Opinion
In the exultant aftermath of the major Democratic wave in last week’s midterm elections, progressives across social media were vocal in their insistence that the Democratic victories were a mandate for consequences, accountability, and the rule of law.
With his election to the U.S. Senate last week, James Talarico has the potential to become one of the nation’s most influential Christians.
Yet for all the attention to the 37-year-old’s pro-choice beliefs or his comments about God’s gender, there has been surprisingly little curiosity about the mainline institutions that shaped him. While right-wing Christians attacked his respectful comments about transgender kids, even left-leaning commentators dismissed his defenses of inclusivism—the idea that all religions contain some aspect of truth—as wishy-washy.
That Talarico could be faithfully relaying the positions of a small but committed number of American Christians doesn’t seem to translate. It’s the unique challenge facing the nation’s mainline churches: A few generations ago, the majority of Protestants considered themselves members of these denominations, but now, many are unaware of their existence, associating “Christianity” with its white evangelical expression, not its modest liberal cousins.
Minister and author Rev. Lillian Daniel recently published a memoir about a difficult period in her life. Defrocked: Good News from a Bad Pastor for a Better Church recounts Daniel’s journey through a ministerial fitness review conducted roughly a decade ago, following a sexual boundary violation she committed with a church employee during her senior pastorate.
Daniel’s creative reflections on the wonders and travails of ministry have helped define the modern landscape of mainline Protestantism. Her writing in Defrocked is characteristically clever, winsome, and charming. The book is laugh-out-loud funny at times and genuinely tear-jerking at others. There are mirthful, unguarded moments and recurring inside jokes, many involving alcohol, little winks between the author and reader that make you feel privy to secret knowledge. The prose is breathtaking: elegiac, disarming, self-aware, rippling with exegetical wisdom and authenticity. That the tale is narrated by such a talented storyteller makes the book’s omissions all the more maddening.
I was part of voting in Tuesday night’s blue wave. I voted for Abdul El-Sayed, whose senatorial race had been called before I went to bed, and I woke up to the news that my current member of congress, an eight-term incumbent Republican, had been unseated.
Tuesday’s midterm election results were a victory for creating a government by, for, and of the people. At a time when many of our political leaders were openly threatening to disrupt or even sabotage our electoral system, voters overwhelmingly chose change and candidates who champion safe, secure, and fair elections.
There’s a lot of buildup leading up to Election Day—and rightfully so. Many of us in the faith community have helped by volunteering as poll workers, serving as poll chaplains, working to “get out the vote,” and praying that all will be able to cast their ballot in fair elections.
But in the face of the threats and efforts we’ve seen to disrupt these elections, the hard work of preserving, strengthening, and ultimately transforming our democracy isn’t over on Election Day; it must continue through the post-election period to ensure that every vote is counted and certified, and that a new Congress is seated on Jan. 3, 2027. As Christians, we don’t engage in this process out of loyalty to a certain candidate or political party; instead, our loyalty is to a God who calls us to stand up for human dignity and advance the common good. During election season, that means ensuring voters have a right to decide their leaders—and shape our shared future.
In September, a psychologist wrote these words in their monthly newsletter:
“As it turns out, character DOES matter. You can’t run a family, let alone a country, without it. How foolish to believe that a person who lacks honesty and moral integrity is qualified to lead a nation and the world! Nevertheless, our people continue to say that the President is doing a good job even if they don’t respect him personally. Those two positions are fundamentally incompatible. In the Book of James the question is posed, ‘Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring’ (James 3:11 NIV). The answer is no.”
Now, I should note, this newsletter is actually from September of 1998, as news of President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky burbled into view. It was written by the late James Dobson, president of Focus on the Family, who excoriated Clinton, the Democratic Party, and “the media” for giving Clinton a pass. But he saved his harshest words for the American people who, to Dobson’s indignation and outright astonishment, continued to support Clinton even after learning that he’d cheated on his wife.
There has been more than enough anxiety, stress, and even trepidation around the midterm elections—not to mention a barrage of political ads fueled by record-breaking spending. As I’ve previously written, this is far from a normal year for midterm elections.
In his letter to the Philippians, Paul instructed the church to “be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus” (4:6-7). That “everything” includes uncertain and potentially volatile elections.
