Eric Folkerth

This should be obvious, but I’ll start with this today, anyway.

JD Vance does not “own” Christianity.
No denomination or church “owns” Christianity.
No political party “owns” Christianity.

Organized Christian faith is —in both America and worldwide— is in fact, a far more diverse and complicated set of structures and system than most American’s generally realize.

I’m feeling the urge to state these self obvious words because of comments by our sitting Vice President, JD Vance, during a recent Kansas campaign stop. During that stop, VP Vance decided to take a swipe at my United Methodist clergy colleague, Rev. Adam Hamilton.

But, not just at Adam, personally.
JD Vance took direct aim at Adam, and also his Church’s “Christianness.”

Yes, Vance’s speech bashed Hamilton’s moderate political views.
And yes…let’s be clear… That is fair game in politics. I’m not decrying reasonable political debate.

I’m suggesting that that’s not all JD Vance did.
This is the sentence I want to draw your attention to. Of Adam Hamlton, Vice President Vance said:

“That is not Christianity…That is left-wing radicalism dressed in the skinsuit of our religion.”

That’s a lot in once sentence, of course.
But the words I want to call your attention to are the final two:

“OUR RELIGION.”

So, I’ll say the self obvious part, again:

JD Vance does not “own” Christianity.
No political party “owns” Christianity.
No denomination or church “owns” Christianity.

I should quickly disclose that I’ve known Adam Hamilton for many decades now. While we were not close, I recall him sitting across the room from me during classes as Perkins School of Theology. He was, then and now, kind of a buttoned-down, quiet guy…personally. Even today, I can still see that younger man in his face.

But Adam Hamilton is, by all reasonable accounts, a moderate Mainline Protestant Christian.

That last sentence is demonstrably true to anyone who actually seriously studies American religious differences. Personally? I’d place him theologically near to my local Dallas area colleagues such as Rev. Stan Copeland and Rev. Clayton Oliphint.

If you look at all their ministries, they have…on the main…been solidly moderate….like Hamilton.

Look, Adam can defend himself….and he has.
Adam’s United Methodist Bishop also has defended him.

I’m not really interested in defending him.
I’m calling your attention back to what VANCE thinks Vance is doing.
I’m calling your focus back to those two words, and how revealing they are.

“OUR RELIGION.”

Do I ever use those words?
Do I ever talk about “our faith” or “our religion?”

Of course I do! But! When and if I do, I do it inside my church…or inside settings when I am addressing only other Christians. Or I do it in writings that are attempting to describe my faith to others.
I use those words all the time.

The paradox of Christian faith is that all of us Christians are trying to speak to universal principles above, beyond, outside, and within…our human understanding. If “our faith” in “our God” are words that mean anything, then they must mean we are always pointing to a reality of God that is well beyond our feeble human comprehension.

But that wasn’t the setting of Vance’s speech. And therefore, that’s a very different use of “our religion.”

Vance was giving public remarks in a very public political campaign. Vance is drawing an US/THEM line between his audience and Adam Hamilton.

Vance is intimating that “we” (whoever we is) “own,” control, and speak for all Christians.

JD Vance is a Catholic convert.1 Self-evidently, this is a different strand of Christianity than Mainline Moderate Protestant United Methodist.
But, and I hope my view is clear…BOTH are Christian.
Not every branch of Christianity affirms that last sentence, of course.

But this is one of our United Methodist “superpowers.” In fact, it’s one of our key distinctions. We affirm the ministry and “Christianness” of all Christians, whether or not they affirm us.

And, at least for the past fifty years, it’s been clear there are many in the Christian world who do NOT affirm us.

Look..that’s fine.
We United Methodists are used to it.

We don’t even all agree with each other, but we work hard to “stay connected in love” even with those we disagree with.

It can be the hardest thing in the world to do this.

We UMC’s have just come through a very contentious schism in which something like one quarter of churches left. Simultaneously to that split, we’ve had decades of evangelicals calling some of us apostates for all sorts of reasons…

They called we UMs heretics when we began to ordain women, now more than seventy years ago…

They called us heretics when we reunited structurally with our African-American members in 1968…

They currently call us heretics for insisting that the LGBTQ community deserves God’s love and full inclusion in the church…

They call us heretics for supporting the migrant community during the current administration…

They call us heretics for insisting that, in America, Muslims have the same right to exercise their religion that we do…

Friends: I’ve now got a drawerful of complaints from folks over the years, some of them deeply vile and offense. MOST of them from people claiming to be “some kind of Christian.”

My thirty year friend, Rev. Jim Rigby, is pastor of a Presbyterian Church in Austin. It happens to be the home church of James Talarico. Recently, Jim has been posting this about harassment his church has been getting:

”…rightwing spies with hidden recorders pretending to be visitors. One of them posed as an atheist wondering if he would be welcome in our church. When a staff member attempted to reassure the man he would be welcome, he then edited the video to make us sound heretical.”

Neither side of the vast political binary in America is sinless when it comes to interrupting the worship of others. I have always spoken out against it.2

But one of the key points to make here is that a politician who purports to represent ALL Americans —religious and non-religious— has as duty to basic respect of all religious persons.

Christians Are Diverse In Their Social Views.

Again, this is demonstrably self obvious. But apparently we must say it, again and again.
Adam Hamilton and I are both UMC pastors (elders) I can assure you, we do not see eye-to-eye on every issue.
Joe Biden and JD Vance are both Roman Catholic. Ditto for them.

