Come November, Democrat James Talarico will face off against Republican Ken Paxton for the Lone Star State’s highly coveted Senate seat.

Talarico has been flagged as a rising star for a party desperately seeking to regain momentum after a bruising 2024 loss, and some think he might be the man to deliver Texas to Team Blue.

Politicos coo at his youthful vigor, his “aw-shucks” personality, and, most importantly, his frequent appeals to Christian theology. The aspiring senator boldly proclaims his alleged Christian bona fides in interviews and on the campaign trail.

In an interview with The New York Times’ resident wonk Ezra Klein, Talarico detailed how his Baptist grandfather initially instilled in him Christian values, and how this seed of theology led him to seek ministry after finishing his studies at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

The progressive college touting itself as “including the first and only Bible department comprised all of faculty of color” should be the first red flag in a sea of them surrounding Talarico.

In large part, the excitement around Talarico stems from the belief that he can speak to religious voters Democrats can’t seem to reach. A 2024 Pew poll showed Christian voters of most persuasions are heavily aligned with the GOP; Catholic Hispanics and black Protestants excluded.

Indeed, Klein’s New York Times colleague David French believes Talarico “is one of the few openly Christian politicians in the United States who acts like a Christian,” painting him as a true emissary of the faith in a den of false prophets.

Perhaps French and Klein think simply uttering enough vapid platitudes about Jesus will entice evangelicals to vote blue.

Talarico joins a long line of Democrats cosplaying as voting blocs they frequently fail to turn out. Minnesota governor and failed vice presidential candidate Tim Walz was apparently supposed to reel in white men, a group the party has spent decades bleeding out with his cringy appeals to leftist-approved masculinity.

Democrats made the same mistake with Walz they are now making with Talarico; mistaking a pastiche of those voters for the real thing.

Though he may claim to be Presbyterian, Talarico instead belongs to what can be described as the “Church of the Good Man.” Adherents eschew uncomfortable parts of Scripture and ecclesial tradition, preferring instead to define good living as being vaguely nice by the standards of the time.

For Talarico, that means doing whatever the progressive zeitgeist tells him to do. He supports codifying Roe v. Wade at the federal level, empowering the federal government to pursue LGBT ideology, and gay marriage as a positive. Video after video shows Talarico making deeply heretical comments like “God is non-binary,” there are “six” genders, and the “trans community needs abortion access too.”

Talarico frequently claims Christians on the Right get bogged down in debates about abortion et al. and forget the fundamental tenet of Christianity is love of neighbor. Yet Talarico then reveals his true intentions by dashing to the other side of the non-Christian spectrum and obsessively focusing on left-wing causes.

Having a peculiar predilection for “trans-children” and a favorite drag queen implies less love of neighbor and more love of leftism.

During the aforementioned interview with Ezra Klein, Talarico carped, “you have an entire political movement using Christianity to prioritize two issues [abortion and LGBT ideology] that Jesus never talked about.”

Talarico has repeatedly argued there is no historical or theological basis for Christians to oppose abortion and has claimed the Bible supports pro-abortion ideology. He uses a flawed understanding of the Annunciation as evidence that consent matters in whether to give birth and claims Jesus’ kindness toward women meant he supported abortion.

When Talarico isn’t improperly referencing scripture, he’s dredging up heretical texts to justify his warped view of his so-called faith. In one sermon dredged up on social media, Talarico cites the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas and quotes Jesus as saying, “When you make the male and female one and the same, when the male is not male, and the female is not female, then you will enter the kingdom of God.” This, Talarico claims, is proof Christ was a “radical feminist.”

Talarico is the “Church of the Good Man” incarnate. He holds no positions which put him out of step with progressive orthodoxy, even where there’s an obvious clash between liberal ideology and longstanding Christian belief.

Democrats assume religion is a largely aesthetic choice, akin to a set of boots or a coat, rather than truly lived. It makes them deeply uncomfortable when they are confronted with the reality that for many Americans, their faith is a central tenet of who they are, guiding their every decision. For Christians, it is a set of moral standards, imposed by the Son of God, that the faithful believe will lead to eternal life.

By treating faith as nothing more than “Just be nice, bro,” Talarico and the Democrats make it clear they neither understand why people come to religion in the first place, nor why their faith might guide their decision to vote past empty platitudes.

If Talarico quotes scripture and invokes Jesus, perhaps his radical agenda will be easier for religious people to swallow.

Scripture is clear on the sanctity of marriage, the evil of abortion, and the immutability of sex, but maybe if we say the magic words, these religious rubes will ignore that and vote for Democrats.

Talarico demonstrates perfectly why Democrats’ attempts to rediscover religious voters fail. Democrat voices claiming to base their worldview on Christian faith reflect more what secular progressives imagine Christianity to be rather than what believers recognize as true.

As Matthew 7:15 tells us, beware of false prophets.

***

Doug Blair is press manager at Heritage Action for America.

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The Gospel According To James Talarico