The Resurrection of Protestant Liberalism?

The 2026 midterm elections were a blue tsunami. The Democrats obliterated the Republicans in what could be referred to in Pro Wrestling parlance as a “squash match.” Last Wednesday Rick DeSantis, the lame-duck Governor of Florida decried the results to be, “as close to an extinction-level event for Republicans in many parts of the country as we have seen probably in the last 100 years.”[1] While the donkey’s victory over the elephant wasn’t surprising - sitting Presidents usually get a spanking in the midterms - this was a shellacking. What I found most interesting was the number of Protestant Liberal candidates that claimed victory last Tuesday.

On November 4, Religion News Service (RSN) ran the headline, “On Election night, the religious left is back.”[2]The story lauds the victories of James Talarico and Rev. Adam Hamilton among others.[3] Talarico is a member of St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Austin, TX. He is also a seminary student at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Both the church and the seminary are affiliated with the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America (PCUSA) - the mainline Protestant Presbyterian denomination in America.[4]

Talarico, whose faith was intricate to his triumphant campaign, highlighted his faith as well in his victory speech, standing before a placard that read, “Love Thy Neighbor,” he said,

“Two thousand years ago, when the people at the top hurt his neighbors, that barefoot rabbi didn’t stay in his room and pray,” Jesus “walked into the seat of power and flipped over the tables of injustice.”[5]

Adam Hamilton, the moderate pastor of the largest United Methodist Church in America,[6] was the first Democrat elected to the Senate in Kansas since 1932. Like Talarico, Hamilton’s campaign was characterized by his brand of Christianity. At a campaign stop last Monday, Rev. Hamilton quoted Scripture no less than three times, including Micah 6.8 - “And what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?”

These mainline victories led to RSN’s November 4th headline that the religious left is back. What makes this so interesting is not that there might be mainline Protestants in Washington. The American halls of power have a long and documented history of the mainline in government - especially the Episcopalian church. What is interesting is that progressively (maybe pun intended?) the political left in America has become increasingly secular. In modern American politics, religious fervor has been dominated by the Right.

This election cycle painted a different picture - Democrats quoting Scripture and dominating Republicans. On his Thursday “Briefing,” Dr. Mohler suggested that the issue of likeability won the day for the Dems.[7] One needs to look no further than Ken Paxton, Talarico’s opponent in the Texas Senate race, to see this parable in living color.

But I wonder if there may be more to the story. Protestant Liberalism was born in the 18th and 19th centuries in Germany. Their goal was to make Christianity more palatable to the modern world. The result is that the gospel was reduced to “Love Thy Neighbor.” Supernaturalism like the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection of Christ were abandoned for social justice.

The supernaturalism inherent to Christianity is still offensive to modern naturalism, but these candidates are not riding the wave of anti-supernaturalism. It is their cultural accommodation on ethics that makes their brand of religion appealing to the modern American voter. Modern progressive Christianity isn’t as concerned with the issues of the Modernist-Fundamentalist controversy, as they are with LGBTQ+ issues, abortion issues, transgender issues and the like. Protestant Liberalism doesn’t look like it used to, and as confessional Reformed Protestants, we must be able to tell the difference.

There was a resurrection of power and popularity for Protestant Liberals in the 2026 midterm elections. The irony is many of them deny the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Will this equate to attendance in their churches and seminaries? Time will tell.

Regardless of how you voted, we need to know the difference - as J. Gresham Machen noted a century ago - between Christianity and Liberalism. Richard Niebuhr famously summarized Protestant Liberalism thus:

“A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.”[8]

The gospel is not “Love Thy Neighbor.” That is an implication of the gospel, but it is not the gospel. The gospel is the announcement of the reversal of the curse. The gospel is that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures; that he was buried, and that he was raised, in accordance with the Scriptures (1st Cor 15.3-4).

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/05/us/florida-republicans-midterms.html

[2]https://religionnews.com/2026/11/04/on-election-night-the-religious-left-is-back/?mc_cid=5487767bb5&mc_eid=a30bffc451

[3]Lindsay James, running for Iowa’s state House and Sarah Trone Garriott, running for Congress in Iowa’s third district, are both progressive female pastors, and were both victorious. Rev. Frederick Haynes III, pastor of a Black mega church in Dallas, Friendship-West Baptist Church, was elected to Congress representing Texas’ 30th district. Rev. Haynes joins Emanuel Cleaver and Dr. Raphael Warnock, all three Democrats, as Black pastors in Congress.

[4]https://pcusa.org/

[5][5]https://religionnews.com/2026/11/04/on-election-night-the-religious-left-is-back/?mc_cid=5487767bb5&mc_eid=a30bffc451

[6]Rev. Hamilton is Pastor of Resurrection: A Untied Methodist Church. The church boasts attendance of 20,000 over multiple campuses. Highland Park United Methodist Church (which, incidentally, just voted to leave the UMC) previously boasted the single site attendance record. Highland Park, sitting on the campus of Southern Methodist University (SMU), is the home church of President George W. Bush.

[7]https://albertmohler.com/2026/11/05/briefing-11-5-26/

[8]Neibuhr, Richard, The Kingdom of God in America (Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT., 1938), 193.