Do you know the name Raja Krishnamoorthi? You should. Based on his fundraising efforts, he’s likely to become the next U.S. Senator from Illinois. His television commercials are virtually everywhere. You can’t miss his engaging smile and seemingly gracious encouragement not to try and pronounce his last name.

Instead he says, “Call me Raja.” (as in RAH-zhaw)

The Schaumburg politician currently serves as a U.S. Congressman from Illinois. Among his U.S. Senatorial competitors are 12 Democrats who have filed petitions to run and 8 Republicans. Not only do most of these people suffer from low or no name recognition, they lack funding anywhere close to Krishnamoorthi.

Raja began his fundraising, and subsequent media blitz to win the U.S. Senate seat, quite a while back—over a full year ahead of the actual election. I’m not sure whether retiring Senator Dick Durbin has endorsed any of the early combatants. Rest assured it won’t be a Republican—unless God changes his political stripes on the way to Damascus. Raja had amassed close to $30 million in his war chest by late fall.

Raja lists his religious affiliation as Hindu. In the area where I live (which includes the highly affluent Naperville community) we were quite taken aback by the number of Muslims and Hindus vying for local government seats in an election two years ago. Their campaign signs were everywhere.

Times have sure changed. Religion has played an important role in the founding of our nation. Colonists, such as the Separatists and Puritans, came to escape religious persecution. Protestantism was the dominant and guiding force shaping our political underpinnings and the culture of those times.

Catholics steadily factored into the picture. But so did Deists. Leaders including Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington are examples. However, the United States was known as a “Protestant nation” or “founded on Protestant principles.”

How are we being reshaped as a nation today? Most Christians have heard of the declining membership and attendance in our churches—particularly in mainline denominations. A good amount of patriotism seems to have paralleled the decline of Christianity.

This is NOT to be confused with the so-called “Christian nationalism.”

Am I bordering on “religious discrimination?” As an American citizen and a Christ follower, there is no room for that. Our U.S. Constitution has a clause within Article VI, Clause 3. It reads,

“Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

What it does not say is that our citizens can’t carefully consider how the worldview of a person from any religious background will affect their political convictions. (I.e. New York City Mayor Zohran Momdani, a Muslim who ran as a democratic socialist, openly advocates for his very “progressive views.”) We have several in our Congress presently who aren’t far behind him. This is a worldview concern!

In other words, look carefully at how a politician’s faith beliefs shape his or her worldview. That’s what concerns me most. Many Americans today only vote on a person’s political agenda without looking deeper at how their worldview shapes that agenda.

Several years ago, I taught an adult Sunday School class at our church outside of Pittsburgh on the subject of worldviews. I had a prominent attorney in the class. After the third lesson, he approached be to say something like,

“This is fascinating! In my years of legal training, no one ever presented a class on the impact of worldviews.”

Admittedly, I was a bit stunned.

An excellent series of resources on this topic is available through Summit Ministries in Colorado. Their primary book is called, Understanding the Times. As they note, it

“offers a fascinating, comprehensive look at how the tenets of the Christian worldview compares with five major competing worldviews of our day: Islam, Secularism, Marxism, New Spirituality, and Postmodernism.”

You can order this and two companion books (new and used) on Amazon.

We are warned in the Scriptures to beware of false teachings. Learn what they are. And as the apostle Paul told the Corinthian church,

“Be alert, stand firm in the faith, be courageous, be strong.” (1 Corinthians 16:13, CSB)

Are the candidates of 2026 and beyond willing to discuss their worldviews? What they believe affects the very future of our country.