In her 2023 book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, Naomi Klein argues that the process of mirroring explains an essential dimension of today’s politics and culture. Instead of a clean divide between good and evil, just and unjust, where we can confidently position ourselves on the side of liberators, we find ourselves in a hall of mirrors, puzzled about which way to turn. Racists pursue their policy ends in the name of civil rights, quoting Martin Luther King Jr. Social media and video hosting services like Rumble, Gettr, and Truth Social replicate YouTube and Facebook, responding to “systemic bias” in the mainstream media and supposedly championing free speech. In its treatment of Palestinians, the state of Israel reflects the persecution and genocide once faced by Jews. Donald Trump’s first go-to insults are the ones that are most obviously true of himself.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s short-lived plan to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan was a product of our age of mirroring. While Hegseth was an officer in the U.S. Army, al-Qaida and Islamic State militants performed executions in public and circulated them online, shocking the world. Now, Hegseth shocks the world by recommending a similar practice, but ostensibly performed by the good guys, in the service of justice. While livestreamed execution might seem rather close to pornography—encouraging viewers to derive pleasure from dehumanizing another, and right-wing Christians find pornography deeply vexing as a political and personal matter—the world of mirrors we inhabit distracts us from noticing those similarities. That is, from making moral distinctions and judgments based on close attention to the particulars of a case and to our principles.
The headlines coming out of the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2026 American Values Survey seem simple: White evangelicals are less likely to view empathy as a foundational moral concept and more likely to say it can be a danger. But Sojourners analysis and an outside expert say PRRI’s question design and its own framing of results violate cardinal rules of survey research.
It’s tough to know what to do as a mainline Protestant pastor these days. Most of the news about churches has not been good. A recent article in The Hill by Rev. Jennifer Butler, Presbyterian minister and CEO of the nonprofit Faith in Democracy, made the case that mainline Protestants are the swing voters of the 2026 elections. It’s safe to say that mainline Protestants are at a crossroads, and how they handle this election will have ramifications for years to come.
Last week at a town hall event in Caro, Mich., a heckler lobbed Islamophobic accusations at Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. That’s unfortunately unsurprising this cycle, as Republicans, panicked by a growing Democratic wave, have doubled and tripled down on bigotry. But what made this incident go viral is the way in which El-Sayed calmly turned the accusations around and demonstrated the extent to which Republican hatred of Muslims is rooted in an exclusionary Christian nationalism.
This past weekend thousands of people marched to the polls in nearly 3,000 events for the No Kings: Vote Early mobilization. This was a historic surge in getting people and communities mobilized for early voting in neighborhoods across the country. Whenever possible, voting early and ensuring an overwhelming voter turnout is arguably one of the most powerful tools and best defenses we have against the abuse of power and authoritarian consolidation.
But early voting, let alone voting on election day, still requires persuading and, in many cases, empowering people to actually vote. Given the challenging reality that an estimated 87 million eligible voters didn’t exercise their vote in the 2024 election, I’ve been thinking a great deal about what role our Christian faith can and should play in dramatically increasing voter turnout.
American evangelicals have long made a bogeyman out of Marx and his many inheritors. In 1952, Billy Graham made “Americanism”—his counter to communism—a central message of his crusades. Of course, this opposition finds its context in both the Cold War and evangelicals’ existing alliance with free-market capitalism.
The latest installment of this criticism comes from former Moody Church pastor Erwin W. Lutzer and former Moody Bible Institute professor Gregg Quiggle: Marx and Moody, published by Moody Publishers in September. Marx and Moody is broken into two clear sections. The first is written by Lutzer, and it primarily deals with Marx. The second is written by Quiggle, and it engages the life and social activism of Moody.
From the outset, the authors make clear their position: This is not a neutral, objective, or academic comparative study of two figures who helped shape their respective disciplines. It is a plea for readers to choose light over darkness, good over evil, Moody over Marx.
In August, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement awarded a $16.7 million no-bid contract for 6,000 pairs of electric-shock gloves. The Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, abbreviated as G.L.O.V.E., can be activated by an officer against bare skin, delivering pulses of up to 380 volts—more than three times the voltage of a standard U.S. wall outlet. ICE says the gloves give officers another way to control people in close settings while supposedly avoiding more serious or lethal force. They’re manufactured by a company called Compliant Technologies, because subtlety is dead in our current political environment.
