James Talarico's Faith-Based Campaign Has a Faith Problem

He Calls It Christianity. Most Christians Wouldn't Recognize It.

The premise of James Talarico’s (CIS) Senate campaign is elegant in its simplicity. Here, at last, is a Democrat who can speak the language of faith. A former seminarian, soft-spoken, quoting Scripture on the floor of the Texas House. Time Magazine and a parade of national outlets have decided he is the answer to the party’s long estrangement from religious voters, the man who will finally pry the Bible out of Republican hands. The theory is that Texas is a Christian state, and that Texas has simply never met a Christian Democrat worth voting for.

It is a clever theory. It also rests on a mistake, and the mistake is worth examining carefully, because it reveals something important about how the people who run the Democratic Party understand the people they are trying to persuade.

The mistake is this. Talarico’s campaign is not, in any sense his own constituents would recognize, faith-based. It is faith-themed. The distinction matters. A faith-based candidacy proceeds from the content of a shared religion and applies it to public questions. A faith-themed candidacy borrows the vocabulary, the cadence, the imagery of religion while quietly emptying it of the things that make it that religion rather than some other one, or none at all. To see the difference, you do not have to take my word for anything. You only have to read what the candidate has said, repeatedly, on camera, over a period of years.

Begin with the doctrine of God, which is where any account of Christianity must begin. In 2021, from the floor of the Texas House, Talarico declared that "God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between," and, more memorably, that "God is non-binary." Pressed later, he explained that the line was "intentionally provocative" and that he had really meant only that God "cannot be defined by human categories." Set aside the walkback for a moment and notice the move itself, because you will see it again and again. He says the startling thing first, harvests the applause of the people who like startling things, and reserves the careful theological gloss for the moment someone objects. The trouble is that ordinary Christians, the ones in the pews in Lubbock and Tyler and Corpus Christi, were not raised on a God who "cannot be defined by human categories" in the sense Talarico means. They were raised on a God who defined Himself, who said "I AM WHO AM," who is addressed throughout the Scriptures and by Christ Himself as Father. A man may believe otherwise. But he cannot believe otherwise and also claim to be giving voice to the faith those Christians actually hold.

The pattern repeats on the body. Talarico has argued that "modern science recognizes many more than two biological sexes," that "in fact, there are six," and that "sex is a spectrum." When this proved inconvenient before a national audience, he told CBS, "I know there are two sexes, men and women." Both statements cannot be true, and the candidate appears to understand that, which is why the second one exists. Here the theology and the ideology fuse, because the claim that the human person is indefinitely malleable is not a scientific finding, it is a metaphysical one, and it sits uneasily beside the first chapter of Genesis, which the overwhelming majority of Texas Christians regard as describing something real about what a human being is.

Then there is abortion, the question on which Texas voters have been least ambiguous. Talarico does not say, in so many words, that Jesus endorsed abortion. What he says is that “the Bible is silent on abortion” and that “Jesus never talks about abortion.” From there he builds a more ambitious argument, drawn from the Annunciation, that because Mary consented before the Incarnation, “creation has to be done with consent” and “you cannot force someone to create.” The Texas Tribune, no hostile witness, summarized the argument plainly as the case that “the Bible sanctions abortion.” Consider what has happened here. The moment in which a young woman says yes to bearing a child, the moment Christians have honored for two thousand years as the supreme example of welcoming life, has been refashioned into a warrant for ending it. Whatever else this is, it is not the reading of Scripture one hears in a Texas sanctuary on Sunday morning. It is the opposite of it, dressed in its clothes.

The same operation runs through the rest of the record. Talarico has called Christian nationalism a “cancer” that turns Jesus into a “gun-toting, gay-bashing, science-denying, money-loving, fear-mongering fascist.” He has described Jesus Christ as “a radical feminist.” He has said that “our trans community needs abortion care too.” He told Ezra Klein that Christianity and “other religions of love” point to “the same truth,” which is to say that the central Christian claim, the one for which the apostles died, that Christ is not one path among many but the way, the truth, and the life, is negotiable. He has reduced the Trinity, in his own preaching, to “religious gobbledygook,” and recast it as “relationship itself.” He has told a graduating class, “I’m not asking you to join an organized religion.” He has stood in a pulpit and redefined the Virgin Birth to mean, not that a virgin bore the Son of God, but that “God’s love is born within each of us.”

