Can a Kansas Megachurch Pastor Join the Senate's Rare Clergy Club?
A look at the few pastors who have served in the U.S. Senate while keeping their pulpits, as Kansas's Adam Hamilton tries to join them.
If Kansas megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton wins his long-shot U.S. Senate race as a Democrat, he would achieve something only one sitting senator has managed in the past century: continuing to lead his congregation while serving in Washington.
Georgia's Raphael Warnock has done exactly that since his 2021 election, regularly preaching at Atlanta's historic Ebenezer Baptist Church. Hamilton, senior pastor of the Church of the Resurrection in the Kansas City area — the largest United Methodist congregation in the country, with roughly 25,000 members — has said he would keep preaching there 12 to 18 times a year if elected.
Warnock, in a video posted on Senate Democrats' social media, described the dual role as natural: both politics and ministry, he said, are about working alongside people and taking faith beyond the sanctuary into the public square.
Hamilton told an interviewer that former Missouri Senator John Danforth, an Episcopal priest who served from 1976 to 1995, has been a mentor. Hamilton said he called Danforth before entering the race to ask how to balance the two callings. Danforth, who presided over Ronald Reagan's funeral, encouraged leading from the center and bringing people together.
Other ordained ministers have served in the Senate without keeping an active pulpit. Arkansas Republican Tim Hutchinson was a Baptist pastor before entering politics in 1985, and Oklahoma's James Lankford, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, has been in the Senate since 2015.
Pastors have been far more common in the House. Notable examples include Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of Harlem, Walter Fauntroy of Washington, D.C., and William Gray of Philadelphia. Missouri Democrat Emanuel Cleaver led a United Methodist church for decades before and during his House service. On the Republican side, conservative Baptist pastors such as Mark Harris, Jody Hice, and Ron Lewis have served in recent years.
One of the most prominent clerics in Congress was Jesuit priest Robert Drinan, a Massachusetts Democrat who served from 1971 to 1981. He left after Pope John Paul II barred priests from holding political office. Drinan was the first lawmaker to call for Richard Nixon's impeachment, over the Cambodia bombing.
Historically, clergy in Congress have been overwhelmingly Protestant. The first Speaker of the House, Frederick Muhlenberg, was a Lutheran minister, and the first African American in Congress, Hiram Rhodes Revels, was an AME minister elected to the Senate in 1870.
This election cycle, several clergy are running for House seats from both parties, including Dallas pastor Frederick Haynes III and two Lutheran/Presbyterian women from Iowa on the Democratic side, and several evangelical pastors on the Republican side.