In Notes on the State of Virginia — Thomas Jefferson’s half-almanac, half-philosophical exploration published in 1785 — the founding father and future president writes about mixing various religions and faith traditions into one unified nation, and how
a man’s god should and should not shape his politics.
“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others,” he writes. “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
But nearly 250 years after Jefferson wrote the words that broke with the old empire, and planted the seeds of a new one, the question of what gods our political class serves is weighing heavily as Americans celebrate the anniversary of the republic.
The arena of religious politics — of faith as the basis of governing ideology — has been a decidedly Republican-dominant battleground since the rise of the evangelical movement in electoral politics in the 1970s. A growing number of Democrats are realizing it doesn’t have to be that way, especially as the United States contends with perhaps its most sacreligious, golden-calf presidency in history.
“Folks on the right often behave as if they own religion, as if they are the chief interpreters of the meaning of Christian faith,” Reverend Raphael Warnock, a Democratic senator from Georgia, tells Rolling Stone. “The implications of that in this American moment, I think, are tragic.”
In 2021, Warnock, a senior pastor at Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, became the first Black senator from Georgia. He did so by leaning heavily into his role as a religious leader and steward of the faith community that had once been home to Martin Luther King Jr. Now, he’s watching a whole new class of progressive Democrats turn to their faith as a way to reconnect with disillusioned voters — on everything from immigration to economic policy.
From Georgia to Texas, Iowa to Alaska, Democratic candidates are attempting to use their religious views as “a bridge,” as Warnock puts it, to connect with voters. At least three candidates in the 2026 midterms cycle have some form of ecclesiastical training. In Texas, Senate candidate James Talarico is former teacher and Presbyterian seminarian leaning on Jesus’s command that his followers “love thy neighbor” as a central pillar of his campaign. In Iowa, Lutheran minister Sarah Trone Garriott is running for a seat representing the state’s 3rd congressional district. In Alaska, Presbyterian pastor Matt Schultz is leveling a challenge against the state’s only congressional representative, a Republican. Others have no formal background as preachers or seminarians, but have embraced their lifelong faith as part of their political identity. Rolling Stone spoke to many of them about the relationship between their religion and their politics, and why they think voters are open to religious messaging from Democratic candidates.
“I’m the staunchest defender of separation [of church and state], but I feel like the secular part of the Democratic Party felt the best way to protect that separation was just to never talk about religion, and that was such a monumental mistake,” Talarico says. “When you cede faith, when you cede meaning to the other side, it’s going to leave you impoverished in your ability to connect with people. I don’t think it needs to be religion proper, it doesn’t necessarily need to be a sectarian religion, but we do have to speak to something different.”
Warnock argues there is an opportunity for Democrats given the extent to which the actions of the party in power are not lining up with their faith-based messaging. “I think what turns people off from religious people, from faith leaders, is when there’s a vast disconnect between what they say and what they do, when there’s a divide between their creeds and their deeds,” Warnock explains, adding that Democrats can use their faith not by offering up fire and brimstone, but by describing the “possibilities in this country for what it actually can be,” and laying out “God’s dream for humanity” as “a kaleidoscopic picture of many colors and hues and shapes.”
One professed person of faith who has a decidedly different dream for humanity is Trump, and it’s worth taking a step back to consider what the fraught American moment described by Warnock actually entails. Trump, who has used the office to enrich himself and his family in ways unimaginable to previous presidents, openly questions if he’s going to heaven — even as he posts AI-generated photos comparing himself to Christ. Trump’s version of a Christian life and politics includes divorces, allegations of infidelity and sexual assault, open theft from the public coffers, the arrest and de facto torture of migrants in fetid detention camps, the brutalization of American protesters, and the deaths of untold millions through his foreign policy blunders. Religious leaders who call out the administration are met with ire, including Pope Leo XIV — the first American Pope — whom Trump deemed “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.”
Yet, Trump continues to embrace the religious fervor around his presidency from the evangelical right. In a speech before the conservative Faith and Freedom Coalition’s annual conference in late June, Trump claimed his movement had “saved religion,” asserting that the “radicals” on the left wanted to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary by “driving God from our public square once and for all.”
