Democrat Senate candidate and pastor Adam Hamilton asked in a 2015 video how much “latitude” Christians have to push back on the Bible, including whether they can say the Apostle Paul was “wrong.”
Hamilton made the comments at an event run by an LGBTQ-affirming Christian group. He spoke during a pastors’ panel hosted by the Reformation Project. The nonprofit was founded in 2013 by Matthew Vines to reform church teaching on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Hamilton traced the questions to congregants who came out to him as gay, saying it left him without a framework for reading scripture.
“How in fact did God inspire it? How much latitude do we have to push back on it? Where can we say, you know, here I think Paul’s wrong?” Hamilton said, calling it “a really unnerving thought” for a person who read scripture daily.
Hamilton said the tension surfaced in a 2001 sermon series, and that the message that shifted his thinking was one on the violence of God in the Old Testament. He said he came to see those passages as incompatible with the teachings of Jesus and concluded there was “a little more culture in the Bible” than he had allowed.
“That has implications for how I read the passages of scripture that are often applied to same gender relationships,” Hamilton said.
Hamilton returned to the Apostle Paul in a January 2025 sermon on Mary Magdalene, arguing that churches barring women from the pulpit had misread Paul’s letters. He said such churches “turned to Paul who’s trying to address first century Christianity,” rather than following what Jesus did with Mary Magdalene. The outlet Protestia reported the sermon under a headline saying Hamilton had called Paul “wrong” about women and ministry.
Hamilton is running for the U.S. Senate in Kansas against incumbent Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS). The senior pastor of the Church of the Resurrection, the largest United Methodist congregation in the country, won the Democrat primary this month.
Hamilton has also said the Bible contains “hundreds” of errors. In a 2022 sermon, he suggested Muslims, Hindus, and adherents of other faiths would reach Heaven and recognize Jesus after death.
A Public Policy Polling survey showed Marshall at 46 percent and Hamilton at 45 percent. Nine percent were undecided. The pollster leans Democrat. Analysts recently shifted the race from “safe Republican” to “likely Republican.”
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