Time and again, though, the denominational diversity of our culture gets shaved down by the media, pundits, politicians and preachers of all stripes.

Early in this present campaign season, I wrote an essay that was mostly aimed at more liberal and Progressive readers. Many of them (something like 35%-ish of all Democratic voters in opinion polls) now choose “none of the above” rather than any religious identifier.

Those voters (that 35-ish percent) are, truth be told, also in different categories from each other! Demographer Ryan Burge has sought to define the distinctions in this group. If memory serves, I think he came up with four distinct groups within folks who have recently left Christian faith and now say “I am none of the above…”

Thirty percent of anything is nothing to sneeze at. It’s an interesting group to understand, and it gets a lot of press. That’s a large cohort.

But, there is an even larger group that gets short shrift from the media, politicians left and right, an the culture more broadly: The majority of voters on the broad left who still identify as “some kind of Christian.”

The soap box I’ve now been on for thirty plus years is this:
Positing that Democrats/Progressives are “non religious” and Republicans/Conservatives are “Christian” perpetuates a factually untrue, culturally lazy, and false binary…when the reality is far more complicated.

Like everything else, our culture has a hard time with nuance.
But that’s just what we need.

JD Vance appears to like that kind of false binary….that is, at least, my sense.
The binary seems to suit his political aims.

My intuition is that he finds the religious faith of somebody like Adam Hamilton, and Texas’ James Talarico, inconvenient in his efforts to align Christianity to his party, alone.

Reality is simply this:
Large numbers of Evangelical Christians do vote for Conservatives/Republicans.
A diverse cohort of religious and non-religious voters also for Progressives/Democrats.

Both of these are true statements. If you are interested, you can find my essay from this May here:

Again —I can’t emphasize this enough— that essay was primarily aimed at Progressive voters….and MOSTLY aimed at secular progress Progressive voters…urging them to understand that their voter coalition has, and likely will, include a diverse coalition of religious folks.

My general, hopefully gentle, point was that although the “none of the above” group continues the grow, the “some kind of Christian”group continues to be stable as well.

On the left side of “middle zero” there are four broad categories of voters, each adding some percentage of “Progressive voters who are Christian.”

Mainline Protestants
Black Protestants
White Catholics
Hispanic Catholics

Black Protestants are the largest, and get the most press, at about 18%. The rest hover around 10-12-ish percent. Throw in the almost 7-10% of voters of other religions and something like 60% of progressive voters still identify as religious in some way.

Conservative voters also break into smaller subgroups of Christians too, of course. Yes, there are Mainline Protestants and Catholics in their coalition.

But it cannot be denied that something like 70% of White Evangelical Christians voted for Trump, and Republican voters overall identify as Christian by almost 80%. Those two are numbers far higher than any other religious/non-religious identifier on either side of the great American binary.

A final point of my May-essay was to suggest that should Hamilton and Talarico prevail, that will likely broaden America’s religious understanding as we discuss religion in the public sphere. For too long, the media, pundits, politicians..everyone…has perpetuated the false binary I just described. So, if for no other reason than the sake of our understanding our own societal complexity: I’m hopeful for we can get to a more robust understanding of who we all are, religiously, as Americans.

Should the two I just mentioned prevail, this will create at least three very overtly “Christian” Senators, each symbolically representing different sections of the Christian world3:

James Talarico (Progressive Presbyterian)
Rev. Adam Hamilton (Mainline United Methodist)
Rev. Rafael Warnock (Black Protestant)

Contrary to the Republican Party —which has now for many years been dominated by Evangelical Christians only4— the religious identifications of Progressive or Democratic voters has always been more (and will continue to be) more complicated and diverse.

I suppose today, I’m trying to make something of the same point from that last essay, by reminding JD Vance, you, me…and everyone:

“Nobody Owns Christianity.”

No party owns it. No denomination. No politician completely speaks for all Christians. No preacher (yes, me included) does either.

Vance shows his own ignorance of these issues by trying to paint Hamilton as a flaming liberal.

Yall….let’s get really real here…
There are millions of United Methodists ready to guffaw at this ridiculous assertion!!

For those of us who actually are more religiously progressive than Adam, it is a truly laughable assertion that Hamilton represents “left-wing radicalism in the skin suit of religion.”

We United Methodists can tell you a thirty-year story of how Hamilton is, in fact, one of clearest modern exemplars of a MODERATE United Methodism that can be found. To his great credit, Adam has consistently bridging the gap between conservatives and liberals inside our denominational debates.

That’s truly, deeply, who Adam Hamilton is. And even though his positions are no doubt more moderate than mine (I can’t vote for him, anyway…) I have deep respect for that place he plays, and for the deeply important church he has build in his mission field.

Being a Christian today requires deep humility. It may be a humility that national politics can’t allow for. Christianity has been, is now, and shall be, a very complicated and diverse religion or faith.

No, Christians don’t always agree with each other.
Yes, Christians often call each other out, publicly and privately.

Politicians, though, have a different calling. They are called to represent all Americans. Whatever their faith, they're called to acknowledge and name the diversity of American society…both religious and non-religious.

I don’t much, but I know that Christianity is far broader than JD Vance’s version of it. And I know he doesn’t “own” it or speak for all of it.

And maybe that truth, and Adam Hamilton’s faithful, but different, expression of it…is what he finds so threatening?