DES MOINES, Iowa — The meeting began with a prayer. Heads bowed and eyes closed. Then the members of “We Are Church Confessing,” a group of liberal faith leaders and activists from greater Des Moines, got to work. It was a midweek morning in May, and the Iowa Democratic caucuses felt at once far off on the calendar and also, somehow, already here.

Several presidential candidates had swept through town in recent days. The primary season was underway, and the group of pastors at Plymouth United Church of Christ had a full agenda. An asylum-seeker needed help at an upcoming appointment with federal immigration officials. Summer meetings needed to be scheduled. There was talk of staging a “die-in” in front of the state capitol to call for more state spending on public education, environmental programs, transgender health care services, an implicit bias training program for police, or preferrably some combination of all of the above.

When the meeting was over, the conversation turned to progressive politics and religion, and how the two fit together.

“There’s a saying: ‘Religion is always political but never partisan,’” said Nikira Hernandez-Evans, the pastor at Plymouth Church. Hernandez-Evans said she’s comfortable preaching about specific issues, but isn’t planning on discussing 2020 politics with her congregants. As the pastor of a “progressive Christian congregation,” she added, “it is not ever my job to tell people what to believe.”

In Iowa, a starting assumption is that the Democratic faithful are majority Christian. The data bears that out. Two-thirds of Iowa’s Democratic voters are Christian; in the 2016 general election, that was 411,528 voters, to be exact. In a break from the past, a growing number of them identify as progressive Christians. But as the 2020 election draws closer, the state’s Christian community — both progressive and moderate alike — is searching for answers to a complex set of questions.

“‘Christian voters’ is a very alienating term …. I don’t feel like I’m a part of that, even though I’m Christian.”

As liberals, how should they blend their spiritual faith and political activism? How should Democrats running for president talk about religion? In Donald Trump, the party’s 2020 nominee will face a president who defies virtually every political norm, including those tied to faith. During the 2016 Republican primaries, Pope Francis said Trump’s anti-immigrant worldview made him “not a Christian.” Trump responded with a statement on Twitter predicting that the Islamic State group would attack the Vatican. He also called the Pope “disgraceful” for questioning his faith. Nevertheless, his policies and judicial appointments have kept him popular with white evangelical voters — the group with the loudest voice in the national religion-and-politics debate, and the one that helped install Trump in the White House.

“When people say ‘Christian voters’ they mean white people and they mean conservatives” who likely oppose abortion and gay marriage, said Natalie Harwood, a member of the First Unitarian Church of Des Moines. Harwood works at a Planned Parenthood clinic and is a diehard supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders. She’s also a person of faith. Given her values, Harwood said, “‘Christian voters’ is a very alienating term. I fall into those categories. But I don’t feel like I’m a part of that, even though I’m Christian.” As Connie Ryan, the executive director of the Interfaith Alliance of Iowa, put it: “a lot of times, progressive people of faith are left out of the conversation.”

So religious activists in Iowa’s Democratic circles are talking amongst themselves. Their dialogue on faith and activism, and what it means to be Christian and progressive, is robust, and their community is larger than perhaps most people realize. In more than two dozen interviews, clergy, religious activists and other liberal Christian voters said they felt they haven’t been at the forefront of progressive politics, leading the charge, in a long time, if ever.

In the 2016 general election, 63 percent of Iowa voters who supported Hillary Clinton were Protestant or Catholic. She won 33 percent of the vote among Iowans who said they attend religious services one or more times a week. Clinton managed to win 25 percent of the white evangelical vote — far less than Trump, whose overwhelming support from conservative evangelicals helped him win Iowa by a wide margin. But it was nonetheless a surprising showing by a candidate who supports abortion rights in a state where Christianity predominates, and where eight in 10 people say religion plays an important role in their lives.

The exit polls highlighted the Republican Party’s overall advantage with religious voters in Iowa. Among Republican voters in the state, 78 percent self-identify as Christian and white; less than two-thirds of Democrats view themselves the same way.

Nobody expects that to change in 2020. But Clinton’s performance in Iowa also served as a simple reminder that many religious voters don’t automatically back the candidate with an R next to their name.

There’s no data on the religious views of people who participate in the Iowa caucuses, or even data on the total number of people who caucus, for that matter — the Iowa Democratic Party doesn’t release a figure. But the available evidence points to an abundance of religious liberals taking part in the first-in-the-nation nominating contest. They’re out there. All Democratic primary candidates have to do is reach them.

