When I first moved to the Boston area in 1979, my congressman was Robert F. Drinan, better known as Father Drinan. He was, of all things, a left-wing Catholic priest.
Father Drinan, a Jesuit, ran for Congress in 1970 on an anti-war platform, defeating the incumbent, Philip Philbin, a pro-Vietnam hawk who served on the House Armed Services Committee. Despite being a priest, Drinan was also a champion of abortion rights.
Exasperated church officials repeatedly tried to drive Drinan out of politics. Finally, Pope John Paul II issued an order in 1980 that no priests could hold elective office. Rather than exit the priesthood, Drinan left Congress. He was succeeded by Barney Frank.
Few clergymen have served in Congress since then, but this year, one divinity student and one ordained minister have a shot at being elected to the U.S. Senate as Democrats. They would join the Rev. Raphael Warnock, senator from Georgia, who succeeded Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church.
As Christians, both James Talarico in Texas and Adam Hamilton in Kansas are superb at reaching back, past the hatred preached by the religious right, to invoke the actual teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Maybe this is some kind of harbinger.
Talarico, who is running ahead of his Republican opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, has a particular gift for shaming the hatred preached by the religious right. “Scripture says you can’t love God and hate other people,” Talarico said in a sermon. “You can’t love God and abuse the immigrant. You can’t love God and bully the outcast. You can’t love God and oppress the poor.”
He has also explicitly criticized so-called Christian nationalists for “the worship of social, economic, and political power in the name of Christ and a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.” Christian nationalists, he deftly observed, have a “greater commitment to the love of power than to the power of love.”
Talarico’s genuine commitment to a Christianity rooted in love has left the religious right and the Paxton campaign sputtering mad. For lack of a better rejoinder, the right has gone after Talarico’s “low testosterone.” In his victory speech after winning the Republican primary, Paxton said of his opponent, “Some people know him as Tofu Talarico. Some people call him Six-Gender Jimmy. I’ve even heard some people call him James Talafreako. And others refer to him simply as Low-T Talarico.”
Even in Texas, you have to believe that the actual message of the Gospels will prove more powerful than Paxton’s pathetic name-calling.
In Kansas, the Rev. Adam Hamilton, the Democratic Senate nominee, leads the nation’s largest United Methodist church, with roughly 22,000 members and locations across Kansas, Missouri, and Ohio. He is no lefty, and his tone is softer than Talarico’s. Hamilton is for expanded health coverage but not Medicare for All. He has avoided “tax the rich” rhetoric. But Hamilton also represents a religious antidote to the hatred of the religious right. He preaches a message of compassionate unity against ugly division.
Though Kansas has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since the New Deal era, the state has a popular two-term Democratic governor in Laura Kelly. In 2022, Kansans resoundingly voted against removing the right to abortion from the state constitution. Kansas farmers have been hard-hit by Trump’s tariffs. Polls show Hamilton in a neck-and-neck contest with the Republican incumbent, Sen. Roger Marshall.
RELIGIOUS LIBERALS HAVE ALWAYS PLAYED a role in American politics, though the religious right has often been louder. The Founders, led by Thomas Jefferson, insisted that America be a secular republic. Most of them were deists, children of the Enlightenment who understood the ruinous potential of religious wars and insisted that religion be a purely private affair. Conservative Christians have been trying to make America a Christian republic ever since.
In 1863, Protestant fundamentalists created the National Reform Association to lobby for an amendment to the Constitution to acknowledge “Jesus Christ as the Governor among the nations.” That campaign failed, but President Lincoln’s devoutly religious secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, in 1864 persuaded Congress and Lincoln, who never belonged to a church, to add “In God We Trust” to the nation’s coins.
Progressive religious belief has often been a potent potential counterweight. Many abolitionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison and the Rev. Charles Finney, the leader of Oberlin College, opposed slavery as Christians. The so-called Second Great Awakening of the 19th century was a socially progressive form of evangelicalism. The Protestant Social Gospel movement of the late 19th and early 20th century was the religious wing of the era’s progressive coalition. It found support for a broad array of social reforms in the teachings of Jesus.
The Catholic counterpart was found in the social encyclicals, beginning with Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891, which called for justice for workers. Further to the left, the Catholic Worker movement took its inspiration from Pope Leo and from the teachings of Jesus on the duty to serve the poor. Michael Harrington, the longtime leader of American socialists in the late 20th century, spent his early life in the Catholic Worker movement.
And of course the Black church was a pillar of the civil rights movement, which found inspiration and comfort in Scripture. Not only were leaders of the primary activist organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, ordained ministers—Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Jesse Jackson, among others—but the church was one of the few Black institutions not controlled by the segregationist white power structure. When the voting rights movement sought to alter that power structure, local churches sheltered activists. That’s why hundreds of Black churches were burned or firebombed.
The National Council of Churches, founded in 1950 and mostly representing mainline Protestant denominations, was a strong supporter of progressive legislation. Until slavish support for Israel crowded out the traditional Jewish support for social justice, Reform Judaism was very much a part of American liberalism. The original Anti-Defamation League combated all religious and racial hatred, before it was truncated into a branch of the Israel lobby. Jewish leaders such as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel expressed a theology that interpreted the teachings of Old Testament prophets as a call for social justice. Rabbi Heschel marched with Dr. King.
THE ASCENDANCE OF THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT and its alliance with the Republican Party got a big boost from Ronald Reagan. Speaking to a meeting of more than 16,000 conservative evangelical pastors and lay leaders from 41 states gathered in Dallas on August 21, 1980, Reagan disingenuously declared, “I know this is non-partisan, so you can’t endorse me, but I want you to know that I endorse you.”
