By Breitbart News Network | Created at 2026-08-13 21:45:56 | Updated at 2026-08-13 23:22:57
4 hours ago
Methodist Pastor Adam Hamilton, the Democrat candidate in Kansas’s Senate race, publicly denied the exclusivity of Jesus during a sermon, promoting inclusivism by asserting that people of other religions have a “different lens” that gives them a less clear picture of who God is but will not keep them from entering Heaven in the afterlife.
Hamilton is the founding and senior pastor of the Church of the Resurrection, running as an “’independent-minded’ candidate on the Democratic ticket for the United States Senate.” He won his primary, pitting him against incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KY) this fall.
Hamilton’s victory places some of his past positions in the spotlight to a greater degree. In past teachings, Hamilton has stated that he does not believe that an individual must know or follow Jesus Christ in their lifetime in order to be saved and spend eternity with God – a central tenet of the Christian faith. Rather, he explains, adherents of other world religions still go to Heaven after they die, only to realize that they had faith in Jesus the entire time but did not know it.
Among theologians, there are three major camps in the question of eternal salvation for those who are not Christians: exclusivism, pluralism, and inclusivism. Exclusivists believe that only a specific belief in Jesus Christ is salvific; pluralists believe that adherence to non-Christian religions are inherently salvific. Inclusivists believe that all salvation is through Jesus Christ, but the atonement he achieved on the cross will be applied both to people who call on his name for salvation and for people who are virtuous but do not know about him.
Without naming it, Hamilton espoused the inclusivist position in a 2022 sermon titled “Is the Bible True? Is Jesus the Only Way?” He appealed to famous Christians who held to this stance, including C.S. Lewis and John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist church.
“This is the sort of official position of the Catholic Church,” the pastor said, referring to the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s and its key documents such as Nostra Aetate. “It’s where most mainline Protestant theologians come out.”
“I’ve done spent this a lot of my life studying different world religions, and you find some get you a little closer,” Hamilton instructed his church, offering the caveat that “bad religion” can manifest itself, “leading to oppression or harm or abuse.” Thus, not all religions lead people to God.
He then employed the metaphor of a phoropter, the tool used in eye exams to determine which lens shape leads to the clearest images in the eyes of a patient.
“The image begins to become clear, like this picture on the screen [of an eye exam chart], and then you study another one, you find it gets it even clearer. You suddenly see that the image becomes even more in focus, and so for me, as I’ve studied different world religions, I sit in the chair, and I’m looking through these different lenses, and when I finally got to that last one, when I finally got to Jesus and Christianity, it was like, I could see clearly the clearest that I had seen,” he said.
“And so I think about how Paul says he talks about Jesus. He says the Son is the image of the invisible God, right? And Jesus elsewhere says if you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father. And and so in Christianity, we believe that God actually came and walked among us in the flesh. He didn’t give us a book; he came in person. And when we look at Jesus, we have the clearest picture we have of God,” he told his congregation.
“When I began to look through the lens of Jesus, my spiritual eyesight, I felt became the most clear it could be, like you see in this image here,” he said, before explaining that people of other religions simply have a different lens looking at the same object — the triune God.
“Now, the truth is that a Muslim would say through Islam they see the most clearly, and a Hindu through Hinduism and a Jew through Judaism, and so I recognize we all have a different lens that we’re seeing through, and sometimes we think – depending how we were raised and how we think – one lens is you know clearly a better lens for me,” he said, suggesting that some simply do not see Jesus in their lens, failing to address the question of those who explicitly reject him.
Hamilton then quoted 1 Timothy 2:3-6 to argue that the atonement of Jesus Christ has been extended to people of all faiths, lumping together a motte of young children or the mentally disabled with the bailey of pagans who reject Christ or even persecute Christians. “Many of us believe that God can give the saving work of Jesus — God can take that payment Jesus has made and apply it to anyone he chooses based upon what he sees of their own hearts,” he said.
“And when it comes to other faiths, I believe as a Christian that they are going to – when they get to heaven, they’re going to see Jesus and they’re going to say, ‘Ah, it was you all along that I was searching for,’ but I don’t fear that those folks will spend eternity in Hell,” he concluded [emphasis added].
Republican lawmakers took notice of a clip from Hamilton’s sermon shared Thursday morning on Breitbart News’ X account. “Why do Democrats keep nominating ‘preachers’ who reject the central tenets of Christianity?” wrote Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), alluding to the candidacy of James “God Is Non-Binary” Talarico. Cruz went on to quote John 14:6, a passage read in the prelude to Hamilton’s sermon but not directly addressed: “Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’”
Hamilton’s position comes as no surprise, given his support for legal abortion, Black Lives Matter, and affirming same-sex marriage within the United Methodist Church — all while presenting himself as a moderate.
Previously, Breitbart News highlighted his belief that the Bible is full of “hundreds” of mistakes and errors. In another message, Hamilton attempted to use the location of Jesus’s ascension as an example of a blatant biblical error, arguing that Luke and Matthew give conflicting locations for the event. In reality, Matthew does not narrate the Ascension, and there is no contradiction between the two gospels.
A recent Public Policy Polling survey – a Democrat pollster – showed an extremely close race between the two candidates, with incumbent Republican Roger Marshall garnering 46 percent and Hamilton seeing 45 percent support. Another nine percent – more than enough to swing the race in either direction – remained undecided. According to some reports, analysts have shifted the race down to a “likely Republican” status.
