Peter Wehner, who served in the White House under three Republican presidents — including as an aide to President George W. Bush — argues in a new opinion piece for The Atlantic that Tuesday's Democratic wins in Senate races in Texas and Kansas amount to a rebuke of the strain of Christianity that placed itself at Donald Trump's disposal.

According to Wehner, the victories of James Talarico in Texas and Adam Hamilton in Kansas stem in part from a growing sense that many politicians who tout “Christian values” have “slandered the name of Jesus in their words and their deeds.” That shift, he writes, is apparent even to non-believers: “the politics of cruelty is at odds with Jesus's command to love your enemy.”

The evangelical relationship with the Republican Party has shifted markedly over time. Half a century ago, in the 1976 election, white evangelicals were split between Republican Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, the born-again Southern Baptist Democrat. By 1980 they had moved decisively to the GOP, and roughly eight in 10 backed Trump in all three of his presidential campaigns. What began as an alliance, Wehner observes, hardened into a fusion, to the point where evangelicalism became a de facto arm of the Republican Party.

Drawing on a long career in politics, Wehner says he has not encountered a group “more easily seduced by political power than evangelicals.” Their rhetoric grew apocalyptic, he writes, and the attendant fear and grievance curdled into hatred for some. In their search for a warrior who would not only defeat the opposition but make it bleed, they found one in Trump — whom Wehner describes as “the cruelest and most corrupt president in American history.”

Talarico and Hamilton, he argues, are cut from a different cloth. Both cite Micah 6:8, the Good Samaritan, the Sermon on the Mount, and Matthew 25 — scriptural touchstones that, together, emphasize doing justice, showing mercy, and caring for the least among us. As Talarico has put it: “the politics of division is no match for the politics of love.”

Wehner is not naive about the challenges. He notes that Democrats have on occasion been openly hostile to Christianity, and that many evangelicals remain leery of both parties' political theology and their stances on certain issues. The senators-elect, he cautions, will face the same tests as others before them: the lure of politicizing their faith, of making scripture a prop for their ideology, and of letting loyalty to Team Blue silence their prophetic voice.

Even so, with Talarico and Hamilton set to share a caucus with Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, who came to the Senate from the pastorate of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, Wehner sees an opportunity for the ice to thaw between the Democratic Party and believers — an outcome that, in his view, would do both the Christian faith and the Democrats some good.

Wehner concludes: “Many millions of Americans, and not a few evangelicals, have been sickened by those who distort the Gospel while pretending to proclaim it. Something deep and good is stirring in our land.”

Source: Alternet