He was the oldest of five children and the son of a manufacturing worker, growing up on a farm in Indiana. He remembers wearing a T-shirt protesting Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry while attending Liberty, a Christian university founded by conservative pastor and televangelist Jerry Falwell.
Twenty years later, Justin Douglas is a Democrat seeking a seat in the US Congress.
He is one of about thirty Christian white clergy members, including pastors, seminary students, and other religious leaders, who are rumored to be prospective Democratic candidates in the upcoming midterm elections. Twelve of them are already running. Many claim that their faith is personally calling them into politics, even as they emphasize the separation of church and state.
A traditional racial division is broken by this movement. Due to the power of the religious right and the party's dominance among evangelical voters, white pastors who run for government are more likely to be Republicans than Black pastors.
Douglas, a 41-year-old Harrisburg, Pennsylvania resident, is part of a new generation of Christian leftists who want to alter that perception by making sure the Democratic brand can appeal to white working-class churchgoers as well as college-educated urbanites.
“We’ve seen Democrats time and time again sell out working class people and we’ve seen Democrats time and time again look like liberal elitists who are looking down on people who think going to church on Sunday is a core part of their life,”
said Douglas, who has been in ministry for more than 20 years.
“Some people might feel judged for that.
But I also think the stereotypes of Republicans being pro-faith are bullshit too. We’re seeing a current administration bastardise faith almost every day. They used the Lord’s Prayer in a propaganda video for what they’re now calling the Department of War. That should have had every single evangelical’s bells and whistles and alarms going off in their head: this is sacrilegious.”
For many years, especially in the South, a large number of white Christians were nonpartisan and frequently cast Democratic ballots. However, the Democratic Party's character was beginning to change toward secular liberalism, feminism, and civil rights by the late 1960s and early 1970s. A growing number of white conservative Christians felt cut off from the party they had long belonged to.
The Internal Revenue Service started denying tax-exempt status to private schools that discriminated based on race in the middle of the 1970s, which contributed to the racial divide. Seeing this as federal overreach, conservative Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell seized on abortion as a topic that could be addressed in terms of religion.
Along with feminism, sex education, and homosexual rights, Falwell's group The Moral Majority used abortion as a more general emblem of moral decay.
While Black churchgoers continued to support Democrats, they defected to Republican Ronald Reagan, and by the end of the 1980s, white evangelicals had emerged as one of the most reliably Republican voting blocs. Under Donald Trump, that has continued for the past ten years. While supporters view it as a blunt tool to protect a church under attack by a godless liberal culture, others view it as vulgar and unchristian.
Hillary Clinton, a fellow Democrat, received just 16% of the white evangelical vote in 2016, compared to 60% for Carter in 1976. Doug Pagitt, a pastor and executive director of the progressive Christian organization Vote Common Good, saw the unsettling shift.
In Iowa, state legislator Sarah Trone Garriott, an Evangelical Lutheran minister, is requesting blessing from her party to run against Democratic peremptory Zach Nunn in what's formerly anticipated to be one of the most important congressional contests in the country.
Robb Ryerse, a former Republican and Christian pastor in Arkansas, is running against Congressman Steve Womack with the banner" Faith, Family & Freedom," which is more constantly used in Democratic crusade accoutrements .
According to Ryerse, the development of Christian nationalism and the fact that Trump entered 85% of the white evangelical vote in the former time's presidential election, according to a Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) check, are contributing factors to the decision of white church to run for government.
Ryerse said:
“We realise hey, our churches and the people in our churches have been duped by this guy and so rather than hope someone else will clean up the problem, what we’ve seen is a lot of pastors respond with, you know what, I’m going to jump in and I’m going to be a part of the solution.
On a more positive note, there’s also that notion we need to do something for the common good. There’s so much alignment between what I believe personally is good for my neighbour, what it means to love my neighbour, and how that aligns with what public policy ought to be.”
How are Democratic voters responding to clergy candidacies?
Popular choosers are responding appreciatively to church educations, especially those white church campaigners who emphasize progressive Christian values that are at odds with Trump’s conduct and rhetoric. Numerous Popular choosers see these campaigners as offering a faith- grounded volition to the Christian chauvinist and MAGA- aligned leadership current in the Republican Party.
A growing number of Popular choosers with religious individualities are open to advancing for campaigners who openly integrate faith and progressive politics, viewing this as a way to reclaim religious converse from the far right.
At the same time, successful outreach examples like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s crusade show that Egalitarians who directly engage faith choosers and communicate dispatches of addition and common good can make stronger support.