It has become common for those seeking high public office, especially those who are not known well to voters, to write a book as part of a campaign introduction. But the Rev. Adam Hamilton, founding pastor of the 23,000-member Resurrection United Methodist Church1 based in a Kansas City, Kan., suburb, didn’t need to do that: Before he launched this year’s campaign to become a U.S. senator, he was already the author of 30-some books.
Befitting his career, those books didn’t focus on politics: They were published by Abingdon Press, a Nashville-based Methodist publishing house, and were written for Christians exploring their faith. Many of the books, particularly those dealing with Biblical themes, come complete with study guides and have been used by Christians from a broad spectrum of denominations. But there is one that at least mentions politics in its title, and as I read it this past weekend I found it surprisingly relevant on current issues, even though it was published in 2008, well before the current rise in Christian nationalism. It’s Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White: Thoughts on Religion, Morality, and Politics.
As it concerns Hamilton specifically, the book, published in 2008, is a snapshot in time, showing what the 62-year-old pastor was like 18 years ago. But by all indications, his outlook as expressed in the book isn’t all that much different than what he has expressed in the ministry he has had for decades, nor different than the type of campaign he has been running. (That campaign, by the way, has so far been remarkably successful, putting Hamilton in what a year ago would have seemed an unlikely situation: Running as a Democrat, he appears to competing neck and neck with the Republican incumbent, Roger Marshall, even though Kansas hasn’t had a Democrat in the U.S. Senate since 1939.)
That outlook is one of unwavering centrism. As Hamilton writes early in the book:
When people ask me, “Are you liberal or conservative” my answer is usually “Yes!”
In the title of his introduction, Hamilton asks a question using the names of a fundamentalist Christian and a very liberal Christian whose names would have been easily recognized when the book was written: “Are Jerry Falwell and John Shelby Spong Our Only Options?” For Hamilton, the clear answer is no. He finds much to criticize in both conservative versions of Christianity, which he fears can become too oriented toward the following of rules, and liberal versions, which may hesitate to recognize sin. He writes:
Finding the sweet spot between legalism and libertinism is not easy. We continue to struggle with it to this very day. Liberalism is the pull toward personal freedom that can easily result in libertinism. Conservativism tends to draw toward rules, laws, and a legalism that so easily negates the power of the gospel. But when we can hold together, in tension, the call to freedom that comes by grace and the call to holiness in seeking to live by the Spirit, we find the sweet spot — the perfect balance between grace and holiness — that allows our faith to soar.
And so Hamilton looks for a middle ground on the array of questions that have divided Christians: What does it mean to believe that the Bible in inspired? Is evolution compatible with God’s creation? Who goes to heaven and hell? Why do bad things happen to good people? What about abortion? What about war? What should the Christian attitude be toward supporting America?
The most interesting part of this book is Hamilton telling of his struggle beginning more than two decades ago to deal with issues relating to homosexuality. The book includes the full text of a sermon he gave in 2004 on the issue, one in which he acknowledged that he didn’t fully understand the issue and said he has “hope that God will help us as the church to discern his will as we move forward.” His views had shifted somewhat leftward by the time he wrote the book; he said that while he believes that “the Bible clearly teaches that God’s design for marriage is heterosexuality,” after listening to the life stories of countless homosexuals he has come to see that God’s will could allow for “a type of ‘plan B’” and that homosexuals shouldn’t be pushed out of the church. He adds that if one of his daughters turned out to be lesbian, “I would love her. I would want her to be welcome in our church. ... Would I be able to love the person she loved? I think I would.”2
In the end, Hamilton ends up at what he calls the “radical middle” or “radical center”:
The radical center within the Christian faith embraces the evangelical gospel that proclaims that human beings are wounded by sin and are in need of saving, and that Jesus Christ is God’s antidote to our human condition. And it embraces the social gospel that seeks to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, and recognizes the Christian’s responsibility for addressing the great problems of poverty, oppression, racism, the environment, and war. The evangelical gospel without the social gospel is spiritual narcissism. The social gospel without the evangelical gospel remains afflicted by sin and holds, in the words of the Apostle Paul, “to the outward form of godliness but denying its power” (2 Timothy 3:5a). The radical center holds that the gospel is incomplete without both its evangelical and social witness.
Not surprisingly, what Hamilton views as the center is too liberal for some of his conservative detractors; in recent weeks many of the country’s most prominent evangelical political activists have criticized not just Hamilton’s politics but also his theology. But it is also worth noting that as a Senate candidate Hamilton is more conservative politically than most Democrats running for federal office this year. For example, he backs an upgrade of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, rather than campaigning for the “Medicare for all” advocated by Democratic progressives.
With a full chapter on the Iraq war and a still-in-progress perspective on LGTBQ issues, Seeing Gray would be outdated as a book to introduce a campaign. But it does offer a fascinating historical perspective on the mind of a candidate now in a pivotal race.
With more than 23,000 members, Resurrection has the largest membership of any church in the United Methodist Church denomination. It has largely followed the megachurch model used by many evangelical churches, with several congregations scattered throughout the Kansas City area.
Hamilton’s views continued to evolve after the book was written, and he ended up being a supporter of efforts within his denomination to rewrite its Book of Discipline to allow for the full participation of gays in the life of the church, including getting married and serving as pastors. That rewrite led to an eventual schism in which about a fourth of United Methodist congregations, those supporting the traditional view on homosexuality, left the denomination.