Two-Churches Chris Murphy’s spiritual awakening includes fundraising on Easter.
Senator Chris Murphy’s (D-CT) happiness, loneliness and back-to-church stew of intrusive and showy sweeping statements came into focus throughout Easter, the day that puts the Christ into Christianity. Murphy proclaimed in a November 2023 Vanity Fair puff piece that he is not sure what he believes but he returned to attending church in the spring of last year.
One unshakable tenet of the senator who wants us off our phones and in church is a special Redemption exemption for fundraising text messages on the day of the Resurrection. Hey, Daily Ructions readers were surprised to receive pleas for campaign contributions through Christendom’s most important day.
Jesus Christ has risen today, can you chip in some money to my campaign? It had to be on Easter because this year fell on the last day of the first fundraising quarter of the year. And Murphy only had $8.2 million in the bank at the end of the last fundraising quarter. And no serious challenge is in sight.
“Over the past two years, Murphy’s joined not one, but two churches, one in Hartford and one in Washington, where his wife and kids live,” Politico reported, also in November. “He said he wants to meet people he wouldn’t normally connect with through work or his personal life.” Connecticut’s junior senator thinks his life in Washington, sometimes in Connecticut and even in the company of his authoritarian friends in Dubai, does not bring him into contact with people of faith. That betrays serious isolation, or Murphy could be incurious about others.
It’s only a hunch but some of those college basketball fans who enjoyed primo seats near Two-Churches at last weekend’s NCAA playoffs in Boston may regularly go to a church, temple or mosque. People of faith, Murphy may discover, are much like others. They probably don’t make a show of it in national publications, especially after six months of attending church after a long hiatus. The mystery of faith can be discovered in church—-often quietly.
Glory, glory, glory, somebody put the touch on me. It must have been the hand of our senator seeking re-election texting for dollars.
Murphy, 50, was filled with wonder at the power of faith in November as the two-term Democrat and Politico reporter Erin Schumacher happened to walk past the Wethersfield native’s Hartford church. “Churches are places that I think do a good job of speaking that language [of people connecting to each other],” he said. “That’s another way to feel less lonely.” You know, that way they talk in church.
Murphy was interested on Easter in speaking a strange language of the politically obsessed with fundraising texts and, for some, campaign ads. After all, the last day of the fundraising quarter needs to be the candidate’s triumphant holy day.
Won’t you pitch in?
Published April 1, 2024.