"We're going to do something unusual."

Evangelical pastor Doug Pagitt, dressed in a denim shirt and archetypal blue hat, stands in front of a white bus, talking to a camera.

It's July 2018, and in the lead-up to the United States midterms, he's touring across 15 states and 31 towns with a clear message: let's "barnstorm the country to change Congress".

His main aim is to engage religious voters — particularly those who have "reflexively voted for Republicans in the past", as he puts it in one video.

He wants them to "do something you may never have done" and vote for the Democrats instead.

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"Progressive politics and progressive ideas have had a harder time in the last four or five decades connecting with religiously motivated voters," he tells Sunday Extra's Hugh Riminton.

The evangelical pastor sees this as a "temporary" condition; part of the ebb-and-flow of politics.

But Pagitt wants that to change — and with a looming presidential election, the stakes are high.

"If it isn't addressed, it could become a permanent condition. And that's something that a lot of us are worried about for a lot of reasons," he says.

Keeping the faith

Sorry, this audio has expired Teaching the Left to talk to evangelicals

Pagitt also broadcasts his message online, to followers of his organisation Vote Common Good.

"We at Vote Common Good are not arguing that the Democrats should become a religious party," he says.

"What we want is for religious voters to know that Democratic candidates take them seriously and that they want to ask for their vote."

Pagitt says there hasn't always been such dissonance between progressive politicians and religious constituents.

"Say 40 years ago in the United States, the religious vote, both Evangelicals and Catholics and Protestants, they were split across parties fairly evenly," he says.

"In 1976 there was an evangelical president who was a Democrat from the southern state of Georgia."

Since Jimmy Carter — who, at 95, still teaches at a Sunday school class in a small church in Georgia — the Democrats haven't had the same brand of openly religious leader at their helm.

"Now some four decades later, [things have] shifted where to think that a Democrat would be a southerner of religious commitment just seems nearly impossible," Pagitt says.

As president, Jimmy Carter prayed several times a day. ( Getty: Michael Brennan )

Trump 2020

In the United States, the evangelical Christian vote is not an insubstantial one.

And exit polls from the last presidential election in 2016 revealed white evangelical Christians voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump: 81 per cent, compared to just 16 per cent for Hillary Clinton.

Christian voters overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election. ( Getty: Sarah Rice )

White Catholics also supported Mr Trump over Mrs Clinton by a wide margin (60 per cent to 37 per cent).

"I was very disappointed that Hillary Clinton did not speak more about the action and the role that her faith has on how she thinks about her public service and how it would impact her as a candidate," Pagitt says.

He argues most Democratic candidates currently running for the primaries are shying away from bringing faith into politics — even when they're Christians.

"What they don't tend to do is talk about it very well or talk about it very openly," he says.

"And on the Republican side, you very often have candidates who have no religious interest at all, like Donald Trump ... who speaks regularly to people of faith and says 'your issues matter to me'."

Pastor Pagitt says Barack Obama did "pretty well at talking about his faith". ( Getty: Brendan Smialowski )

Pagitt says this goes a long way with religious voters.

"Donald Trump is that classic example of a politician being able to say, 'even though I'm not like you, I do like you'," he says.

"Voters can sniff it out when someone doesn't like them.

"And if they get the feeling that a Democratic candidate doesn't like them, it kind of doesn't matter if the candidate is even more similar to them in their own faith tradition."

Training Democrats

Part of Vote Common Good's work involves training Democratic candidates on how to engage religious voters.

Evangelist pastor Doug Pagitt wants religiously-motivated voters to engage with politics. ( Getty: Mark Ralston )

Pagitt says for Democratic candidates to be effective, it's about empathy — not espousing religious values.

"We say to them, 'feel free to tell a voter I'm not a religious person. I'm not motivated by religious faith, but I know that you are and because you are, I want to know more about how you're motivated for the things that you care about in the world'," he says.

And he doesn't want politicians to shy away from talking about issues like abortion.

It's a topic, he says, that's "not talked about very often on either side of the political spectrum".

"Somehow it's become a 'no talk' rule that carries a lot of power for the religious right," Pagitt says.

Pagitt is hesitant to cast any one religious group as the "power broker" in the US, and acknowledges a presidential candidate could still win without the religious vote.

"I just don't know why you would and why you would try to do so when religious voters are available, and are wanting to consider Democratic candidates, especially at this time," he says.

"Why you would turn your back on those voters, not only for this particular election, but just ongoing?"