This seems to be about the resurgence of the religious left. I consider that good news. There is also one particular point it makes:
Maybe it will soon be time for UUs to get back into the fray?"...there is a whole strand of the left, or was, who thought religion was the opium of the masses, ignored the power of the Black church to organize on behalf of its people and lead on civil rights, and pretended all Christians were far right...."
--Kim
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Here's some shocking news for you: America's greatest climate activist is...a METHODIST and he writes, "As a longtime Methodist, I can attest that—at least from a distance—it is not the most dramatic of the world’s religious operations. Very little incense, not much speaking in tongues, and sulfur and brimstone are barely in evidence. There are bishops, but they don’t get special hats." More importantly he writes that there is a wave of progressive Christian candidates running, mostly in places where our favorite flavor of radical politics might not play and that they represent a broad effort to take back Christianity from the right.
Bill continues, "earlier this month, Kansas’s current most prominent Methodist, the Reverend Adam Hamilton, won the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate. He is now aiming to become, in November’s election, the first Democrat that Kansas has sent to the Senate since 1932, the political equivalent of leaping Wichita’s Epic Center—at twenty-two stories, the tallest building in the state—in a single bound. It’s a hard task, but not impossible. Indeed, the Cook Political Report recently moved the Kansas Senate race from “Solid Republican” to “Likely Republican”—and that’s in part because there’s something interesting happening in American politics this cycle."
Furthermore, he writes, "While many observers are focussed on the emergence of the Democratic Socialists of America (who boast a total membership of just over a hundred thousand), a more important trend in the Democratic Party may be the resurgence of the once dominant and long-dormant mainline Protestant tradition. In Texas, Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico—a progressive Presbyterian seminarian who supports reproductive and L.B.G.T.Q. rights and the separation of church and state, condemns Christian nationalism, and has a slight edge in the polls over his Republican challenger—has gained widespread attention. (If he wins in November, he will be the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Texas in nearly forty years.) The Religious News Service reported earlier this month that there are at least twelve pastors, seminarians, and former clergy who have run for federal office on the Democratic ballot this year, and that seven had made it through their primaries. (In Iowa’s Second District, the Reverend Lindsay James, a state representative and a Presbyterian, beat the Reverend Clint Twedt-Ball, a Methodist, to win the primary for an open House seat.) By contrast, according to the Religious News Service, seven clergy have run in G.O.P. primaries, and just three of them, all evangelicals, won. Among the issues on the ballot in 2026, then, is what Christianity will mean in American politics in the years to come. And since nearly two-thirds of American adults, which is to say roughly a hundred and seventy million people, identify as Christian, it’s a fateful question, one at least as important as what will happen with the D.S.A."
So much good stuff here: "There’s no clear account yet of why the President and his team chose midwinter Minnesota to make their most aggressive stand on immigration, but it’s clear it was a bad decision. They’d picked a place with high levels of social trust and organization, derived at least in some part from the state’s long Lutheran tradition. (I’m on an advisory board to an immigrant-support organization now known as Global Refuge, but which for most of its life was known as the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.) And, along with many other groups, mainline Protestantism rose to the occasion. Renee Good, a mother of three who had opposed the crackdown and on January 7th was killed in her car by an ice agent, was a Presbyterian who had taken mission trips as a youth. Following her death, the Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire instructed his clergy to “get their affairs in order—to make sure they have their wills written” so that they could be ready to stand between “the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.” Hundreds of clergy members from across the country flew to Minneapolis to join the protests. On January 23rd, many of them temporarily disrupted the airport to protest deportation flights; about a hundred were arrested. The next day, Alex Pretti, an intensive-care nurse and a lifelong Catholic, was shot and killed by federal agents. This season’s slate of clerical candidacies is the next obvious step in this resurgence, and it’s clearly reverberating because Trump’s extreme positions have left an opening. But, at some level, these campaigns also seem a response to the right-wing evangelical hijacking of the Gospel message. That is, a political debate is growing out of a theological one: How should we read the Bible, and what does it mean?"
Bill is modest, as befits a Methodist guy, but in pointing out that the DSA has 100k members he could've pointed out that Third Act, the climate and democracy group he founded about five years ago, has more members.
p.s. Re: "shocking!" I was joking but there is a whole strand of the left or was who thought religion was the opium of the masses, ignored the power of the Black church to organize on behalf of its people and lead on civil rights, and pretended all Christians were far right.... As for myself, I've known and know lots of progressive Catholics and Protestants, including priests, ministers, and nuns. Some of this is about media coverage focusing on right-wing Christianity and all but shutting out left-ish Christian action most of the time....
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