Americans are growing increasingly skeptical of his sincerity. The number of Americans who view Trump as “not at all religious” has spiked since 2020. His favorability is sliding among Christians, particularly Christians of color. Recent polling has found that about half of evangelicals think the president’s war and Iran and treatment of migrants do not align with Christian values. As the primary season ends and candidates begin hunkering down for the final electoral stretch, many congressional hopefuls are calling out the hypocrisy of the religious right.
“I think Democrats make a mistake when they cede the faith and values space to the right, especially since in more instances than not, it seems to me that [Republicans] have got the faith wrong,” Warnock says. “This is a moral moment, and we need people of faith, not just Christians, but people of various faith traditions — and people who claim no faith tradition at all, but are people of moral courage — to stand up and assert the covenant that we have with one another as an American people.”
“I have a kind of freedom, because while I love doing this job, I’m not in love with politics, I’m in love with change,” he adds. “My faith is not a weapon, it’s a bridge. It’s an invitation to be in conversation with me, and me with you, as we try to figure out what it means to be human and what it means to be an American in this moment, and what is it that we can build together.”
Cliff Johnson, a civil rights lawyer and Sunday school teacher running as a Democrat in Mississippi’s deep-red 1st congressional district, agrees.
“I think all the time about how we can use the shared language of faith to talk about hard things,” Johnson says. In his view, Christ made following his teachings pretty simple: Love God and love your neighbor. Who’s your neighbor? The answer is clearly everybody, and that causes me to tell my friends on the left, look, guys, we can’t hate people, right? We can be mad at people, and then say, come join us. If you hate people, they know you hate them.
In the caustic, isolationist politics currently dominating America, the notion of strength through community building feels “revolutionary,” Johnson says, and as a candidate, Sunday school teacher, and law professor, he tries to impress upon people that the only way to find common understanding is to “develop the muscles to stay in the room with people with whom you disagree.”
Community as a potential balm to the divisiveness of modern political discourse is a theme echoed by many of the Democrats running on faith. Sarah Trone Garriott worked as a chaplain in an emergency room in Philadelphia before moving to Iowa and taking up a position in the Des Moines Area Religious Council, a community aid network. “I got to be a pastor to the whole community,” she says. “There’s just a lot of common ground that we have, even if people have different beliefs or different perspectives.”
The candidates also agree on one critical point: their religion is not a campaign strategy, or a political weapon, but an innate part of who they are as people. “My faith is what motivates me to do hard things and show up for my community,” Trone Garriott explains. “When I speak out from a perspective of faith, about the issues, it’s because that’s what my faith teaches, that I’m there to help people. We feed the hungry, we help the sick, we welcome the stranger, we care for those who need help.”
Talarico agrees that one’s politics should arise from their faith, not the other way around. “You’ve heard me root everything in those first two commandments: love God and love your neighbor,” he says. “I do think that sequence is really important, that you can’t fit the big stuff into small stuff. Partisanship, politics, policy are smaller than faith, so you want you want those things to grow out of the the big, big stuff, the deep stuff. We try to tap into that whenever we can, and not always in a sectarian way.”
The budding wave of religious progressives can all (at least loosely) be linked historically to the principles of the social gospel, an American protestant social movement of the 19th century that attempted to address social ills — things like poverty, disease, racial and social inequality, and pollution — through Christian principles. It was not particularly well unified (which is why you’ve probably never heard of it), and its priorities and character varied from state to state and diverged widely on issues. But it did create an undercurrent of religious social and economic progressivism that endured into the modern age, and continues to transcend specific denominations.
“[Among] different religious communities, non-religious people, there’s just a lot of common ground that we have,” Trone Garriot says of her own faith journey. “[Most Americans] want people to succeed, they want kids to be fed, and folks have health care. For some folks, their motivation for that is not religious, but we can come together for the results.”
Warnock points to the desire for more morality and principled politics in an age where the most dominant political figure in the world — Donald Trump — seems to embrace self-serving corruption at the expense of Americans. The desire to reclaim one’s faith from the MAGA movement, which has taken their idolatry of the president to blasphemous degrees and the gospels at the convenience of their politics, is a ripe space for both voters and candidates.
