By Helen Coster and Joseph Ax
Feb 17 (Reuters) - Sarah Trone Garriott, an Iowa state senator and Lutheran minister, has never shied away from putting faith at the center of her political campaigns.
This year, she is among an unusually high number of Democrats running for Congress who are infusing their campaigns with explicit appeals to religious doctrine, an effort national Democrats hope will peel away some Christian voters from the Republican column in November's midterm elections.
Christian voters have long gravitated to the Republican Party, but some experts say President Donald Trump’s second-term policies, particularly his crackdown on illegal immigration, could provide an opening for Democrats.
In some cases, the Democrats are themselves members of the clergy or studying to join it, including Trone Garriott; Alaska congressional candidate Matt Schultz, a Presbyterian pastor; and Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian.
More than a dozen faith leaders are running as Democrats for federal and state offices this year, far more than in previous cycles, according to Doug Pagitt, a pastor who runs Vote Common Good, a progressive Christian political group.
"It is really important that people of faith speak to issues in the public realm, because faith is about how we live together,” Trone Garriott told Reuters. “So is politics.”
SECULAR BASE
Unlike many previous faith leaders who have run as Democrats, including Georgia U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock, this year’s candidates don’t come from the Black church community that has historically been part of the Democratic base.
They are trying to buck a decades-long trend: the last white clergy member to serve as a Democrat in Congress appears to have been U.S. Representative Bob Edgar, who left office four decades ago.
While prominent Democrats in the past have spoken about their faith - former President Joe Biden, a Catholic, often discussed the role of faith in his life - what sets these candidates apart is how explicitly they are connecting their religious beliefs to policy issues, experts said.
“When you say that a candidate is religious, most voters then assume that they're Republican, that they're pretty conservative,” said David Campbell, a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame. “What you're seeing now is a small group of Democrats who are using religious language to speak about issues on the left.”
The approach comes with risks. In 2024, Trump won 83% of white evangelical voters, the highest on record, while earning support from the majority of both mainline Protestants and Catholics, according to an analysis by Ryan Burge, a professor at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.
Meanwhile, the Democratic base has become increasingly secular. Forty percent of people who prefer the Democratic Party identified as religiously unaffiliated in a 2023-24 large-scale survey by Pew Research Center, more than double the share from 2007.
“If you're a Democratic candidate, you actually have a pretty tricky road to navigate, because on the one hand, you do have a very secular base, people who are not very comfortable with religion,” Campbell said. “But on the other hand, there are a lot of moderate voters out there who are up for grabs who are very comfortable with religious language.”
Schultz, who is challenging incumbent Republican U.S. Representative Nick Begich in Alaska, said he is not concerned about turning off non-religious voters.
“People have a more sophisticated view of religion than we often give them credit for,” said Schultz.
Mike Marinella, a spokesman for the Republican Party's national House campaign arm, dismissed the notion that candidates like Trone Garriott and Schultz can threaten Republicans' popularity with Christian voters.
"Republicans have dominated with faith-based voters cycle after cycle because we're delivering on common sense while Democrats are ramming through their radical liberal wish lists that are completely out of step with their own faith," he said.
FAITH AND POLICY
Iowa gubernatorial candidate Rob Sand, the state auditor and a practicing Lutheran, said a big reason he became a Democrat was that “the Christian faith is all about looking out for the little guy.”
“I can't tell you that I think it's a winning strategy,” Sand said. “I can tell you that I can't do this without talking about it.”
Sand is among the candidates - including Trone Garriott, Schultz and Talarico - who are tying their faith to their support for one of the trickiest religious issues for Democrats to navigate: abortion rights.
In some ways, the issue has been transformed from a Republican attack line to a Democratic advantage since the Supreme Court overturned a nationwide right in 2022.
Schultz said Christian scripture does not make it clear precisely when human life begins and argued that Republicans oppose steps that would actually reduce abortions: better healthcare, access to contraceptives and expanded child care.
“I am pro-choice, not despite my Christian faith, but because of it,” he said.
'LOSS AND GRIEF'
Days after Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, was killed by federal agents in Minneapolis, Schultz took the pulpit at his church in Anchorage to call it “murder.”
“These are the fruits of this administration: murder and tears and loss and grief,” he told Reuters.
Trump’s immigration tactics have drawn increasing scrutiny from some faith groups, particularly after federal agents in Minneapolis fatally shot Pretti and another U.S. citizen, Renee Good.
“(Jesus) welcomed the stranger, he fed the hungry, he stood up for the vulnerable, he cared for the poor, and that is our calling as Christians,” Trone Garriott said. “And what people are seeing right now in so many ways ... is communities being terrorized, people being treated with great cruelty.”
Trump administration officials last week told a U.S. Senate committee that the shootings of Pretti and Good would need to be investigated. That represented a departure from the immediate aftermath, when officials including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem labeled both "domestic terrorists," despite video evidence contradicting that claim.
Many of the candidates have also focused on economic justice while emphasizing the Bible’s call to care for the poor and the afflicted. In that sense, the campaigns are aligned with Democrats’ efforts to put affordability at the center of the midterm battle.
“I think a person of faith sees these moral problems of the day and already has the lens and the framework with which to deal with it,” said U.S. Representative Morgan McGarvey, a Kentucky Democrat who is helping to oversee candidate recruitment for the Democrats’ House campaign committee.
“Do we have food? Do we have healthcare? Do we have housing? Do we have an ICE agency which is even capable of respecting people's rights?”
(Reporting by Helen Coster and Joseph Ax in New York. Editing by Paul Thomasch and Alistair Bell)
