Preaching to the Choir

Rural Democrats

I was born and raised a Southern Baptist. I remember fire and brimstone sermons that had me running toward the altar on several Sunday mornings.

I was on my knees within seconds on the altar steps. I know the pastor was probably sick of me jumping out of the pew and running down the aisle to confess everything, but in the end, that was a problem of his own making.

When I was a kid, I was saved several times to make sure it stuck. I was also baptized more than once because the fiery sermons made me doubt my salvation.

I taught Jonathan Edwards’s Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God for years in American Lit (it was in the curriculum) and my students would often get uncomfortable with the sermon — it was scary.

I told them it was just another Wednesday night for me when I was their age.

Jonathan Edwards’s sermon wasn’t just a piece of literature from Puritanical New England — it could have been written by Brother Bill, who preached in a tiny Baptist Church in Oklahoma every Sunday in the 80s.

I was a true believer, but his sermons put fire and fear in me.

I would fall into the pit of hell to be tormented forever if it weren’t for God holding me up over the flames. God could let me fall at any moment…I thought about it a lot.

Brother Bill put the fear of God in folks. He was also preaching to the choir.

We were already believers, and yet we came and listened three times a week. We knew the message, but we also needed the community and the reassurance of fellow believers.

I recently posted a photo on Facebook of a rural Democratic event I spoke at a few weeks back. A man commented that he hoped I wasn’t “just preaching to the choir.”

My response?

Sir, that is exactly what I am doing…

Saline County Democrats event. 10/12/25.

The idiom, “preaching to the choir,” means to speak to people who already share your opinion. They are already sympathetic to the cause. They are true believers.

The meaning is pretty obvious, but the idiom has a slightly negative connotation — what’s the use, right? Why bother to speak on things your audience already agrees upon?

Because we all need encouragement to keep the faith. But some need it more than others.

I wonder if the man who commented about preaching to the choir is a red-state Democrat? I wonder if he is a rural progressive? I wonder if he knows how lonely and isolating and solitary it is to be left-leaning in a sea of red?

It can be hell.

I drove three hours last Sunday to speak to the Saline County, Missouri Democrats. I have been on a bender of sorts lately…back-to-back speaking events every weekend for three weeks now.

I’ve been everywhere from North Dakota to Iowa in the last week. And, of course, Missouri.

The Saline County event had been pushed back a few weeks because of a travel issue and I had felt guilty for weeks about the mistake — it was my mistake. But the event went on, and there were a lot of people in the community center in Marshall.

A man at the event, who has worked with the County Democrats for years, told a story about being in that same community center just a few days earlier for a Republican gathering. A town hall of sorts with local State Reps and a State Senator.

He said he walked in, and someone stopped him at the door and told him he shouldn’t be there. “You’re a Democrat.”

This man said, “I am also an American.”

He was allowed to enter.

He said the lawmakers in attendance were rude and inconsiderate and condescending. One State Senator admitted to a recent vote to gerrymander a Kansas City district as a way to replace Emanuel Cleaver, the current Congressman. A Black Congressman.

The Senator admitted it…

When this man repeated the story to the Saline County Democrats, there was a gasp from the audience. Not because they couldn’t believe it, but because they knew it.

Preaching to the choir.

I can deliver a barnburner telling my audiences across the state that Missouri is 49th in starting teacher pay and 50th in classroom funding. That Republicans defunded schools for so long that 33% of Missouri schools are on a four-day week. That they can’t find the money to fund public schools, but they found 50M to fund private religious schools.

That the organizations that dole out the school voucher money are the same organizations that stand to gain from the scheme.

Preaching to the choir.

I can bring fire while speaking on the willingness of almost every last Republican lawmaker in this state to overturn the will of their own constituents.

Missourians passed regulations on puppy mills, and the GOP gutted the law. We passed anti-gerrymandering legislation which Republicans overturned by putting it back on the ballot with deceptive language. We expanded Medicaid, and they stalled funding it. We passed a higher minimum wage and earned sick time measures, and the GOP signed those measures away within weeks of the vote.

We put abortion rights on the ballot, and won, and a woman still cannot access an abortion in this state nearly a year later.

Preaching to the choir.

I can talk about the hell of uncontested races and the years of voter apathy as a result. The decline of rural spaces in the state. The hollowing out of small towns and the jobs and the Main Streets that were lost decades ago. About the family farms that have folded and are now part of massive farms and Big Ag.

And now the farmers who are left with soybeans stored for a market that disappeared.

Preaching to the choir.

I give talks to people so often that my notes don’t even serve me much anymore. My speaking schedule is not slowing down anytime soon.

I present to folks who often know what I’m about to say, but they come anyway. It might be because nothing much is going on in town, or it might be because they need to see their politically sane neighbors in the folding chair next to them.

My friends deserve a loud collaborator — a fellow traveler spreading the good news.

Especially my rural Democratic friends doing the work in their communities.

I’ll keep preaching to the choir.

~Jess

P.S. I know many of you will be attending a No Kings rally on October 18th. I will be in Kansas City at Mill Creek…I’d love to see you there!