With the February caucuses still more than seven months away, candidates have time to hone their stump-speech lines about faith, and Iowa’s liberal Christian voters have plenty of time to decide who they’ll support. Some Democrats, like South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, have already found their rhythms. Meanwhile, local leaders like Sarah Trone Garriott are working to determine what role they’ll play in the election. Trone, who works at the Des Moines Area Religious Council, left her ministry at Faith Lutheran soon after Trump took office in order to get involved more directly in community organizing.

What religious progressives don’t have heading into the 2020 race is a political blueprint that appeals to liberals from a wide range of Christian denominations, as well as Democrats from other faith backgrounds. This is true nationally, not just in Iowa. Factor in liberal voters who don’t identify with any religion at all, and it becomes easy to understand why Democrats tiptoe around the faith discussion.

It’s a classic Big Tent conundrum, a trap Democrats couldn’t escape in 2016. Include enough different people, enough interest groups and issues and viewpoints, and eventually the overarching message starts losing focus. Deep down, everyone walks away feeling slightly unsatisfied. The question is, will Democrats avoid the same trap this time around? Or can they find a way to make the diversity work to their advantage?

***

Progressive Christians will be the first to admit that, under Trump, they’re still figuring out how to mobilize politically. But that kind of challenge doesn’t seem insurmountable to people predisposed — through natural optimism, or belief in a higher power, or a combination of both — to see the glass as half full. In Iowa, at least, the religious left does have some things working in its favor, starting with a remarkably consistent attitude about the role faith should play in public life. This shared perspective was clear on a mid-May afternoon at Lucca, a trendy Des Moines eatery, where Rev. Naomi Kirstein, a local pastor, had convinced three of her congregants to meet me to talk religion and politics.

The place was filled with business people and government workers in suits. The state attorney general sat a few tables away, enjoying a quiet meal. It was pouring outside, setting the mood for a discussion on the two topics you’re never supposed to discuss with strangers. At the pastor’s table near the back of the restaurant, her son Nathan Kirstein, an attorney and one of the people she had invited to lunch, was trying to explain the importance he places on the faith background of candidates running for president.

“I don’t care what a candidate’s faith is,” said Kirstein, who works at an organization that advocates for people with disabilities. The more important question for him, Kirstein said, was whether a candidate’s platform matched up with his own faith principles of fairness and compassion. “Whether you’re Muslim, Hindu, atheist, it doesn’t matter. What are your values?”

What if playing it safe on religion is no longer necessary for Democrats running for president in 2020?

Heads started nodding around the table. “Values and character and moral compass are important to me, and rise above electability,” said Deborah Svec-Carstens, a state government lawyer who is pursuing a master’s degree at the Iowa School of Theology. The group’s pastor agreed. “My faith informs me,” Naomi Kirstein said. A candidate “doesn’t have to say ‘I’m Christian’ for me to vote for them. But I want to hear how their issues — because of my faith — connect to the poor, the oppressed, taking care of the earth.”

The conviction that faith informs politics came up again and again in interviews with liberal clergy, lay people and others progressive activists in the state. So did the importance of maintaining a separation between church and state, though the issue has a different meaning for religious liberals than it does for conservatives.

On the right, that separation is typically framed as a question of religious liberty, and based on an argument that the government does not have the right to force people to obey laws that violate their religious beliefs. On the left, the argument for a church-state divide is based on a libertarian insistence that religious freedom is absolute, and the state should never pass policies based on religious grounds. Tellingly, when Vice President Mike Pence, a deeply religious evangelical Christian, came up in conversations, Iowa’s liberal faith leaders tended to raise the separation of church and state issue first, before mentioning his conservative stance on abortion and other issues. (“My impression of Pence is that he’s a theocrat,” said Patti McKee, the director of the Catholic Peace Ministry in Des Moines. The remark was not meant as a compliment.)

Another constant was the deeply held view that government should provide a strong social safety net for people who need help. Most Democrats feel that way, but secular liberals don’t usually talk about government in spiritual terms. In Iowa, progressive Christians are as openly religious as their conservative counterparts. And both sides invoked the same scripture, even when they were promoting policies on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Consider the opposing views of Ron Heideman, a liberal activist who lives in Indianola, Iowa, and belongs to a Unitarian church there, and Steve Scheffler, the president of the Iowa & Freedom Coalition, one of the state’s leading conservative faith groups.

“When I look at the Republican Party, and what Jesus says in the Bible, I see no similarity at all,” Heideman said. Scheffler felt the same way about Democrats. “As a bible-bleeding evangelical, I believe the scriptures are not open to interpretation,” Scheffler said. Progressive Christians “don’t preach the gospel. They preach a social doctrine of whatever fits their personal agenda.”

