Jules for Jesus

The guitarist wore a scruffy beard, ponytail and patched-up denim jacket as he performed a soaring solo.

In front of the strumming rocker, at the base of the stage, Jules Bailey threw his arms around his wife, Jessica, and 5-month old son, August, in a close embrace.

Earlier, Bailey had swayed to the lyrics —"Blessed be the name of the Lord/ Blessed be your name" —bouncing baby August in his arms. Now the family stood in silent prayer, heads bowed.

This was a typical Sunday morning at Bailey's church, Imago Dei Community.

Bailey, a Multnomah County commissioner who's now running for Portland mayor, is in many ways a child of Southeast Portland, where he was raised and where he lived for much of his adult life.

As a state legislator who represented inner Southeast Portland neighborhoods in the Oregon House from 2009 to 2014, Bailey championed bicycling, beer and biodiesel, among other causes appealing to his lefty constituents. "Jules had a very strong progressive bent on things, particularly energy and the environment," says Salem lobbyist Len Bergstein.

In one very specific way, Bailey, 36, is unlike many of his former neighbors and even members of his own family: He's a Christian who attends church on Sundays at Imago Dei, a nondenominational, evangelical church in the Buckman neighborhood.

In much of America, declaring a personal faith—specifically, born-again Christianity—is all but a requirement when running for elected office.

But in Portland—a city where 42 percent of residents claim no religious affiliation—Bailey's evangelical belief may be foreign to voters, and is seemingly at odds with his progressive persona. (His opponent Ted Wheeler occasionally attends Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, a citadel of West Hills WASPs.)

To be sure, much of Imago Dei is awfully Portlandian. The altar is decorated with distressed wood, and the communion wafers are available gluten-free.

But Imago Dei's version of Christianity preaches co-habitation is a sin and marriage occurs only between a man and a woman. Bailey says he rejects those beliefs, as well as church doctrines that give men the primary role in spiritual leadership, but he continues to worship at Imago Dei, which he calls family.

It's one of the reasons he's running for mayor.

"My faith is a really big motivator for what I do," he says. "It's a big reason why I feel I have a calling to help. It's a big reason why I talk about love in my speeches. I believe in that. But I'm not running to be a mayor for just one religion. I'm running to be a mayor for everybody."

"I started committing myself to a faith community."

Bailey says his conversion began on his 21st birthday, when his paternal grandmother, a bookkeeper from North Bend, gave him a Bible.

"It was sort of like, 'Gee, thanks, Grandma,'" Bailey says of the gift now. "It sort of set on my shelf for a while, and I didn't really look at it. I had a lot of assumptions about what was in it."

Bailey's parents had separated when he was about 5. He grew up shuttling between two homes about 20 blocks apart near Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard. Neither household practiced Christianity.

Then, while a student at Lewis & Clark College, he picked up Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamozov, which draws on discussions of faith and God. "I thought, I don't really understand this book at all," Bailey says. "I need a better understanding of religious context to appreciate this. So I went back and read the Bible cover to cover as a contextual, literary exercise."

Bailey's political science professor at Lewis & Clark, where Bailey graduated with a degree in international affairs and environmental studies in 2001, says he isn't surprised that Bailey first approached the Bible intellectually.

"That's the kind of guy he is," says Curtis Johnson, who calls Bailey one of the best students he ever taught.

It wasn't until Bailey reached Princeton, where he earned a master's degree in public affairs and planning in 2007, that his intellectual interest transformed into religious devotion. He joined a Bible study group with other graduate students.

In 2009, a year after he won his first election to the Oregon House, a friend introduced him to Imago Dei.

Bailey says he was going through a rough personal period at the time, but he declined to discuss specifics. He filed for divorce from his first wife, Amy Liqiong Wong, on Dec. 23, 2009.

At the time, Imago Dei met in Franklin High School's auditorium, in the South Tabor neighborhood. It was led, as it is today, by Pastor Rick McKinley, a bulky, bearded man with a Gothic cross inked on his inner right forearm. ("The pastor calls people 'bro,' sports a goatee and talks in a drowsy, stoned-frat-boy drawl," WW wrote in a 2005 cover profile of one of McKinley's parishioners, the evangelical author Donald Miller.)

"The sermon really spoke to me," Bailey recalls of an early experience at McKinley's church. "I had definitely been going through a conversion experience, but it was really then that I started committing myself to a faith community."

Bailey's parents didn't learn about his Christianity until he invited them to his 2010 baptism.

"I was surprised," says Bob Bailey, his dad. "I didn't even know he was interested, but I was proud of him. He came to that conclusion on his own."

His mother, Ann Kopel, describes herself as an atheist. She says she was shocked by her son's conversion. "Oh my God," she said to herself at the time, "where did this come from?"

Six years later, she understands. "It brings a coherence to his beliefs about how people ought to treat each other," she says.

"This is a family."

Step inside Imago Dei on a typical Sunday morning and you might momentarily think you're at Revolution Hall, a nearby music venue.

Parishioners clutch cups of coffee as they sway to rock music in the sanctuary. They come dressed in jeans and hoodies, and the religious art on the walls incorporates tattoo imagery.

Yet the church also espouses traditional values about marriage, divorce and gender roles. Men lead the church, although elders believe men and women are equal. McKinley, the pastor, did not respond to an interview request.

"We believe that Christ's gifts are equally given to men and women to build up His Body," the church website declares, "but that God has designated men to fulfill the primary role of spiritual leadership."

Marriage, the church says, "is a God-ordained, public covenant between a man and a woman." Divorce is allowed only in cases of adultery, homosexual behavior, incest, bestiality or religious desertion by one spouse. And cohabitation is "an expression of sexual sin that seeks intimacy without commitment."

Bailey says he rejects these components of his church. "I worship a God of love, and I believe when two people love each other, it's a reflection of God," he says. "And I believe everybody should have the right to enjoy that love and that marriage."

It was the last precept, though, that pushed Bailey from the church for about a year in 2011. He and Jessica wanted premarital counseling, but the church declined to offer it to them because they were living together.

He returned after numerous conversations with elders led him to believe there was room for his beliefs in the church, he says.

"Families can have disagreements," he says. "But at the end of the day, this is family."

"I don't think Portland is anti-religion."

Even if Bailey doesn't march in lockstep with his church, he's definitely singing a different tune than many residents of the major U.S. city with the smallest percentage of people claiming formal religious attachments, according to 2015 figures from the Public Religion Research Institute.

When Bailey grabs breakfast at Bijou Cafe or Nel Centro downtown—two spots popular among politicians—he often does so to study the Gospel of John with friends from church.

Ben Sand, one of those friends, says Bailey feels his faith deeply but would never project it on others. "He doesn't wear it in a way that's obnoxious," he says.

John Horvick, a pollster for DHM Research in Portland, says voters are unlikely to be concerned by Bailey's faith, even if it's unusual here. "I don't think that would be perceived as a negative thing in Portland," Horvick says.

Bailey, for his part, says his faith is an asset, even in Portland.

"I don't think Portland is anti-religion," he says. "I think Portland has a lot of really spiritual people who have beliefs or worship in their own way. I think people really want to know somebody is doing things for the right reasons and is really motivated by something that is greater than themselves."

Willamette Week