What is the Christian left? Talarico, Hamilton and the Bible verses behind the “religious left”

Is it new?

No. What is new is that it is winning elections in Texas and Kansas. Christians have argued from Scripture for social reform throughout American history, and for long stretches that argument came mainly from the left. In 1907 the Baptist pastor Walter Rauschenbusch, who had served a congregation in New York’s poor Hell’s Kitchen district, published Christianity and the Social Crisis; Britannica calls him the leader of the Social Gospel movement, which pressed churches to work for labour laws and an end to slum conditions. In a 2008 interview for the Pew Research Center, the political scientist John Green said that for much of the 20th century “the dominant form of faith-based politics was on the left,” and named the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s as the best-known example.

Evangelicals have a left wing too. Over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, according to Wheaton College’s archives, 52 evangelical leaders met at a YMCA in Chicago, among them Ron Sider and Jim Wallis, and produced the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern, confessing their part in racism and pledging to work for a fairer sharing of the world’s resources. Wallis’s Sojourners community and magazine became the best-known voice of that wing. Then, from the late 1970s, the religious right became the face of Christian politics in America, and the religious left has been declared “back” many times since.

The honest caveat is that the numbers have not always backed the headlines. In a 2020 study in Sociology of Religion, the sociologists Joseph Baker and Gerardo Marti used several national surveys and found a notable decline in the share of Americans who are both religious and politically liberal, and in how engaged they were. A few Senate wins do not reverse that on their own. They show that a candidate can talk about Jesus from the left and win in a red state, which is a different claim.

The verses behind it

The Christian left is not making its texts up. The Bible returns to the poor over and over, and two passages carry most of the weight. The first is Jesus’ first sermon in Nazareth, where he reads from Isaiah and says it is fulfilled in him:

¹⁸ “The Spirit of the Lord is on Me, because He has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to release the oppressed, ¹⁹ to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

The second is the judgement scene in Matthew 25, where the King separates the nations and tells the righteous what they did for him:

³⁵ For I was hungry and you gave Me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave Me something to drink, I was a stranger and you took Me in, ³⁶ I was naked and you clothed Me, I was sick and you looked after Me, I was in prison and you visited Me.’

He adds, “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you did for Me” (Matthew 25:40). Around these two the movement gathers the prophets: “let justice roll on like a river” (Amos 5:24); “act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8); and Isaiah’s “Woe to those who enact unjust statutes … to deprive the poor of fair treatment” (Isaiah 10:1–2), a verse aimed squarely at lawmakers. The Law tells Israel to treat the foreigner “as native-born and love him as yourself, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34), and the first church in Jerusalem shared its goods so that “there were no needy ones among them” (Acts 4:34). James asks what good it is to wish a hungry person well and “not provide for his physical needs” (James 2:15–16).

Hamilton’s “two thousand verses” is a round figure, not a careful count, and counts vary with what you include. The point behind it is not in doubt: concern for the poor is one of the loudest themes in Scripture, not a footnote.

What those verses do not settle

Read where they stand, these passages tell God’s people what they must do. Matthew 25 judges “the nations,” but the deeds it praises are personal: feeding, clothing, visiting. Acts 4 describes believers giving freely; Peter tells Ananias the land had been his own to keep (Acts 5:4), so it is not a tax law. Isaiah 10 does speak to rulers, but it condemns unjust laws without telling us which tax rate or welfare programme is just. Paul, writing to a church, can say “If anyone is unwilling to work, he shall not eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10). Scripture sets the goal, that the poor are not crushed or forgotten; it leaves Christians to argue about the means, and Christians who care about the poor honestly disagree about whether a given policy helps them.

The temple story is also being stretched. When Jesus overturned the money changers’ tables, he was clearing his Father’s house, “a house of prayer” (Matthew 21:12–13). It is about worship, not a promise to shake up the Senate, and we said the same of the “wolves in sheep’s clothing” sermons preached against these candidates in our page Can a Christian be a Democrat? Finally, none of these verses makes a party holy. Jesus told Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36), and the psalm warns, “Put not your trust in princes” (Psalm 146:3). That warning applies to princes of every party.

What critics say

The sharpest objection is that the Christian left reads the Bible selectively: loud on the poor and the stranger, quiet where Scripture cuts against progressive positions, above all on abortion and sexuality. Conservative writers have pressed this against Talarico for months; a RealClearReligion essay in March 2026 was titled “James Talarico’s Cost-Free Creed,” and TheBlaze has called him a “pro-abortion Democrat.” Critics point to verses such as “You knit me together in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13) and “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (Jeremiah 1:5), and to the church’s teaching on unborn life from its first centuries.

A second objection is the mirror image of the one the left makes against the religious right: that it uses Jesus to sell a party platform. A third, from the sociologists rather than the theologians, is that the movement is smaller and older than the headlines suggest. All three deserve a hearing, and the first one, we think, lands.

How Christians differ

Catholic. Catholic teaching fits neither American party. The Catechism says, quoting Pope John Paul II, “The Church’s love for the poor . . . is a part of her constant tradition” (no. 2444), and it also says that “direct abortion … is gravely contrary to the moral law” and that this teaching “has not changed and remains unchangeable” (no. 2271). A Catholic who votes left must answer the second; one who votes right must answer the first. Many Catholic thinkers say both sides keep half of the Church’s social teaching.

Mainline Protestant. Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans and Episcopalians in the United States have long leaned toward the Social Gospel tradition, and their national bodies often speak on poverty, immigration and climate. Hamilton and Talarico come from this world, as do the two Iowa ministers in this week’s headlines.

Black Protestant. The Black church has joined personal faith and the fight for justice since slavery, from the civil rights movement onward, and Haynes and Senator Raphael Warnock stand in that line. Many Black Protestants are also more conservative on sexuality than the white religious left, which makes “Christian left” a poor fit for them too.

Evangelical. White evangelicals have been the core of the religious right for decades, and many reject the Christian left’s theology outright. A smaller evangelical left, from the Chicago Declaration to Sojourners, argues that the gospel calls for both personal conversion and justice for the poor.

Orthodox. Orthodox churches rarely map onto American left and right at all; their tradition of almsgiving is strong and their moral teaching on life and marriage is traditional. These are general summaries; within every tradition, members vote in different ways.

Our take

This is our opinion, not a report. The Christian left is right about the poor and wrong to wear the label.

On the poor, the left has the Bible on its side, and too much of American Christian politics forgot it. Matthew 25 does not ask how you voted; it asks whether you fed the hungry and visited the prisoner, and a Christian politics that spends its energy on culture-war wins while shrugging at Isaiah 10 has some explaining to do. If these elections make Christians on the right read Amos and James again, that is good for the church.

But the label is a mistake, and it is the same mistake the religious right made. When a movement takes the name “Christian left” or “Christian right,” it tells half the church that its politics are less Christian, and it ties the name of Christ to a party’s whole platform, including the parts Scripture does not support. The Christian left’s weak point is exactly where its critics aim: a faith that rarely quotes Psalm 139 and quotes Matthew 25 for everything is choosing its verses. A Christian who reads Luke 4 should also hear Jeremiah 1:5, and a Christian who reads Jeremiah 1:5 should also hear Luke 4. Those who do will rarely fit neatly into either party, and they should not try to.

We are not saying Hamilton or Talarico is insincere; we have no way to judge a man’s heart, and Scripture tells us not to try. We are saying that the most faithful Christian politics this week is the one that refuses both labels and asks every candidate, of every party, the questions Scripture asks.

Over to you

Which verse do you think Christians on your own side of politics most often skip over, and what would change if they took it seriously? Tell us below.

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