The story goes that Jimmy Carter, a freshly minted governor of Georgia in the early 1970s, had been discouraged about the country in the wind-down of the Vietnam War and the various scandals consuming President Richard Nixon.
Within months of his inauguration as governor in 1971, he was on the cover of Time, and a flattering profile of him appeared in the magazine. Then, a Carter friend who would later become U.S. drug czar sent him a memo outlining how he could be elected president, ostensibly when Nixon left office in 1976.
As the 1972 presidential campaign unfolded, Carter began meeting Democratic candidates vying for that year’s nomination, and he later secured a visible post with the Democratic National Committee for the campaign.
“For the first time,” he told The New York Times, “I started comparing my own experiences and knowledge of government with the candidates, not against ‘the presidency’ and not against Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. It made it a whole lot easier.”
Image courtesy of The Carter Center.
An early 1973 visit from Georgian and former Kennedy and Johnson Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and Rusk’s nudge toward a possible 1976 run, cemented the governor’s thinking.
Carter announced his bid on Dec. 12, 1976, and the national joke was “Jimmy Who?” Even his mother questioned him. “President of what?” she asked of his plans.
As he personally wrestled with “Why not me?” his campaign biography was called “Why Not The Best?”
It’s not the exact scenario Adam Hamilton, 62, pastor of the nation’s largest United Methodist congregation, Church of the Resurrection, and now a Democratic candidate for U.S. senator in his home state of Kansas, went through, but there are similarities.
Like Carter, Hamilton was discouraged in 2024 by the president in office — this time Donald Trump, newly inaugurated for his second term.
He said he found himself praying for Trump, for his wisdom, humility and grace, but very quickly felt the president had “done and said things that were an assault on my values and the teaching in our congregation.”
Hamilton said Trump’s decisions hurt people in Kansas, and he continued to feel, “This is not OK.”
Why not you?
A year later, the fifth-generation Kansan was still feeling the same way, so in January of this year his wife of 44 years, LaVon, asked, “Why not you? You do justice, love mercy and walk humbly. Maybe you’re the kind of candidate who could be elected today.”
Thus, did Hamilton enter, a la Carter, his “Why not me?” moment as he considered whether to run against incumbent U.S. Sen. Roger “Doc” Marshall, who’d been in Congress since 2017.
To hone his decision-making, he decided to fast at lunchtime during Lent, and invited his Lenten text, the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew, to speak to him. "We were not aligning with the poor in spirit, not being peacemakers, not loving our enemies, not doing unto others," Hamilton said of the country. “We were not saying “thy kingdom come, thy will be done.'”
Ultimately, he said he decided, “If we had a chance, I’m willing to do that (make the race)."
Only weeks ago, late in August, Hamilton said he was preaching on the story in Matthew where Jesus beckons his disciple Peter to step out of the boat and walk across the water to him.“
There are moments in life where we’re called to get out of the boat,” he said. “They’re often tumultuous and can be most frightening. But I felt a deep conviction.”
The country, Hamilton said, was broken, and he was worried about what was being left to people like his 12-year-old granddaughter.
“I want better for her,” he said.
Hamilton’s life, he’s quick to tell you, wasn’t one where he’d had a longing for political office. He was, he said, somewhat like the biblical prophet Jeremiah, who had “a burning fire shut up in my bones.”
“This was not my career ambition, not my aspiration,” he said. “I’d be glad not to do this. But I want things to be better.”
Warnock offers advice
For further confirmation, he reached out to U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Georgia, senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church (where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once was co-pastor under his father, the Rev. Dr. M.L. King Sr., and where the civil rights leader’s funeral was held) and the junior senator from the Peach State since 2021.
“You can have a huge impact,” Warnock told him. “You can have an impact nationally.”
Hamilton still had some skepticism about doing something so personal, especially when he was so out front.“I’m never 100% sure something is God’s will,” he said. “The best I get is about 82.5% sure. But I decided if I was going to jump in, I was going to jump in to win.”
Church of the Resurrection, which Hamilton started in 1990, permitted him to take his step out in faith.
One of the skills he took with him in that step was one that “The Message” author Eugene Peterson said he had to learn the hard way.
Early in his ministry, he writes in “The Pastor,” he had a growing church that demanded a significant amount of his time. One evening after supper, he said that his 5-year-old daughter, Karen, asked him to read her a story. No, he said, “I’m sorry, Karen, but I have a meeting tonight.”
“This is the twenty-seventh night in a row you have had a meeting,” she shot back. She had been keeping track.
Peterson went to his meeting but scrapped the agenda and told the ruling elders that if succeeding as a pastor meant failing as a parent, he was already a failed pastor and would resign.
Later in “The Contemplative Pastor,” he wrote, “Pastoral listening requires unhurried leisure, even if it’s only for five minutes. Leisure is a quality of spirit, not a quantity of time. Only in that ambiance of leisure do persons know they are listened to with absolute seriousness, treated with dignity and importance. Speaking to people does not have the same personal intensity as listening to them.”
“Listening” and “listening with empathy,” Hamilton said, were two of the most important attributes that would transfer from the ministry to the campaign trail.
