Georgia has a history of faith-inspired leaders. Which vision will govern?
The night of the 2026 primary election, I walked into the downtown Atlanta Hyatt Regency minutes before Keisha Lance Bottoms stepped on stage to become the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia.
With emotion, the former Atlanta mayor described asking God, in the immediate aftermath of President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, what she was being called to do in this season. After prayer and deliberation, she announced her candidacy 196 days later.
Observers of Atlanta politics heard a familiar refrain. Bottoms has described sitting in church one Sunday overcome with emotion as the associate pastor’s sermon affirmed her private deliberations about running for mayor.
She won a contested election and served one term, inheriting a host of ethics-related challenges and facing the pandemic and protests following the murder of George Floyd and death of Rayshard Brooks. The same faith that led her to seek office also told her it was time to leave.
Georgia hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since 1998. It has never had a Black governor, nor a woman in the role.
But Bottoms shares something with most past governors: Christianity.
Former Democratic Gov. (and President) Jimmy Carter’s faith was central to his identity.
Former Repubican Gov. Sonny Perdue stood on the steps of the Capitol and prayed for rain — notably mentioning personal stewardship as partly to blame for the state’s drought.
Debate intensifies over vision of Christianity in politics
Christian rhetoric is hardly absent from our state and national politics.
However, Bottoms’ candidacy comes at a time of intense debate over Christian nationalism, raising a consequential question: For believers, what does faith tell them their power is for?
We are witnessing a battle between two visions: dominion versus stewardship. Christian nationalism fuses religious identity with political authority.
Power is to be acquired, retained, and wielded. Liberation theology, in contrast, calls the power structure to create the conditions under which the people can be healthy and whole first. Georgia has seen this Christianity before.
A Georgia preacher we all know fought for equal citizenship, for voting rights, for the dignity of the sanitation worker — Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
His moral clarity called the question of what it takes to build a more perfect union for all, regardless of race or creed. His theory of change was human dignity, not Christian rule.
Bottoms has an opportunity to translate this moral tradition into democratic action. If faith is the moral vocabulary in which Bottoms most naturally explains who she is, she has an opportunity to tell Georgians what that faith asks her to do with power.
What does her Christianity say about Georgians working multiple gig jobs to make ends meet? About ensuring Georgia children are set up for success? What moral specificity does she uniquely bring to the governor’s mansion?
Bottoms’ term as mayor offers some clues
We can search her mayorship for clues.
- An audacious plan to build or preserve 20,000 affordable housing units, an effort continuing under Atlanta’s current mayor.
- Support for barbershops and hairdressers whose small businesses were crushed by the pandemic.
- A city-funded savings account for babies born during her time in office.
This is not to say her governing was not without missteps. Leading through a pandemic, the Buckhead secession effort and a national civil rights reckoning laid the ground for the state Legislature to pass some of the most restrictive protests laws in the country.
Georgia has spent two decades becoming the darling of the South for big business, from tech unicorns to lucrative, boring companies that quietly power our daily lives. Yet the share of Georgians in poverty has changed relatively little. A higher percentage of children in Georgia are uninsured compared with the national average. More than half of renters are spending more than the federal government recommends for housing and utilities.
A progressive Christian theory of the state makes clear these aren’t solely individual hardships, but moral failures that demand shared responsibility and problem-solving from government and community.
The Peach State has shown the nation a desire for Christian progressivism and moral clarity in the election and elevation of U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock. In Warnock and Bottoms, the South can show how Christian progressivism can transform a state and country struggling to meet its citizens’ most basic needs.
Two and a half centuries in, the American question isn’t whether faith belongs in politics, but what happens when religious conviction acquires political power.
Bottoms says she has been called for such a time as this. The question isn’t if God called her to run. Rather, it’s what her faith is calling her and Georgia to become.
Saba Long is an Atlanta-based communications strategist and former nonprofit executive director. She is a co-host of “Where The Party At?,” a podcast that explains politics to everyday people.
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