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Adam Hamilton stood beside his campaign bus on Monday, open Kansas farmland behind him, and recorded a message for JD Vance, hours before the vice president took the stage in Topeka to rescue Sen. Roger Marshall. Hamilton, the founding pastor of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection, had every reason to answer Vance in anger. Instead, he invited him to church.
“Before he attacks me or the church again, I’d like to invite the vice president to actually attend a service,” Hamilton said. “If he accepts the invitation, he’ll meet many thoughtful Christians, including some who actually voted for him and President Trump just two years ago.”
That invitation explains why, one week before Election Day, a Methodist preacher has a real chance to become the first Democrat Kansas has sent to the Senate since George McGill won reelection in 1932.
A pastor on the ballot
Hamilton, 62, started Resurrection in 1990 with a few people meeting in the chapel of a funeral home. It grew into a congregation of roughly 25,000 members across the Kansas City area, the largest United Methodist church in the United States. He married his high school sweetheart at 18, and he still leads the church he founded.
He won an 11-candidate Democratic primary in August after raising nearly $3.7 million in his first 62 days, a state record for a Senate launch. The Cook Political Report moved the race to Toss Up on Oct. 6, and the RealClearPolitics average had the two men tied at 45.8 percent as of Oct. 10.
Hamilton talks about his faith the way he lives it. “I slip to my knees, I offer my life to Christ, I pray for the Holy Spirit to lead me, I read scripture,” he told ABC’s Jonathan Karl this month.
He carries a small Bible in his back pocket, and he has pulled it out for reporters on the trail.
The doctor who sued his patients
Marshall has given Kansans plenty of reasons to look for someone new. Before Congress, he spent decades as an obstetrician in rural Great Bend, and a New York Times investigation published Sept. 8 found that he sued more than 700 of his patients over unpaid bills. Some owed as little as $101.
His lawyers routinely charged 18 percent interest and garnished paychecks, and 81 patients were arrested after missing court dates. Many of the people he took to court were new mothers in rural Barton County, where his practice was often the only option.
Marshall has offered Kansans no apology. In a statement, he complained that the Times had decided “a rural doctor keeping the hospital’s lights on is some kind of scandal,” and the senator called the story a “hit job” orchestrated by Chuck Schumer.
At the Kansas State Fair debate, he defended the lawsuits as a “common business practice.”
Hamilton’s reply fit in a single post: “Medical bills should not ruin lives. We must do better than this.”
Vance goes after a pastor’s faith
Unable to defend his own record, Marshall has gone after Hamilton’s faith. He calls Hamilton a megachurch pastor who is “too woke for Kansas.”
At a Sept. 14 rally in Olathe, Vance played clipped soundbites from old sermons, declared that Hamilton’s preaching “is not Christianity,” and called it “left-wing radicalism dressed in the skin suit of our religion.”
On Oct. 19, President Trump claimed in Park City that Hamilton “openly mocks Jesus,” without citing a single sermon.
Bishop David Wilson, who leads the Great Plains Conference of the United Methodist Church, called the attacks “inaccurate and unwarranted.”
He noted that the people of Resurrection were the ones being criticized. Vance, who wrote 304 pages about finding God, returned to Topeka on Monday and went after Hamilton’s faith once again.
“He doesn’t know me, doesn’t know anything about my faith,” Hamilton told Karl. On Monday, he went a step past the complaint.
He described a congregation that is “roughly equal parts Republicans, Democrats, and independents,” and he asked the vice president to come see it for himself.
Pope Leo XIV told Catholics last month that believers “cannot remain as unengaged spectators” in public life. Hamilton has shown what that engagement can look like when it is rooted in a congregation where Republicans and Democrats share the same pews every Sunday.
“We have to do better than picking on small groups”
The same instinct shaped Hamilton’s answer when KMBC’s Cody Holyoke asked about transgender Kansans, whose driver’s licenses and bathroom access Kansas Republicans have moved to restrict. Hamilton began by admitting what he did not know, and then he reached for the Gospel.
“I don’t think we should take a small group of people and bully them, pick on them, and hurt them,” he said. “Jesus told me I was to love my neighbor as I love myself.” Republicans, he added, have “turned a group of people into a campaign issue because it polls well.”
Hamilton is no ideologue here. At last Wednesday’s debate, he said he does not want “biological men or boys” competing against his 12-year-old granddaughter in sports.
That position puts him alongside plenty of his Republican neighbors, and he still refuses to make vulnerable people a punch line for votes.
A path back into MAGA country
Hamilton belongs to an unusually large class of clergy running as Democrats this fall, and Religion News Service is tracking 11 races featuring faith leaders.
In Texas, James Talarico has cited Pope Leo XIV and two of his predecessors in pledging to work with Catholics to reduce abortion.
These faith-forward Democrats are showing their party how to walk back into places it abandoned.
Hamilton packed a theater in Hutchinson, in a county Trump carried by about 34 points, and one Republican who voted for Trump three times told ABC News he is knocking doors for him.
Two former Republican governors, Bill Graves and Mike Hayden, have endorsed him.
As I reported in September, MAGA-country Catholics are already standing up to Trump, and Hamilton is giving them a candidate to stand with.
Kansas has not sent a Democrat to the Senate in 94 years. On Nov. 3, it can send a pastor who met a vice president’s contempt with an invitation to worship.
Against an incumbent who hauled new mothers into court over hospital bills, Hamilton has run on the plain words of the great commandment. Hamilton would be an extraordinary senator.
His victory would also tell every Christian in America that the faith still belongs to those who serve their neighbors.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with the people of faith in Kansas who refuse to let a vice president decide whose Christianity counts. We stand with the new mothers Roger Marshall dragged into court over medical bills, and with every neighbor who has been turned into a campaign issue because it polls well.
In an election season soaked in contempt, we remain rooted in a Gospel that asks more of us than outrage. Jesus sat at table with the people the powerful mocked, and he told us that whatever we do for the least of his brothers and sisters, we do for him.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that heals. They want leaders who keep the church doors open, and right now, with Kansas a week from a choice that could change the Senate, that hunger has never felt more urgent.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼 that good and decent people become our leaders.
I have no respect for Vance. He keeps blundering into these controversial situations and taking the worst possible side. Does anyone actually like him?