God, Justice and the 2026 Midterms: Why More Pastors Are Running as Democrats

For years, Democrats treated religion like a live wire: too risky to touch, easier to ignore. In 2026, a new crop of pastors, preachers and seminarians are cutting the caution tape and stepping directly onto the political stage.

From Alaska to Texas and Iowa, “faith‑forward” Democrats are running as proud people of the cloth, talking about prayer, Scripture and justice in the same breath as health care and voting rights. They are betting that reclaiming Christian language from the right can both close the party’s long‑running “God gap” and blunt the rise of Christian nationalism, all without sacrificing pluralism or alienating nonreligious voters.

A clergy wave inside the Democratic Party

Matt Schultz, senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Anchorage, is running for Alaska’s lone U.S. House seat, one of several ordained ministers Democrats have recruited to test whether “candidates of the cloth” can help win back religious voters in 2026. In Tennessee’s 5th District, small‑town mayor and Sunday school teacher Chaz Molder is mounting a congressional bid of his own, underscoring how party strategists now see openly religious Democrats as key to closing a long‑running “God gap” with Republicans.

Progressive Christian networks have been laying the groundwork for years. Axios reports that Vote Common Good, a left‑leaning faith group led by pastor Doug Pagitt, is tracking roughly 30 white clergy entering politics as Democrats, many of them first‑time candidates. A Substack analysis by writer James Cruce finds that at least six white clergy and one seminarian have already declared 2026 congressional runs, with roughly twenty more ministers seriously weighing state or local races — a scale organizers frame as a “coordinated movement” rather than a one‑off experiment.

Justin Douglas: From evangelical pastor to Democratic insurgent

One of the most closely watched figures in this wave is Justin Douglas, an evangelical pastor and county commissioner from the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, area who is now running for Congress as a Democrat. Douglas attended Liberty University, spent two decades in evangelical ministry, and founded The Belong Collective, a church plant centered on inclusion — a biography that once would have pegged him as a natural Republican recruit.

Douglas instead describes Christian nationalism as “the biggest threat to both faith and democracy,” arguing that the movement “is corrupting the church and public life” and misusing Christianity in legislation. In interviews highlighted by Cruce, he insists, “I will never legislate my theology… My job is to serve everyone and invite everyone to the table,” casting his campaign as a theological rebuttal to the idea that the United States should be defined as a Christian nation in law.

Sarah Trone Garriott and the Iowa experiment

In Iowa’s 3rd District, state senator Sarah Trone Garriott is running for Congress after already pulling off what Democrats in Des Moines still talk about: flipping two Republican‑held state Senate seats, including defeating the sitting GOP Senate president in 2022. Garriott is an ordained Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) minister with a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School, and she is explicit that her run is grounded in her calling as clergy.

“Faith has something to say to politics,” Garriott says, but she rejects the idea that Christian nationalism speaks for believers, telling Cruce that “what we are seeing labeled as the faith perspective is not faithful to me.” She argues that many voters who took comfort in Trump‑era religious rhetoric are now uneasy with its harsher edges, and that pastors like her can offer a different vision of Christian public witness — one rooted in economic justice and pluralism rather than culture‑war grievance.

James Talarico: The seminary‑trained Senate hopeful

In Texas, state representative James Talarico has become one of the most visible faces of faith‑forward Democratic politics as he pursues a 2026 U.S. Senate bid. A former public school teacher and current Presbyterian seminarian, Talarico has gone viral for committee‑room confrontations with Republican colleagues over Christian nationalism, often quoting Scripture to argue that the gospel demands care for the poor and the marginalized.

Axios notes that Talarico has used social media to mock Republican efforts to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms by posing faith‑infused counter‑questions like, “Instead of displaying the Ten Commandments in every classroom, why not put ‘the love of money is the root of all evil’ in every boardroom?” Those clips, shared widely among progressive Christians, have made him a model for how Democrats might talk about faith in ways that feel authentically religious while challenging the moral authority of the Christian right.

Other candidates of the cloth

The clergy wave extends well beyond these marquee names. The Bulwark’s reporting points to Schultz in Alaska and Molder in Tennessee as bellwethers for whether white mainline Protestants can again become a meaningful part of the Democratic coalition. Resist and Rise’s tally includes pastors and ministry leaders in several competitive House districts, all explicitly running as Christians who believe Christian nationalism “betrays Christianity itself.”

In addition to ordained clergy, organizers highlight a broader cohort of faith‑forward Democrats who, while not pastors, are fluent in religious language and active in their churches, especially in Midwestern swing seats. Strategists told The Bulwark that the party has long relied on Black clergy, with figures like Sen. Raphael Warnock as prominent examples, but now sees winning back even a slice of white Christian voters as essential to building durable majorities.

Why this is different from past cycles

What distinguishes 2026, faith organizers argue, is not just that Democrats are “doing religion,” but who is doing it. In past cycles, consultants often coached secular candidates to sprinkle in phrases like “people of faith” or “moral values” at church visits or in targeted mail. By contrast, the 2026 crop features ordained ministers and seminarians who call Christian nationalism a “theological heresy” and say their campaigns are an extension of their pastoral work, not a deviation from it.

This strategy is also a response to sobering polling. Cruce cites a May 2025 survey showing that 75 percent of Christian voters report little or no trust in the Democratic Party and 58 percent view Democrats as actively hostile to Christianity. That trust deficit, combined with the long‑documented “God gap” — the tendency of more religiously observant voters to back Republicans — has convinced some Democratic operatives that simply softening rhetoric won’t be enough; the party needs messengers who can speak as insiders to skeptical congregations.

The risks of running as religious Democrats

Running as a faith‑forward Democrat comes with risks on two fronts. On the right, clergy candidates face accusations that they are diluting or distorting traditional Christian teachings, particularly when they back abortion rights, LGBTQ protections and expansive government spending as expressions of gospel values. On the left, they encounter secular activists and nonreligious voters who worry that leaning into religion — even progressive religion — could blur church‑state lines or marginalize people with no faith at all.

Party strategists quoted by The Bulwark openly acknowledge this tension, noting that Democrats have often been “intolerant” of culturally conservative voters in their own ranks and that simply nominating pastors will not erase deep disagreements over sexuality and gender. Even some of the clergy‑candidates admit they are still experimenting with how much to foreground faith on the stump, trying to avoid sounding like a sermon while convincing voters that their moral commitments are more than just branding.

Reclaiming faith, or widening the divide?

The faith‑forward Democrats of 2026 are betting that the best way to blunt Christian nationalism is not to sideline religion, but to put different kinds of Christians at the center of the story — pastors, seminarians and lay leaders willing to argue Scripture in public and link their campaigns to a theology of justice and inclusion. Their gamble is that, in a country where most voters still claim some religious identity, authentic faith voices can reopen doors that have slammed shut on Democrats in white church communities.

But this is also a high‑wire act: if they lean too hard into God talk, they risk alienating secular and non‑Christian voters; if they pull their punches, they may never persuade skeptical believers that the party takes their faith seriously. The ministers running this year seem convinced that the greater danger is despair — the sense that politics has become too cruel, and the church too compromised, to change — and that the only honest answer is to carry their collars onto the ballot and let voters decide whether a different kind of Christian politics is worth a try.

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