The gloves arrive at a strange moment in the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown. ICE arrests surged to nearly 51,000 in August. From June to August, ICE set arrest records. But deportations haven’t followed that trend. They’ve plateaued around 1,200 per day, roughly the same pace as May 2026, when ICE made about 32,000 arrests. There are many reasons for this gap: asylum claims, court proceedings, diplomatic issues with receiving countries. But the gap also makes the continued buildup of ICE’s arrest-and-detention machinery more revealing. If they are not getting better at the deportation part of their mass deportation campaign, what exactly is all this additional force accomplishing?
For two years, in the rectory where I live, my spouse and I hosted two parents seeking asylum along with their Canadian-born child. When she was a baby, not walking or talking, I used to sing lullabies to radicalize her—songs like the “Canticle of the Turning” (based on the Magnificat) and “Here I Am, Lord.” I would rock her to the beat of these justice-inspired songs, hoping that she would come to know that God is a God of justice.
But eventually, as anyone with a child in their life knows, you get bored of the traditional kid content, and so you begin searching for something unique. YouTube had just the thing I was looking for. The video I showed my 2-year-old housemate was from Rachel Griffin Accurso, who goes by the name Ms. Rachel. In this particular video, Ms. Rachel looks right into the camera and asks the toddler, “Can you say mama?” As I held this child, so innocent, so vulnerable, beside me as she engrossed herself in language and learning, I found myself thinking about the state of the world. How did we get to a point where—for years—we idly stood by and watched a genocide in Palestine livestreamed on our devices? How did we get to a point where anti-Black racism is making an unapologetic comeback? Why are we so hyper-focused on limiting the freedom of trans folks and immigrants when the actual source of our troubles is the Epstein class?
At the beginning of the second Trump administration, a homemade yard sign appeared in my neighborhood. It quoted the German Protestant pastor Martin Niemöller’s “First They Came” poem. Promoting both empathy and political action, Niemöller’s poem has become rightly omnipresent as Trumpism and its Christofascist base are arguably the most successful fascist movement since Nazi Germany. Lesser known than the poem is Niemöller’s journey into the antifascist spirit that inspired it.
Niemöller’s gradual turn against Hitler began only after the church’s autonomy was threatened in the Nazis’ attempt to establish the Reich Church. Before 1934, he voted for the Nazis numerous times, led a Freikorps unit during the Weimar Republic, joyfully greeted Hitler’s rise, and even sent his autobiography to Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels with a personal note that it was written in the “spirit of the Third Reich.” In his role in the Confessing Church, he was againstHitler, but kept the ultranationalism and antisemitism that led him to support the Nazis in the first place. His imprisonment wasn’t enough to shake off his fascist proclivities—he still volunteered for the war effort from Sachsenhausen concentration camp. It took the defeat of Germany and a direct confrontation with his own complicity after the war, for him to reject fascism.
I need to level with you: The 2026 midterms are not a normal election.
Faith groups like Sojourners have long talked about the importance of elections. I have written about elections extensively in the past. But this year is different.
Specifically, there is a great risk that the Trump administration and its allies will attempt to disrupt or deny the election results; these attempts could very well succeed if we don’t act—or if they create enough chaos and fear to deter people from voting. It’s critical that Christians commit to pushing back on these attempts with faith-inspired activism—not just up to Election Day, but all the way through the seating of a new Congress on Jan. 3.
I’m at the point where I’m a bit at a loss for what to say about Palestine. It has been three years since the on Israel on October 7, 2023, when Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted another 251 people.
That date also marks the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, which continues despite the ceasefire. More than 70,000 Palestinians have been killed by the state of Israel. Palestinians are losing faith in nonviolent resistance, and I honestly can’t blame them. Settlers and their allies in government are determined to annex the entire West Bank, and Israeli politicians are openly imagining a world where Palestinians are no longer in Palestine. The word “bleak” does not even begin to describe the situation in Israel/Palestine—a situation that is only made worse by the U.S. continuing to provide military aid to Israel. Perhaps “catastrophe” is a better word.
The recent botched attempted executions of Christa Pike and Tony Carruthers in Tennessee have laid bare what it is we are doing in my state in the name of justice—and people of faith are horrified by it.