When James Talarico took the stage Tuesday night to celebrate his victory in the U.S. Senate race in Texas, he concluded his long-shot campaign the way he began it: talking about Jesus.

“That barefoot rabbi didn’t stay in his room and pray. He walked into the seat of power and he flipped over the tables of injustice,” Talarico said from behind a lectern emblazoned with “Love Thy Neighbor.”

“Texas,” he told the crowd, “it’s time to start flipping tables.”Talarico wasn’t the only Democrat to campaign around Christian faith and court a segment of voters who had drifted toward Republicans. Across a number of closely watched races, Democratic clergy and a seminarian won Republican-held seats in the House and Senate and helped propel the party to its most sweeping victory in decades.

Adam Hamilton, a United Methodist megachurch pastor who flashed his Bible at campaign events, won the Senate race in Kansas. Sarah Trone Garriott, a Lutheran minister, beat a Republican House incumbent in Iowa while continuing to preach at churches across the state. And Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian who regularly quotes Scripture, helped Democrats storm the Republican stronghold of Texas.

“The religious left has a Jesus-speak secret sauce that works,” theologian Anthony Bradley observed on X the day after the election.

Preliminary exit polls indicate Democrats gained ground among Christian voters relative to 2024, including a shift of 3 percentage points in Protestant support toward the party’s candidates and an 11-point shift among Roman Catholics. White evangelicals still overwhelmingly back Republicans.

For a Democratic Party long wary of mixing Christianity and politics, the victories of unapologetically faith-based candidates in hotly contested races marked a turn.

In podcast interviews, stump speeches and campaign ads, the contenders articulated a vision of progressive or center-left politics rooted in theological principles. Some on the left hope their success will prompt the party to engage religious voters more directly and pave the way for other outspoken Christians to run as Democrats.

“We might look back at these midterms and say this was the start of moving on from a politics where it was largely one party saying they were defenders of religion and another party being indifferent or antagonistic about it,” said Michael Wear, the president of the nonprofit Center for Christianity and Public Life.

Among religious voters, Democrats have historically performed well with Black Protestants and Jewish Americans, as well as many Muslim voters, including those who backed Abdul El-Sayed, the first Muslim to be elected as a U.S. Senator. Long a political bellwether, Catholic voters were virtually split in their choice for president in 2020, according to AP VoteCast, then broke sharply for Donald Trump in 2024.

In the past decade, Democrats largely ceded the white Christian vote to Republicans. Some candidates and party leaders had shied away from embracing Christianity because of its association with conservative positions on social issues such as abortion.

That began to shift more recently, some Democratic strategists argue, as the GOP’s fusion of evangelical Christianity and state power under President Trump helped spur a wave of religious Democrats to run for office.

“They said, ‘My faith is being misrepresented and maligned by somebody at the top who claims he is Christian,’ ” noted Faiz Shakir, an adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.).

A White House spokesman said, “There has never been a greater president for Christian Americans than President Trump, and his strong record proves it.”He added that Trump “proudly defended and expanded our religious rights.”Nine Democrats who studied at a seminary or divinity school will serve in the 120th Congress. Many of them champion an alternative model for what faith could mean in the public sphere, including emphasizing diversity and compassion for the vulnerable.

Such appeals likely resonated with mainline Protestant and Catholic voters, two groups who have expressed growing dissatisfaction with the Trump administration. A Pew Research Center survey released in October found Trump’s approval ratings had fallen among every religious group since the start of his second term.

Among white nonevangelical Protestant voters, 60% said they disapproved of his performance as president, according to the survey, as did 59% of white Catholic voters and 78% of Hispanic Catholics. Pope Leo XIV and U.S. bishops had spoken out against Trump’s immigration-enforcement tactics, some of which particularly affected Hispanic Catholics.

Ahead of the election, Democrats held briefings for congressional candidates on outreach to faith voters and communities, according to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s national political director, Brooke Butler.

Some candidates found success by tying Christian theology to voters’ economic worries, especially affordability. Talarico, for instance, argued that honoring God and following the Golden Rule meant expanding healthcare, lowering the cost of living and repealing billionaire tax cuts.

A person close to the national Republican Party leadership said religious voters who backed Democrats likely did so for economic reasons not because they had changed their views of which party represents their values.

But on Wednesday, Sarah McCammon, a senior fellow at the centrist Democratic advocacy group Third Way, argued on X that Democrats were “learning how to speak effectively to religious voters and talk authentically about their own faith.”Authenticity, she added, “is the key; if it’s fake, people will know. It also has to be genuinely inclusive, and respectful of church/state separation.”It is too early to say whether this election marks the start of a realignment among Christian voters.

Policies espoused by some religious Democrats remain unpalatable to many social conservatives, particularly white evangelicals. Republicans, for instance, spent millions in Texas on ads featuring Talarico’s previous “woke” comments.

Some conservative Catholics caution against reading the election results as a rejection of their politics. Kelsey Reinhardt, Chief Executive of CatholicVote, a conservative advocacy group, noted Republican voters still supported socially conservative causes and cited successful Colorado ballot measures her group backed that prohibit transgender athletes in girls’ sports and ban certain gender surgeries for minors.

Yet Democratic strategists say their party will likely look at the election as a case study in how candidates fluent in the language of faith can win over more voters.

“Many Democrats are wondering: ‘How do we maintain that kind of relationship with those people?’ ” Shakir said. “And there is no doubt in my mind that faith is going to be one of the most discussed items.”