A progressive understanding of Christianity won in the US elections |
Two-thirds of Americans identify as Christian, but since less than a third of the country actually makes it to church regularly, many rely on what they pick up from the media – social or otherwise – to know what the religion means.
And until yesterday, that received wisdom could be summed up as: a conservative, domineering, and above all anti-gay force fiercely committed to the Republican party.
Today, it means something different. The Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico has won in a Texas landslide – despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that he ran on a wildly different interpretation of Christianity.
In his view, the important commandments are to love one’s neighbor, in material terms: feeding, clothing, healing. And he’s quite willing to think about that in radical ways, if by radical you mean getting to the root: “We as Christians are called to do more than charity,” he said. “We are called to challenge the systems that make charity necessary.”
If you go 35 miles north of Texas, across the Oklahoma panhandle, you reach the deep red state of Kansas, which hadn’t elected a Democrat since 1932. But Kansans last night picked a pastor, the Rev Adam Hamilton, to represent them in the Senate. Hamilton started a successful church in the suburbs of Kansas City, and though he’s clearly a moderate, he’s also clearly willing to state that the gospel is, for lack of a better word, liberal. Read this carefully – it is far sharper than you’d think at first glance:
double quotation markWell, let’s just talk........