“Religion shows up in many ways,” Warnock says. “It does a lot of good in the world, and a lot of evil, quite frankly, in the name of religion, in the name of Christianity. There were plenty of Christians who were on the wrong side of the slavery question. They were on the wrong side of the Jim Crow segregation question.”
In other words, talk is cheap. “I don’t think that people are necessarily impressed or unimpressed by your creeds. I think what matters is your deeds,” Warnock says. “If you can center the faith in a way that is focused on love, that’s focused on justice, that’s focused on community, that’s focused on on trying to center people in the on the who are on the margins, then yeah, I think the country is ready to hear from those kinds of people.”
None of this is to say that Democrats are anywhere close to dominating the arena of religious politics. Republicans are embracing new orthodoxies seemingly on a daily basis. Vice President J.D. Vance — a presumptive candidate for the 2028 presidential race — is currently on a book tour promoting his latest memoir on his conversion to Catholicism, the right-wing faith tradition du jour.
Vance, and other recent Catholic converts, have found themselves in a bit of a pickle given that the still relatively new American pope, Leo XIV, has made abundantly clear that the Catholic Church and its teachings do not endorse many of the policies endorsed by the Trump administration and its acolytes, particularly on issues of foreign policy and immigration.
Trump and his vice president have repeatedly sparred in public with the pontiff, with Vance at one point instructing the head of the Catholic church to be “careful” when commenting on “matters of theology.”
“What it shows is that what he’s committed to is his political agenda,” and not his faith, Warnock says of the vice president. “If the church gets in the way, he’ll run roughshod over that as well. It’s really striking, and it is the clear embodiment of hubris and arrogance.”
In Alaska, Matt Schultz is the child of a Catholic priest and a Catholic nun who were excommunicated after falling in love. He himself is a Presbyterian minister. “I’ve always looked at religion as sort of a funny, quirky little thing, and I love my faith tradition, but I also recognize that we make mistakes,” he says, pointing to his parents continuing to live a life of faith and love despite perhaps making “mistakes.” Both he and Warnock described the right’s treatment of Christ’s teaching as a blatant case of “identity theft.”
“They’ve taken the name Jesus and twisted it into a horrible tool of oppression,” Schultz says. “People are smarter than this administration gives them credit for, and when you go out there and say we’re Christians, but then you turn around and harm people so deeply, and take health care away from the sick, and take food away from hungry children, people smell bullshit. They say, no, you’re contradicting the very faith tradition that you’re claiming is on your side.”
It remains to be seen what amount of success these candidates will have in November. While Warnock is not on the ballot this year, his fellow Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, also a Democrat, is currently facing reelection, and visiting pulpits across the state to preach a populist economic message. Both are rumored to be considering presidential runs in 2028.
James Talarico is facing a close race in Texas against state Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose wife is divorcing him on grounds of “biblical” adultery. Trone Garriott’s prospective district was narrowly won by Trump in 2024 and is currently held by a Republican. Schulz would also need to flip Alaska’s at-large district. Johnson is throwing an electoral Hail Mary in his Mississippi district that is rated at +18 Republican by the Cook Partisan Voting Index.
All of these candidates understand that trust in the Democratic Party is at a historic low. In the aftermath of a demoralizing loss in 2024 — and almost two years under the authoritarian governance of Trump –faith in the ability of the party establishment to react to the excesses of the Trump administration and deliver for its voters is all but gone. “People are seeing the rank corruption that’s going on right now, and they’re wondering, ‘Is there anybody who’s for real?’ Is there anybody whose [beliefs] are based in something other than just being another transactional politician?” Warnock says.
When the institutions that are supposed to protect and defend Americans and their communities surrender themselves to open corruption, greed, and criminality, it’s perhaps natural to return to the moral compasses and social creeds of faith as a guiding sociopolitical force.
It’s a principle Warnock, and the many candidates walking along a similar path, are centering. “It’s not my creeds that I take to that work, it’s not the orthodoxy of my particular faith: it’s really the values of my faith,” Warnock says. “It’s justice making, centering love and love of humanity, truth telling, empathy, compassion, and the ability to look in the eyes of your neighbor and see a glimpse of your own humanity.”
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