The election of 2026 may finally mark the moment when the Democratic Party rediscovers religion. Several candidates across the nation are openly talking about faith.
In Texas, James Talarico, a seminary student and the Democratic nominee for Senate, warns that his party for too long has confused the separation of church and state with the separation of personal faith from public life. He talks about how his Christian faith informs his positions on everything from immigration to welfare and money in politics.
Similarly, Adam Hamilton is mounting a surprising challenge to Roger Marshall in Kansas, where a Democrat has not won a Senate seat since 1932. Hamilton is pastor of the largest United Methodist church in the country.
In Iowa, Sarah Trone Garriott, a member of the state senate and an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is running to unseat Zach Nunn, a pro-Trump Republican, in Iowa’s third congressional district.
Not all the Democratic nominees talking about faith are Christians. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate, is unabashed about his Muslim faith, and he has brilliantly parried Republican attempts to portray him as a terrorist, turning those attacks into a full-throated defense of the Constitution.
Republicans have claimed a monopoly on religion far too long.
Why are we seeing a surge of piety on the campaign trail? History provides a clue.
When John F. Kennedy was running for president in 1960, only the second Roman Catholic to win a major party nomination (Alfred E. Smith lost decisively to Herbert Hoover in 1928), many Protestants worried that a Catholic president would harbor loyalties to the Vatican.
Kennedy responded with a speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on Sept. 12, 1960, where he stipulated that he was not the Catholic candidate for president; he was the Democratic nominee for president who happened to be Catholic. Voters, Kennedy said, should bracket a candidate’s faith when they entered the voting booth.
When Kennedy narrowly prevailed in the 1960 election, we entered what I call the Kennedy paradigm of voter indifference to a candidate’s faith. Most people, for example, don’t know Lyndon Johnson’s religious affiliation (Disciples of Christ), and when George Romney, Mitt Romney’s father, was running for the Republican nomination in 1968, he wanted to talk about his Mormon faith, but few Americans were interested.
That indifference changed dramatically with the Watergate scandal and the corruptions surrounding the Nixon presidency. Suddenly, voters wanted to know that candidates possessed a moral compass. It’s no accident that we elected Jimmy Carter in 1976, a Southern Baptist Sunday-school teacher who promised that he would “never knowingly lie” to the American people.
For many Americans, religion or religious affiliation is a proxy for morality, a kind of shorthand. That’s unfortunate because it doesn’t account for the fact that many people are decent and morally upright despite claiming no religious identity.
Today, the nation is enduring the most corrupt presidency in its history, an administration daily reaching new lows that make Ulysses S. Grant, Warren Harding and Richard Nixon look saintly. Is it any wonder that voters are seeking candidates with a moral compass?
Whereas Republicans once claimed the franchise on faith, some Democrats now acknowledge that they should be talking about faith and values.
We’ll know soon whether or not those appeals will be successful, and it must be acknowledged that the candidates speaking openly about religion face uniquely flawed opponents. El-Sayed’s opponent collected millions from special interests and moved from Michigan to Florida following his most recent defeat two years ago.
Roger Marshall used strong-arm tactics to collect medical debts from his OB-GYN patients in Kansas, and Nunn swatted a phone away from someone asking about his complicity in the closing of rural hospitals in Iowa.
The corruptions surrounding Ken Paxton, Talarico’s Republican opponent in Texas, rival those of Donald Trump himself.
Whatever the outcomes in the midterm elections of 2026, Democrats should learn that speaking openly about faith is no handicap. In a political era mired in venality, it may in fact hold the key to success.
Randall Balmer, an Episcopal priest and professor at Dartmouth College, is the author of “America’s Best Idea: The Separation of Church and State.”