Chattanooga pastor shares his thoughts on Hamilton
Will Lauderback, senior associate minister at First-Centenary United Methodist Church, a congregation of more than 2,000 members in Chattanooga, Tennessee, said he got to know Hamilton while attending his emerging leaders program in 2013 and 2014.
“During that time,” he said, “I saw his ability to engage as a leader who can sit in the middle of a diverse congregation and move everyone toward a mutual greater good. I believe that his time on [Capitol] Hill will prove mutually beneficial for the country. If I were a Kansan, I would be voting for him not as a democrat, but as a Christian who wanted the best for my country.”
Image taken from Hamilton campaign video. Adam (left) and Levon (right).
On a recent day on the trail, Hamilton said, he met with five farmers and visited a tractor factory where he learned of the negative impact President Trump’s tariffs had had on them.
Just “hearing their stories” was important, he said, and asking “How can I help you?”
“I want to avoid doing harmful things,” Hamilton said. “I want to be very consistent. I want to give people hope. I want to walk away having made a difference.”
When it comes to the ballot box for the November election, some people will vote Republican because that’s what they always do, and some will vote Democrat because that’s what they always do. Others will vote for a specific party based on their stance on one or more issues.
But many voters today, Christian and non-Christian, Methodist and non-Methodist, Black and white, male and female, gay and straight, are feeling at odds with what has become such a polarized country. What calming words about doubt and courage, subjects Hamilton addresses in many of his books, does he have for them?
“At Resurrection,” he said, “we’re always trying to bring things together. We’re focusing on helping people love one another this year. We’re focused on how to bring people together.”
The Church of the Resurrection is estimated to have 25,000 members. Hamilton says that total includes about 9,000 Republicans and 9,000 Democrats. To say the least, it would be difficult to get them to agree about church business, much less politics.
But, he said, people in general “are looking for people who want to bring people together.”
A letter from a woman in Greensboro, North Carolina, is an example, Hamilton said. “She said she wanted someone to ‘help me not hate my neighbor,'” he said. “Politics has divided us.”
Goal is sowing unity, not division
If Hamilton is elected, he said, sowing unity and not division will be his watchword.“We’re supposed to love our neighbors as ourselves,” he said. “So, I want to work across the aisle. I want to find common ground for Republicans, Democrats and independents. I want to be generous of spirit while conserving traditional values and traditional ideas, solve big problems, and live up to the values and aspirations people have of me."
Hamilton would find out whether his fellow Sunflower State residents agreed on Aug. 4.
With 10 other Democrats also vying for the nomination to face Marshall, he thought, “We’ll find out in the primary.”
Hamilton’s primary campaign raised $3,678,710, more than three times the total of the other top seven candidates combined. That translated into a 34.8% plurality in the Democratic primary, more than twice that of his next-closest opponent.
No recent polling has been done on the general election race, but two national prediction organizations recently moved the Kansas race from "Likely Republican" to "Leans Republican."
And Hamilton now can conceive the possibility.
“We took the right step,” he acknowledges. “I think we have a real chance to win. There are a lot of people who are hungry for change.”
Hamilton, in pondering what kind of senator he would be, raises the new vision statement adopted by the United Methodist Church in 2025: “The United Methodist Church forms disciples of Jesus Christ who, empowered by the Holy Spirit, love boldly, serve joyfully, and lead courageously in local communities and worldwide connections.”
He also weaves in the maxim attributed to Methodist founder John Wesley’s maxim: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”
In other words, Hamilton says, he doesn’t want to be inconsistent.”
If he is elected in November, the Resurrection pastor and author of more than 30 books said he would be the first sitting United Methodist pastor to be elected to the U.S. Senate.
That means something, he says. He also said he would continue to preach at his church on occasion, mentor people and generally “be involved.”
“And,” he said, “I want to take [along] the values of the people called Methodist.”
Hamilton might have several things in mind concerning those values, but here’s what John Wesley offered in 1774 ahead of a British general election:
- Cast your ballot for the candidate you judge most worthy, strictly "without fee or reward.”
- Refrain from speaking ill or slandering the opposing candidates.
- Ensure your heart and attitude are not sharpened with resentment or malice against those who vote differently.
Hamilton also would be the first Democrat to represent Kansas in the Senate in nearly a century. Indeed, Democrats haven’t come within 10 points of winning such a race in more than 50 years.Marshall, for his part, says the pastor is “too woke for Kansas” and, in a state where this is important, “doesn’t know a heifer from a steer.”
The Democratic Party, the senator maintains, “is too crazy for Kansas.”Hamilton, raised in the Kansas City suburbs, is not exactly, like Carter, “Adam Who?” because of his church and the widespread use of his books, and has moved past his early “Why me?” thinking.
"The Kansas voters will decide whether I’m supposed to win,” he said, “but I feel like I was being called to step into the arena.”
In that arena, Hamilton told The Associated Press, “I’m not running for the Senate to make everybody in this country Christian or United Methodist,” he said.
Instead, he told the AP, he is “running on decency.”
In this polarized country, that might be an attribute many people can get their arms around. Time will tell if Kansans do.