Who Is James Talarico?
James Talarico is the man who just took a Senate seat from Texas, the first Democrat to do so in a generation. A former sixth-grade teacher from the Austin suburbs, a Presbyterian seminarian still finishing his degree, and a four-term state legislator who built a national following by speaking of Jesus in the soft cadences of a progressive preacher. He defeated Ken Paxton by roughly a dozen points. The headlines treat this as a triumph of moderation wrapped in faith. From where I stand, it looks more like the latest and most polished version of an old substitution: the name of Christ kept on the lips while the substance of Christian teaching is emptied out and replaced with the moral vocabulary of the present age.
The separation of Church and State is a genuine American achievement, one that has protected the Church from the State’s embrace and the State from the temptation to turn itself into a church. Yet that constitutional arrangement has never required the erasure of Christianity from the nation’s memory or public life. The United States was not founded as a secular republic in the modern sense. Its laws, its habits of self-government, its sense of the person as more than a collection of appetites, and its residual belief that certain things are simply not to be done, were shaped by a Christian inheritance that long outlasted any formal establishment. To treat that inheritance as optional, or as one more private preference among others, is to pretend that a people can live indefinitely on the capital of a faith it no longer confesses. Talarico’s version of the faith does not restore that capital. It spends it.
He presents himself as a Christian populist. He talks about loving God and loving neighbor. He invokes the two great commandments and tells audiences that politics is simply the public form of that second commandment. The trouble is not that he mentions the neighbor. The trouble is that the neighbor has been redefined so thoroughly that the commandment no longer binds anyone to the created order that Scripture and the Church have always understood. In 2021, opposing a Texas bill that would have kept biological males out of girls’ sports, he told the House floor that the opening lines of Genesis use both a masculine and a feminine Hebrew word for God, that God is therefore “both masculine and feminine and everything in between,” and that “God is nonbinary.” Trans-identified children, he added, are made in that image. He has since called the language provocative, yet he still defends the underlying claim that contemporary gender categories can be read back into the divine nature. That is not a minor rhetorical excess. It is a direct inversion of the binary that Genesis places at the heart of the human creature.
The same method appears in his treatment of the unborn. On Joe Rogan’s podcast he argued that the Annunciation shows God asking Mary for her consent before the Incarnation, and that this story therefore affirms a right to refuse the creation of new life. “You cannot force someone to create,” he said. The Gospel of Luke records Mary’s free assent, yes. It does not record a negotiation over whether the child should exist. Mary’s fiat is the perfect human response to divine initiative, not a template for autonomy over the child already conceived. Talarico has also said the Bible is silent on abortion and that Christians may therefore disagree. The Didache, the early Christian catechism, is not silent. Neither is the constant teaching of the Church that the life begun at conception bears the image of God and may not be deliberately destroyed. To treat Mary’s yes as permission for the no of abortion is to take the most sacred moment of Christian history and turn it into an argument for its opposite.
On the economic side he is not a declared socialist in the style of the Democratic Socialists of America. He does not call for the abolition of private property or the nationalization of the means of production. What he does support is a familiar progressive package: a public option that would let every American buy into Medicare (what he has called “Medicare for Y’all”), a federal minimum wage of fifteen dollars, higher taxes on billionaires and large corporations, the closing of various “loopholes,” universal childcare, paid family leave, and the expansion of tax credits for working families. He has also proposed an “AI dividend” so that ordinary citizens would own a piece of the companies developing the technology. In a 2020 climate forum he went further, linking climate change, white supremacy, and capitalism as interlocking “oppressive systems” that needed to be dismantled. His campaign has since insisted he is a “proud capitalist.” The record shows a politician comfortable with substantial redistribution through the tax code and with treating certain economic outcomes as moral failures of the existing order rather than as the ordinary results of markets, incentives, and human limits.
He belongs to a progressive Presbyterian congregation and studies at a seminary of the Presbyterian Church (USA), a body that has long accommodated same-sex relationships and, more recently, gender ideology. His “love of neighbor” therefore includes the affirmation of sexual and gender arrangements that traditional Christianity, Catholic and Protestant alike, has judged incompatible with the created order. He can speak warmly of Pope Francis and even of Pope Leo while rejecting their clear teaching on the sanctity of unborn life. The result is a Christianity that retains the emotional register of the Gospel (compassion, welcome, justice for the poor) while discarding the doctrinal and moral content that once gave those words their force. It is the faith of the Social Gospel and of the mainline Protestant decline, updated for TikTok and for a state that still remembers the old language of the Bible.
