Evangelical Ministers Are Running as Democrats to Fight Christian Nationalism
At least seven white Christian clergy, including a Liberty University graduate, have declared 2026 campaigns. They’re betting that reclaiming faith requires putting their names on ballots.
The Counter-Offensive
“The biggest threat to both faith and democracy is the rise of Christian nationalism,” Justin Douglas told Religion News Service. “We’re seeing the ways Christian nationalism is corrupting the church and public life, and the way our faith is being misused in legislation.”
The numbers are striking. At least six white clergy and one seminarian have declared Democratic runs for Congress in 2026. Another twenty ministers are seriously considering state or local races. Vote Common Good, the nonprofit tracking this movement, counts roughly thirty white clergy running as Democrats nationwide.
That’s not a coincidence. It’s organized.
The Hopefuls
What makes this different from past Democratic outreach to religious voters is that these aren’t secular politicians learning to quote Scripture. These are ordained ministers arguing that Christian nationalism is theological heresy, a corruption of the faith, not an expression of it.
Douglas attended Liberty University. He spent twenty years in evangelical ministry. He founded a church in Harrisburg called The Belong Collective.
Now Justin Douglas is running for Congress as a Democrat.
Douglas is part of something that would have been unthinkable a generation ago: a coordinated movement of white Christian clergy running as Democrats, explicitly framing their campaigns as a faith-based counter-offensive against the religious right.
Doug Pagitt, who runs Vote Common Good, says the surge reflects “a sense of alarm among progressive pastors, who aim to counter President Trump’s agenda and the spread of Christian nationalism.” His organization trains candidates to connect with evangelical and Catholic voters, the very constituencies Democrats have hemorrhaged for decades.
Douglas’s path to Democratic politics tells you something about the fractures within American Christianity.
In 2015, he became lead pastor of The Bridge Church in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania. Which is a congregation affiliated with the Brethren in Christ, an Anabaptist tradition similar to Mennonites. He built a community that emphasized radical welcome. Then, in 2019, the denomination revoked his pastoral license.
His offense: publicly affirming LGBTQ inclusion.
“I deeply believe that LGBT individuals should be involved in the life of the church without limitation, including marriage,” Douglas told local reporters at the time. The church was shuttered. He lost the denomination-owned housing where he lived with his wife, Brittney, and their three kids.
Douglas didn’t walk away from ministry. He took his congregation and started over, founding The Belong Collective, a fully inclusive faith community. Then, in 2023, Run for Something recruited him to run for Dauphin County Commissioner.
Local operatives told him he was making a mistake. He’d centered his campaign on deaths in the county prison—18 people who’d died in custody since 2019. He bought a billboard featuring the death toll. “My name was much smaller than the fact that 18 people had died,” Douglas said. “That was intentional.”
He won by 42 votes. It was the first time Democrats had controlled the Dauphin County Board of Commissioners in over a century.
Now he’s running for Congress against MAGA Scott Perry, a Freedom Caucus member whose phone the FBI seized as part of the January 6th investigation. Douglas’s Liberty University background gives him standing to make an argument secular Democrats can’t: that Christian nationalism betrays Christianity itself.
“I will never legislate my theology,” he says. “My job is to serve everyone and invite everyone to the table.”
Douglas isn’t alone. In Iowa, Sarah Trone Garriott is running for Congress in one of the most competitive House districts in the country. She’s an ordained ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) minister with a master’s from Harvard Divinity School. She’s also the only Iowa Democrat recently to flip two Republican-held state senate seats, including defeating the sitting Senate President in 2022.
“Faith has something to say to politics,” Garriott says. “And what we are seeing labeled as the faith perspective is not faithful to me.”
In Texas, state representative James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, is running for U.S. Senate. His viral confrontations with Republican colleagues over Christian nationalism made him a progressive star. When he appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast in July and argued, “There’s nothing Christian about Christian nationalism,” Rogan told him he should run for president.
He’s aiming lower, for now. But his candidacy tests whether faith-forward progressive messaging can break through in a state Democrats haven’t won statewide since 1994.
See previous articles from our in-depth series on Christian Nationalism:
Challenges
Here’s what these candidates are up against.
PRRI’s 2024 American Values Atlas, based on more than 22,000 interviews, found that 80-85% of white evangelical voters supported Trump. Among those who attend church weekly, it was 88%. Two-thirds of white evangelicals qualify as Christian nationalism “Adherents” or “Sympathizers.” Sixty percent believe God ordained Trump to win the election. (Resist and Rise, Sep 15, 2025) Defining Christian Nationalism: Not Your Grandparents’ Patriotism
Nearly four in ten Christian nationalism Adherents agree that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.”
But the clergy candidates also face problems inside the Democratic coalition. A May 2025 poll found 75% of Christian voters have little or no trust in the party. Fifty-eight percent see Democrats as actively hostile to Christianity.
Pagitt, the Vote Common Good director, is blunt about it. “The Democratic Party overall, as we’ve learned from experience, has not been overly welcoming and accommodating to religious candidates,” he says. “One of them said, ‘If they’re so needy and dumb that they need us to explain why they should vote for Democrats, we don’t want them.’”
Religiously unaffiliated voters now make up 39% of the Democratic base, the party’s largest “religious” demographic. Candidates who talk openly about faith risk alienating secular progressives. Candidates who don’t cede religious identity entirely to Republicans.
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It’s a two-front war, and these ministers are betting they can fight it.
“I am very hopeful, and I am seeing really good signs,” she says. “I see people turning out of special elections. I see people volunteering. I see people running for office and stepping up. All these new folks who have never considered it before, they’re finding a way to get involved.” — Sarah Trone Garriott
Then the kicker: “The greatest opponent we have is despair.”
That’s the bet these candidates are making. Not just that they can win elections, but that reclaiming faith for progressive politics requires putting their names on ballots. They are not just critiquing Christian nationalism from the sidelines but offering an alternative vision of what it means to follow Jesus into the public square.
We’ll find out in November 2026 whether the bet pays off.
Know of progressive faith leaders in your community pushing back against Christian nationalism? Reply to this email or leave a comment below. I’m tracking this movement for future coverage.
SOURCES
Religion News Service, “White Christian clergy running for Congress as Democrats,” December 15, 2025
PRRI, “Christian Nationalism Across All 50 States,” February 4, 2025 (22,000+ interviews)
Change Research/Vote Common Good poll, May 2025 (1,761 Christian voters)
The Keystone, “Progressive pastor flips Dauphin County,” November 14, 2023
Texas Tribune, “James Talarico’s progressive take on Christianity,” September 16, 2025
Iowa Public Radio, “Sarah Trone Garriott announces run,” May 5, 2025
Axios, “’Shocking’ number of white clergy run as Democrats in 2026,” November 9, 2025
Pew Research Center, “Demographic profiles of Trump and Harris voters in 2024,” June 26, 2025