Adam Hamilton — Kansas: A Century Pushed from Inside Its Own Ground
Tarek Abou Ghazala — Editor
No Democrat had won a Kansas Senate seat since 1932 — four successive
No Democrat had won a Kansas Senate seat since 1932 — four successive generations with the seat in one hand, until among election professionals it had passed from the category of the difficult into the category of the impossible.
In late April, a man of sixty-two stood in a public park in suburban Kansas City and announced his candidacy. He was not a politician: the Reverend Adam Hamilton, founding pastor of the Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, the largest United Methodist congregation in the United States, with more than twenty-two thousand members. He had toured the state on a listening tour before deciding, and had first wanted to run as an independent, until he was told repeatedly that there was no path to winning except through one of the two parties.
He raised about $3.7 million in sixty-two days — the largest Senate campaign launch in the state's history — and then won the primary against ten rivals.
His opponent was Senator Roger Marshall, aligned with the president's wing and endorsed by him, who addressed his voters in the idiom of rural Kansas, saying the suburbanite "doesn't know a heifer from a steer" and calling him "too woke for Kansas." Hamilton did not turn the other cheek. He answered, in substance: "If Jesus were standing in front of them today, Roger Marshall would call him woke." Asked how certain he was that running was God's will for him, he replied, in substance: "I am never 100% sure of God's will, so I tell people I am 87.2% sure."
On the night of 3 November, what had been thought impossible for four generations fell.
The first lesson here is that religious language in American politics is not the property of one side. This issue alone contains two Democratic clergymen: a Presbyterian seminarian in Texas and a Methodist pastor in Kansas, both of whom addressed a conservative electorate in its own idiom rather than their opponents'. This is a particular kind of push: it does not contest the opponent's ground from outside, but enters it and contests his claim to represent it.
The choice of the verse from al-Ḥajj is deliberate. It is the second passage in the Qur'an that states the law of repelling, but it names the fruit of that law specifically: monasteries, churches, synagogues and mosques, together in a single sequence. What the push preserves is not one house of worship but the plurality of them. It therefore reads alongside the previous article: in one night the chamber admitted the first Muslim, and a Methodist pastor from a state that had not elected an opponent of the Republicans in a century.
One matter nevertheless deserves a pause. The man announced that he will remain his church's pastor, preaching a dozen or more times a year while serving as a senator. The gathering of two pulpits in one hand is an old question in human society, not settled by the good intentions of the man holding them, and it belongs among the things to be examined rather than passed over.
Limits of this reading
- Breaking a century-long streak with a candidate of exceptional personal standing is not evidence of a structural shift in the state.
- Kansas elects Democratic governors regularly; the exception was specific to the Senate, which narrows what "a century" can be made to mean.
- The race had little reliable public polling, and what was published fell inside the margin of error.