(LifeSiteNews) — A Methodist megachurch pastor Democrats have nominated for U.S. Senate in Kansas challenged his congregation to repent for contributing to climate change in a recently unearthed 2020 sermon.
Rev. Adam Hamilton is the pastor of the 24,000-member Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, which Religion News describes as the largest United Methodist church in America. Last month, he won a crowded Democrat primary with almost 35 percent of the vote and will face incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall in November.
Fox News reported Monday that it found a January 2020 sermon of Hamilton’s titled “What would Jesus say about climate change?”
“Some of the things that we grow, because we like to eat them, like cattle, end up producing more carbon dioxide than other crops that we could grow, other forms of food that we could have,” Hamilton told his flock. “And so, in all of these ways, we are creating or adding to the amount of greenhouse gases in our world.”
“Now, you got to do everything you can to reduce your own usage of fossil fuels, but maybe changing your diet so that the things that you eat are requiring less production that creates methane and carbon dioxide and everything else,” he continued.
“So what I’m calling you to today, and I’m calling myself to it, because I’ve been wasteful, I’ve done things that wasn’t, you know, I didn’t think about it, how it wasn’t really good stewardship of the earth around me,” the pastor added. “I’m calling us to repentance to say, ‘I realize that this has impact, even if it seems small, it has an impact on the world and future generations. And I feel badly about that, and I’m going to do something different from this time forward.’”
Marshall pounced on the revelation, telling Fox that “in a state with more cattle than people, Hamilton saying that Kansans need repent for eating too much beef and flip flopping on the Farm Bill proves he’d be just like every other liberal Democrat in the Senate.”
A Hamilton spokesman responded by noting that Marshall himself had “repeatedly introduced legislation to reduce emissions from cattle and claimed ‘everyone’s concerned about the methane production in the cattle industry,” and “should repent for failing to stand up for Kansas cattle producers on tariffs, foreign imports, and skyrocketing diesel prices, and now he should repent for attacking Adam for something Roger Marshall said himself in the Senate.”
But while Marshall has worked in the past on methane reduction, the most noteworthy aspect of the sermon is not Hamilton’s stance on an environmental policy question but rather his framing environmental activity as a spiritual matter in need of “repentance.” By contrast, his campaign site endorses a “woman’s right to choose,” i.e. abortion, despite the Bible unambiguously condemning “murder” and “shed(ding) innocent blood” as “detestable to” the Lord, because “in the image of God has God made mankind”; and modern embryology conclusively establishing that the preborn are living, distinct human beings from the earliest moments of conception.
The Kansas Senate race has recently tightened according to multiple analysts, but Republicans hope framing Hamilton as another “woke” extremist can turn things around in a midterm election season widely seen as an uphill battle for the GOP. A similar fight is underway in Texas, where Democrats nominated Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico on the assumption his religiosity would help sell him as a mainstream candidate, but soon ran into a long list of far-left positions Talarico not only held but framed as rooted in Christianity.