the rise of progressive Democrats who “are openly embracing their Christian faith and challenging Christian nationalism’s claim to be the true embodiment of Christianity.” It is about time.

The numbers are striking. “At least 12 pastors, seminarians and former clergy have run for federal office as Democrats this year … a number close observers say is unheard-of in recent memory,” the New York Times reported. “Even after the winnowing of the primaries, there will be seven running this fall. On the Republican side, there are only three.”

In contrast to the blasphemous deification of Donald Trump and MAGA self-proclaimed Christians’ frightful propensity to justify everything from concentration camps to war crimes to endemic lying as part of the mission to save white Christians from supposed obliteration, progressive Democrats are offering a different take on Christian values.

Melissa Deckman, PRRI’s CEO, and Ruth Braunstein, director of the SNF Agora Institute, wrote recently for Newsweek: Democrat Sarah Trone Garriott, an ordained Lutheran minister running in her state’s 3rd Congressional District, argues that Democrats have long avoided religious language because “all they’ve seen is the religious right and religious extremism.” Presbyterian minister Lindsay James says she was moved to run for Congress after the 2025 “Big Beautiful Bill” put 27,000 Iowans in her district at risk of losing health coverage, noting that her chaplaincy work showed her firsthand what that loss would mean for families struggling to get by.

In Alaska, congressional candidate and Presbyterian pastor Matt Schultz says he feels a moral obligation to speak out against Trump-era GOP policy, often invoking the parable of the Good Samaritan: “It’s important to remember that if someone is hoping to just be an innocent bystander, that’s not an option. You’re either helping or you’re part of the problem.”

Add to these the high-profile Senate nominees James Talarico in Texas and Adam Hamilton in Kansas, who have an opportunity not only to run up the score for Democrats in red states and districts but also to repudiate the notion that Christians have some religious obligation to vote for a party whose moral outrages and support for abhorrent behavior (e.g., covering up for a pedophile and his enablers) should disturb all but the most hardened MAGA cultists.

To be clear, the shift is among white Christians. Black churches have remained bastions of social activism, continuing the legacy running from abolition to the civil rights movement. What is new is the degree to which white Christians are responding to the call to return to the moral foundations of Christianity. (“Millions of Americans, including many Christians, look at Trump’s second term and see a litany of moral outrages: the sudden deportation of neighbors, the withdrawal of food aid and health care benefits and a war with no clear aim or endpoint.”)

For the first time in decades, white Christians are tying faith to political advocacy. “By hewing closely to Christian priorities like feeding the poor, the Democrats running as pastors have a chance to speak to Americans who are hungry for a different relationship between religion and politics, who want to see religion as a moral compass rather than a political agenda,” the New York Times noted. (And it provides a powerful counterweight to the Trumpian notion that empathy is “toxic.”)

At issue is whether Christianity, or frankly God, is the province of one party. For years, progressive groups such as the Interfaith Alliance have advocated for religious diversity, an essential component of pluralistic democracy embodied in the First Amendment. Now, their leaders see a spiritual revival to accompany a pro-diversity political movement.

“I have become convinced that we are indeed experiencing what we so desperately need, a great awakening in our own time,” Paul Raushenbush, the president of Interfaith Alliance, said in his September 19 keynote address for the William M. Johnson Lecture Series at Crescent Hill Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. “Unlike previous examples of religious revival, our awakening is not attached to a single faith tradition or leader, but rather is a broad stirring inspired by a combination of a radical spirituality of nonviolent resistance, a named moral ethic of loving our neighbor, and driven by a promise of a democracy that can be made a reality by and for the people.” (Certainly, one factor in this “great awakening” is a widespread yearning for personal connection, something more emotionally sustaining than impersonal, often angry and cruel online discourse.)

Democrats remain a diverse party with a much higher percentage of “none of the above” voters (who reject any religious affiliation), so this is not about creating a left-wing theocratic party. Instead, as Doug Pagitt, an evangelical pastor and founder of the progressive Christian nonprofit Vote Common Good told the Times, Democrats finally seem determined to push back against Republicans who paint “Democrats as hostile to the Christian faith.” Rather than Christianize the Democratic Party, progressive Christians are making the case that the party must “include religious people in the pro-democracy movement.”

If Democratic candidates identifying as progressive Christians win in November, they will help sustain a Democratic blue wave but also, and more important, reaffirm the ideals of a country founded by religious dissenters and renegades who suffered from repressive established religion. Their wins would repudiate the noxious idea that America was founded for the benefit of white Christians rather than as a pluralistic democracy. And finally, for Christians longing to get mean-spirited, racist, xenophobic ideology masquerading as faith out of the pews, public acceptance of spiritual role models may reaffirm their own faith tradition that looks to churches for spiritual and social connection, not political indoctrination.

In short, defeat of white Christian nationalism at the hands of a diverse political electorate that includes millions of faithful Christians would be transformative for Democrats, democracy, and American Christianity. What a fitting rebuke to white Christian nationalism that would be.

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-Jennifer Rubin, The Contrarian is community-supported. Help fund bold journalism and critical lawsuits to stop Trump’s corruption by becoming a paid subscriber. Join the fight now!

Photo by Brad Dodson on Unsplash

Commentary:

What should we make of today's theocratic Trump Republican fascists, these white Christian Nationalistic misogynists and homophobes who are defunding the United Nations refugee agency? And what should we make of today's theocratic Trump Republican fascists who are scapegoating and deporting immigrants, repressing and dehumanizing women's rights and LTGBQ, and weakening rules on toxic air pollution by keeping coal power plants opened? And what about their continuing undermining of government functions already approved by Congress, their slashes to Medicaid, their closure of USAID and allowing the Affordable Care Act tax subsidies to expire, their attacks on elections and independent Media, their plan to restrict mail-in voting, their restrictions on protests, their politicization of the military, and their disregard of the U.S. Constitution, to name just a few of their autocratic, undemocratic injustices.

-Glen Brown