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James Baldwin’s soaring, sermonic prose; Toni Morrison’s scriptural authority; William Faulkner’s Genesis-like cosmologies of Southern identity and place: All draw heavily on a Christian-inflected aesthetic.

He brought his remarks home with the sermonic delivery of his dream of social and class harmony transcending racial and ethnic lines in America.

If Mr. Carter was deliberative, Mr. Trump must be reactive; where Mr. Carter was essentially sermonic, a devotee of Reinhold Niebuhr, the great theologian of human limits, Mr. Trump is comedic-demagogic, a fan of Norman Vincent Peale, the pop-evangelist behind “positive thinking.”

But unlike “Selma,” her drama about Martin Luther King, Jr., it can seem awkwardly sermonic, relaying its ideas by way of familiar tropes.

Her pronouns shift from “him” to “we”—“Our hopes were pinned on Iowa. We had to win it or otherwise stand down”—and she adopts Barack’s own sermonic listing mode, describing meetings with voters “in Davenport, Cedar Rapids, Council Bluffs . . . in bookstores, union halls, a home for aging military veterans, and, as the weather warmed up, on front porches and in public parks.”