What the Media Is Getting Wrong About the Midterm Elections and “The Christian Left.”

by | Nov 11, 2026 | Opinions & Commentary

James Talarico at a campaign event in Texas. Image: Candidate’s website

What the Media Is Getting Wrong About the Midterm Elections and “The Christian Left.”

by | Nov 11, 2026 | Opinions & Commentary

James Talarico at a campaign event in Texas. Image: Candidate’s website

Yes, at long last, the Democrats have seemingly realized that they don’t have to cede faith to the Religious Right.

Republished with permission from John Pavlovitz

They did it again.

They simply cannot help themselves, and despite their incessant name-dropping, it doesn’t seem like God can, either.

These people are seemingly beyond saving.

As a fierce Blue tsunami renovated the entire political landscape of the United States on Election Day, bringing with it a searing repudiation of the Trump regime’s abject barbarism, white Evangelical Christians were the most notable holdouts—again.

For the sixth time in ten years, in numbers far exceeding every other substantial demographic across this nation, they have elected to co-sign cruelty, amen exclusion, and knowingly harm their neighbors.

In nearly unchanged percentages, White Conservatives who claim faith have reiterated their allegiance to a Godless career mobster and rejected the open-hearted namesake of their religious tradition. It’s been a wholesale betrayal of biblical proportions.

Despite every human rights atrocity committed by the Republican Party since their bloated orange messiah of misery began his now ten-year campaign of boundless brutality, insatiable greed, and peerless perversion, they have remained prostrate before him.

Proven sexual violence, documented acts of treason, a litany of war crimes, and an unrelenting, decade-long torrent of lies, vulgarity, and dehumanizing rhetoric were not enough to extricate them from complete cultic adoration.

And speaking as a former pastor and for the tens of millions of people across this nation who genuinely desire to embody Jesus’, it’s been both heartbreaking and blood-boiling.

The good news is that the “nones,” religiously unaffiliated voters, have eclipsed white Evangelicals at the polls, and these are the people who helped elect Christians like James Talarico and Adam Hamilton, and powered the blue wave that deeply faithful and fiercely anti-religious people are celebrating together.

And this is where we’ve gotten things a bit twisted.

One of the leading storylines in the wake of the election has been the perceived emergence of a new kind of Christianity taking hold in America. Historic wins by openly Christian Democratic candidates in Texas and Kansas have been widely hailed by pundits, the media, and progressive Christians throughout the country as the sudden rise of “the Christian Left,” but that isn’t quite accurate.

Yes, at long last, the Democrats have seemingly realized that they don’t have to cede faith to the Religious Right; that a sizable portion of their base are deeply spiritual people who have felt orphaned by the political poisoning of the Conservative White Church. The political Left has seemingly widened their tent in a way they may have been reticent to in the past.

But the simple truth of the matter is that what we’re seeing right now isn’t the arrival of progressive Christianity; it’s the arrival of… well, Christianity.

I mean, the Jesus kind, the love your neighbor kind, the kind the MAGA movement has jettisoned, the kind that the Evangelical Right has all but eradicated from its buildings, its messaging, and its collective aspirations.

This may seem like an exercise in semantics, but it is a critical distinction and should serve as a pivot point for us as we think and talk about faith in America moving forward.

For decades, White Evangelicals here have perpetrated the greatest religious fraud in modern history; rebranding something that began a couple thousand years ago as a compassionate community of disparate, mutually invested human beings—into a gated, guarded neighborhood of whiteness, straightness, and America First selfishness

For too long we have allowed the Right to self-identify as followers of Jesus, something that has been both heresy and lunacy. This election reminds us again that when it comes to regaining the theological plot they’ve lost, these people cannot be saved.

They are not moved by the suffering around them or infuriated by the barbarism of their political allies in the way the rest of us are, religious and nonreligious alike.

They have spent thousands of Sundays in churches drinking from a corrosive cocktail of nationalism, narcissism, and fear that has left them unable to embrace the open-hearted, loving religion people like Talarico and Hamilton successfully campaigned on.

It’s time we named what’s really happening here in America.

It isn’t that the Democratic Party has finally created some novel, politically viable, left-leaning version of Christianity to compete with the Right; it’s that the empathy of Jesus is finally being platformed by Democratic candidates.

As a result, White Evangelicals are being exposed as having hijacked and sinfully misappropriated an entire faith tradition for as long as any of us have been alive.

The Christian Left is simply Christianity as Christ modeled it: compassion-centered, justice-focused, table-expanding, peace-seeking. That this all feels new here says everything about the heartless, loveless garbage the Religious Right has spent decades selling us.

It’s time we boycotted it for good.

John Pavlovitz

John Pavlovitz

John Pavlovitz is a writer, pastor, and activist from Wake Forest, North Carolina. A 25-year veteran in the trenches of local church ministry, John is committed to equality, diversity, and justice—both inside and outside faith communities. When not actively working for a more compassionate planet, John enjoys spending time with his family, exercising, cooking, and having time in nature. He is the author of A Bigger Table, Hope and Other Superpowers, Low, and Stuff That Needs to Be Said.

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