Take these statements together and a coherent system emerges, but it is not Christianity as the word is understood by the people Talarico needs to vote for him. It is something more like a therapeutic universalism, a religion of love in the abstract, drained of every specific creedal commitment that would distinguish a Christian from a kind agnostic. There is an old and respectable name for the view that all religions are simply different roads up the same mountain. The name is not Christianity. It is religious indifferentism, and it has been recognized as the rejection of Christianity’s central claim by serious Christian thinkers for as long as the claim has existed.

Now, a fair-minded reader might object at this point, and the objection deserves an answer. Surely, one might say, a politician is entitled to his own theology. Surely it is illiberal, even un-Christian, to police another man’s faith. This is a serious point, and I want to concede what is true in it. No one should be barred from office for heterodoxy, and no voter is required to administer a doctrinal exam. If Talarico had run as a progressive Presbyterian with idiosyncratic views, there would be nothing to write about. The problem is precisely that he has not done this. He has run as the authentic article, the real Christian the others only pretend to be, and his national admirers have amplified that claim into the organizing premise of his campaign. When a man holds himself out as the standard of the faith and then redefines its every load-bearing doctrine, the discrepancy is not religious bigotry to notice. It is just accuracy.

Which brings us to the deepest tell, the one that has nothing to do with abortion or sexuality or the doctrine of God, and everything to do with what the Democratic Party thinks Christianity is. To clear Talarico’s path, the party set aside two black candidates who, on paper, had every claim to the nomination. One was Colin Allred, the former congressman and the party’s own recent statewide nominee. The other was Jasmine Crockett, a black woman with a national profile and a genuine constituency. The manner of Allred’s setting-aside is instructive. According to an account that surfaced publicly this year, Talarico, in a private January conversation, said he had expected to run against Allred, whom he characterized as a “mediocre black man,” rather than against Crockett, whom he praised as formidable. Talarico has confirmed that he used the word “mediocre.” His defense is that the word described Allred’s “method of campaigning” and not the man, and that he would “never attack him on the basis of race.” When Allred phoned him and offered him the chance to apologize, Talarico, by Allred’s account on CBS, declined.

Sit with the assumption buried in all of this, and with the casual contempt of the remark that helped clear the field. The people who engineered Talarico’s path looked at the Christians of Texas and concluded that what those Christians wanted was the aesthetic of faith, a preacher’s diction and a white man’s face, rather than its substance. They believed the costume would be enough, that Texas Christians could be moved by the sound of religion without inspecting the meaning. It is hard to imagine a more revealing misjudgment, or a more condescending one. It treats the most committed believers in the state as people who can be reached by tone alone, who will not, or cannot, tell the difference between a man who shares their faith and a man who has hollowed it out and put it on.

They can tell the difference. That is the thing the strategists in Washington and the editors in New York have not understood, and that they are about to learn. The Christians of Texas are not theologically naive. They have heard the word “non-binary” applied to the God of Abraham, and they have heard the Annunciation conscripted into an argument for abortion, and they have heard their own faith described as a cancer when it is held with conviction. They were not insulted by a Republican. They were instructed, patiently and at length, by the candidate himself.

The campaign calls itself faith-based. The people of Texas are simply taking the candidate at his word and reading the fine print. What they are finding is not a fellow believer who happens to be a Democrat. It is a man who has spent his public life telling them, in his own voice and on his own video, that nearly everything they believe is mistaken, and who now expects their votes for having said it gently. That is not a faith-based campaign. It is a campaign that assumed the faithful weren’t paying attention. In November, Texas will show him that they were.

James Talarico’s Faith-Based Campaign Has a Faith Problem.

If you’re a Catholic and want to learn more download “Catholic Doctrinal Evaluation of the Public Religious Statements of James Talarico”.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly.