In this commentary for the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Rev. Dr. Colin Bossen examines the significance of the 2026 US midterm elections for religious pluralism, populism, and democratic citizenship. Focusing on Abdul El-Sayed’s historic election as America’s first Muslim senator, Rev. Dr. Bossen argues that the results reflect more than a resurgence of the religious left. They illuminate a longstanding struggle between competing populist traditions: an inclusive, multiracial populism grounded in economic justice and religious diversity, and an exclusionary populism associated with white supremacy and Christian nationalism. Drawing on American political and religious history, Rev. Dr. Bossen explores how changing patterns of representation challenge established boundaries of national belonging while exposing the continuing tensions between democratic inclusion, religious identity, and exclusionary nationalism.
By Rev. Dr. Colin Bossen*
The United States midterm elections are being read as marking the resurgence of the religious left. From the abolitionist movement through Jimmy Carter’s presidency, it was once a dominant force in the country’s politics. In recent decades, it has been eclipsed by Republican-aligned evangelicals and Christian nationalists who comprise the religious right. In this regard, the 2026 US midterms have marked something of a realignment. Come January 2027, Protestant ministers and seminarians affiliated with the Democrats will outnumber those connected to the Republicans in Congress. Texas alone is sending the Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico to the Senate and Frederick Haynes III, senior minister of the Dallas Black megachurch Friendship-West Baptist Church, to the House of Representatives. Adam Hamilton, senior minister of the country’s largest United Methodist congregation, will be heading to the Senate from Kansas, a state that has not elected a Democrat to serve in the chamber since 1932.
As important as this turn is, it is less significant than the election of Abdul El-Sayed as a senator from Michigan. Numerous Protestant clergy on both the left and the right have long occupied congressional offices. The first Speaker of the House was Frederick Muhlenberg, a Lutheran minister. Richard Cain served as an African Methodist Episcopal pastor before he entered the House as a representative from South Carolina following the Civil War. After his final term in Congress, he spent the remainder of his career as a bishop. Many twentieth- and twenty-first-century examples can be found. The civil rights icon Adam Clayton Powell Jr., for instance, served simultaneously as pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church and as a congressman from New York. The arrival of figures like Hamilton, Haynes, and Talarico does not signify something fundamentally new.
In contrast, El-Sayed’s swearing into the Senate will be truly novel. He will be the first Muslim in the nation’s history to belong to the body. His entry into the chamber represents a change in the demographic and religious composition of the United States. While the first Muslim arrived in what is now the United States long before the nation’s founding, it wasn’t until 2006 that Keith Ellison became the first Muslim elected to the House of Representatives. At the time of Ellison’s election, there were 2.4 million Muslims in the country, about 0.8% of the population. Today, there are about 5.5 million, representing 1.6% of all residents of the United States (Mohamed, 2026). At the same time, the number of people in the United States who identify as Christian has dropped significantly, falling from 78% of adults living in the United States in 2007 to 62% now (Smith et al., 2025).
These demographic shifts might partially explain why the period between Ellison’s and El-Sayed’s elections has been marked by a rise in Islamophobia. While anti-Muslim hate crimes hit their highest level in 2001, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, negative views of Islam are far higher now than they were then. Twenty-five years ago, 25% of adults in the United States said that Islam was more likely to inspire violence than other religions. The percentage is now 51% (Mohamed, 2026). Tellingly, tactics demonizing Muslims played an important role in several Republican campaigns. In Texas, members of the party tried to stir up fear of Sharia in their efforts to drum up support (Religion News Service, 2026) Attacking El-Sayed for his faith was a central part of the strategy against him. Both President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance went after him, with Trump calling him a “jihadist” and Vance claiming he was an agent of “terrible evil” (Hippensteel, 2026).
The most telling incident during El-Sayed’s campaign was not with either the president or the vice president. It was with Thomas Teepell, a former member of Missouri Republican Senator Joshua Hawley’s staff (Edwards, 2026. At a campaign event where Teepell identified himself as “Tommy,” he pressed El-Sayed to “disavow the Muslim Brotherhood.” The exchange went viral, with El-Sayed observing that implicit in the question was the accusation of “dual loyalties,” the claim that religious minorities have allegiances that rank higher than those they owe to the nation or the United States Constitution. El-Sayed observed that the same charge had been made against John F. Kennedy, the country’s first Catholic president, and asserted that his first loyalty would be to the Constitution. He turned the tables by pressing Teepell to “disavow any attempt to read any religious doctrine into the laws of our country.” Teepell refused to do so and implied that he viewed the nation’s founding document as inherently Christian.
The exchange represented a confrontation between populist traditions, both frequently infused with religious dimensions, long present within the United States. Teepell appeared to offer views similar to those I label in my scholarship white supremacist populists. Closely connected to Christian nationalism, they believe that White people, especially Christians, are the country’s only authentic citizens. In an op-ed that he penned while initially running for office, Teepell’s former boss Senator Hawley provided an example of this kind of populism. He linked concerns about the economic needs of the working-class with coded language around the threats that “globalists” and “illegal immigrants” present to the country (Draper, 2026; Hawley, 2018). Such language has long been a way to covertly peddle White identity politics.
El-Sayed, in contrast, represented pluralistic populism. This variety of populism combines a capacious understanding of who belongs in the country with a sharp focus on economic security. He invoked Kennedy, whose own religious identity signaled an expansion of who could make a claim to authentic citizenry, and embodied in his candidacy a further enlargement of the demographic boundaries of the nation. At the same time, he provided a memorable three point campaign platform: “Money out of politics. Money in your pocket. Medicare for all.”[1]
The pluralistic and white supremacist varieties of populism have long contested with each other. El-Sayed wasn’t the only Democratic candidate connected to pluralistic populism who won in the midterms. Notably, Talarico and Gina Hinojosa, the successful Democratic candidate for governor in Texas, both are linked to it as well. Hinojosa has explicitly called herself a “populist” and centered economic issues (The New York Times, 2026). She is also a Catholic, with her faith alongside El-Sayed’s Islam and Talarico’s Presbyterianism embodying the inclusive vision of pluralist populism (Barone, 2026).
Despite their victories and the Democrats’ stunning sweep of the midterms, there’s little reason to think that conflict between different variants of populism will end anytime soon. It has been going on for much of the history of the United States. States like Texas have at various times been strongholds for both pluralistic and white supremacist populism. The Lone Star State (Texas) was a bastion of the original late nineteenth century Populist Party. Some of its leaders were Protestant clergy. Its members included precursors to the kind of multiracial democracy advocated by contemporary pluralist populists. In the early twentieth century it was a stronghold for the Ku Klux Klan. The archetypal white supremacist populist movement, it arguably provided the template for much of contemporary Christian nationalism.
All of this suggests that what is novel about the midterms is not the conflict between religious left and religious right. It is that a Muslim senator has now joined a coalition that includes not just Catholics and Protestants but figures like the new mayor of Los Angeles, Nithya Raman, a Hindu (Mukherjee, 2026), the longstanding Jewish senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders, and the soon-to-be Washington State House Representative Jaelyn Scott, the first openly Black transgender woman to serve in a state legislature (Seattle Gay News, 2026). The contest between pluralistic and white supremacist populism over who comprises the authentic citizenry of the United States remains far from settled.
(*) Rev. Dr. Colin Bossen is an award-winning preacher, scholar, and social justice organizer. He serves as the senior minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Houston, Texas, and as a Visiting Fellow at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford. Email: colin@firstuu.org | colin.bossen@hmc.ox.ac.uk
References
Barone, Camilllo. (2026). “Meet the Catholics who shaped the 2026 midterms,” National Catholic Reporter, November 4, 2026. https://www.ncronline.org/news/meet-catholics-who-shaped-2026-midterms
Draper, Robert. (2026). “Josh Hawley and the Republican Populists, at War with Their Party,” The New York Times, April 28, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/28/us/politics/josh-hawley-populist.html
Edwards, Joe. (2026) “Who is ‘Tommy’” Report Identifies Man in El-Sayed Clash as Ex-GOP Staffer,” Newsweek,October 19, 2026. https://www.newsweek.com/tommy-abdul-el-sayed-muslim-brotherhood-michigan-12588556
Gregory A. Smith et al. (2025), “Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off: Findings from the 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study,” Pew Research Center, February 26, 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/decline-of-christianity-in-the-us-has-slowed-may-have-leveled-off/
Hawley, Josh. (2018). “GOP Senate candidate: America needs a border wall and an immigration policy to protect Americans,” Fox News, September 12, 2018. https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/gop-senate-candidate-america-needs-a-border-wall-and-an-immigration-policy-to-protect-americans
Hippensteel, Chris. (2026). “JD Vance steps up extreme attacks on Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed,” The Guardian, October 27, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/27/jd-vance-el-sayed-attacks
Mohamed, Besheer. (2026). “25 Years After 9/11, a Portrait of Muslim Americans,” Pew Research Center, September 3, 2026. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/09/03/25-years-after-9-11-a-portrait-of-muslim-americans/
Mukherjee, Trisha. (2026). “Nithya Raman, a practicing Hindu, elected as mayor of Los Angeles,” Religion News Service,Alex Garland, November 5, 2026. https://religionnews.com/2026/11/05/nithya-raman-a-practicing-hindu-elected-as-mayor-of-los-angeles/
Religion News Service. (2026). “The Texas Sharia Panic: How a Rallying Cry Became a Curriculum,” Complexified, September 21, 2026. https://religionnews.com/2026/09/21/the-texas-sharia-panic-how-a-rallying-cry-became-a-curriculum/
Seattle Gay News (2026). “Jaelyn Scott wins in a landslide, becoming Washington’s first openly Trans legislator,” November 4, 2026. https://www.sgn.org/story/171841
The New York Times (2026). “Gina Hinojosa on Why She Calls Herself a Populism (and Not a Progressive),” October 24, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/video/podcasts/100000011212069/gina-hinojosa-on-why-she-calls-herself-a-populist-and-not-a-progressive.html
[1] Medicare for all signifies universal healthcare for the United States.
Pluralism Triumphs in the 2026 US Midterms: Religion, Populism, and America’s First Muslim Senator
In this commentary for the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Rev. Dr. Colin Bossen examines the significance of the 2026 US midterm elections for religious pluralism, populism, and democratic citizenship. Focusing on Abdul El-Sayed’s historic election as America’s first Muslim senator, Rev. Dr. Bossen argues that the results reflect more than a resurgence of the religious left. They illuminate a longstanding struggle between competing populist traditions: an inclusive, multiracial populism grounded in economic justice and religious diversity, and an exclusionary populism associated with white supremacy and Christian nationalism. Drawing on American political and religious history, Rev. Dr. Bossen explores how changing patterns of representation challenge established boundaries of national belonging while exposing the continuing tensions between democratic inclusion, religious identity, and exclusionary nationalism.
By Rev. Dr. Colin Bossen*
The United States midterm elections are being read as marking the resurgence of the religious left. From the abolitionist movement through Jimmy Carter’s presidency, it was once a dominant force in the country’s politics. In recent decades, it has been eclipsed by Republican-aligned evangelicals and Christian nationalists who comprise the religious right. In this regard, the 2026 US midterms have marked something of a realignment. Come January 2027, Protestant ministers and seminarians affiliated with the Democrats will outnumber those connected to the Republicans in Congress. Texas alone is sending the Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico to the Senate and Frederick Haynes III, senior minister of the Dallas Black megachurch Friendship-West Baptist Church, to the House of Representatives. Adam Hamilton, senior minister of the country’s largest United Methodist congregation, will be heading to the Senate from Kansas, a state that has not elected a Democrat to serve in the chamber since 1932.
As important as this turn is, it is less significant than the election of Abdul El-Sayed as a senator from Michigan. Numerous Protestant clergy on both the left and the right have long occupied congressional offices. The first Speaker of the House was Frederick Muhlenberg, a Lutheran minister. Richard Cain served as an African Methodist Episcopal pastor before he entered the House as a representative from South Carolina following the Civil War. After his final term in Congress, he spent the remainder of his career as a bishop. Many twentieth- and twenty-first-century examples can be found. The civil rights icon Adam Clayton Powell Jr., for instance, served simultaneously as pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church and as a congressman from New York. The arrival of figures like Hamilton, Haynes, and Talarico does not signify something fundamentally new.
In contrast, El-Sayed’s swearing into the Senate will be truly novel. He will be the first Muslim in the nation’s history to belong to the body. His entry into the chamber represents a change in the demographic and religious composition of the United States. While the first Muslim arrived in what is now the United States long before the nation’s founding, it wasn’t until 2006 that Keith Ellison became the first Muslim elected to the House of Representatives. At the time of Ellison’s election, there were 2.4 million Muslims in the country, about 0.8% of the population. Today, there are about 5.5 million, representing 1.6% of all residents of the United States (Mohamed, 2026). At the same time, the number of people in the United States who identify as Christian has dropped significantly, falling from 78% of adults living in the United States in 2007 to 62% now (Smith et al., 2025).
These demographic shifts might partially explain why the period between Ellison’s and El-Sayed’s elections has been marked by a rise in Islamophobia. While anti-Muslim hate crimes hit their highest level in 2001, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, negative views of Islam are far higher now than they were then. Twenty-five years ago, 25% of adults in the United States said that Islam was more likely to inspire violence than other religions. The percentage is now 51% (Mohamed, 2026). Tellingly, tactics demonizing Muslims played an important role in several Republican campaigns. In Texas, members of the party tried to stir up fear of Sharia in their efforts to drum up support (Religion News Service, 2026) Attacking El-Sayed for his faith was a central part of the strategy against him. Both President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance went after him, with Trump calling him a “jihadist” and Vance claiming he was an agent of “terrible evil” (Hippensteel, 2026).
The most telling incident during El-Sayed’s campaign was not with either the president or the vice president. It was with Thomas Teepell, a former member of Missouri Republican Senator Joshua Hawley’s staff (Edwards, 2026. At a campaign event where Teepell identified himself as “Tommy,” he pressed El-Sayed to “disavow the Muslim Brotherhood.” The exchange went viral, with El-Sayed observing that implicit in the question was the accusation of “dual loyalties,” the claim that religious minorities have allegiances that rank higher than those they owe to the nation or the United States Constitution. El-Sayed observed that the same charge had been made against John F. Kennedy, the country’s first Catholic president, and asserted that his first loyalty would be to the Constitution. He turned the tables by pressing Teepell to “disavow any attempt to read any religious doctrine into the laws of our country.” Teepell refused to do so and implied that he viewed the nation’s founding document as inherently Christian.
The exchange represented a confrontation between populist traditions, both frequently infused with religious dimensions, long present within the United States. Teepell appeared to offer views similar to those I label in my scholarship white supremacist populists. Closely connected to Christian nationalism, they believe that White people, especially Christians, are the country’s only authentic citizens. In an op-ed that he penned while initially running for office, Teepell’s former boss Senator Hawley provided an example of this kind of populism. He linked concerns about the economic needs of the working-class with coded language around the threats that “globalists” and “illegal immigrants” present to the country (Draper, 2026; Hawley, 2018). Such language has long been a way to covertly peddle White identity politics.
El-Sayed, in contrast, represented pluralistic populism. This variety of populism combines a capacious understanding of who belongs in the country with a sharp focus on economic security. He invoked Kennedy, whose own religious identity signaled an expansion of who could make a claim to authentic citizenry, and embodied in his candidacy a further enlargement of the demographic boundaries of the nation. At the same time, he provided a memorable three point campaign platform: “Money out of politics. Money in your pocket. Medicare for all.”[1]
The pluralistic and white supremacist varieties of populism have long contested with each other. El-Sayed wasn’t the only Democratic candidate connected to pluralistic populism who won in the midterms. Notably, Talarico and Gina Hinojosa, the successful Democratic candidate for governor in Texas, both are linked to it as well. Hinojosa has explicitly called herself a “populist” and centered economic issues (The New York Times, 2026). She is also a Catholic, with her faith alongside El-Sayed’s Islam and Talarico’s Presbyterianism embodying the inclusive vision of pluralist populism (Barone, 2026).
Despite their victories and the Democrats’ stunning sweep of the midterms, there’s little reason to think that conflict between different variants of populism will end anytime soon. It has been going on for much of the history of the United States. States like Texas have at various times been strongholds for both pluralistic and white supremacist populism. The Lone Star State (Texas) was a bastion of the original late nineteenth century Populist Party. Some of its leaders were Protestant clergy. Its members included precursors to the kind of multiracial democracy advocated by contemporary pluralist populists. In the early twentieth century it was a stronghold for the Ku Klux Klan. The archetypal white supremacist populist movement, it arguably provided the template for much of contemporary Christian nationalism.
All of this suggests that what is novel about the midterms is not the conflict between religious left and religious right. It is that a Muslim senator has now joined a coalition that includes not just Catholics and Protestants but figures like the new mayor of Los Angeles, Nithya Raman, a Hindu (Mukherjee, 2026), the longstanding Jewish senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders, and the soon-to-be Washington State House Representative Jaelyn Scott, the first openly Black transgender woman to serve in a state legislature (Seattle Gay News, 2026). The contest between pluralistic and white supremacist populism over who comprises the authentic citizenry of the United States remains far from settled.
