James Talarico’s Old-Time New Leftist Gospel Hour

James Talarico’s defeat of Jasmine Crockett for the Democrat Senate nomination in Texas this month is being trumpeted as a new day for a Democrat Party that has steadily alienated white males and Christians. Talarico, a Presbyterian seminary graduate, sometime lay preacher, and current Texas state representative, has been heralded as a kind of great hope for turning red-blooded Texas blue again.

While Talarico might well be a tougher candidate for Republicans to beat than Crockett, whose campaign even some fellow black Democrats called “terrible,” it isn’t clear that his somewhat creepy “hicklib” preacher boy schtick will have any more power in a big-time race than did the small-town mayor schtick of Pete Buttigieg, to whom some of Talarico’s supporters compare him. And a big part of the reason for that is the now old-fashioned liberal Christian theology Talarico hawks.

In the introduction to a long interview with Ezra Klein, Klein describes Talarico as “a little bit unusual for a Democrat. He’s a very forthright Christian politician. He roots his politics very fundamentally in a way you don’t often hear from Democrats in his faith.”

One can see in the title given to the interview (“Can James Talarico Reclaim Christianity for the Left?”) and in the framing, the amusing inconsistency of Democrats. While Democrats treat Christians who reject left-wing orthodoxy as vicious theocrats violating the Constitution, those who embrace Democrat positions by claiming they are rooted in Christian faith are positively described as “forthright Christian politicians.”

In the interview with Klein, Talarico talks about his background. The grandson of a Baptist preacher, Talarico was raised in the infamous St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Round Rock, Texas. It was there that he learned to approach Christianity from the Rev. Jim Rigby, who still pastors the church.

Rigby, whom Talarico refers to as “Dr. Jim,” became famous for his positions on abortion and sexuality. He teaches that abortion is a straightforward moral good. He was subjected in the 1990s to numerous formal complaints in the Presbyterian Church USA for his ordination of active gays and lesbians, as well as his blessing of same-sex unions.

Of course, these rather dogmatic positions on morality are accompanied by a fuzziness about questions of Christian doctrine. Rigby famously allowed a professor to join St. Andrew’s who then wrote an essay about his new church membership and the anti-Christian creed he professes: “I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe Jesus Christ was the son of a God that I don’t believe in, nor do I believe Jesus rose from the dead to ascend to a heaven that I don’t believe exists.”   

Rigby is himself rather vague about what he believes about central Christian beliefs, such as the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection, as well as God Himself, a quality Talarico shares with him.

Talking to Klein, Talarico confusingly says: “The genius of Christianity — the miracle of Christianity — is not the claim that Jesus is God. It’s that God is Jesus, meaning that Jesus helps us understand the mystery.” What he seems to mean is that Jesus is a kind of example of what God is like, but not God, who is always vaguely referred to as “the mystery.” Or, as Talarico elaborates, God is “ultimate reality, the ground of our being, the cosmos, however you want to define God.”    

While the God of the Bible creates man in His own image, male and female, Talarico likes to say that God is “nonbinary.” If Talarico believes that God is just another name for the universe or reality, perhaps that’s correct. But what then does Jesus reveal?  

Talarico’s Jesus is only one of many prophets who tell us something about this God. To Talarico, Christianity is no more true than the “beautiful faith traditions” like Buddhism and Hinduism that are “circling the same truth about the universe, about the cosmos.”   

Oddly, though, Talarico’s Jesus looks suspiciously like a liberal-left modern activist, with Talarico describing Christ as a “humble, compassionate, barefoot rabbi in the first century, someone who broke cultural norms, someone who stood up for the vulnerable and the marginalized, someone who challenged religious authority.”

Ooh, Hippie Jesus! But questions arise. Which cultural norms should we break? How ought we to stand up for the vulnerable and marginalized? Talarico tells Klein that the “Gospel breaks us out of religious dogmas and orthodoxies and challenges religion itself.” But that’s not all it challenges.

“For me,” Talarico said in 2019, “prophetic voices like Jesus have helped me reckon with my own whiteness, my own masculinity, my own certainty, my own ego. It’s a never-ending process, and it’s a painful process.”

It would be better to say that Talarico’s vision of Jesus substitutes a new religion, one that has substituted a whole new set of moral imperatives for the old ones.

Talarico claims that the Greek word for church means “to be called out of our culture, called out of our economy, called out of our political system.” Yet his own vision is really that organized religion is bad and should only serve the current Democrat Party’s weird obsessions with abortion and gender ideology.

Democrats are apoplectic that conservatives have been resurfacing Talarico’s old statements from over the years. But there is no evidence that he has changed any of the crazy views he has expressed from pulpits and on social media over the years, and so his past comments remain relevant as he seeks a U.S. Senate seat.

Here are some of Talarico’s views that Christian readers in particular will find quite astounding:

• The Bible is pro-abortion, as evidenced by his belief that the Angel Gabriel came to get Mary’s “consent.”
• We must “defend trans Texans” by giving them abortions.
• “Modern science,” says there are “six genders.”
• “Prison is violence,” and we need to “imagine a world without prisons.”
• Whiteness is a virus.

Democrats such as Klein are excited at the prospect of Talarico “reclaiming” Christianity for Democrats. The problem is that the kind of liberal Christianity he peddles is a theologically empty secular Gospel that substitutes politics for theology and government for God.

Hardcore Democrats like it because Talarico’s pseudo-theology is labeled “Christianity” while being profoundly anti-Christian in just about every way imaginable. Talarico provides cover for liberals to continue undermining Christian values and dismantling Christian institutions under the guise of “reclaiming” the faith.

But unfortunately for Democrats, Christians who have actually picked up a Bible and understand the basic tenets of the faith can smell this deception from a mile away. Don’t expect any great groundswell of Christian support for Talarico at the polls this November.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.