After seminary, Hamilton began building a church, holding the first services in the chapel of a funeral home in 1990. To increase attendance, he sent postcards to every address in the surrounding city of Leawood, Kansas. When someone new came, he would stop by their house the next day to give them a coffee mug, a process that later became known internally as “mugging.” By the early two-thousands, the congregation was well into the thousands. Hamilton usually preaches forty Sundays a year, with his sermons beamed into other locations on huge video screens.
The United Methodist Church has historically held together a wide theological spectrum. “Methodists are chameleons,” Mark Holland, a pastor who served as mayor of Kansas City, Kansas, told me. “In the Northeast, we look a lot like the Unitarians. In the South, we look a lot like the Southern Baptists.” Several people told me that Hamilton is from the more evangelical side of that spectrum. It’s a fraught description: the term has become associated, at least in some people’s minds, more with a political identity than with a religious one. On our way out of Oak Ridge, Pastor Turner said that his parishioners should want to put Christians in office, and “not just evangelicals!”
As I hurried after Hamilton, he agreed to the term, but with caveats. “ ‘Evangel’ means good news,” he told me. “I’ve always considered myself what I would call a progressive evangelical, and that is somebody who cares deeply about people coming to faith in Christ, experiencing what Jesus talked about—the new birth—being filled with the Holy Spirit, and then being committed to love their neighbors as they love themselves.”
Democrats are often willing to go along with sentiments like “love your neighbor.” Even progressive crusaders like Elizabeth Warren pepper their speeches with references to “the least of these,” from Matthew 25, or the parable of Jesus flipping the money changers’ tables, from Matthew 21. But anything more Jesus-y than that is uncommon. “I’ve been here for a while, in Congress,” Emanuel Cleaver, a U.S. congressman from Kansas City, Missouri, who is also a Methodist pastor, told me. “One of the things that I learned early on was that Democrats have a nervousness around their love for Jesus.” (Hamilton’s campaign declined to make time for the candidate to speak about his faith ahead of the election.)
There’s been an interesting religious dynamic this midterm cycle. Michael Wear, a former Obama Administration official who runs the Center for Christianity and Public Life, told me, “Hamilton, Talarico, and so many of these candidates who are leading with their faith have had to spend a lot of time on the campaign trail, and a lot of money, making clear that they are not one of those Christians.”
After Hamilton got done church-hopping, volunteers held a get-out-the-vote event at a brewery not far from COR. At the bar, a group of forty-something regulars were posted up watching the Chiefs game; they hadn’t come for the Hamilton event, but it was a conversation piece. “I one hundred and ten per cent recognize the hesitation of electing a pastor, because of the Christian nationalism being put forward by the right wing,” a woman named Julia said. She had cast an early ballot for Hamilton, but the pastor part of him gave her pause. “I am concerned about the infiltration of religion into politics in any capacity,” she said.
On the campaign trail, Hamilton loves to talk up the political diversity of his church: according to COR’s internal numbers, it’s about forty per cent Republicans and forty per cent Democrats, with most of the rest being Independents. He has leaned into the story of his own independence, noting that he only recently switched his voter registration to Democrat. This is a little misleading. Hamilton preached at a prayer service following Obama’s second Inauguration; he also served on the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships.