(*) Rev. Dr. Colin Bossen is an award-winning preacher, scholar, and social justice organizer. He serves as the senior minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Houston, Texas, and as a Visiting Fellow at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford. Email: colin@firstuu.org | colin.bossen@hmc.ox.ac.uk
References
Barone, Camilllo. (2026). “Meet the Catholics who shaped the 2026 midterms,” National Catholic Reporter, November 4, 2026. https://www.ncronline.org/news/meet-catholics-who-shaped-2026-midterms
Draper, Robert. (2026). “Josh Hawley and the Republican Populists, at War with Their Party,” The New York Times, April 28, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/28/us/politics/josh-hawley-populist.html
Edwards, Joe. (2026) “Who is ‘Tommy’” Report Identifies Man in El-Sayed Clash as Ex-GOP Staffer,” Newsweek,October 19, 2026. https://www.newsweek.com/tommy-abdul-el-sayed-muslim-brotherhood-michigan-12588556
Gregory A. Smith et al. (2025), “Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off: Findings from the 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study,” Pew Research Center, February 26, 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/decline-of-christianity-in-the-us-has-slowed-may-have-leveled-off/
Hawley, Josh. (2018). “GOP Senate candidate: America needs a border wall and an immigration policy to protect Americans,” Fox News, September 12, 2018. https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/gop-senate-candidate-america-needs-a-border-wall-and-an-immigration-policy-to-protect-americans
Hippensteel, Chris. (2026). “JD Vance steps up extreme attacks on Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed,” The Guardian, October 27, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/27/jd-vance-el-sayed-attacks
Mohamed, Besheer. (2026). “25 Years After 9/11, a Portrait of Muslim Americans,” Pew Research Center, September 3, 2026. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/09/03/25-years-after-9-11-a-portrait-of-muslim-americans/
Mukherjee, Trisha. (2026). “Nithya Raman, a practicing Hindu, elected as mayor of Los Angeles,” Religion News Service,Alex Garland, November 5, 2026. https://religionnews.com/2026/11/05/nithya-raman-a-practicing-hindu-elected-as-mayor-of-los-angeles/
Religion News Service. (2026). “The Texas Sharia Panic: How a Rallying Cry Became a Curriculum,” Complexified, September 21, 2026. https://religionnews.com/2026/09/21/the-texas-sharia-panic-how-a-rallying-cry-became-a-curriculum/
Seattle Gay News (2026). “Jaelyn Scott wins in a landslide, becoming Washington’s first openly Trans legislator,” November 4, 2026. https://www.sgn.org/story/171841
The New York Times (2026). “Gina Hinojosa on Why She Calls Herself a Populism (and Not a Progressive),” October 24, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/video/podcasts/100000011212069/gina-hinojosa-on-why-she-calls-herself-a-populist-and-not-a-progressive.html
[1] Medicare for all signifies universal healthcare for the United States.
Latest News
Pluralism Triumphs in the 2026 US Midterms: Religion, Populism, and America’s First Muslim Senator
2026 US Midterm Elections: It’s Not Just Affordability, Stupid!
Prof. Lewandowsky The AfD Does Not Create Xenophobia, It Amplifies It
Prof. Turčalo: Serbia’s Student Movement Showed That the Western Balkans Are Not Condemned to Tyranny and Ethnonationalism
Dr. O’Donohue: Why Courts Constrain Democratic Backsliding—or Enable It
Pluralism Triumphs in the 2026 US Midterms: Religion, Populism, and America’s First Muslim Senator
2026 US Midterm Elections: It’s Not Just Affordability, Stupid!
Prof. Lewandowsky The AfD Does Not Create Xenophobia, It Amplifies It
Category
Pluralism Triumphs in the 2026 US Midterms: Religion, Populism, and America’s First Muslim Senator
2026 US Midterm Elections: It’s Not Just Affordability, Stupid!
Prof. Lewandowsky The AfD Does Not Create Xenophobia, It Amplifies It
Prof. Turčalo: Serbia’s Student Movement Showed That the Western Balkans Are Not Condemned to Tyranny and Ethnonationalism
Dr. O’Donohue: Why Courts Constrain Democratic Backsliding—or Enable It
ECPS Panel — Between Outrage and Silence: Digital Populism, Emotions, and Democratic Participation