The right is finally losing its stranglehold on Christianity

The Democratic Party's estimated 13-point victory is the second-largest midterm win since 1942, upstaged only by the midterms of 1974. Then, following Watergate, Democrats rode a similar wave of voter disgust against a rogue CIA and similar criminal president who also felt entitled to break the law.

There’s no shortage of analysis about what drove voters’ anger this time — corruption, inflation, ICE, attacks on democracy, war, or the price of gas, much of it validating pre-existing narratives of this writer. I’ll wait for further data from SSRS exit polls, and even then, will take voters’ after-the-fact claims with a grain of salt: opinions are mood-and-situation contingent, and there is no known poll testing the variance between what someone claims motivated them when they marked their ballot, and what factors actually did.

Whatever the why, it’s no leap that a nation founded on the rule of law would reject a criminal who so openly flouts it. But a nascent trend, more nuanced, is slowly emerging from the wreckage. Voters, whatever their personal triggers, have seen the predicate hatred that drives Trumpism and appear to be rejecting it.

The ascendance of White Christian Nationalism, America’s own Hitler movement, has finally awakened America’s conscience and given voice, strong if late, to true Christianity.

The rise of progressive Christianity

James Talarico, the first Texas Democrat elected Senator in 40 years, led a wave of successful Democrats who framed their campaigns around Christianity with a compassionate spin. Talarico’s progressivism gained traction in a state culturally and politically tied to its opposite: Conservative, judgmental and even hateful big-box evangelism has dominated Texas politics for nearly 50 years.

Enter Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian who paused his pursuit of a Masters in Divinity to run for Senate, fighting Texas culture wars with… scripture. As a member of the Texas state legislature, he told fellow lawmakers, “We as Christians are called to do more than charity. We are called to challenge the systems that make charity necessary...” He told the sponsor of a bill forcing the Ten Commandments into public schools that it was a deeply un-Christian effort. His midterm campaign slogan was, simply, “Love thy neighbor.”

You can’t watch an interview with Talarico or read his quotes and not come away convinced that his religious convictions are real, but he is not the only one. Adam Hamilton, a Methodist pastor, had a similar result as the first Democrat to win a U.S. Senate seat in Kansas in almost a century. Axios reports further that at least five progressive faith leaders won midterm elections in other traditional Republican strongholds as well, including two ordained ministers, Sarah Trone Garriott and Lindsay James in Iowa. These progressive candidates leaned heavily on faith during their campaigns, lacing their speeches with biblical themes. In each successful case, voters embraced some iteration of Christ’s instructions to help the poor.

Rejecting the hatred of white Christian Nationalism

You can be an atheist like me and still bow to the truth and beauty of Christ’s teachings. In passage after passage, Jesus taught that the righteous help those in need; they do not starve, beat, or imprison them, they do not enjoy cruelty. In Matthew 25:31-46, Jesus said Christians will be judged by how they treat the poor; whatever is done for “the least of us” is done for God. In Luke 10:25-37, the Parable of the Good Samaritan, Christ teaches the grace of lifting up and serving the downtrodden. In Consider the lilies, he gives spiritual comfort to laborers struggling with poverty.

Whatever the specific passage, the basic distillation of Christ’s teachings has always been, ‘Love thy neighbor.’ It has never been ‘kick thy neighbor.’ It doesn’t take a scholar to see that political movements promoting racial hatred and division are the opposite of Christian.

True spiritual leaders know the difference between Christianity and the need to financially support a big box church. The Rev. Janet Maykus, now pastor of the United Christian Church of Austin, notes that, “The loudest voices that people hear are these megachurches, and they think that's what we're all doing.” But, she notes, true “faith is rooted in justice and kindness rather than doctrine.” She prays for her “siblings in Christ who have lost their way to the lure of white Christian nationalism.”

Using religion for political power

White Christian nationalism, the ideological fusion of conservative Christian identity with racial hierarchy and cultural dominance, is the heart of Trumpism. But MAGA’s foundational pillar only uses Christianity to manipulate societal differences to generate fear and political cohesion.

Last year, the European Center for Populism studies traced the historical trajectory of Trump’s white Christian nationalism, from Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy,’ to Reagan’s Moral Majority, to the ascendance of Newt Gingrich’s Tea Party in 2010, landing at today’s MAGA movement. In truth, it should have reached back to the Confederacy. Writer João Ferreira Dias argues that what appeared at first as grassroots populism was, in fact, a carefully engineered political project to transform fringe radicalism into a national force. MAGA has never held the majority; it has been the triumph of minority rule made possible through right wing media capture and strategic voter manipulation.

Nothing illustrates this better than Project 2025, the roadmap for Trumpism. At its core, Project 2025 is an oligarchs’ cookbook. It exacerbates social divisions and culture wars to divert the nation’s attention while its beneficiaries rape national parks, schools, and prisons, privatizing public assets to generate wealth for themselves. Like Confederates willing to destroy the nation to protect white slaveholding profits, Project 2025’s true objective is the protection of private white wealth at the expense of everyone else.

Project 2025, like Trump, bastardizes Christianity to advance private objectives, just as the right has rejected Christ’s teachings since the Confederacy. But it appears at long last that voters are beginning to see the truth, the light, and the way.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.