Why I applaud the Rev. Adam Hamilton's run for the U.S. Senate

We need decent people who are devoted to caring for others

When I first learned that the Rev. Adam Hamilton was considering a run for the U.S. Senate from Kansas, I was disappointed — not because he shouldn’t run but because if he wins he’d represent Kansas, not Missouri, where I live.

(This photo of Adam Hamilton came from this site.)

I’d certainly welcome any senatorial candidate with Adam’s many gifts. He or she, after all, could replace either of the two guys who now represent the Show Me state in the Senate: Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt. They’re both Republicans who have failed to do anything serious to stop the second version of the horror show starring the always-transactional Donald J. Trump.

I first met Adam before he founded the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kan., in 1990 with 10 or so members. Now it’s well over 20,000 members with 10 campuses. And even if he wins, he says, he’ll remain COR’s senior pastor, though on considerably less than a full-time basis.

So let’s think a bit about any clergy member running for such a public office and then let’s think about what Adam — one of nine candidates running for the Democratic Party’s nomination — might bring to the task. (Note, please, that I say nothing here of the other eight candidates, about whom I know little.)

The person who represents my wife and me in the House of Representatives now is also a United Methodist clergyman, Emanuel Cleaver. His religious background has helped him be a voice for the overlooked and ignored, for the needy and downtrodden. Do I always agree with Emanuel? No. But after knowing him for many years, I feel confident that he has the best interests of his constituents in mind and that his life’s work has been aimed at helping others. There are a few other pastors in Congress, too, and this list of clergy who’ve served in political office is surprisingly long.

Adam Hamilton has the same love-thy-neighbor approach to life center that I find in people like Emanuel Cleaver. Maybe that’s true at least partly because being able to create a megachurch that holds itself together requires a leadership style that understands what can be negotiated but also what can’t be compromised. That’s no easy job, but Adam has excelled at it — and without a run-away ego.

Adam seems to have learned a lot of that early in his life. As he described it in this column he wrote for The Kansas City Star recently (you shouldn’t hit a paywall), “My parents dropped out of Shawnee Mission East (high school) when they had me. My dad was 17, my mom 18. . .After their divorce, my mom, a remarkable woman in her own right and one of my heroes, married a carpenter. He was a great guy when he wasn’t drinking. . .By my junior year of high school, they had divorced too, leaving my mom to raise three kids on her own. She did it heroically, by sheer will. At one point we lost everything to bankruptcy and moved into an abandoned farmhouse that members of our church helped make habitable. After we moved out my senior year, the fire department burned it down for practice. We moved seven times in six years.”

So given that sometimes-painful early personal history, Adam’s approach both to life and Christianity is both roomy and welcoming. His faith is not unorthodox, nor is it attached to strange fringe spiritual ideas.

Instead, his Mainline Protestant faith drives him to teach people how to love other people extravagantly — the way his mother and many others he encountered as a young person tried to do. He teaches a faith that makes room for all kinds of people but that is deeply committed to certain core principals, particularly to generative, sacrificial agape love.

One example of Adam’s faith principles at work was his effort to keep his United Methodist denomination from splitting apart a few years ago over LGBTQ+ issues. As a denominational leader, he truly believed that people who differed about that could, nonetheless, stay under the same denominational roof, and he worked hard to make that happen. When that proved beyond the capacity of United Methodists, Adam stayed with those who were open and affirming of LGBTQ+ folks (the right choice), though he clearly regretted the schism.

Indeed, for Adam, a central part of his faith tradition involves learning from Jesus how to love and care for — not own or control — each other. In my experience, he listens well and then takes what he hears and processes it through the lens of Christ’s life and his core teachings, with emphasis on the teachings that we encounter in the wildly countercultural Beatitudes, which tell us that the “blessed” (or happy) people are the ones who are “poor in spirit,” who “mourn,” who are “meek” and “merciful.” And on and on until you realize that Jesus’ words don’t describe many of today’s political leaders.

Adam’s decision to run as what he calls a moderate Democrat is an example of the time he takes to think things through. Which is to say that he first explored the idea of running as an independent. He obviously came to recognize two things about that. First, chances of success would be lower. And second, running as a Republican would join him to a political party that Trump and his MAGA followers have turned into something without a moral center or even a core moral vision.

Does Adam agree on every issue with every Democrat currently in Congress? I doubt it. But his ability to find common ground with others is what’s so badly needed now in American politics. He knows that “compromise” need not mean giving in to evil. Rather, it can be a way to move toward broader achievements and agreements in the future.

To avoid conflicts of interest, journalists like me always have to be careful about whom we call a “friend.” That’s certainly true for regular reporters but it’s also true even for opinion journalists, which is what I’ve been for most of my career.

Although Adam and I are friendly to each other and respect each other (he wrote the forward for my last book), I don’t think of him as one of my close friends. He is, however, a pragmatic fellow Christian who does what such people do — he struggles to understand what God wants of him and then tries to live that out faithfully. I have deep respect for that.

Could I be misjudging Adam? Maybe. It wouldn’t be the first time. In fact, as I’ve reminded him, the first time we met was in the 1980s when, as an associate pastor, he officiated at the funeral for the mother of a Kansas City Star colleague of mine. It was a seriously boring service that left me thinking this: “This guy is never going to make it in ministry.” As I’ve told Adam, either he was having a bad day then or I was — and probably both of us were. For surely I was dead wrong in that judgment, and for proof of that, just look at where Adam is today.

I can’t vote in Kansas, so I will have no official say in Adam’s political future. But I envy Kansas voters who now have a chance to elect someone with a reliable ethical compass — someone who, win or lose, will continue trying to do the right thing for others. In that, he’s already a winner.

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More efforts on behalf of Christian Nationalism

From the beginning of our nation 250 years ago, some people have tried to turn the United States into a Christian nation, meaning getting citizens to believe that somehow God has uniquely blessed the U.S. and that only Christians should lead the country, using Christian standards and creeds. In other words, they’d tear down the barrier between church and state.

An upcoming staging of “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise and Thanksgiving” (a gathering on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., this Sunday) shows that such Christian nationalizing efforts are quite active. But the result desired by the promoters of the event would not be the nation that our founding documents declared the U.S. to be.

Jerome Copulsky, a research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs at Georgetown University, has written this helpful article to show more clearly what’s been happening under the second Trump administration to boost Christian Nationalism efforts.

After offering some helpful national history, he concludes this way:

“The second Trump administration has taken a visibly aggressive posture promoting conservative Christianity. Over the past months, government departments and agencies have hosted prayer meetings for employees and posted Bible verses and theological messages to the public on social media, and the chairman of the Religious Liberty Commission announced that ‘there is no such thing as ‘separation of church and state’ in the Constitution.’

“While it is fitting and proper for individuals and congregations to rededicate themselves to their God in prayer, it is not the role of government to unite America in faith. Instead, in this 250th year of our independence, we should rededicate our nation to the tradition of religious liberty as articulated by James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.”

Indeed. But to work against Christian Nationalism, you have to recognize it when you see it. So please pick out two or three books from this list and read up on this dangerous ideology. And if you’re in the Kansas City area, also read my recent Flatland column about how area seminaries are responding to the nationalism threat.

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