This was just four years after the election of Jimmy Carter, a born-again evangelical who was also a social liberal. Going all the way back to the constitutional founding, evangelical denominations had been strong supporters of the separation of church and state because they correctly feared that any state religion would be one of the larger Protestant denominations at their expense. But that stance ended with Reagan.
The architects of this scheme were Paul Weyrich of the Moral Majority and the segregationist Rev. Jerry Falwell. In the years right after the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, the Southern Baptist Convention had no position on abortion; the main objection came from the Catholics. But on the eve of the 1980 election, GOP strategist and Catholic conservative Weyrich brokered a deal in which the Southern Baptist theology would become officially anti-abortion. Falwell bought in mainly because he was livid that the federal government had challenged the all-white Bob Jones University’s tax exemption. At that same August 1980 speech, Reagan pledged to end IRS actions against church-based segregation academies.
Since Reagan, the alliance between the Republican Party and the Christian right has grown, while the role of religion as a progressive force has been dormant. At their peak in 1965, mainline Protestant churches counted 31 million members. That has dwindled to about 13 million, or about 10 percent of the U.S. adult population. Meanwhile, in 2025, Pew Research Center reported that evangelical Protestants now account for 23 percent of all U.S. adults, down only slightly from 26 percent in 2007. Exit polls in 2016 showed that 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump.
Religion-based liberalism reduced over the years to individual leaders of the “faith-based” left such as Jim Wallis, charismatic pastors such as the Rev. William J. Barber II, and publications such as Commonweal and Sojourners, as well as the Black church. But there are stirrings of a comeback. The ISAIAH Movement, headed by Doran Schrantz, was key to building a progressive coalition in Minnesota. ISAIAH was led by faith-based groups, but it was much broader, with real impact as a strategic on-the-ground alliance and on legislative politics. And there are Popes Francis and Leo, two of the most socially progressive pontiffs in the history of the Catholic Church.
It is somehow fitting that the religious left should be having a resurgence, because the religious right has become crazier and crazier. Exhibit A is the vice president of the United States.
JD Vance, who converted to Catholicism at age 35, has attempted to instruct Pope Leo on theology, evidently unaware that His Holiness is infallible on matters of doctrine. At the same time, in his recent book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, Vance, a former Protestant, expresses an odd discomfort if not disdain for many core Catholic rituals. Of the Eucharist, Vance writes, “This was always a little weird to me as a Protestant: You guys actually think this bread converts to the body of Christ?”
Theologically, Vance has been drawn to an extreme version of Catholicism, which seeks to roll back the heresies of the Enlightenment. He quotes a favorite passage from Augustine criticizing the debauchery of Rome’s ruling class (“Let the poor court the rich for a living, and that under their protection they may enjoy a sluggish tranquillity; and let the rich abuse the poor as their dependants, to minister to their pride.”) and turns it into a critique of the overconsumption of the poor.
Vance told Fox News, “We should love our family first, then our neighbors, then love our community, then our country, and only then consider the interests of the rest of the world.” This directly contradicted both St. Thomas Aquinas’s concept of the ordo amoris (order of love) and Pope Francis, who wrote that “[T]he true ordo amoris that must be promoted … by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
Compared to Pete Hegseth, Vance is a flaming religious moderate. In Hegseth’s 2020 book American Crusade, he wrote that those who enjoy Western civilization should “thank a crusader.” Two of his tattoos use crusader imagery: the Jerusalem Cross and the phrase “Deus Vult,” or “God wills it,” which Hegseth has called “the rallying cry of Christian knights as they marched to Jerusalem.”
Meanwhile, Israel’s grotesque genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank have appalled a majority of America’s Jewish community. The end of the AIPAC captivity has liberated American Judaism to resume its long-standing progressive role.
The alliance of Zionist Jews and the Christian right was always an awkward one. Fundamentalists have a totally instrumentalist view of Zionism, as a way station to the Rapture, when all non-Christians will go straight to Hell. The critic Leon Wieseltier put it perfectly when he characterized the entente between Zionists and Christian fundamentalists as “a grim comedy of mutual condescension.”
PIT THE THEOLOGY OF VANCE, PAXTON, and Hegseth against the theology of Talarico, and Talarico soars. Still, I don’t want to be too effusive or wishful in my embrace of organized religion as part of a progressive salvation, so to say.
For the past 2,000 years, organized religion has been mostly a force for evil. The Crusades slaughtered millions. The Inquisition tortured and murdered millions more. After the Protestant Reformation, Christians did bloody battle with other Christians. The two main factions of Islam, Shia and Sunni, regularly go to war with each other; India was sundered in bloody battle between Muslims and Hindus. The theological question of how to worship God gets all jumbled up with the question of whose tribe is to dominate.
Jefferson put it as well as anyone when he wrote, “Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.”
My dear friend James Carroll, in his landmark book Constantine’s Sword, distinguished between the corrupt and malevolent deeds of the organized Church beginning in the fourth century, and the actual teachings of Jesus. It was those teachings, not a conspiracy of Christ-killer Jews, that made Jesus a dangerous radical and led to his murder.
“Christianity has always been ambiguous,” Carroll told me. “It has been a source of social justice but just as powerfully it has been about the pursuit of domination and control. It’s a never-ending struggle. It’s naïve to think of the cruelty of Christian evangelicals who have embraced Trump as an aberration. They stand firmly within the dark current of the worst manifestations of Christianity.”
Extreme right-wing Catholics like Vance, Carroll added, “solve the problem of decadence by embracing theocracy. The irony is that right-wing Catholics are at odds with Francis and Leo, who put compassion ahead of control.”
I learn a lot from progressive Catholics like my friend Jim. Speaking just for myself, I would prefer a movement for social justice rooted in the secular values of the Enlightenment. But if we are to have an upsurge of religious fervor, let it be based on the actual teachings of true prophets.
