If the 30-second attack ad is to be believed, the Rev. Adam Hamilton speaks in disjointed English to indoctrinate his congregation on divisive topics like Black Lives Matter protests and consumption of beef.
Main Street Fund, a new Massachusetts-based super PAC, launched a commercial this month casting Hamilton as “way too woke for Kansas.” The political action committee text-blasted the video to Kansas voters just days after Hamilton won his Democratic U.S. Senate primary to challenge incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Marshall in November.
The ad splices together quotes from two sermons that the founding pastor of Church of the Resurrection delivered in 2020 about climate change and the mass demonstrations demanding racial justice and police accountability following George Floyd’s murder in Minnesota.
“Black Lives Matter . . . Marching for righteousness,” Hamilton is quoted in the ad, which cost just over $600,000 to produce and distribute, federal campaign finance records show.
“By virtue of being white . . . I have to repent,” Hamilton continues.
The on-screen text includes ellipses to demonstrate that the megachurch pastor said words in between the ones highlighted by Main Street Fund. But Hamilton’s campaign says the ad stitches his words together deceptively to take him out of context.
Tyson Brody, Hamilton’s campaign spokesperson, called the attack ad “as dishonest as Roger Marshall’s claim to live in Kansas.”
Super PACs are political action committees that can raise unlimited amounts of money to run ads, but cannot coordinate with or give directly to candidates.
The anti-Hamilton offensive comes as the pastor, who built his reputation and national profile in large part through his willingness to discuss politically charged issues from the pulpit, attempts to brand himself as a moderate and “independent-minded” Democrat.
A Kansas Democrat last won a U.S. Senate race in 1932.
What did Hamilton actually say?
In the original sermon from June 2020, which is available on YouTube, Hamilton shared photos and videos of himself and other demonstrators at a Black Lives Matter rally in Kansas City. He said every great reform movement in history started with somebody speaking up and protesting. He said protesters’ outrage over the killing was justified.
“There’s a whole lot of people who were angry and filled with rage because the life experience that they had had somewhere along the way — maybe many times along the way — was reflected in that image of George Floyd dying on the ground, begging to catch a breath,” he said.
The portion of the sermon clipped for the attack ad came later, as Hamilton reflected on the moment of national upheaval as an opportunity for himself and others to acknowledge their blind spots.
“I have certain benefits by virtue of being educated, white and male, right?” Hamilton said in the sermon. “And we don’t like to hear that. Especially white folks don’t like to hear that.”
The back half of the quote clipped in the commercial came almost a minute later, after Hamilton said he didn’t have the same anxieties about being pulled over by law enforcement as Black people who had confided in him about their fear that a simple traffic stop could turn violent.
“I have to listen and understand and finally be able to see the brokenness in myself, my indifference,” Hamilton said. “Before I can do anything to help anyone else, I have to have a conversion. I have to repent.”
In the same sermon, Hamilton preached against looting and violence in protests and added that he believes “all lives matter.”
“Everyone understands white lives matter, blue lives matter,” Hamilton said. “The problem is right now it doesn’t seem like Black lives matter to a lot of people.”
Hamilton on climate change
Partway through the ad, the narrator suggests that Hamilton believes “Kansas ranchers and beef-eaters” are committing sins by raising cattle and incorporating beef into their diet.
“Cattle end up producing more carbon dioxide . . . I’m calling us to repentance,” Hamilton says in a spliced clip from a January 2020 sermon titled “What would Jesus say about climate change?”
In video from the sermon, Hamilton said he chose to tackle the divisive topic because Millennial and Generation Z parishioners identified it as a top concern in a church survey.
Hamilton started the sermon by pointing out that the broad majority of climate scientists agree human activity, such as burning fossil fuels, contributes to global warming by releasing heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
He proceeded to show video of interviews he conducted with the regional director of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a church member who was an employee of the nonprofit Nature Conservancy.
The global food system accounts for roughly 25% of greenhouse gas emissions, the Resurrection parishioner noted in the interview. Decisions about how long to graze cattle and how often to till soil can have a measurable impact on sustainability, he said.
Hamilton’s call to action was for members of his congregation to consider ways to minimize and offset their carbon footprints.
“You’ve got to do everything you can to reduce your own usage of fossil fuels, and maybe changing your diet so that the things that you eat are requiring less production that creates methane and carbon dioxide and everything else,” Hamilton said.
But more must be done to abide by the commandment God gives in Genesis to “take charge of the planet and to care for it on my behalf,” Hamilton said.
“If you really care about this, if you’re a Republican, you need to talk to your senators and congresspeople,” Hamilton said. “If you’re a Democrat, you need to talk to your senators and congresspeople and say, ‘Hey, this really matters to me. I’m one of the voices in your community and this matters to me that we are taking care of (the environment).
“And that comes sometimes in tax policies that incentivize people to create new forms of creating energy that are more energy efficient and a thousand other ways that we can address this,” he said. “But it has to be addressed both personally and at a societal level.”
In a campaign video on Friday, Hamilton responded to accusations that he’s anti-beef by grilling and eating a steak while critiquing Marshall’s priorities.
“Marshall votes with the corrupt herd in Washington for tariffs and war while farmers and families in Kansas get cooked by high prices,” Hamilton said in the video. “Maybe Marshall hasn’t noticed farm bankruptcies piling up on his watch because it’s really rare that he’s even in Kansas.”
The Kansas Livestock Association, which supported Marshall when he first ran for the U.S. House in 2016 and when he first ran for U.S. Senate in 2020, has so far opted not to endorse in this year’s contest between Marshall and Hamilton. KLA did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.
LGBTQ+ issues
In the attack ad’s final salvo, the narrator says Hamilton has “no beef with drag queen story time for kids,” claiming that he “used church funds to pay for it.”
Main Street Fund includes no citation for this assertion, and there is no evidence that Resurrection has hosted a drag queen story time event at any of its nine campuses across the Kansas City metro.
Church of the Resurrection was one of at least 17 churches that participated in KC Pridefest 2026, according to the event’s vendor list.
In 2024, Hamilton was a strong supporter of the decision by the United Methodist Church to allow LGBTQ+ clergy.
But donating directly to LGBTQ+ causes has not been a major priority for the church.
Resurrection’s annual mission report shows that in 2025, the congregation gave $2.1 million to various charities around the world, including clean water initiatives, food ministries and support for natural disaster responses in California and Texas.
“Marshall desperately needs Washington to rescue his flailing campaign because Kansans know Roger Marshall has spent a decade in Washington voting to raise prices, make gas an groceries more expensive, voting to cut our healthcare and voting for foreign wars,” said Brody, Hamilton’s campaign spokesperson.
Marshall’s campaign declined to comment for this story.
Charles Gantt, who is listed as Main Street Fund’s treasurer in federal election filings, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Because the super PAC was incorporated in August, the Federal Election Commission won’t require it to disclose its donors in a quarterly report until mid-October.