Texas has now elected this man. The Lone Star State, long a byword for a certain stubborn resistance to the national progressive current, has yielded a Senate seat to a candidate who once declared there are six biological sexes and who frames opposition to his views as a failure to love. Paxton’s personal scandals made the contest easier than it should have been; many voters simply refused to defend a candidate they did not respect. That does not change what was chosen. A generation that has been taught to hear “love your neighbor” as permission to redefine the neighbor has now placed one of its most articulate spokesmen in the Senate. The victory is real. The deeper question is whether the Christianity being offered can still recognize the difference between the neighbor and the ideology that claims to speak for him, and whether a country that once drew strength from a living Christian inheritance can continue to do so when that inheritance is reduced to a rhetoric of compassion without the doctrines that once made compassion more than a feeling.
by Alfonso Beccar Varela and Grok
The separation of Church and State is a genuine American achievement, one that has protected the Church from the State’s embrace and the State from the temptation to turn itself into a church. Yet that constitutional arrangement has never required the erasure of Christianity from the nation’s memory or public life. The United States was not founded as a secular republic in the modern sense. Its laws, its habits of self-government, its sense of the person as more than a collection of appetites, and its residual belief that certain things are simply not to be done, were shaped by a Christian inheritance that long outlasted any formal establishment. To treat that inheritance as optional, or as one more private preference among others, is to pretend that a people can live indefinitely on the capital of a faith it no longer confesses. Talarico’s version of the faith does not restore that capital. It spends it.
He presents himself as a Christian populist. He talks about loving God and loving neighbor. He invokes the two great commandments and tells audiences that politics is simply the public form of that second commandment. The trouble is not that he mentions the neighbor. The trouble is that the neighbor has been redefined so thoroughly that the commandment no longer binds anyone to the created order that Scripture and the Church have always understood. In 2021, opposing a Texas bill that would have kept biological males out of girls’ sports, he told the House floor that the opening lines of Genesis use both a masculine and a feminine Hebrew word for God, that God is therefore “both masculine and feminine and everything in between,” and that “God is nonbinary.” Trans-identified children, he added, are made in that image. He has since called the language provocative, yet he still defends the underlying claim that contemporary gender categories can be read back into the divine nature. That is not a minor rhetorical excess. It is a direct inversion of the binary that Genesis places at the heart of the human creature.
The same method appears in his treatment of the unborn. On Joe Rogan’s podcast he argued that the Annunciation shows God asking Mary for her consent before the Incarnation, and that this story therefore affirms a right to refuse the creation of new life. “You cannot force someone to create,” he said. The Gospel of Luke records Mary’s free assent, yes. It does not record a negotiation over whether the child should exist. Mary’s fiat is the perfect human response to divine initiative, not a template for autonomy over the child already conceived. Talarico has also said the Bible is silent on abortion and that Christians may therefore disagree. The Didache, the early Christian catechism, is not silent. Neither is the constant teaching of the Church that the life begun at conception bears the image of God and may not be deliberately destroyed. To treat Mary’s yes as permission for the no of abortion is to take the most sacred moment of Christian history and turn it into an argument for its opposite.
On the economic side he is not a declared socialist in the style of the Democratic Socialists of America. He does not call for the abolition of private property or the nationalization of the means of production. What he does support is a familiar progressive package: a public option that would let every American buy into Medicare (what he has called “Medicare for Y’all”), a federal minimum wage of fifteen dollars, higher taxes on billionaires and large corporations, the closing of various “loopholes,” universal childcare, paid family leave, and the expansion of tax credits for working families. He has also proposed an “AI dividend” so that ordinary citizens would own a piece of the companies developing the technology. In a 2020 climate forum he went further, linking climate change, white supremacy, and capitalism as interlocking “oppressive systems” that needed to be dismantled. His campaign has since insisted he is a “proud capitalist.” The record shows a politician comfortable with substantial redistribution through the tax code and with treating certain economic outcomes as moral failures of the existing order rather than as the ordinary results of markets, incentives, and human limits.
He belongs to a progressive Presbyterian congregation and studies at a seminary of the Presbyterian Church (USA), a body that has long accommodated same-sex relationships and, more recently, gender ideology. His “love of neighbor” therefore includes the affirmation of sexual and gender arrangements that traditional Christianity, Catholic and Protestant alike, has judged incompatible with the created order. He can speak warmly of Pope Francis and even of Pope Leo while rejecting their clear teaching on the sanctity of unborn life. The result is a Christianity that retains the emotional register of the Gospel (compassion, welcome, justice for the poor) while discarding the doctrinal and moral content that once gave those words their force. It is the faith of the Social Gospel and of the mainline Protestant decline, updated for TikTok and for a state that still remembers the old language of the Bible.
Texas has now elected this man. The Lone Star State, long a byword for a certain stubborn resistance to the national progressive current, has yielded a Senate seat to a candidate who once declared there are six biological sexes and who frames opposition to his views as a failure to love. Paxton’s personal scandals made the contest easier than it should have been; many voters simply refused to defend a candidate they did not respect. That does not change what was chosen. A generation that has been taught to hear “love your neighbor” as permission to redefine the neighbor has now placed one of its most articulate spokesmen in the Senate. The victory is real. The deeper question is whether the Christianity being offered can still recognize the difference between the neighbor and the ideology that claims to speak for him, and whether a country that once drew strength from a living Christian inheritance can continue to do so when that inheritance is reduced to a rhetoric of compassion without the doctrines that once made compassion more than a feeling.
by Alfonso Beccar Varela and Grok
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