Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson discussed her own faith and criticized "conventional politicians" for lacking a "sophisticated understanding" of issues in the United States.

"Some people seem to think if you’re coming from a spiritual perspective, you’re less sophisticated. I respectfully disagree, I think you’re more sophisticated. I think people who have a deeper understanding and commitment to love tend to have a greater recognition of the power of evil," Williamson told the New York Times on Thursday.

She then criticized politicians for not recognizing the "dark psychic force" she referenced in the second Democratic presidential debate.

"The conventional politicians haven’t been mentioning it because they don’t know what to say about it because there’s a lack of sophisticated understanding of what it is and what to do about it," said Williamson.

Williamson's defense of a spiritual perspective came after she criticized Democrats.

"I believe that the over-secularization of the Democratic Party has not served it. And I don’t think it has served the Democratic Party to make people of faith feel so diminished sometimes," said Williamson.

Democratic voters are less likely to believe in God than Republicans and Independents, and religiously unaffiliated Americans overwhelmingly identify as Democrats.

Several Democratic politicians have been criticized for targeting people of faith. Last December, Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, questioned a Catholic judicial nominee over his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization, prompting an official rebuke from the Senate. In 2017, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein drew criticism for telling judicial nominee Amy Coney Barrett, also a Catholic, "the dogma lives loudly within you."

"It’s only been in the last few decades that Democrat and liberal politics has become so overly secularized and so overly corporatized. This is an aberration in my mind, and I’m enough of a student of American history to know that. Franklin Roosevelt said a prayer on the radio as soon as the D-Day invasion began. Look at the Second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln. He contextualized the entire Civil War in terms of what it represented spiritually and his quoting from the Bible and so forth," said Williamson.

In 1978, 6% of Democrats were religiously unaffiliated, while more than 30% identified as Catholic, 19% as mainline Protestant, and 22% as evangelical Protestant. The percentage of Democrats identifying as religiously unaffiliated has more than doubled in the last four decades, while those identifying as Catholic, mainline, and evangelical declined by roughly nine percentage points in each category.

Williamson is the author of over a dozen books about spirituality. She grew up in a conservative Jewish home, but was later influenced by Helen Schucman's 1976 book A Course in Miracles, which the author claimed was dictated to her by Jesus.

She has made love a centerpiece of her campaign, and has said she is "going to harness love for political purposes."