Religion was usually the preserve of Republicans. These Democrats are challenging that

Though the last races have yet to be officially called, it is obvious that last Tuesday’s US midterm elections were a bloodbath for the Republican Party. The Democrats have won, or are likely to win, in places they previously squeaked victories (Georgia, North Carolina), had nearly given up on (Ohio, Iowa), long dreamed of breaking (Texas, Alaska) and scarcely dared to hope (South Carolina, Kansas, Mississippi).

Aside from the obvious reasons for a wave election, from unpopular Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raids to the war in Iran and its attendant effect on prices, a key ingredient in their victory was candidate quality. With notable exceptions, the party and its voters did a good job in matching candidates to races.

But rather than a bland slate of centrist career politicians, the new class of Democratic senators and congresspeople are as heterogeneous as we have seen in years. Maine elected a left-wing former logger, New Hampshire the country’s first openly gay senator. After a bitter race in Michigan marked by enormous spending from outside groups like AIPAC, and rank Islamophobia, Abdul El-Sayed won a stunning victory to become the first Muslim ever elected to the Senate. Our conception of what a Democratic politician looks like will have to change.

Since 2016, the party has seemed locked in battle between the centrist and centre-right establishment once represented by Hillary Clinton, and an insurgent left that grew out of Bernie Sanders’s two campaigns. The size of this victory made it difficult for either side to claim full vindication. Democrats won where they ran open socialists and they won where they ran former republicans. Such was the unpopularity of the opposition that they won virtually everywhere. Democrats are starting to resemble a sort of big-tent, catch-all party, united only by their hatred of a particular figure.

Nonetheless, ideological lessons can be learned from these results. What most candidates shared was a populist, outsider message, whether expressed through democratic socialism or more familiar “pocketbook issues”. The Trump administration’s corruption was a potent issue, as was the US’s continuing failure to ensure genuinely universal healthcare. In a warning shot for Irish parties, support for the mushrooming spread of data centres was political poison, helping Democrats win in some truly unlikely spots.

A huge victory produces the possibility of a political realignment – or more accurately, a hundred different realignments. The coalition that wins the 2028 presidential election will be very different from that of 2024.

Among this new class of Democratic politicians are several figures who are explicitly, even professionally, religious. James Talarico, Gina Hinojosa, and a rejuvenated state party flipped Texas for the first time in decades. Texas has operated as essentially a one-party state since republicans cemented their control in the early 2000s. As long-time Texas journalist Christopher Hooks put it, “In a real sense, Texas is going to have ‘politics’ again.”

Talarico is a young (by senatorial standards) Presbyterian who once studied at seminary, has a faintly messianic tone and frames his liberalism in religious terms. His enemy is the Christian nationalism of the Maga right, which he has described as a “cancer” on the church. He once described Pope Francis as a personal hero. His brand of compassionate Christianity took the previously unwinnable Texas and won it by a thumping 12 points.

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Even more interesting is Adam Hamilton, a long-time leader of a large Methodist church who won the Kansas senate seat for the Democrats for the first time since the New Deal. Hamilton was previously best known for being on the liberal end of a schism within the wider Methodist church over the issue of LGBTQ+ clergy and same-sex marriage. He styles himself a centrist and almost ran as an independent.

Neither are Bernie-style socialists, but nor do they fit into our stereotypical understanding of what a Democratic politician – or for that matter an American Christian public figure – looks like.

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The last Democrat to be propelled to the White House on evangelical Christian votes was Jimmy Carter. Since then, evangelicals have seemed inextricably linked to the right, and the Republican Party. Under the Bible-thumping George W Bush, US Christianity itself seemed to become coded as a conservative force.

But this is historically specific to the late 20th and early 21st century. Christian churches played a leading role in progressive causes throughout American history, from the Quakers and Presbyterians who fought for abolition of slavery, to the black churches that formed the backbone of the Civil Rights movement. The movement to oppose the Vietnam War was full of clergy, like the Catholic Berrigan brothers and the Episcopal bishop C Kilmer Myers.

Trump’s election (and Bush’s before him) created real tears within the complex fabric of US religious organisations. It was gobsmacking, even for the non-religious among us, to witness just how cynically Trump instrumentalised Christian rhetoric and imagery to appeal to his fervently religious base. Evangelical leaders lined up behind Trump, the man who finally delivered a Supreme Court that would overturn abortion rights. But in embracing such an obviously venal and godless president, they further divided US Christians, and even their own denominations.

These divisions are invisible to the outside, until they spill messily out into schism and recrimination. The election of a progressive (by papal standards) Latin American pope and a US one immediately after has had effects beyond the Catholic flock, even if many Protestant denominations would not care to admit it. Many Americans, even non-Christian ones, see much to admire in the pope’s clear concern for humanity, whether speaking on Gaza, AI, or refugees.

It is possible that we’re witnessing the anguished birth of a new kind of revived American religious progressivism, one which cuts across old denominational lines, and recentres Christian social teaching ahead of the decades of culture war and prosperity gospel. At the very least we will see new politico-religious forms appear, some difficult to parse without the knowledge of the struggles which have produced them. Assembling them into a coalition will be a strange business indeed.