If you want to understand American politics today, starting with the prospects for the 2018 midterm elections, you need to know Jim Domen. By the time he was in middle school, Mr. Domen knew he was different. His attraction to boys confused him. He knew it would shock his parents, born-again Christians.
“I tried to read the Bible, and I prayed to change the sinful desires,” Mr. Domen told a radio interviewer in 2013. He tried dating girls, but that didn’t work either.
When he eventually told his parents, they were “devastated,” he has said. They ordered him to seek treatment from a Christian counselor, but his attractions persisted.
For several years in his 20s, Mr. Domen has said, he had a relationship with a man. After the couple split up, Mr. Domen enrolled as a seminary student at Azusa Pacific University, an evangelical Christian university in Azusa, Calif., and it was there that his life changed at last. He met his future wife; took a job at the California Family Council, an affiliate of Focus on the Family, an organization that promotes “biblical” answers to America’s social problems; and worked toward the passage of Proposition 8, California’s 2008 statewide ballot initiative stating that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”
From 2011 to 2014, Mr. Domen was a leader of Multisport Ministries, a national men’s athletic ministry that encourages men “to win as God’s men, competing in the character of Christ.” His transformation, he has said, was helped along by “hanging around healthy heterosexual men really teaching me on what it is to be a true man, the true masculinity.” Mr. Domen’s Twitter bio reads: “Pastor, Ironman, Husband, Daddy, Triathlete and Deplorable. I want the world to know I live for the glory of Jesus Christ.”
Since 2014, Mr. Domen has been leading Church United, a group he founded with the aim of “helping pastors transform California at the government and church level.” If the Republican Party holds on to its congressional majority in 2018 and the presidency in 2020, it will be thanks in part to the efforts of Mr. Domen and others like him.
This month in Washington, at the Road to Majority conference, an annual gathering of conservative religious activists, I heard Marsha Blackburn, a Republican representative from Tennessee who is running to replace Senator Bob Corker, sum up the national picture.
“You all have heard that the democrats say they’re going to have a big blue wave,” she said, as the audience tittered. “We have to make certain that blue wave goes crashing into the great red wall.” With a nod to the west, she added, “It looks like they had a little red-wall building going on in California this week.”
California may look to the world like a blue state. But, as Ms. Blackburn knows, it has large swaths of red. Much of this is concentrated inland, where agribusiness millionaires share the roads with a multiethnic working population.
Mr. Domen’s contribution to the red wall turns on an evergreen insight: Pastors can drive votes. The goal of Church United is therefore to politicize pastors in the right direction. Church United started with six affiliated pastors in 2014. The group now counts approximately 500 member pastors.
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