Staff Reports
Fox News this week dug up a January 2020 sermon by Adam Hamilton and fed it straight into the Kansas Senate fight. The clip shows Hamilton, the Democratic nominee and founding pastor of a large United Methodist church, urging his flock to “repent” about choices that raise their carbon footprints — including lines about diet and cattle. In a state that lives and breathes beef, that soundbite landed like an ugly steak on the campaign grill.
What the sermon actually said
In the recorded sermon titled “What Would Jesus Say About Climate Change?” Hamilton talked about stewardship, greenhouse gases and personal change. He said, “That’s what repentance means — I saw things differently, it changed my heart, and it changed my behavior.” He also suggested people might consider changing what they eat to cut emissions. That is the line Republicans have been running on, trimmed to fit a tidy attack: “repent for eating beef.”
Why this matters in a cattle state
Kansas is not exactly a tofu-trailblazer. The state has roughly 5.8 million head of cattle — more cows than people by a long shot — and agriculture drives a lot of local income. Telling farmers and ranchers they should feel guilty about beef is political malpractice in rural Kansas. Voters here notice who shares their values and who sounds like a sermon from inside a coastal think tank.
The ad war and the context
Republican groups and Senator Roger Marshall pounced, running edited ads that stitch the sermon into a neat “out of touch” narrative. The Hamilton campaign and independent reporting note those ads splice different parts of the sermon, removing context. So yes, the attack is both a fair political play and a little slick: Hamilton’s full message was broader, but the soundbite — even out of context — makes him look misaligned with Kansas culture.
So what should voters take away?
Voters should watch the full sermon clip themselves and judge. But they should also notice tone and judgment. It’s one thing for a pastor to urge personal stewardship. It’s another for a Senate nominee to sound like he’d lecture a beef state about dinner choices. Kansas deserves a senator who understands farm bills, diesel prices, and local values — not one whose past sermons make easy fodder for ads and debate jabs. If Hamilton wanted to avoid this, he should have known what to say in public — or expected the rest of us to watch what he already said.
