By Jill Gattens
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer

Clergymen who run for political office are not necessarily conservative and sometimes hold progressive beliefs, a local pastor told an audience at Towson University on Thursday.
The Rev. Mark Parker of Breath of God Lutheran Church in Baltimore and an unsuccessful 2016 candidate for the Baltimore City Council, also said it was an opportunity to talk about what faith can look like in the public sphere, especially around issues of immigration, racism and public education.
Parker acknowledged that the collar was not a happy sight for some people and didn’t elicit smiles form his neighbors when he was on the campaign trail – especially those in their 20s and 30s, the LGBTQ community, and other people who feel they have been attacked by the church.
Nevertheless, Parker said he used his election campaign to challenge the stereotypes associated with religious leaders and to educate voters about the good that churches can bring to a community.
“I didn’t make apologies for it [the church], but I tried to demonstrate what it meant for me and maybe how it might be different from what it might mean to other folks,” Parker said.
Parker came to Towson as a part of a lecture series sponsored by The Table: A Lutheran-Episcopal Ministry at the university. The first installment focused on faith and politics. He was joined by Karen Simpson, who ran for Maryland state delegate in 2018.
Simpson, a former Democratic candidate in district 31B, said she tired of other people being the voice of Christianity and wanted to be the voice in her super conservative community.
“We were motivated by the 2016 election,” Simpson said. “We were tired of seeing those who were raised to be politicians. We needed someone new, someone different.”
Simpson said she felt called to run for delegate and believed it was so important to be that public servant. After meeting an indigenous woman, she said she realized the need for that voice.
“She said, ‘No matter what you do, nobody cares about us,’” Simpson said. “‘You care about all these different groups and we’re still on our own,’ which especially in that community is true. I still think about her and the need for that voice.”
Parker said he feels his main job in Baltimore City is to advocate on behalf of his people who didn’t have a voice. He said it is also his responsibility to be a community leader who can walk alongside people in making transformations in the neighborhoods. He felt he had been doing that as long as he had been preaching.
“As a pastor, I feel like that’s what I was doing for the six years before that,” Parker said. “A city council person in Baltimore City where I’m from felt really similar to the work that I was already doing. I just felt like I could make a bigger impact.”
During his campaign, Parker told voters that he was not running for office as a pastor. Instead, he painted himself as a neighbor running for office as a neighbor who happened to be serving as a pastor.
“Religion is something that, especially for younger voters, religion is either incredibly unfamiliar or about which they’re very skeptical,” Parker said. “Because of how personal it can be, I strongly respected my own internal boundaries between my role as pastor and the role as candidate.”
Parker said he was aware that most voters in his district would view a pastor as a negative thing. He said he went out of his way to stress his progressive views, such as his commitment to reproductive rights.
“We had this opportunity to say that there are Christians that view the world in a really different way than [former Arkansas Gov.] Mike Huckabee,” Parker said, referring to the conservative minister who ran for president as a Republican in 2008 and 2016. “Christians involved in politics can look and sound and care about working on really different issues than what you assume. A chance to put that out there and see what happens.”
1 Comment
Awesome article, Jill!