Liberal and conservative Christians are having “totally different conversations” about religious freedom and the government’s role in society because the two sides think about key concepts like responsibility and sin in such different ways, said Jennifer Harvey, a religion professor at Drake University in Des Moines. Christians on the left view society’s ills through a “collectivist” lens, she said, while those on the right typically see the same problems in individualistic terms. Of course, liberals have argued for decades that the conservative position ignores systemic racism and other forms of structural inequality.

“We cannot just say it’s a level playing field. The playing field is hardly level,” said Rev. Frederick K. Gaddy, the pastor of St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church in Des Moines. “It’s hard to say, ‘Pull yourself up from your bootstraps,’ when someone’s stepping on your neck. It’s like, ‘Well, take your boot off my neck and then let’s talk about that.’”

***

For Democrats talking about faith on the campaign trail, the conventional wisdom is that it’s risky, at best. If a candidate ignores faith completely in stump speeches and interviews, they risk alienating voters whose lives are centered on religion. If they take the opposite approach and lean in, talking in detail about their places of worship and belief in the Almighty, they risk scaring off secular voters who don’t want to listen to God stuff.

Faced with that kind of impossible decision, nearly all campaigns do the logical thing and aim straight down the middle of the lane, without putting any fancy English on it, hoping to score a solid-feeling seven each frame, or maybe even an eight. Sure, the strategy might result in the occasional split, leaving pins at both extremes feeling lonely and abandoned. But it reduces the odds of a damaging gutterball (see: Obama, Barack, trying to explain the economic frustrations of rural Pennsylvania voters during the 2008 primaries: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion.”) Nobody wants to be that guy.

But sometimes, in rare cases, that strategy pays off. Obama, after all, also won praise for speaking directly about race and religion in a speech that addressed his relationship with the minister of his church in Chicago, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. That speech proved to be a highlight of his campaign, the kind of viral, star-affirming moment that has so far eluded numerous high-profile 2020 Democrats languishing in the polls. What if the conventional wisdom is wrong — what if playing it safe on religion is no longer necessary for Democrats running for president in 2020?

In Iowa, liberal Christians don’t exist on the margins of the grassroots left. They are the grassroots left.

Today’s Democratic Party is not what it was a decade ago. In 2008, Democrats were debating things like the Iraq War vote. The party was less attuned to economic inequality and climate change. Twitter was a toddler. It was a moment of calm before the global financial crisis and the Great Recession set in, before the fight over Obamacare. Pre-tea party. Pre-Occupy Wall Street. Pre-Black Lives Matter, pre-#MeToo. Pre-@RealDonaldTrump, pre-AOC.

A decade later, the conversation on the left around many of these issues has changed. More broadly, the country looks and prays differently than it did when Obama first ran for president. In 2008, 54 percent of Americans identified as white and Christian, according to data from the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, which tracks religious attitudes in the United States. In 2018, just 41 percent identified that way, a fairly stunning 13-point drop in only 10 years.

“Young, white Christians leaving the church and becoming religiously unaffiliated are turbo-charging the change,” Robert Jones, the institute’s CEO, said in an interview. Religiously unaffiliated Americans are still outnumbered, however. In Iowa in 2016, just 15 percent of voters said they were religiously unaffiliated; 75 percent said they were Catholic or Protestant. And the focus on the total number of white Christians ignores an important phenomenon taking place among the many millions of voters who still call themselves Christian: a hollowing-out of the political middle. The shift is pronounced in Iowa, where religious Christians on the right skew very conservative, and ones on the left increasingly skew very liberal.

The shift mirrors the growing divide in national politics. The Democratic Party overall has moved significantly left, in response to a vocal progressive wing that is not down with incremental change. Democrats in and out of Congress don’t want the government to spruce up the safety net. They’re asking for a gut reno. Free or partially free public college, the big banks broken up, a higher minimum wage to help the working poor, some sort of a national health care system (the ideas are many and the concrete details few), sweeping climate change action, and much, much more, mostly paid for by raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations.

These are exactly the kind of proposals coming out of church meetings and roundtable discussions in Iowa. The specifics differ at times. The broad themes — helping the needy and most vulnerable, protecting the earth — are exactly the same. The candidates aren’t quoting scripture left and right, but they don’t have to. When Senator Elizabeth Warren says the rich should “pay their fair share,” or Sanders claims society has a “moral responsibility” to take on climate change, voters of faith recognize the symbiosis.